HopkinsCinemAddicts

Defiance - An Adventure in Transmedia

Transmedia, specifically transmedia storytelling is the art of telling a single story or exploring a single world across different media. It is closely associated with the idea of a story world, a more abstract concept referring to a single narrative world that exists across different works of narrative art.

 

In the summer of 2011, Syfy announced an upcoming transmedia collaboration with gaming company Trion Worlds. The result is a two-part project that premiered this year in April with a long-form TV science-fiction political action drama and a corresponding multi-platform MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game).

 

    This is the background of the world they share. In the year 2046, arks carrying survivors of a dying alien solar system carrying an entire ecosystem arrive on Earth, causing war and a complete restructuring of the planet’s surface, society, and biosphere. The show takes place after this, in a town called Defiance, following the myriad political and social struggles resulting from the mix of alien and human cultures and agendas. To some degree, the show relies on tried-and-true plot tropes, such as Romeo and Juliet-style love stories, cultural and spiritual tensions, and classic science fiction elements like alien-on-alien battles, spacecrafts, blue glowy things, and futuristic energy weapons which account for most of Syfy’s budget on the show.

 

    The goal of the project was to extensively link the shared world of the game and the show. They take place in the same area at the same time, and the two branches of the project promise future crossovers, ranging from the ability of the player’s character in the game to appear in the show to large scale players’ actions influencing the show’s narrative future. At the moment, however, the crossover is limited to similar storylines and characters and timed missions in the game that must be completed by the next episode’s airing. The two development teams both made concessions for such a project to become a reality. While, for example, the gaming team thought the alien races known as “Voltan” should bring with them flying car technology, Syfy’s television crew told them that was right-out too expensive.

 

    Meanwhile, Syfy’s conceptual team thought horses or similar pack animals would fit the setting. The logistical team for the video game informed them that pack animals interfere with combat in games like the one they were designing. I admit to having not played the game, but I do have exposure to both television and games of this genre – and the mutual influence is clear.

 

    The TV show brings several well-recognized actors, including Grant Bowler, (known for his previous work in Ugly Betty and True Blood,) and Julie Benz, from (Angel and Dexter). Of course, the television actors served as the live models for their digital doubles in the game. The actors, along with the visual decisions for the various races in the world, had to be decided on several years in advance than they would have been for a typical science fiction show for like this without a collaborating video game team. On the other hand, while video games can relatively easily create very non-human aliens, a TV show has more limitations, meaning Defiance’s aliens look remarkably human. The collaboration has a kind of lowest common denominator effect, where both media have to take into account the limitations of the other.

 

However, transmedia collaboration is not without its strengths. Despite several obvious archetypes and standard genre elements, the extensive world-building is obvious from the very first episode. Because the show is free to tell for of its mythology in the setting of the game, the world feels like it has even more depth. There are two complete languages for the show and game, constructed by David J. Peterson, who also worked on Dothraki, the constructed language from Game of Thrones. Though we don’t see much of some of the alien races, as not all are represented in the main cast, each has distinctive cultural characteristics, evident in their speech patterns, dress, and attitudes, even in minor roles.

 

The races are also original in that the cultures seem to have been built from the ground up, rather than borrowed from Earth cultures and pasted onto alien species, a welcome relief to a veteran viewer of the genre (though some play it a little close at times).

    The show promises a world full of conflict and tensions, some which are more television arc-worthy, others of which could easily permeate throughout the show and game worlds (such as racial tension and environmental dangers). The show has recently been renewed for a second season, hopefully bringing the promised crossovers closer to reality.

Evil, Inc. : The Institution in the Works of Joss Whedon

Before Joss Whedon's Avengers (2012) (reviewed here) rocketed him onto the main stage, he already had a core following of dedicated fans watching and analyzing his works. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of gender and language across Whedon's canon, but on the verge of a new series carrying his creator's seal, Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D., to premier on ABC, there is another repeated element that deserves examining. Since the beginning of Whedon's television career, his main characters have been pushed and pulled by shadowy unseen organizations, and pitted against not just individual villains, but also entire evil institutions.

Angel (1999-2004) begins by introducing viewers to Los Angeles' literal darker side. The show is set up as a combination of a detective noir and horror/fantasy. The head of this grim side of LA, though, isn't organized crime, it's a law firm, Wolfram & Hart, that specializes in defending and protecting the worst of the worst, which in this universe, means vampires, demons, and genocidal maniacs. Though each season of the show has it's own arc and main villain, the law firm remains as the central embodiment of evil throughout the show.

It's an obvious joke, a firm of powerful lawyers that keeps the rich richer and the poor underpowered (“Evil white folks really do have a Mecca! … Oh, I get it, I get it. You all can cater to the demon, cater to the dead man, but what about the black man!” - Charles Gunn, Episode 1.21 Blind Date). Here, they are taken to the extreme, with demonic clients and bloody rituals. But Whedon uses the idea of evil lawyers beyond the humorous gag. They become an examination of evil, (often seen as wild and animalistic or demonic) as it is enacted through something so proscribed and systematic as law. Angel, a hero on a quest for good and personal redemption, is forced to face a world where evil is institutional, and intrinsically engrained. At one point, the former head lawyer of the LA branch tells him as much:

    "Our firm has always been here in one form or another. The Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge—we were here the first time a caveman clubbed his neighbor and watched in fascination as his brains oozed out in the dirt. We're in the hearts and minds of every living human being [...] The world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us."(Holland Manners 2.15 Reprise)

Wolfram & Hart, then, is about how evil is part of civilization from the beginning, because it is part of us from the beginning. Evil lawyers are in power, but isn't evil always?

Whedon's next evil corporation never got a chance to come out of the shadows. Much of what viewers know about Firefly (2002) and Serenity's (the 2005 movie sequel) mega corporation of Blue Sun comes from piecing things together from the 14 episode show, interviews, and official merchandise. What is clear is that Blue Sun is everywhere. The logo is all over the show, on products from food and clothes, to more luxury goods, to transport vehicles. But the company reaches much farther. On some planets, they are an exclusive monopoly. The show reveals (or would, but didn't have a chance to get that far, and instead does so on DVD commentary) that they have even begun human experiments for their medical and military contracting subdivisions, which have led to horrifying results. There are clearly implied ties to the government and it is not clear whether Blue Sun and the Alliance Government are even actually separately functioning entities. Unlike Wolfram & Hart, which operates inside a system as it's necessary or ever present evil, Blue Sun is the system. Our Heroes, in this show, are rebels against this system and in 14 episodes and one movie, we only see reasons to agree with them. But in an interview, Whedon elaborated on more nuance of the main character, Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds's politics:

“Mal’s politics are very reactionary and ‘Big government is bad’ and ‘Don’t interfere with my life. And sometimes he’s wrong — because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.”

If Wolfram & Hart is about evil inherent in the system, Blue Sun is about the dangers of an unbalanced system, of one company with too much power, and people with too little voice to change that.

Dollhouse (2009-2010), unlike his two previous shows, takes us inside a corporation, a biomedical firm, Rossum, that produces the most advanced neurological treatments, and also runs an underground elite network of “houses” of programmable humans, known as dolls. From the inside of one of these Dollhouses, the show depicts several characters moral struggles with the technologies that allow for the complete rewriting of the human mind. The dolls are people who have entered into a contract of slavery to do things they cannot imagine and will not remember, in exchange for financial compensation and being cured of whatever problems they may have had (often mental illnesses) or instead of prison sentences. As the end game for Rossum is revealed, and the stakes get higher, allegiances change and justifications fall away. Rossum has a lot of elements of Blue Sun, in that they are too powerful, and too long unchecked, but it also brings in some elements of Wolfram & Hart's message. The series tells us that the technology that Rossum possessed was so powerful that it would almost inevitably end all of civilization. Why? Because people seek power and control, and now they can have it.

In his non-TV shows, Whedon cannot seem to leave the institutional evil behind him. Though the main character of Dr. Horrible is technically supposed to be evil, the “Hero,” is clearly an absolutely terrible person. In the 45 minute web musical, Whedon makes sure to mention that this hero is a “Corporate TOOL.” Cabin in the Woods, (which this blog already touched on here, [spoiler warning]) toys with a corporation that seems quite evil, and well, turns out to have a more complicated purpose.

The reason all this is important to understand in the wake of The Avengers and the anticipation to S.H.I.E.L.D., is that in the source material,  S.H.I.E.L.D. is a very large, very powerful organization. Though technically under either US or UN control, in the recent Avengers, they are shown to be largely autonomous, and occasionally even act against the advice and order of these authorities. In the block buster superhero movie, of course,  S.H.I.E.L.D. is unambiguously the good guys, coming in and saving the day. But Whedon's fear of such institutional power survived even until filming, as a cut scene from the beginning shows. This scene would have framed the whole movie with the question of whether this agency is, in fact, reckless, dangerous, and too powerful.

With a whole series, more personal creative freedom and less big name super heroes, I for one, and anxious to see where Joss Whedon plan's to take this next large institutional power in the future.

The Smaller Screen: Television and the Internet

Now-a-days, every film and tv show have an official website, many of them with extra content, ranging from behind the scenes photos to brand new footage or animated web series set in the same universe. More and more people are accessing films and television for the first time from their computers through web-streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, official Youtube channels, or streaming directly from network or TV show websites. Things that are not officially available are still peddled on the web, either on technically illegal streaming sites or illegal download. The fact is, the web and the computer are now integral parts of how film and television are consumed.

Then, there are the materials created explicitly for the web. The web series, or web television is technically in its late teens as a form, but changes in web speed, accessibility, and technology, such as Youtube's creation in 2005 fundamentally made the web a kind of playground for new, independent creators, especially those interested in episodic structure. Web series, as defined by Wikipedia, consist of everything from weekly news shows, to animated movie reviews, to slapstick comedies produced on low budget to newer dramas made with partnerships in Hollywood or with big name web companies.

Recently, television stations have been buying rights to shows originally made for the internet and airing them. At this point, there are far too many varied forms or web television to address at once. Low budget, episodic comedies are popular and well suited to the short run times that many web series have. Dramas are less common. Nearly all web episodes air short episodes. Very short. For dramas, which on television find it more useful to run for an hour as opposed to comedies at a half hour, the web demands an adaptation of narrative structure. On the longer end, a web show like Sanctuary (one of the highest budgeted, at 4.3 million, and with Hollywood insiders) ran eight 15-20 minute episodes before being picked up by (then) SciFi for television. On the shorter end, several mystery shows ran episodes of 90 seconds each.

H+, a new show this fall, produced by Warner Brother's Digital Distribution, their web specific developers, in partnership with Youtube, chose a median episode length of about 4 minutes per episode. From the creative team of John Cabrera (writer, known from his acting on Gilmore Girls) and Bryan Singer (producer, who worked on The Usual Suspects, along with several super hero movies), the show is on the scale of the post apocalyptic science fiction shows that the major networks keep trying out for prime time slots. With a budget of a little under 2 million, and filmed around Santiago, Chile, the plot spans decades and the entire globe. It calls on special effects for simulated many advanced technologies, as well as classically higher budget effects, like explosions, crashed cars and complex sets.

The bare bones of the plot is what happens when technologies like smart phones become even more advanced to the point of integration into the human body, and what, in an extreme case can be the fall out from that. Quoting inspiration from Lost, the story is told non-linearly, through multiple threads about the technology that slowly (by episode 24, halfway through the proposed 28 episode 255 minute run) seem to be connecting to each other through overlapping character. Every episode has a given location and time relative to “it happening,” the disaster the changes the world that is supposed to be the driving mystery.

Having followed the series through it's 2-3 episodes a week release schedule, the series comes off quite differently than it's made for TV counterparts (Revolution – J.J. Abrams similarly plotted adventure on NBC; Falling Skies – an apocalypse driven by alien invasions – produced by Steven Spielberg on TNT). The combination of short episodes and receiving those episodes as part of disjoint stories seem more like views into a world and do less to push the viewer towards wondering about the mystery. Because the series premiers on Youtube, the comments contain instant reactions. Rather than discussions of the mystery, or insightful connections or theorizing (typical, I am told, of a forum after an episode of Lost,) most of the top comments are complaints about the short format, asking for longer 15-30, even hour long episodes. The creators occasionally step in the discussion and recommend watching a bunch of the episodes at a time.

What seemed curious is that now, in 2012, the web series format is nothing new. Most of the people watching H+ watch other videos on Youtube, maybe even other series. What is it about this one? In gauging my own impressions of the format and the content, perhaps the scope and the scale of the project are just too big for such a small screen. It's only recently that we have come to expect high budget effects and global scale shooting from television. Only recently have the high tech and the post apocalyptic gotten comfortable on the small screen (though, it could be argued, that they are still trying to find their footing there.) Moving it so quickly to the web series, especially to such a short episode, the visuals and intensity feel like small clips from something out of what we have come to expect of high budget television or movies. They feel like additional information rather than the core plot. Certainly the decision to build up this universe that is already hard enough to contain on the web through non-linear slowly converging storylines adds to the frustrations.

Ultimately, H+ has still creating an engaging universe and interesting characters. Whether or not the medium or the form they used is ultimately beneficial is unclear. The web is still a new media, and certainly not one accepted at the same level as television. Budgets are lower, and it's considered an honor to be picked up by a network to be aired through “normal” means. It's future, though can only get brighter as technology improves and people rely less and less on the major networks for their programming. Already, Netflix and Hulu are creating their own content. Perhaps a program like H+ isn't so much in the wrong place, but before it's time.

Check out H+ for yourselves on their Youtube Channel.

The Role of the Storyteller in The Princess Bride

Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride has remained a favorite throughout the years. It is a tale of dashing swordfights, monsters, and true love. It is able to place itself head and shoulders above the rest because of its emphasis on the nature of stories and storytelling.

                The film is framed in terms of a story being told from an old man to his grandson. Immediately, the film sets up the idea of passing stories and mythology along to the younger generation. This concept is the basis for the oral tradition that ruled over so many tribes of the past. Before they had a written language, the only way to pass down stories was for the elders to tell them to the younger generations. Though the grandfather is using a book to tell the story, he is still the latest in this long line of storytellers.

                The characters within the story itself are also ruled by the stories they tell. For example, the character of Inigo Montoya lives to get revenge on the man who killed his father.  However, the audience does not see these events. Instead, they hear it told as a story from Inigo himself. By giving the audience the information in this manner, Inigo is created as a man whose whole life is driven by a story. Everything that he does throughout the entire film is preempted by the story that he tells Wesley.

                Wesley also exists through the story of the Dread Pirate Roberts. His reputation is based off of the exploits of the men who came before him. The name is what carries the power, not anything that he has personally done. In this way, he has to become the story instead of being able to tell his own story. Even when he returns and finds his true love, he needs to pass the title on to someone else. He is drawn to continue the story even though his role is over. When he does decide to pass on the role, it is implied that the title will fall on Inigo, a man who is no longer driven by his own story and must now find another.

                These two story driven characters come together for the first time in a wide ranging and extremely cinematic duel. They range all over the terrain, each playing with the other. The nature of the film as a story allows this confrontation to play out in this manner. Real sword fighting is quite brutal, quick, and does not last nearly as long as the fight in the film. However, as both men are living through a story that does not necessarily involve the other, they are able to play and to enjoy what they are doing. Their excitement is shared through the screen by way of the grandfather telling the story of these two men dueling. In addition, this is all being told through the eye of the director and the screenwriter who want to thrill the audience with their story. All this layered storytelling comes together to form a cohesive whole, creating one of the great fairy tales of American cinema.

 

Multiple Cities and Multiple Films: Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG

Let’s start off with the title, what it contains and what it elides: My Winnipeg.

Winnipeg. This is indeed, and without a doubt, a film about Winnipeg, a large-ish town in central Canada situated at the fork of the Red and the Assiniboine rivers. This wintry Manitoban capital -- ensconced in stratified layers of snow and time, rocked to sleep by its own nostalgia, simultaneously the scheming writer and captive audience of boundless lore -- is the psychic prison Guy Maddin seeks to escape and the locus of his archaeological project. (That this “archaeological” project is just one of many -- alongside disparate “psychoanalytic” and more purely cinematic ventures -- is something that I shall return to later.) Insofar as the film tries to teach us unknown facts about an unknown place (I imagine that most viewers are, like me, ignorant of the real Winnipeg), it can claim to be a documentary -- and it is, indeed, presented by something called The Documentary Channel (a CBC outlet of sorts.) And at times the film hews too closely to its straight-documentary vision, providing us with quirky customs, eccentric faces, decrepit buildings: a whole cosmos of urban truth and myth that we have seen a thousand times before, in a thousand other places, from a thousand other creators, in a thousand tourist manuals, on the lips of a thousand other good-old-days-ers championing the moribund glory of the past. It is objectively fascinating stuff, but so soaked in sentimentality that it risks lulling you just as much as it has lulled multitudes of Winnipeggers. (And lulling is not so far from boring.) But at other times, My Winnipeg strays so far from what we could call documentary realism that it risks raising another sort of ire. None of Maddin’s Winnipeg stories are presented with even the slightest bit of historiographical clarity: no sources, no provenance, no interviews, not the slightest objective slant of verifiability or falsifiability. We are essentially being made privy to nifty nostalgia for an urban spirit-world that might never have existed. While there is undoubtedly something commendable and hyper-cinematic about this -- isn’t the dream-world always a more fertile subject than the real world? -- it becomes claustrophobic as the film progresses, rattling along episodically from one set piece to another. If this is indeed a documentary, what documents can we cling to? What information can we use as a reputable foundation for our own mental schema of Winnipeg? How can we -- or Maddin, for that matter -- ever escape from the Platonic cave of shadows and illusions? Without any third-party interviewees or voices, all we have is Maddin’s poetic stream of consciousness laced to spectral half-facts -- and that can begin to feel very solipsistic after a while. And this brings us to the next word of the title.

My. In addition to functioning as an archaeological excavation of the multiple cities contained in Winnipeg’s interstices -- parallel cities dislocated geographically, historically, socially, financially, erotically from the banal consensus reality of Wikipedia’s Winnipeg -- Maddin’s film paints itself as a psychoanalytic project in which the filmmaker seeks to “film his way out” of his hometown, escaping once and for all from “the heinous power of family and city.” That this heinous power -- the sickly grip of despair that lurks within the rigidity of childhood -- is never adequately shown is one of the film’s major problems, one of the things that sabotages its psychoanalytic aspirations and reduces it, ultimately, to the inoffensive folklorism described above. Not that Maddin doesn’t make a game effort. He hires actors to play his family members in reenactments of crucial formative moments and brings his domineering mother into the mix (played in an excellent turn -- not as one of the reenactors but as Maddin’s “real” mother, confusingly enough -- by ‘40s femme fatale Ann Savage.) Wending his way through memory on a highly-literalized “dream-train,” Maddin hardly shies from erotically-charged, even shameful remembrances, revealing the way that local history (a sexualized labor movement of tongue-in-cheek “Bolsehevik rapists” stalking a Catholic girls’ school), boyhood development (much affection is lavished on old arenas and the stately, nude athletes that showered there) and maternal influence (his mother’s naked lap is presented as a geological force comparable with the forking Red and Assiniboine) fuse to build a psychosexual tapestry all the more consumptive for being half-remembered (and half-memorable.) And yet, the dark latent strata of love and hate are never quite unearthed. I craved the bedrock of malaise that would not only show why Winnipeg seduced Maddin in the first place but also share a glimpse of what it is that now drives him to escape. This Winnipeg is his, but he never shares enough to make it ours…

What my breakdown of the title leaves out is just that thing that any Maddin-lover would most expect: style. And My Winnipeg isn’t lacking. All the Soviet-style montage, wry intertitles and silent melodrama we know so well from “The Heart of the World” and Brand Upon the Brain are brought to bear on little unassuming Winnipeg. There are sequences of unabashed visual splendor that might stand beautifully as self-contained episodes, but are only with great awkwardness shepherded into the documentary and psychoanalytic narratives that ostensibly make up the meat of the film. At one point, various Winnipeg elders gather for a sinister séance, in which a lovely ballet dancer dances out messages from the spirit world. It is a sparkling, romantic dialogue of images – a telegram from 1915 edited up with all the alacrity of a music video – and while it work tremendously as a three-minute short film, it leaves you wondering what it reveals about Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg, or any Winnipeg for that matter. At another point, a montage of the whirring beauty salon of Maddin’s mother is dynamically, discontinuously edited, with sprays, purses, gossiping mouths, dusty powders flying in every direction – a whole panoply of womanly signifiers that Maddin credits with building the feminine side of his psyche. And later, a mystical hockey arena in the process of demolition – and filled while a century’s worth of ghostly players playing one final match – presents the male side of Maddin’s upbringing. All of these scenes share the same dialectical montage style, the same back-and-forth volley of faces, fetishized objects, even intertitles. But those high-melodramatic interludes seem to exist on utterly a different plane from  the somewhat banal documentary paces or the fascinating – yet weirdly unfulfilled family reenactments. Like the city of its title, My Winnipeg seems to have uncountable maps for uncountable alleys. How do these alleys cohere into a single city, or a single film? This is a question that Guy Maddin doesn’t quite know how to answer.

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Photo courtesy of Martin Rankin, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

On the Doorstep of a Hidden World: Masks and Sacraments in Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT

A mask affords its wearer a rare privilege: he can ingest images from the outside world without projecting any back. He can nourish his imaginative life without letting anyone else register his thoughts, his reactions, or even his identity. He can become a different person with the mask on, then return to his same old self when he takes it off. In such a way, a mask acts as a sort of liminal device -- a portal that allows the Self to travel unscathed into secret worlds by concealing the face that would otherwise link that Self to its usual obligations, relations and consequences. But a mask is not innocent -- its privileges can tempt and corrupt, and its very presence often signals that a line has been crossed, that something has been done or seen that could not have been done or seen by an unmasked agent.

The Venetian mask that rests, cold and silent, on the pillow in this still from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut has its eyes wide open but sees nothing because it lacks a wearer -- it is an object welcoming to secret images but incapable of imagination. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman's character sleeps with eyes shut, swaddled in bland blankets, dressed in a conjugal nightie, ring-hand facing out. She is vulnerable and incapable of travelling into the outside world, but her mind is active, and the film dwells on the erotic dreams that occupy her sleep. Her epistemological quest is inward-driven; she investigates her inner desires. But the mask, which her husband picked up on a secret foray into New York's sexual underworld, speaks to a knowledge-seeking journey of an entirely different sort: a hunt for a secret world outside that bed, a world accessible only through the secrecy and deception of the mask's wearer. This still, with all its implied dichotomies between presence and absence, blindness and sight, warmth and coldness, sleep and wakefulness, passivity and activity, encapsulates both the thematic richness and the viewing experience of Kubrick's film. Everything is there if you just look for it, but you won't necessarily see more by staring straight ahead with eyes wide open. Commit to closing your eyes and wandering through Kubrick's dream-world and you will see plenty.

Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999 and based upon Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, is of course Kubrick’s final work,¹ released just months after his death. Grossly mismarketed as an "erotic thriller" ², enveloped in the real-life gossip-storm of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s (rumored) carnal dysfunction, weighted with the ambiguous expectations we reserve for the posthumous work of geniuses, and generally just derided for trying to confront sexuality in earnest, the film suffered, even and especially before its release, from unfortunate extratextual baggage. Thankfully though, all that baggage falls by the wayside once you actually watch the film. All that remains is cinema itself — the traces in time and space of a mind's probing, of its seductions, its frustrations, its dead-ending paths and unexpected acts of generosity. Whose probing, though? And whose mind? Do the film's obscure investigations belong to Kubrick, or to his characters, or to us, the viewers? The answer is both simple and complex: as in all detective stories -- and this is, despite the lack of guns/badges/detectives, a detective story -- the engines of narrative fuse our curiosity with that of the artist and with that of his creations. Eyes Wide Shut is a dream-universe that we are all citizens of; and all of us alike -- director, viewer, protagonist -- fast become consumed with finding the secret world that lies hidden within that world...

The film — which traces the nocturnal travails of the sexually malnourished and existentially unmoored Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise, in an elusive performance) — is 'problematic' in the best sense of the word. It refuses to be easily read — not in a wan Bartleby-esque fashion, but rather in a vaguely Borgesian way³, a way that multiplies symmetries and symbols and patterns, suggesting that meaning (whatever that means) is both ever-receding and ever-present, glimpsable but not inhabitable. As Bill begins to wander -- emotionally and geographically -- away from his wife Alice (played by Kidman as a woman with a rich erotic imagination and a barely-tapped reservoir of marital resentment), the film vacillates in tone between upper-class picaresque (Bill's wanderings as satirical voyage peppered with insinuating piano players, lascivious widows, gentle whores, and sleazy shopkeeps) and philosophical allegory (Bill's wanderings as subjective investigation into the darkest depths of desire, power and knowledge.) What the film is most emphatically not, though, is a sexy, straightforward jaunt through the sexual underworld of New York City. (Indeed, the city seen on screen is quite obviously not Manhattan; whether you want to call it "a dream-vision of the Upper East side" or just "London posing as such" is up to you.) And there is little in the way of linear story; instead, we follow in Bill's shadow as he circles -- like a blind but hungry falcon -- closer and closer to a hidden world of sex and death.

Gradually, the comedy-of-manners falls away, and we, like Bill, are drawn in, wide-eyed, by the pull of the sacred unknown, by the promise of a sexual unleashing accessible deep within the core of civilization. And so we arrive at the film's Gnostic centerpiece: the infamous orgy sequence, a mesmerizing scene where faces are hidden and skin is uncovered, where blue-bloods, capitalists and prostitutes don Venetian masks for oblique sacraments of sex and power. Sumptuous tracking shots follow Bill through a vast mansion as naked bodies thrust and writhe all around him in devotional silence; the soundtrack features an Orthodox liturgy played backwards to surreal effect; a high priest waves a censer; the blind and hungry falcon stops circling and alights at the center of his path and opens his eyes to see and eat. The formal virtuosity of the scene -- not to mention the heady brew of sex, power, wealth, revelation and mystery -- is enough to suck the air out of any room, enough to send cold tendrils of awe into any cinephile's brain, just as much as the similarly ornate final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As in 2001, there is a pervasive mystical ambiance, a sense of historical objects repurposed for timelessness, but -- and I really never though I would say this -- the orgy sequence of Eyes Wide Shut is perhaps even more ambiguous than the Louis XVI sequence of 2001. Are we witnessing a ritual of Dionysian wildness or rather an Apollonian intervention, the imposition of social and religious protocol onto the pre-social gestures of sex? What should we make of the utter lack of pleasure or emotion in the sex? Like Bill, we are left wondering what we have learned; reaching the secret world only leaves us with more questions: who is behind the masks? Is there another deeper secret world that orchestrated this one?

Eyes Wide Shut does not answer these questions, but neither does its narrative end with that morbid central sequence. The blind and hungry falcon -- having ever-so-briefly seen and tasted -- is cast back out into the world and finds himself circling outwards again, in concentric loops that return him, not without some melancholy, to the frustrations of the everyday. Bill re-acquaints himself with his professional and married lives but has to live with the corrupting and dangerous knowledge of what he has seen. And so the final third or so of the film traces the aftermath, the return to equilibrium, the frayed edges of Bill's consciousness stitching themselves back to reason, the compromises he must make to survive his brush with the sexual ineffable. Narrative circumstances force him to step away from the seductions of the secret world embedded in networks of power and wealth, and instead to focus on the secret world of married domesticity -- a different but no less mysterious type of sexual covenant. The return to this covenant will require a new set of maskings, unmaskings, sacramental rituals, and threshold-crossings, but perhaps I should save that for another post...!

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[1] His script contributions to A.I. Artificial Intelligence don't count; that film has Steven Spielberg’s grubby, sentimental fingerprints all over it — although it is occasionally possible to catch a glimpse of Kubrickian visual wit within the self-indulgent morass.

[2] A disreputable, not to mention inaccurate, genre christening that calls to mind Skinemax-y assignations much more than existential dream-longings.

[3] I am not referencing Jorge Luis Borges just for the fun of it. Aside from similarities in structure (an episodic, circling way of building narrative without ever quite building plot) and form (decadent, florid imagery dead-ending in banal obviousness, while the ineffable instead jumps out, in blunt and concise language, from the interstices of the everyday), there is also rich thematic overlap -- dare I say a shared metaphysics? -- between Borges's short stories and the world of Eyes Wide Shut. Both Kubrick and Borges fixate -- with trepidation and awe -- on the emergence of a raw, erotically-tinged secret world within the consensus reality of daily social functioning, a secret world that protagonists are pulled towards at great personal risk but can never quite understand. Both artists traffic in implication, in temptation, in that one glimpse of the infinite that barely lasts a second but that will perhaps haunt you forever. Consider, by way of an example, Borges's story "The Sect of the Phoenix," which describes a global mystery cult whose ominous secret, transmitted through the ages but never spoken aloud (nor even spelled-out in the pages of the story), is thought by many readers to be none other than the 'secret' of sexual intercourse. Here, as in Eyes Wide Shut, we see sex recast as a sub-world within the world, a secret society both obvious and unfathomable.

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Photo found on btsergio's Flickr account, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Love, Obsession, and the Movies in Tampopo and Who's Camus Anyway?

A gangster in a stark white suit and his mistress stride down the aisle of a movie theater, taking their seats right in the front row. A gaggle of thugs follow after them, placing a table in front of them and quickly covering it with a luxurious basket of foods, two champagne flutes, and a bottle of champagne. The champagne is poured into a flute, and as the gangster lifts it to his lips he looks straight into the camera, addressing us, the audience - “Oh? So you're at a movie too. What are you eating?”

Juzo Itami's 1985 film, Tampopo, is a joyful visual feast celebrating the Japanese's love of - and obsession with - food. The film is a series of vignettes surrounding the main story of Tampopo, the owner of a struggling ramen shop, and Goro, a truck driver who accidentally becomes her mentor in the art of preparing and serving ramen.

And what an art it is – an early scene shows Goro's companion Gun (played by a young Ken Watanabe) receiving a lesson from a ramen guru on the proper technique to eating a bowl of ramen. The food itself is lovingly photographed – closeup shots put the bowl in the center of the frame, then pan in to fully revel in the aesthetic composition of the soup. The ramen master gently lifts the slices of pork on the top and tucks them under the noodles – explaining that this is a token of respect for the contribution of the pork. Ramen in Japan is like the cheeseburger in the US – greasy, salty, cheap and satisfying – but in Tampopo it is treated with the respect usually reserved for high cuisine. While the experience of having fresh ramen may be foreign to most American viewers, the act of eating and savoring food is universal. Tampopo takes eating a bowl of ramen and elevates it to a ritual – celebrating the pieces that make up the whole. When done perfectly, even lowly street food like ramen can become high art.

Many of the film's gags rely heavily on Japanese culture and social traditions, yet the film also incorporates elements from traditional Hollywood genres. Amongst the vignettes in the film are parodies of cultural stereotypes - a young business executive upstages his superiors at a restaurant with his extensive knowledge of French cuisine. A mother on her deathbed rises to make dinner for her family, her last act before death. A group of young women are taught how to eat noodles abroad properly, without slurping or making any noise – except once they see a foreigner in the same restaurant noisily slurping down his noodles, they follow suit. While the jokes in these scenes are heavily Japanese, they become universally accessible in their complete reversal of expectations.

As much as the film celebrates the rituals of food, it is also a celebration of Hollywood genres and film itself. The formation of a genre is a sort of ritual in itself, a meaningful repetition of familiar characters and tropes. Tampopo pays homage to traditional genres – especially the western and the gangster film. Goro the truck driver rolls into Tampopo's restaurant like Shane, there to clean up the town, conquer the bad guys, then move on. The final ramen tasting scene is filmed like a shootout, with the five taste-testers approaching the ramen store with steely resolve, ready for one last test.

The gangster figure in the film is the complete embodiment of obsession and lust, for food, cinema, and life. The opening scene immediately combines food and cinema, and the gangster's lust for both – he demands both the most optimal dining and viewing experience, threatening a man behind him for crinkling his potato chip bag too loudly. He requires silence for his movie viewing, and explains how right before death, one is said to see their life before their eyes, like a movie – and he wants no interruptions when he sees his own. Later, the gangster is featured in a version of the typical romantic sex scene – yet the addition of food and its creative uses make the scene hilariously unsexy. Finally, near the end of the film the gangster is stumbling in the gutter, shot and bleeding to death. As his lover cries over him, all he can talk about is – what else – food. Right before he passes, he hushes her, “Be quiet. My last movie is starting.” Food is life, and life is a movie.

 

For the characters in Mitsuo Yanagimachi's film, Who's Camus Anyway? (2005), the boundaries between cinema and real life become blurred as they endeavor to create a film. Who's Camus centers around a group of film students in Tokyo who are about to shoot a film, and their personal and creative trials as obstacles get in the way.

Who's Camus starts off playfully self-reflexive – as a film about film, there are several layers of interpretation and meaning involved. The opening sequence is a smoothly choreographed long take, with a fluid camera that floats around the college campus, introducing the viewer to the different characters of the film. Two of the filmophile students, naturally, are discussing legendary long opening takes of films, name dropping films like Orson Welles's Touch of Evil and Robert Altman's The Player.

These are the first of many references to films, novels, and philosophers – at times the film feels like it is only accessible to viewers who know the material referenced. However, when one of the producers of the student film, Kamimura, enters a cafe and immediately begins re-enacting a scene from Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin, it becomes clear that the name dropping is not just for show. Kamimura remembers and recounts the scene in precise detail, remembering each camera movement, the placement of the extras in the scene, the motions of the film's star. The extras in the film we are watching become the extras in the film in his mind. The lines between reality and cinema are blurred and crossed over for Kamimura, the walking encyclopedia of film.

Who's Camus Anyway? follows the personal drama and conflicts of the student film crew as they struggle to put together their film, called The Bored Murderer, and themselves. The film within the film is about a high school student, Takeda, that invades the home of and then murders an elderly woman, for no apparent reason. As the director and his crew ponder why he would commit this act, they begin to dissect the motivations behind their own – often immoral – behavior. When Hisada, the assistant director of the student film, explains to her boyfriend why she kissed two other men while he was away, she uses similar language to Takeda, the murderer in her own film. To explain their actions both of them make no excuses – they wanted to see what it felt like after they had crossed those boundaries.

The film's most impressive cinematic feat is its last fifteen minutes, which is the actual filming of The Bored Murderer. Here the line between the film, its producers, and its audience is completely erased. The sequence starts out straight forward enough – it is clear when the audience is watching the filming of Takeda's story and when the audience is seeing what the movie looks like – as though it has already been processed and edited together. The viewer changes between the two visual worlds, that of the filming and that of the film. Then things start to get weird. In the film within the film we watch as Takeda washes up after killing the elderly woman. Her husband comes home and starts knocking on the outside of the house, and Takeda begins to panic. The film cuts outside to see the husband knocking on the window – and then Hisada calls cut from off camera, enters the shot, and tells the actor playing the husband that the take was good. Then, within the same shot, the plot of The Bored Murderer continues – Takeda leaps out of the window with a knife, tackling the husband. It is clearly not the actor who plays Takeda committing some prank on set. As the scene continues on, we are back within The Bored Murderer. The next shot is a wide shot – where previously all the crew and equipment had been set up around the house, everything is now gone, consistent with the interior film. The transition between the reality and the fiction within Who's Camus is seamless – the worlds have been united in one shot. The cinematic borders between what happens in front of the camera and what happens behind have been blurred and erased. The filmmakers become part of their own film, and the film is part of them.

 

 

Mind Trip: Movies for a New Era

“I see dead people.”

Perhaps one of the most famous phrases in movie history, The Sixth Sense is only one of so called mind-game films from the 90s. The mind-game films themselves were part of an assortment of films from the 90s with a complex narrative, films such as Fight Club, Memento, Oldboy, Run Lola Run, and The Truman Show. Mind-game films fall into three categories: (1) films in which a character is being played with, (2) films in with the audience is being played with, and (3) films in which both are the case.  What made these films so fascinating was their experiments with spectator relationships through disorientation or deception, usually with plot twists and trick endings.  

For example, The Sixth Sense. The Sixth Sense falls into the third category.  The final twist at the end is not only hidden from the main character, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, as well as the audience.  How is does director M. Night Shyamalan keep the audience in the dark? The clues are all there.  We never see anyone interact with Malcolm, there are hints of cold air wherever he goes, and a few other small hints.  Yet, Shyamalan misleads the audience through Malcolm’s own self delusions.  As Malcolm explains away the reasons around him, we as viewers are also swept along until the end.  Shyamalan uses mise en scene to emphasize where the audience is looking, drawing attention away from the clues already in scene.  The entire movie is one massive Kansas City Shuffle.

Another example would be Memento. In Memento, the audience is tricked and led, by both the narrative form as well as the narrative.  The story plays out backwards, asking what has happened rather than what will happen.  The form disorients the viewer, forcing them to piece together the story.  It’s an active form of viewership. Often, the audience would have to watch the movie twice or more to understand everything.  As in The Sixth Sense, Memento has a twist at the end. Once known, the whole movie is viewed differently .

Memento is not the only one to play with the narrative form.  Run Lola Run also played with time. The audience explores various alternate possibilities as Lola tries to save her boyfriend. Run Lola Run also intercuts the possible futures of the people Lola runs into as brief snapshots.  Run Lola Run relies on the form for its complex narrative, neither misleading nor using any massive twists.

Why are these movies so popular? One reason stems from the complexity. When creating a film with a complex narrative, plotting the plot becomes even more important.  The connections and choices in these movies are, to put it simply, smart.  The audience is surprised; the formula had been abandoned.  By abandoning the formula, these films are free to play with narrative form and experiment with how the audience reacts.  Not only changing the narrative, but how they tell the narrative.  

These mind-game films go a step further.  Not only is form often complex, but the narrative also. Tricks, traps, deceit, and confusion – theses films delight in disorienting the viewers. Some films used the formulas to lead the audience astray. While others went a different way, the fact remains that these films rejected classical storytelling. The result is magnificent.  So, next Friday night, check out The Others, The Usual Suspects, The Truman Show, Silence of the Lambs, Memento, Primer, Pi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Machinist, or one of the hundreds of other movies integrating these techniques.

 

The Painted Screen: Le mystére Picasso, The Mystery of Picasso, The Picasso Mystery

“We’d love to know the secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.”– Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Mystére Picasso (1956)

Picasso, seated shirtless in the studio, stares at the easel opposite him (its back turned to us), a rare moment in which the figure of the artist is shown.  Two paintings hang on a wood partition to his left, positioned between the artist and his canvas.  As Picasso stands and approaches the partition, Clouzot cuts to the painter examining his work, his eyes staring intently, matador-like, before cutting to the works themselves.  Even without the filmmaker’s voiceover, his question, his underlying conundrum is stated clearly in these opening three shots.  There is the artist and there is his completed work; what, though, was his process in making them, what was his “secret” method?  In the 75 minutes that follow Clouzot will challenge his viewer to examine this question, to try and understand the artist not through his biography, past work, or what he says about himself, but instead through what he creates before us.

Clouzot cuts to the easel, the blank canvas standing out in the shadows of the studio.  A cloud of smoke is blown from the right into the frame, an introduction to the painter as he approaches the paper.  Picasso doesn’t pause or wait to examine the canvas as he did before with the previous two, but instead begins drawing immediately.  We don’t see him put the pen to paper, though, as Clouzot cuts from the wide angle of the artist and easel to a close-up of the canvas.  Picasso’s hand moves across the paper, sketching a cartoon-like face with a dove behind it.  The filmmaker then cuts to the shadowed face of the artist and back again to the paper.  It is only after he’s finished drawing that Picasso steps back to examine his work.  The artist and canvas are separated here.  It is the hand that connects them; and it is through the hand, as Clouzot states in voiceover, that we can see and experience “what’s going through [his] mind.”  Although this here is made as a statement, it seems as though the filmmaker is inherently asking whether we can ever truly know the inner dynamics that drive the artist’s work.

Clouzot narrates over these opening shots that we can only wonder what Rimbaud was thinking when he wrote “The Drunken Boat,” or Mozart when he composed his symphony “Jupiter.”  What were their secret processes?  Painting, Clouzot says, is different in that it allows us to follow the artist’s hand at work.  By mounting the camera on a frame behind a semi-translucent piece of canvas, Clouzot is able to make the figure of Picasso (and thus his hand) disappear, leaving only the lines, colors (the only instances of color in the film.  All the shots of Picasso and Clouzot in the studio are filmed in black and white), and figures that he paints visible to the audience.  Image is layered over image, constantly changing and transforming.  Characters are drawn, altered, erased, redrawn, erased again, and redrawn again.  Clouzot here raises a question of medium.  As he states in the film, “what is impossible to know for poetry and music is not the case for painting.”  It is difficult to know whether Clouzot is intentionally elliptical here or not.  What is it that separates the painter from the poet or musician?  Couldn’t we just as easily follow the artistic processes of music and poetry as with painting?  It is film, as a medium, that stands apart here then.  It is film, with its unique temporality that makes it possible for us to view the artist at work.  Like Picasso who paints himself painting in the studio throughout the film, Clouzot films himself filming the painter in the studio.  The Mystery of Picasso thus has as much to do with the medium of film as it does with painting; it is a film that exemplifies Clouzot’s skills as a filmmaker as much as it does Picasso’s as a painter.

In Clouzot’s earlier film The Wages of Fear (1953), four men must drive two trucks of nitroglycerine 300 miles from Las Piedras over mountainous roads in South America.  Over the course of the film, Clouzot (often referred to as the French Hitchcock) creates one of the most intense experiences in cinematic history.  There is an undercurrent of suspense and tension in The Mystery of Picasso as well.  The drama here, though, comes from the creation and transformation of the images, their construction and deconstruction, from imagining what will appear next, from watching the scene as it unfolds. The subject matter of many of these is deeply personal for the painter, as Picasso often portrays himself and his friends and inspirations (Matisse, Delacroix, and Miró and his then lover Jacqueline)[1].  Like a film, these works tell stories, they employ a cinematic narrative; they have settings and situations, characters and relationships that grow, change and develop.

By filming Picasso in process, Clouzot forces us to establish a complex relationship with these paintings.  Our emotions are manipulated as the artist blots out large sections he’s meticulously crafted or repetitively tinkers with a face, shape, or detail over and over again.  By watching the artist work, layering figures, colors, and new designs on top of each other and weaving them seamlessly together, the images become inextricable from one another.  As viewers, we’re unable to look at the final product without seeing the series of transformations and changes that went into creating it.  We can hate the image one minute, love it the next, hate it again, and be ultimately left unsure of how to feel.

But what is the value of seeing these works transform and unfold, what is our fascination with the process?  Is there the hope that by watching Picasso work we will somehow unravel what pushes him, what drives him creatively, artistically, or intellectually?  Clouzot creates a “documentary” on Picasso in process in order to reveal to the viewer the inner dynamics that compel his work.  But while it shows us the transformative stages and evolution his paintings undergo, does it ever truly reveal anything about the artist himself?  As Clouzot leads us to believe (and as the film’s title would suggest), the artist is a mystery, something to be to solved or unraveled.  And yet, is the real Picasso revealed here through his work, or is he simply putting on a show for the viewer.  Even by the end of the film, we are still left wondering, who is Picasso?  Is he a performer, a showman?  Is he the creative genius we expect him to be?  To a certain extent, Clouzot is right; we can follow what the painter is thinking through his hand.  The creation and evolution of these images give us a momentary glimpse into the artist’s mind, and through filming the transformation of the image Clouzot allows us to see what Picasso sees, experience what Picasso experiences.  But by allowing us to follow Picasso’s hand as he works, Clouzot is ultimately showing us that we cannot solve the mystery of the artist, especially in the case of Picasso.  The painter’s secret process is not simply how his works transform on the canvas, but instead what happens internally, the psychologically charged creative forces that drive his hand.  Clouzot’s true focus in the film then is not simply in unraveling the process behind the artist’s work to better understand him, but instead to raise a certain deeper question of media.

What is this final product, what is the medium here?  Does Clouzot transform the screen into a canvas or the canvas into a screen?  Is this painting, is it film?  Is it animation, or maybe a medium in between?  Clouzot doesn’t necessarily create something entirely new; the photographer Hans Namuth had worked on a similar project with Jackson Pollock previously in 1951.  But where as Namuth’s film focuses only on Pollock’s process of working, Clouzot moves further by creating something that challenges us to define it, that pushes us to respond to a work of art in a different way.  The Mystery of Picasso is, in the literal sense, painting filmed.  And yet by turning the dimensions of the screen into the canvas we are no longer able to view the film as we would a typical narrative or documentary; our approach and response is inherently different.  We’re driven to look at and consider these works as paintings as well, and yet somehow we can’t.  The temporality of film changes our experience with them; by seeing how they transform and evolve, we’re unable to look at them as if they were hanging on a wall.

Currently Watching: The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953), The Class (Cantet, 2009), Moon (Jones, 2009), Sugar (Boden and Fleck, 2008), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000), Bio-Dome (Bloom, 1996), The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009), Breaking Away (Yates, 1979), Gomorrah (Garrone, 2009), The New World (Malick, 2005), The Pest (Miller, 1997), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009)

 

 

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[1] Archie Rand, painter and professor of Art at Columbia University

Who needs a narrative...Not Stan Brakhage! (Diana)

Production Journal #5

"Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way"

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

Still from my next project Panic

It's really easy to get caught up in a storyline. Narrative has become so important in films today that it's hard to imagine a film without one. There are very few films that come out of mainstream hollywood today that don't have a planned out traditional plot. Unfortunately, many movies end up sacrificing the most important aspects of film in order to put all emphasis on the narrative. The visuals end up suffering as a result of this. The shots only purpose is for the revealment of plot information. There is no room or need for a creative eye therefore destroying the visual importance of film. For me, visuals are the most important. In order for me to really like a film, it has to engage me visually. The shots need to be dynamic and thought out; they have to have more purpose than just giving plot information (which is what most Hollywood blockbusters do). I want to see more! I want beautiful shots that move me. 

Maybe the best idea is to throw away all narrative and focus on the visceral visual experience of watching a film. This is what many avant-garde film directors have decided to do and so this week in class, we reviewed the works of many of these greats. The director that called out the most to me was Stan Brakhage. I was especially impressed by his great ability to capture an emotion or feeling without entering the narrative realm. I found myself most attracted to his films; his amazing ability to capture these raw emotions is moving. He is also a true filmmaker; the physical film is very important. You see this through the way he physically manipulates the film; by his scratching and painting directly onto the celluloid. I found that through the lack of story line or plot Brakhage was able to better focus on capturing the emotions that inspire him. 

As you can see, the theme of my week has been this idea of non-narrative. For my next project I was prompted to become inspired by these past great avant-garde filmmakers. I decided to honor Stan Brakhage and try to capture an emotion. I decided to try to capture the feeling of panic through film; to do this I used an actress and used some experimental camera techniques. I originally wanted to shoot in color. I wanted to experiment with color (as Brakhage did) and use it as an instrument for expressing an emotion. Unfortunately, I also wanted to scratch the physical film as well, but that was not going to be possible because that would require an extremely long and complicated process that I simply would not have time for in this 2 week deadline. So, I decided to shoot on black and white 16mm film which I could easily edit manually; good old scissor and tape holding the film together. I shot again on the old Arri-S camera. The shoot was difficult, but only because I was my own crew. It was difficult working the lights, using the heavy arri-s camera handheld, and directing my actress all at the same time. But I managed and the footage turned out relatively well. In terms of experimentation, I played with lighting and focus to represent the chaos and derealization one experiences when having a panic attack. I just got the film back, and will begin editing manually this weekend. I'm going to be adding scratches and perhaps coloring onto the film. For this project, I'm just going to let it all go.

 Stills from Panic: The slight defocus of the shot really throws things off and makes everything a little creepier; which is exactly what I wanted.

Next blog, I will try to include pictures of these same frames but with the scratches. Until next time.

Diana.

Organic, no additives (Inhye)

The storyline of The Celebration (1998) is simple. It centers around a wealthy Danish family celebrating its patriarch’s 60th birthday: Helge is enjoying his dinner party when his son, Christian, accuses him in front of all the guests of raping him and his twin sister, Linda (who recently committed suicide). When Helge later admits to his fault during a family breakfast, his eldest son Michael tells him to leave the table so the rest can finish their meal. The family is clearly is dysfunctional, but contextually The Celebration is subtly complex, leaving more grays than black and white. What we’re shown on screen is so candid we’ve become nuanced to the family’s situation, discouraging us from making hasty judgments.

Why? Because the camera is truly like an eye in The Celebration: sequences are undiluted and coarse, almost encroaching and nosy. The sense of uncomfortable intimacy can be attributed to the hand-held camera movement, the lack of special effects, and the tightness of the shots mimicking eye contact (long shots in The Celebration only serve to provide general scenic framework). The second-hand awkwardness is vicarious and we feel twinges of shock and subtle comedic relief, rather than bursts of them: realistically, the film borders voyeurism, not fabricated entertainment, and there is barely a trace of post-production. But this seemingly rudimentary approach to filmmaking is incredibly calculated.  In the Dogme 95 approach to filmmaking, everything must be painstakingly planned to avoid the need for post-production, cover-ups or cinematic gimmicks.

Its “Vow of Chastity”¹ states:

1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed.
3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the action takes place.
4. The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place here and now).
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The final picture must be transferred to the Academy 35mm film, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, that is, not widescreen.
10. The director must not be credited.

Extracting poignancy from the mundane is Dogme 95's objective, maintaining that art does not have to rely on frills. Thus, not only does the filmmaker have to rely solely on the pedestrian for provocation, the audience is then given an unprocessed version of a story. These films can’t be watched passively: attention must persist or else we “fall behind,” risking appreciation for Dogme 95 entirely. Like in everyday life, in which we can be unsettled by the smallest deviations from the norm, The Celebration demands the same sensitivity: there is no “cheating,” like forewarning music or exaggerated shots to guide our expectations.

And obviously Dogme 95 has its limits. By its definition, it cannot film fantasy, imagination or history, all concepts cinema is characterized by, and in many ways, obliged, to depict. This strict doctrine exiles almost every popular filmmaker but it should not be considered as a backlash at or challenge to Hollywood. All films aim for the same goal of surprise, empathy and escapism: The Celebration goes to show that a narrative, a family affair, a deeper look into the less-dignified life can evoke all three.

 

Works Cited

¹"Dogme 95 -." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95>.

Taste the Rainbow (Diana)

Production Journal #4

Still from my last film Lovely Lane. The sky painted dome in the main sanctuary of Lovely Lane UMC.

Last week, I shot my first color film. Though it might not sound like a big deal, this is a huge step in my young and unexperienced filmmaking career. Before this, I'd only ever shot on 16mm b&w film. Though this isn't unexpected considering I've only made four films before this, I always found my self avoiding the color realm. There's just something magical about b&w. Maybe it's the striking contrast between the shades of dark and light. Perhaps it's the way it makes the light look. Or maybe it's the fact that everything; people, places, and things just look better in b&w. I am in love with b&w and somewhat hesitant towards color. For my last film, I was asked by my teacher to take Eisenstein's soviet montage and apply it to my own project. I decided to shoot at a church because they have a lot to offer aesthetically. To avoid complicating my film by making great Eisensteinian statements about religion, I decided to focus on the architecture of the church. Churches tend to have their own personalities and moods that I thought would be interesting to capture. I finally shot at Lovely Lane United Methodist Church. Lovely Lane is the oldest Methodist church in Baltimore and is well-known for it's gorgeous romanesque architecture. The second I walked into the church I was blown away. Its unique dome shaped sanctuary is awe inspiring. I was impressed the most by the sky painted on the dome's ceiling which is apparently astronomically accurate. The people at the church were very welcoming. One of the members was even nice enough to take me around and show me the church's nooks, crannies and secret passageways. I decided for this film that it was time for me to explore and experiment with color. How could I not? The church is saturated with it. The stained glass windows, the rich red and gold tones of the main sanctuary, the cool colors of the old chapel. It was time for me to let go of my inhibitions and taste the rainbow.

Still from Lovely Lane. The organ in the old chapel of Lovely Lane UMC.

It's funny because I used to have the complete opposite opinion of this. Ask the average person what they think about b&w films and they'll say they don't like them. Ask them, why? "Because they're boring". The plot could be perfectly engaging, the cinematography could be gorgeous, but for some reason the fact that it's b&w predisposes a film as boring. Many years ago when I was still a kid, I was one of those people. One Thanksgiving, my family and I were having dinner at a family friends house like we did every other year. Understanding that my sisters and I were children and that we'd eventually get bored of "adult talk", Michael (the head of the house) tempted us with a film. Instead of the usual Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 version...not that Johnny Depp nonsense) we watched every other Thanksgiving, he suggested we watch Cyrano de Bergerac, the 1950 film directed by Michael Gordon. When I saw the black and white stills on the back of the VHS box, I was instantly turned off. "Oh. It's in black and white? Boring." My sisters agreed. Michael assured us that the film was very funny and wonderfully made, but nothing he said could convince us. Poor Cyrano didn't stand a chance against the technicolored glory (and chocolate) of Willy Wonka. In the end we won, and despite the lecture we received from our mother later on for being difficult, we felt it was worth it. It wasn't until I saw the film noir Laura (1945) a few months later that I began to appreciate b&w films. Later on, I also began to take a photography class which shot in b&w. Soon enough, I was transformed and I found myself in love with b&w. 

 

 
Stills from Lovely Lane. The contrast and richness of colors are so beautiful in this church.

Now that I've broken through and seen the beautiful results color can bring, I'm definitely going to explore the color world more in my next project, a sort of homage to Stan Brakhage. Hopefully I'll be able to get some beautiful color images in this project as well. I'll keep you posted on how that's going.

Until next time,

Diana

a + b = c (Diana)

Production Journal #3

One of my absolute favorite parts of production is editing my footage. Putting together the pieces and making them whole; mixing and cutting each element till together they make a film. It's in this process where the film gets its power. Here's an analogy for you: the shots are words and editing is putting the words together to form a sentence. No one is going to understand what you're saying if you just say random words. Once you take the time to put the words together to express what you want to say, people will finally hear and understand.

Still from Trav'lin' Light: actor Jacob Israel Chilton

I recently spent 16 hours in the computer lab putting my last film Trav'lin' Light together. For two nights, I sat and stared at a computer screen for 8 hours looking at the same photographs over and over. Thought this may sound like an extremely boring process, it's everything but. It's exciting, thought provoking, and oh so satisfying when you see the final result. Editing is mathematical and very calculative. Though I vowed never to take a math class again once I graduated from High School, I love making a+b=c: putting shots together to create the whole film. I enjoy the puzzle of cutting film together. My eyes might not have appreciated the strain and my legs may have began to suffer from muscular atrophy, but it was totally worth it. 

For some filmmakers, editing is everything. In one of my classes, we've been discussing the works of the great Soviet Montage filmmakers Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin. To them, editing was the key to communicating certain things to the viewer. Eisenstein felt that creating conflict between images was the golden rule of editing and successfully putting together a film. My favorite kind of conflict he created was through intellectual montage; which is basically putting together images to get across some kind of intellectual (often propagandistic) message. For example, in his film Strike (1925), Eisenstein talks about a factory worker strike in pre-revolutionary Russia. In one climactic scene, he focuses on the violent and brutal manner the military used to stifle the strike. In this scene, he juxtaposes images of innocent workers, women, and children violently beaten and killed with some very atrocious images of a bull being brutally slaughtered (Eisenstein actually filmed a bull being killed - the guts and organs falling out are real). Of course, by putting these images together, one gets the idea that the military are treating these innocent people like animals. In result, the audience becomes further disgusted and outraged at what's going on. This scene is the perfect example of how he juxtaposed images to create some kind of idea or emotion. 

It's moments like this where I realize how manipulative film and editing can be and how vulnerable that makes us. At the same time, being an aspiring filmmaker, I got the power (menacing laugh)! For class, my next film assignment is to include Eisenstein's theory of soviet montage and editing in my own project. It's due next thursday, so once again you'll find me living in the DMC till then. It's very exciting though, I will be shooting in the oldest methodist church in Baltimore. Wish me luck, and I'll let you know how that goes down.

Until next time,

Diana P.

Havana, Lisbon and Wim Wenders (Shauna)

It is in an incredible risk to create a film about the struggle of making a film.  A movie partly devoted to the study of sound, not only the production of music by trained vocalists and musicians, but the accumulation of everyday noises by a man with a boom mic seems equally ambitious.  For anyone else, the results might be forced and superficial, but Wim Wenders' products are at once astounding and spontaneous.  Both in Lisbon Story and Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders seamlessly integrates the passionate, fatal and trivial aspects of cinema and musical performance.  Whether staged or improvised his narratives never veer into the dreadful realm of predictability.  It is through his profound sensitivity to place, reflected in the local musical and chromatic vibrancy of Cuba in Buena Vista, and the hybrid medieval-industrialized Lisbon basking in Mediterranean light, that the questions of art, music and cinema are raised.  He grounds the two films so authentically in their locales that we eagerly embrace the topics of music and movie-making.

Wenders is not interested in strictly replicating the structure, lighting, energy and mood of the two respective cities, though he masterfully captures the form and atmosphere of each urban place.  He goes beyond simply conveying the essence of a city as an entity: he suggests the emotional sentiments a city might elicit and characterizes the bond between his characters and their environments.  The crosscut is used particularly effectively in Buena Vista to create a coherent portrait of an intimate cast of characters who retain their mannerisms, humor, technical skill, wit and dignity whether at home or on the stage, whether in Cuba, Amsterdam, or New York.  A specific building, street, figure or piece of debris might trigger the memory of another place or time, but Wenders plays visually with nostalgia in such a way that he avoids overt sentimentalism. 

 

Guitarist Ochoa Bustamante (left) and vocalist/guitarist Compay Segundo. Creative Commons, by Hiabba (2008). http://search.creativecommons.org/

Most of the emotional responses and dynamics between character and place are sufficiently subtle to require full attention and multiple viewings.  In Buena Vista, a group of elderly Cuban male musicians and one female vocalist come together to record and perform the nation's provincial and popular music.  They are musicians who have been forgotten or fazed out -- some had abandoned their instruments for a decade or more -- but performers endowed with a striking vitality, humanity and appreciation for their Caribbean culture.  Working with Ry Cooder, Wenders captures the centrality of music to their lives: in the studio, on the streets, in ornate pre-Revolution gambling houses and in abandoned bars.  Rhythm is inescapable, permeating all aspects of life.  Wenders recognizes that the discovery of a culture and locale so inherently bound to music constitutes something refreshing and unique.  Particularly from the European or American perspective, he acknowledged in the commentary, we tend to think of music as a separate entity, something we listen to for a duration and then set aside.  We occasionally go to concerts, listen to the radio or improvise, but these are less integral elements in the fabric of life than they are exceptional circumstances.  In contrast, Cubans constantly discover, produce and collaborate in formal and informal musical exchanges. 

 

Extreme Right: Trumpet player Manuel Mirabal Vázquez. Creative Commons, by Moyo Taxiguerrilla (2006).

One of the film's most revealing sequences occurs when singer Omara Portuondo, clad in a bold print dress, strolls down the street of her old neighborhood amid residents standing on the curbs and in front of dilapidated buildings.  As she wanders through the street, Portuondo sings, partly to herself and partly offering an impromptu performance to the audience that has gathered for her.  One woman of African descent joins her in song, invoking their common career experience and suggesting Cuba's ethnoracial heterogeneity.  During the commentary, Wenders emphasized that the neighborhood promenade scene unfolded spontaneously, a fact that is at first difficult to believe.  The individuals who gather to hear Portuondo balance reverence with anonymity.  They convey interest and desire to hear her voice, yet maintain relative nonchalance and refrain from pressuring or bombarding their locale celebrity.  Their expressions also appear unaffected by the presence of the camera.  The audience embodies civility and appreciation, without the self-consciousness or egotism that often accompanies the presence of a camera.  Indeed, as Wenders asserted, there is nothing "fake" about the people of Cuba. 

Interestingly, the concept of cinematic authenticity is a motif that recurs in Lisbon Story.  Towards the conclusion of the film, the mysterious German filmmaker Frederick challenges the very act of movie-making.  In his diatribe with his sound recorder he equates "Pointing a camera" with "pointing a weapon" and reflects, "...Every time I pointed at something, I had the feeling of depriving things of their life."  The very presence of the camera changes the subject, and the very eye of the cinematographer distorts it even further.  That is Frederick's unhappy conclusion, anyway.  The only way to escape these limitations is to capture figures without their knowledge or consent and without the corrupting influence of the filmmaker's own eye.  Frederick fashions plastic shopping bags, small backpacks and garbage cans into vessels for hidden cameras.  The flimsy blue plastic shopping bag seems appropriated directly from Buena Vista, where it also functioned as a vehicle, but one holding sacred visual elements from the past, rather than illicitly capturing unknown moments in the present. Cuban pianist Rubén González's uses a blue plastic bag to transport photographs of himself and other musicians at the height of their careers.  Against his characteristic orange zigzag button down, Rubén's insubstantial bag of treasured images intimates the pervasiveness of Cuban poverty, but also visually encapsulates Cuban values of relationships, authenticity and meaning in images and lyrics.  Armed only with a minimal plastic shopping bag, Rubén manages to protect the photographs from any blemish, indentation or tear.

 

Bassist Orland Lopez "Cachaito." Creative Commons, by Volume12 (2008).

Visual parallels between the two films run far more deeply than mere recurrent props.  In fact, Wenders captures environmental structures and geographies with suggestive doubles in Havana and Lisbon.  Train tracks function as one structural motif and symbol of transport, change, interconnectedness and, paradoxically, divisiveness.  In Buena Vista Social Club, Ochoa Bustamante sings and plays his guitar with a provincial folksiness as he walks towards the steady cam, following the tracks.  In Lisbon, the pace of life around the tracks is slightly more frantic and mechanized.  Trolley tracks in Lisbon Story help propel the protagonist Winter towards the mysterious child employed by Frederick.  Other analogues to the Lisbon trolleys are the putrid green and pink buses imported from the Soviet Union, seeming anachronisms that are actually critical to Havana's contemporary transport infrastructure.   

Wenders grapples with the environmental opposition between old and new in both films, and plays extensively with boundaries.  Boundaries may be physical thresholds, such as the coastal waters crashing against Havana's highways, or may exist in space and time, as with the cross cuts between the group's performance in Amsterdam and their work in the Cuban recording studio weeks earlier.  Diegetic sound bridges across these cuts (Silencio, sung by Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo) lend a sense of continuity to an editing technique that might otherwise create temporal confusion. 

In both films, cinematography works to suggest navigation and exploration.  It evokes another breed of tension, this time between familiarity and newness.  The mobile camera ventures through the streets of Havana and Lisbon in a series of long takes that capture not only the neighborhood architecture and lighting, but the residents' attitudes and body language.  Wenders relied fully on the mobile cam and two heavier cameras with tripods (no tracking or dolleying), and the subtle irregularities in camera stability humanize the framing.  We are somewhat conscious of the street venturer recording the sights.  He is not a blatant tourist, but rather a selective observer, an outsider who also experiences a sense of connection with the new city.  In Lisbon Story, Winter embodies that "outsider."  En route to Lisbon, he listens to a Portuguese language cassette and struggles to replicate comical phrases.  Yet, although certain cultural and linguistic aspects of life in Lisbon are quite foreign, other elements -- like the exotic voice of Madredeus (Teresa Salgueiro) -- exist independent of national bounds and deeply resound with Winter.  A similar tension arises in Buena Vista Social Club, when the members of the band arrive in New York City for the first time.  In souvenir shops, the musicians recognize certain bobble-heads (Charlie Chaplin, for instance), but struggle and fail to name others (Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy).  By including such sequences detailing cultural connections and deviations, the director reveals something about himself.  Wenders has thoroughly established himself as an international figure in cinema.  Yet, he too must experience the strange, exciting imbalance that comes from traveling: the alien and unsettling juxtaposed with the familiar and universal.  And this opposition is what makes his local environments so vivid, so authentic and so approachable, regardless of a viewer's experiences or background.

Theater and Film: The Work of Ingmar Bergman (Daniel)

     If photography was the mother of cinema, then theater was the midwife.  The first motion pictures, pioneered by Thomas Edison in the U.S. and the Lumière brothers in France, were largely devoted to life and its unadulterated slices.  Both the kinetograph and the cinematograph were pressed into service of the real.  Their task, to reveal life at its most unrehearsed moments: workers leaving a factory, kids leaping off a dock into the water, a boxer flexing.  Early cinema had much in common with the flâneur of Impressionism: life's idle, unbiased spectator.  Movement was enough to fill the theaters.  Eventually however, audiences required more than just pictures in motion.  Cinema had breathed new life into the photograph, had given its mother wings.  But it was the theater that finally nudged film on to flight.  On December 1, 1903, The Great Train Robbery (Edison Manufacturing Company), adapted from Scott Marble's eponymous stage melodrama, soared onto the screen as cinema's very first narrative film.  From that momentous day forward, theater has served as film's primary template for storytelling in the flesh.
    Literature too has shaped the development of film narration, but more on gestational terms.  Literature has served as film's narrative blueprint, theater, its narrative prototype.  In the art of storytelling, theater has always been film's closest comrade.  Theater is the midwife of cinema.  It was the theater that, to modulate a Socratic metaphor, drew out a second life from photography's first.  Theater helped release the strange and wonderful thing residing patiently inside the Niépcean womb.  With The Great Train Robbery, theater helped unleash the story in motion-pictures, perhaps film's greatest commodity.  All the story in cinema betrays something of the theatrical impulse.  Thus, theater and film are fundamentally related media that have shared a long osmotic history.
    Many of the first narrative films were essentially filmed plays, proscenium view pieces shot at a distance in long takes.  Early film acting was a product of earlier theater work, placing the highest emphasis on gesture.  Many films first appeared within a theatrical framework, weaved into stage productions by the likes of Marinetti and Meyerhold.  Max Reinhardt's theatrical lighting would set the tone for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920), and the look of German Expressionism in general.  The term mise-en-scène, which originally referred to scenic design, would later be adopted to describe the shot.  So many plays have been adapted into films and so many films have been staged.  Thus, the conversation between theater and film has been long and fruitful.  Orson Welles, David Mamet, Mike Nichols, Elia Kazan, George Cukor and Michael Curtiz all got their start in theater, not to mention a hoard of Hollywood's greatest Method icons.  So many have taken part in the theater-film discourse, and bettered themselves for the experience.  None however, have worked as extensively in both media as Ingmar Bergman, legendary filmmaker, revered dramaturge.  Bergman began in theater in 1938 and ended there in 2002.  In between, he made over sixty films, securing his place among the greatest auteurs of all time.  Bergman's films were all tempered by his love for, and experience with, the theater.  They were his greatest act in a three act epic.
    Thus, Bergman's approach to cinema was decidedly theatrical.  He had a singular feel for dramatic rhythm, a way of waiting for tension, pausing for resonance.  He flourished with continuity editing, the long take, the meticulous composition and the slow pan.  His techniques hovered over the poetry of the moment, the edge of dramatic tension.  And of course, Bergman had a wondrous way with thespians; eliciting the tenderest, most intricate performances from actors that came off as well onstage as they did onscreen.  Bergman's most famous film, The Seventh Seal (Svensk Filmindustri, 1957), was actually based on Wood Painting, a play he wrote as an exercise for one of his acting classes.  In the same vein, After the Rehearsal (Cinematograph AB, 1984) is about the staging of Strindberg's A Dream Play, a production Bergman had put on four times in the past.  Thus, Bergman's forays into both theater and film proved essential to the success and character of his oeuvre.  In Bergman's words, “My films are only a distillation of what I do in the theater.  Theater work is sixty percent."
    Of all the trends Bergman carried over from theater to film, August Strindberg's chamber play may have been the most prominent.  In his Letter to the Members of the Intimate Theater, Strindberg protests the tired conventions of classical dramaturgy and delineates a new kind of drama to help beat back the dust slowly gathering about the curtains.  Conventional wisdom demanded plays in five acts, each with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end.  The end of each act indicated a space for applause.  If the play was written in blank verse the last two lines had to rhyme.  Climactic monologues were a must, not to mention tirades.  Roles were specially crafted for stars, even if they conflicted with the general thrust of the narrative.  Strindberg hated how contrived and suffocating the classical formula had become, how a fast set of rules had begun to dictate the kind of play one could produce.  He hated the way playwrights were now slaves to stories they could no longer control, how the dramatic arc dictated the thematic flow of the narrative.  There was no room for the leitmotif, no space for thematic reverberation.  On the heels of Miss Julie, a ferocious one-act success, Strindberg began to see a way out of the traditional rut.  Thus, he tossed all these structural conventions aside, formulating a faster, more intense drama which would meet the demands of an impatient public and open up the way for thematic ascendancy.  This new kind of play revolved around “the concept of chamber music transferred to drama.  The intimate action the highly significant motif, the sophisticated treatment.”  Chamber music, with its structural latitude and emotional intimacy, was to be the model.  Designed for four instruments, this genre of music was meant for the coziness of a palace chamber and, as Goethe so famously described it, resembles "four rational people conversing."  It is useful to think of chamber music as conversation, as an intimate engagement amongst a small group of people who, though they might at times seem to wander off topic, always come round in the end.  Thus, chamber music, above all else, describes a sense of emotional immediacy punctuated by thematic reverberation.
    Strindberg drew the chamber play along these lines, organizing the drama into three acts, with a small cast, modest set design and intimate venue.  The play would subject all the structural conventions of realistic playwriting to the thematic and tonal concerns of the drama.  As Strindberg explains, "we seek the strong, highly significant motif, but with limitations.  We try to avoid in the treatment all frivolity all calculated effects....No predetermined form is to limit the author because the motif determines the form.  Consequently: freedom in treatment, which is limited only by the unity of the concept and the feeling for style.”  Bergman went on to stage a number of Strindberg's chamber plays at various points throughout his career, most notably Strindberg's oft misunderstood masterpiece The Ghost Sonata.
    The Ghost Sonata, modeled after Beethoven's "Geistertrio," is deeply indebted to the structure and rhythm of the chamber form.  Organized around three acts, five characters and a unity of both space and time, the action takes on a force that could only be achieved through the smallness of the chamber paradigm.  Coupled with this overriding intensity, is the leitmotif, the returning thematic phrase that punctuates each succeeding act.  One of The Ghost Sonata's most pronounced motifs deals with generosity and its inevitable adulteration.  At the beginning of the first act, the Student Arkeholz asks the Milkmaid to wash out his infected eyes.  After some initial hesitations, the Milkmaid obliges, dabbing at the Student with her handkerchief.  Only the night before a house collapsed, leaving a mess of dead and dying in its wake.  Thus, the Student cannot use his own hands, for they have been contaminated by the wounded.  This image, the gift of sweet water beside a poisoned world, designates magnanimity as the antidote to life's daily oppressions.  Only through kindness can we wipe away the memory of our most recent nightmare.
    Moments later however, the Student is confronted by the Old Man, Director Hummel, who observes the encounter from his wheelchair.  Hummel informs the Student that his father never repaid a debt accrued to him in days of foolhardy speculation, that though he saved Arkenholz's father from misery he was repaid only with "the terrible hatred of those who owe a debt of thanks."  Thus, Hummel asks for the Student's help, so that he may make good on his father's obligation.  The Student complies, spurring Hummel to make Arkeholz's fortune as a way of repaying his general debt to society.  As he accepts this new mission, Hummel takes the Student's hand in his own.  Arkenholz recoils at once, crying out against Hummel's freezing hand and draining touch.  The image has changed.  Director Hummel is moved by a chain of obligation, not by a  bending of the soul.  Hummel's generosity is contingent upon recompense.  For Hummel, the world and its hardships are mitigated more through negotiation than through kindness.  We are only as moral as we are dependent.  Thus, Hummel can't see the cruelty in raising old accounts with a stranger returned from the graveyard.  For him, life has been nothing but an iron contract, "no sooner do you escape one trap than you find yourself in the middle of another."  Hummel's relation to mankind is essentially vampiric.  His every kindness represents a draining of the blood, his every investment, a costly return.  Thus, each give becomes a take, each charity a sort of trap.  This killing kindness is echoed throughout The Ghost Sonata, evolving with each recurrence.
    The Cook and Maid of the Colonel's household don't even bother to disguise their traps as Director Hummel does; their courtesy is nothing but bald-faced malice.  As the Colonel's daughter complains, the cook "boils out the meet, gives us the threads and water while she drinks up the bullion.  And when we have steak she cooks the flavor out of it first, eats the sauce drinks the broth...it's as if she could suck with her eyes."  The Maid marches to a similar tune, forcing the Daughter to redo her every chore.  The Daughter herself is placed in ambiguous relation to charity.  As the Student explains in his last climactic monologue, the Daughter has given him nothing but false hope, a withering glimpse of paradise.  Her handsome house proved sick and sordid to the core, her shy affections, the gateway to venereal disease.  She offered the Student Maya's exquisite veil only to tear it from before his eyes.  The daughter is a kind of Indian giver, someone who offers only what they will later take away.
    The Ghost Sonata itself participates in this twisted sort of charity.  The play takes as quickly as it gives, practicing a vampirism not unlike Hummel's or the servants'.  It gives us the gentle Buddha "with a bulb on its knees, out of which the stalk of a shallot has shot up, which bears a spherical constellation of white star-flowers!"  As the Student explains it, "The bulb is the earth...the stalk shoots straight up, like the axis of the spheres...its upper end the...star flower...a reflection of the cosmos....Buddha is sitting with the bulb of the earth...so that he will see it grow out and upwards transforming itself into heaven.  This poor earth shall become heaven!"  The play seems to hold out some great hope for the dawning of utopia.  But this hope is soon retracted in the succeeding section, where Arkenholz excoriates the daughter for her general stagnation, for her failure to work toward the Buddha's promise of paradise.  Devastated, the Daughter dies instantly.  Here, the gift actually kills its recipient.  Sight kills the seer.  The coldness of reality eliminates the daughter and her shimmering veil.  The give and take motif comes to warn us about the play's own two gifts: candor and hope.  With complete candor we will die of despair, with complete hope we will grow sick with complacency.  Thus, the play strikes out for the golden mean.  Christianity is the gift of candor, the recognition of a sinful world rife with inevitable suffering.  Buddhism is the gift of hope, the belief in a way out, a heaven on earth that can be achieved through human decency.  The play shows us the ugly world beyond the veil even as it points toward the heavens.  Thus, it offers us the white flower without falling in for the white lie.
    But as we turn our attention to the close of the drama we are reminded once again of Hummel and his charitable traps.  As the Daughter lies dying, Arkenholz eulogizes over her fading form, appealing to the heavens, "And you sleep...sleep without dreaming, and when you awake again...may you be greeted by a sun which doesn't burn, in a home without dust, by friends who have nothing to hide, by a love without flaws.  You wise and gentle Buddha, who sits here waiting for a heaven to grow forth form this earth, grant us patience in our trials, and the strength of will so that your hopes will not be disappointed."  After all that talk of heaven on earth, the play goes in for the easy lie, the opiate of the masses, pie in the empty sky.  The Student's vision of the afterlife is nothing but mental masturbation, a remote, unrealizable fantasy.  How can this world ever house "a sun which doesn't burn" or a "home without dust"?  It can't.  There can never be a heaven here on earth.  It is the fantastic in the Student's monologue which makes his appeal for patience so pathetic.  Who will have the patience to wait for "a love without flaws?"  Our last hope is relegated to that faraway light at the end of a long dark tunnel.  Buddha and his heaven on earth have been replaced by Jesus and his posthumous salvation.  Thus, the play snatches away our last hope for respite, as Hummel drains away the remaining strength from Arkenholz's hand.
    Apart for providing audiences with tremendous insight into the intent of the narrative, the giving-motif also helps unravel the mechanics of both Strindbergian drama and the chamber mode.  Because Strindberg's chamber plays do not follow along the peaks of Freytag's mountain, because they are not structured through narrative intrigue, rhythm becomes the most crucial element of organization.  It is the flow from scene to scene, image to image, that guides the audience.  The inexorable chain of cause and effect is subjected to the resounding motif.  Like the theme in a musical composition, the motif returns again and again, sometimes when one least expects it, and often in variation.  Without the motif to annotate the action, The Ghost Sonata would be a vacuous play indeed.  It is the current of give and take, the Milkmaid's giving of water, Hummel's taking of hand, the vampirism from servant to servant, and then, the final exchange between Student and Daughter, that gives The Ghost Sonata its spiraling, breathless tempo.  That is what truly weaves the drama together, what makes the play a sort of conversation between characters who, though they might appear to veer off topic, always come round in the end.
    Autumn Sonata (Filmédis, 1978) too is cast in the chamber mold, bearing a resemblance to Strindberg's Ghost Sonata which runs deeper than the play's title.  The film also revolves around a small group of characters, in this case four, to reflect the chamber quartet.  The productions share a unity in time and place, the former occurring primarily in Viktor and Eva's vicarage over a twenty-four hour period.  Thus, the action takes on an intensity that comes with the chamber play and its signature sense of insulation.  The narrative itself progresses in a manner similar to the sonata form with  an exposition-reveal-return structure to guide the action.  At the beginning of Autumn Sonata we are given a sense of the major characters and the film's focus, the seemingly amiable, albeit enigmatic, relationship between Eva and Charlotte.  Thus, the film's opening delineates the lines along which the bulk of the drama is to unfold.  We then pierce through the Charlotte-Eva facade, exposing the ugliness of their antagonism in a reveal.  Here The Ghost Sonata again comes to mind, with all the muckraking of its second act, to wit, the Colonel's sordid, decadent household.  Then, as Bergman's film flutters to a finish, we return to the Sonata's original movement: a mother and daughter, pleasant, but from a distance.
    Like Strindberg's plays, Autumn Sonata also pivots around the "highly significant motif."  Theme, above all else, guides the pacing and progression of the narrative.  Of all the film's currents then, language, may be one of its strongest.  Language is something used and abused by all of Sonata's characters.  It is the mirror of the film, something that can reveal or distort reality at will.  Viktor opens the film with a soliloquy recounting his engagement to Eva and the quiet life they have led together ever since.  But Viktor's words often take liberties with the truth and this idyllic image is no exception.  Viktor and Eva have never been completely at peace with one another, or at least never in the way Viktor's words seem to suggest.  The couple has not always lived a "quiet happy life at the parsonage."  When discussing his wife with Charlotte, Viktor confesses that Eva never loved him, that she admitted to being incapable of truly loving anyone.  Throughout the picture Eva and Viktor act more like old friends than old lovers.  There is a hesitance in their interactions, a sense of mutual discomfort that refutes Viktor's allusions to domestic bliss.  Viktor moves on in his opening remarks to read an excerpt from one of the published works in Eva's forgotten literary past.  The passage hopes for a love that will one day give Eva the courage for true introspection.  Viktor then declares, "I’d like to tell her just once that she is loved wholeheartedly, but I can’t say it in such a way that she’d believe me.  I can’t find the right words."  Here once again, words are more a barrier than a bridge, especially as they are directed at the audience rather than the person who needs to hear them most.  But when Viktor finally does direct them to Eva herself he is dismissed.  Eva tells him his own words "have no real sense" that, as a minister, he must be suffering "from a kind of occupational disease."  At the end of the film, Viktor again reiterates his linguistic ambivalence lamenting, "If only I could talk to her, but it’s just a lot of dusty words and empty phrases."  Ambivalence might be the best word to describe Viktor, a man who spends the majority of the film tiptoeing around both his wife and her mother.  He is a man of dusty words, not a man of action.  Viktor rarely says or does anything; he is unable to influence the crumbling world around him, largely because his gap between emotion and expression is so yawning.
    Charlotte and Eva too are plagued by the inadequacies and abuses of language.  Charlotte may be the film's worst culprit, using words to conceal her shortcomings from others.  In her confrontation with Helena, Charlotte caresses her neglected, ailing child with all the sweetest of intonations, crooning, "I’ve thought of you so often, every day."  In this way, Charlotte disguises her hatred of both daughters and the mess she has made of motherhood.  As Eva explains, "I was brought up with beautiful words," but beautiful words alone.  The only way Charlotte ever expresses any true emotion is through music.   As she reveals while defending herself to Paul, "The critics always say that I'm a generous musician.  No one plays Schumann's concertos with a warmer tone nor the big Brahms sonata.  I am not stingy with myself."  Into music Charlotte throws all the finer feelings of her being, all the feelings one generally reserves for life.  Thus, her career in music literally and figuratively replaces her life as a mother.  Music replaces language; art replaces life.
    Eva too has a cunning way with words.  Her invitation to her mother skirts sweetly around the shadow of their past and the distance of their present.  In fact, like her mother before her, Eva is magnetized to the piano, leaving her career in literature by the wayside.  Thus, she too finds a woodenness in words, giving them up for the clear fire of music.  The exchange that best encapsulates language and its relation to both characters comes during the Chopin recital when Eva asks for Charlotte's opinion of her performance prodding, “I want to know what I did wrong.”  To which Charlotte responds, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”  Then, during Eva's late-night airing of grievances, Charlotte asks, "What did I do wrong?"  To which Eva replies, "You did nothing wrong."  The bookend here speaks volumes about the struggle between mother and daughter to elude, both one another, and the possibility for progress.  In the words of Strother Martin, "what we've got here is failure to communicate."
    Like Ghost Sonata, Autumn Sonata too is governed more by tempo than by a tightly structured narrative.  It slides and swells with the ebb and flow of conversation.  As Viktor talks to the audience, as Eva and Charlotte blather to each other, as Helena cries into the silent night, words are what pull the film from start to finish.  Language is the motif and "motif determines the form."  Thus, theater and film: the Strindbergian drama and the Bergman picture.  The chamber film was the concept of the chamber play transferred to celluloid.

 

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    In her seminal essay "Film and Theater," Susan Sontag concludes a long, laborious comparison of both media with the following:

    For some time, all useful ideas in art have been extremely sophisticated.  Like the idea that everything is what it is, and not another thing.  A painting is a painting.  Sculpture is sculpture.  A poem is a poem, not prose.  Etcetera.  And the complementary idea: a painting can be "literary" or sculptural, a poem can be prose, theatre can emulate and incorporate cinema, cinema can be theatrical.  We need a new idea.  It will probably be a very simple one.  will we be able to recognize it?

    In many ways, as I conclude this long, laborious essay on the gesamtkunstwerk, a term I remain unable to spell, I feel much like Ms. Sontag: wry, irreverent and a little weary of the intermedia phenomenon in general.  I embarked on this project for many reasons, but diffidence may have been one of my most basic inspirations.  My overt intention was to give readers a new appreciation for the cinema as something protean, a product of aesthetic collaboration.  My covert intention was far more simpleminded.  I strove to validate film through the veneration of other media.  With Dali, Faulkner and Bergman I felt I could place film where it belonged: on the shoulders of giants.  The paragone that erupted during the Italian Renaissance still rages.  Which art is best?  Can we include photography in this most hallowed pantheon?  Can we include film?  I am very tired of questions like these, of unending attacks on the avant-garde.  I am sick of defending film against the skeptical student of art history or the petty English major.  One thing this project has taught me: that I needn't bother.  Film has been, is, and always will be, as profound and sophisticated as all the other arts to which we pay the most careful deference.   But again, I am sick of such comparisons, of the hierarchy, of a world measured in arching eyebrows.  Forget the staking out of artistic territory, forget the painterly, the literary and the theatrical, or at least, forget them as lines along which to do battle.  Art is an egalitarian realm.  One art can only aid another, if used in proper faith.  That is our new idea.

Bibliography

Conway, Stephen. "Rhythm and Blues: Strindberg’s Chamber Plays." Sub Verbis: Stephen Conway. 1993.         <http://subverbis.com>.

Knopf, Robert. Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Strindberg, August, Walter Gilbert Johnson, and  10 Stockholm .Intima teatern.  Open Letters to the Intimate Theater.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966.

Strindberg, August, and Joe Martin. Strindberg-Other Sides: Seven Plays. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. "Film and Theater." The Tulane Drama Review Vol. 11 (1966): 24-37.

Törnqvist, Egil. Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University         Pre

Literature & Film: The Sound and Fury of Citizen Kane (Daniel)

            Film is a visual medium.  This may be the most misleading maxim of cinema studies, a maxim that prioritizes the specifically cinematic element of film, the moving image.  The aphorism falls short however, in overlooking everything cinema offers in addition to illumined pleasure, the things film can do for the mind that go beyond what it can do for the mind’s eye.  Films are not simply photographs strung together in succession; they are not simply streams of visual stimulation.  Film is a visual medium in form, that is, it communicates through primarily visual means.  But, in content, film is storytelling.  Films are stories, stories told through images.  There is no visual aspect of film that doesn’t serve a narrative purpose.  There is nothing in film that doesn’t signify in some thematic or expository fashion.  Thus, film may indeed be a visual means of expression, but the object of that expression, is story.   The object of film is something told.

 

            If all films are indeed stories at heart, then literature may be one of cinema’s most natural allies.  Film has drawn on literature from its inception.  In fact, Shakespeare appeared on the silver screen in as early as 1899 with King John (British Mutoscope & Biograph Company).  In the 1960s, film and literature professor Harry Geduld estimated that nearly forty percent of Hollywood films were literary adaptations.  But literature is not merely the source material of cinema.  And film is not merely literature through a lens.  Both are storytellers in their own right.  Both are aesthetically devoted to the revelation of plot and character.  It is only natural therefore, to consider the interchange between both media, the way literature and film have been artistically intertwined.  So many of literature’s most prominent figures have delved into the art filmmaking: F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Norman Mailer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Chandler, to name a few.  But beyond the cheap thrill of celebrity, the author-film association points toward what can be most fruitful in examining the literature-film connection: the synergy of aesthetic cooperation, the way film can be literary, and literature, cinematic.  If Birth of A Nation (David W. Griffith Corp, 1915) can be Dickensonian in its use of parallel editing, if Ulysses can be Eisensteinian in its use of montage, if The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1941) can be Chandleresque in its use of narrative surprise, then the literature-film connection deserves protracted consideration.

            At the center of this consideration stands William Faulkner, one of America’s greatest men of letters.  Faulkner wrote extensively for Hollywood and most famously for Howard Hawks with productions like The Big Sleep (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1946) and To Have and Have Not (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1944).  Ironically enough, Faulkner’s greatest contributions to screenplay structure had already been made before his move to California in 1932.  Faulkner’s work as a screenwriter was emphatically conventional: linear, plot driven, cause and effect narratives that enticed audiences with the thrills of sex and violence.  It was Faulkner’s literature that made the real waves, that helped revolutionize the screenplay and novel alike.  Faulkner’s modernism, his subjective, fragmented prose ushered in an entirely new form of expression, a sort of kaleidoscope world that had begun with Joyce and his Portrait of the Artist.  The Sound and the Fury, widely considered Faulkner’s magnum opus, sold poorly when it was first published in 1929, though it received considerable attention from the literary elite.  Years later it would be remembered as a turning point in American literature, a touchstone for the medium.  American film too would soon have its touchstone, a masterpiece of modernist proportions that would forever change the face of cinema.  In 1941, Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz would piece together a fragmented, subjective narrative, a kaleidoscope world that ushered in an entirely new form of cinematic expression.  In 1941 came Citizen Kane, (Mercury Productions, RKO Radio Pictures) and with it, the dawn of modern cinema.

            To cite the influence of one artist’s work upon another’s is almost always an uphill battle.  Artists don’t generally append bibliographies to their oeuvre, nor do they record their every encounter with world culture.  The skeptic would have an easy time of debunking the Fury-Kane parallel, of demanding proof that Welles and Mankiewicz had indeed read the novel I have claimed they had in mind.  I believe the Sound and the Fury to have been a signal influence on Citizen Kane.  But I do not have proof of this influence, at least in the empirical sense of the word.  I will endeavor to substantiate this influence nonetheless through specific references to both works and the striking similarities that exist between them.  But first a word to the skeptics, even if I should fail to convince you of the Fury-Kane parallel insofar as it pertains to the novel of which I have made specific mention, do not dismiss the undeniable parallel between Faulkner’s modernism and Kane’s.  The two are so overwhelmingly akin, that corroborative evidence becomes almost irrelevant.  Whether or not Welles and Mankiewicz actually leafed through the saga of Compson despair, both were certainly acquainted with the kind of project Faulkner had undertaken, both would have been unable to escape or ignore the zeitgeist of their time.  In short, Faulkner and Modernism: the winds of American culture were blowing so strongly that Welles and Mankiewicz could have heard nothing but subjectivity and fragmentation amid all the sound and fury.

            Both The Sound and the Fury and Citizen Kane are organized around subjective narration; both worlds are created by the characters that move within them.  What distinguishes these works from first person art of the past is the extent to which readers and audiences move within the characters themselves, rather than within the worlds those characters inhabit.  There is something shockingly absorptive about Fury and Kane, a way in which we live and breathe through the protagonists.  Both the novel and the film are uniquely telepathic; both are, in essence, projections of the mind.  There is no remove in Fury-Kane narration, no bird’s-eye view, no space for air separate from the speaker.  You must see through Benjy and his retarded haze, Thatcher and his fastidious commercialism, you must observe the world through another’s observation.

            The Sound and the Fury begins with the observations of one of literature’s most famous narrators: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.  They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.  They took the flag out and they were hitting.”  Benjy is a profoundly retarded adult.  His world is composed of color and form, but nothing more.  Benjy paints a purely sensible picture, an impression apprehended more by the body than by the mind.  He is incapable of intellectualizing experience, of imposing order upon the things he sees and hears.  He does not know to say golf, all he knows is hitting.  Benjy bears closest resemblance to the novel’s title.  It is his jumbled collision with reality, his world of waves crashing upon the shore, that reflects the cacophony of living, the “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”^[1]   Benjy presents us with one of the most dramatically distorted views in all of literature.  His profound confusion may well serve as a model for one of modernism’s most penetrating insights, that the subjectivity of human experience abolishes any hope for objective truth.  Thus, we can never fully comprehend the Compsons and their story because we have gotten it through three glasses darkly.

            Citizen Kane too wrestles with the cloud of subjectivity, giving us the man of the title through several of his associates, each with a different version of the truth.  The first witness called to the stand is the March of Time newsreel, offering an account of Kane’s life that underlines the central problem of testimony:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kane's empire, in its glory held dominion over thirty-seven newspapers, two syndicates, a radio network.  An empire upon an empire.  The first of grocery stores, paper mills, apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners.  An empire through which for fifty years flowed, in an unending stream, the wealth of the earth's third richest gold mine.

 

           

            Herein lie the first signs of subjectivity, the deep booming voice of god announcing the monumentality of its subject.  The news must approach Kane from low angles, as it does his Xanadu pleasure dome, to attract its viewership.  Kane must be a big man who has done big things in order to interest a big audience.  He must also be something of an enigma, something good journalism can unravel for its readership.  Thus, the newsreel encourages a degree of confusion over Kane’s visage, cutting between three perspectives that contradict one another in succession.  First P. Thatcher declares, “Mr. Charles Foster Kane…is in fact nothing more or less than a Communist!”  Then a rabble-rouser checks in insisting, “He is today what he has always been and always will be a Fascist!”  And lastly, Mr. Kane assures us that he is only, “one thing - An American.”  The March of Time then goes on to prove its worth, slicing Kane into thematic chunks so that we may emerge with a neatly packaged understanding of the man and his life.  To wit, Kane held many conflicting opinions, went through two wives, petered out of politics and withered away in solitude.  The March of Time is, above all, a self-serving version of citizen Kane.  The man’s struggles with love and vulnerability are never touched upon, making it the film’s most superficial stab at truth.  Here again we encounter Faulkner and the observer effect, albeit from an obverse angle.  Here, it is the lucidity of experience that does us in.  For its every attempt at organization, the March of Time falls into distortion.  There is an inevitable oversimplification in the way we make sense of experience, a tragic obscurity to human understanding.  Thus, to tame the world of its sound and fury is to lose the world entirely.

            Fury and Kane, both tell the meat of their stories in flashback, flitting across time and space like a bird wanders across the sky.  The odysseys of Compson and Kane are assembled more then they are constructed, glued together from shards of memory, rather than built from the ground up.  There is a dynamism to this sort of temporal fragmentation, a reason behind the bucking of Aristotelian unities.  Faulkner and Welles tell their stories dialectically, through the dynamic contrast of opposites.  There is a richness in Fury and Kane that only this sort of juxtaposition could have achieved, a way in which the past and present merge with one another to form the kind of synthesis Hegel would have appreciated and Eisenstein may have admired.

            Quentin, the second of the Compson narrators, is particularly suited for this temporal dialectic.  For his relation to the past is defined by conflict.  Quentin is haunted by the memories he cannot change and the march of time he cannot halt.  Time is Quentin’s greatest foe, the arbiter of his ultimate undoing.  Thus, Quentin’s memories rise up without warning, creeping away as suddenly as they arrive:

 

 

 

 

The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop.  I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move.  It moved almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door, driving the shadow back into the door.  Only she was running already when I heard it…She ran out of her dress, clutching her bridal, running into the bellowing where T.P. in the dew Whooey Sassprilluh Benjy under the box bellowing…I stepped into sunlight, finding my shadow again.  I walked down the steps just ahead of it. The half hour went. Then the chimes ceased and died away.

 

           

            Here Quentin flashes back to the day of his sister’s shotgun wedding.  For Quentin, this event encapsulates the Compson decline.  Caddy has lost her maidenhood, and with it, the badge of Compson propriety.  Thus, for Quentin, Benjy bellows to particularly startling effect, mourning Caddy’s fall from grace.  The memory is bookended by two mentions of shadow and one mention of a faraway clock.  For Quentin, both things serve as symbols of temporal preoccupation, the shadow reminding Quentin of the sun and its daily march across the sky.  Quentin can’t stay firmly rooted in the present for he is constantly swept up in the pain of the past.  Quentin can’t reverse or repair the damage time has wrought upon the Compson name, nor can he escape his awareness of a losing battle.  Thus, it is the constant oscillation, the flickering from present to past, from the haunting to the ghost itself, that gives Fury its dialectic dynamism.

            For Walter P. Thatcher, the electric contrast between past and present proves equally revealing.  Thompson, the sleuthing reporter assigned to Kane’s case, travels to the Thatcher Memorial Library for a look at the collection’s memoirs.  The library is pristine and imposing, a study in dark, gleaming surfaces carved out in the neoclassical vein.  A sculpture of Mr. Thatcher himself sits stiffly atop a marble podium as we tilt from a low angle toward the floor.  Thatcher wears an appropriately stony grimace, his eyes frozen in a penetrating stare.  The librarian, Ms. Anderson, with hair stretched tightly over her skull, makes for an amusingly anal caricature, pointedly reminding Mr. Thompson of the strict “conditions under which [he] may inspect certain portions of Mr. Thatcher's unpublished memoirs.”

            The setting seems to resemble some version of the Thatcher afterlife, a severely controlled, impossibly immaculate environment in which to wile away eternity.  But of course, the elephant of irony remains: Mr. Thatcher is dead, and all his earthly attempts at control have been ceded in the face of some unknown chaos.  Thatcher’s memories too are laughably systematized: a stiffly written, categorized account.  The "grand old man of Wall Street" has conquered time in a way Quentin would have appreciated, stuffing impressions into words, words into books and books into gigantic metal vaults.  Naturally enough, Mr. Thatcher’s memories revolve around Kane’s lack of fiscal responsibility and general irreverence.

            But again, it is the discord between present and past, between the reality of Thatcher’s death and his lifelong pursuit of control, that lends itself to profundity.  Thatcher, because of his obsession with “proper order,” bridled Kane in a way that would forever sour the relationship between the two.  Thus, Thatcher’s past bridling is rendered tragically frivolous by the frigidity of his present death, and the inevitable disorder therein.  Thus, it is once again the dialectic of Faulknerian fragmentation that gives both past and present a mutually informative resonance.

            The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s modernist masterpiece, forever changed the face of American literature, using subjectivity and temporal fragmentation to unprecedented expressive effect.  The novel also changed the Hollywood screenplay lending Citizen Kane the most innovative elements of its narrative design.  Without Kane there would be no Hiroshima Mon Amour (Pathé Entertainment, 1959), no Last Year at Mareinbad (Terra Film Produktion, 1961), no Rashomon (Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1950), and without Faulkner, there would be no Kane.

^{[1]  Shakespeare, William. Macbeth Act V, Scene V ( 25-27)}

Bibliography

 Harrington, Evans, and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979.

Kawin, Bruce F. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Ross, Harris. Film as Literature, Literature as Film :An Introduction to and Bibliography of Film's Relationship to Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

 

Why film people are the best artists, and some important stuff... I guess (Dik)

So I just broke down and moved alot of film equipment by myself (3 trips worth), and I'm kinda irritated, plus I have to pee bad,  but whatever.  You crave edutainment, and I'm here to deliver.

See, film people (and I mean film makers) even though we are all creative and cool, and artsy, and smoke cigarettes, and are francophiles, and are kinda emo sometimes, and like scarves, and the color black, and shades, including a host of other things the French and the Beatniks played out decades ago, we are pragmatists -for the exception of Oliver Stone, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Gilliam, and some underground film makers who if I mention their names would just make me sound like a pretentious snob...which I'm not...I'm an elitist.  Sounds alot classier don't it?  When I say we are pragmatists I mean we understand the logistical limitations our medium imposes upon us.  All those other kind of artists are nuts...and we would be too if we could pee on our cameras without themshort circuiting (still love ya Jack and Andy).  But from my personal experience, other artists seem looser than us film people who are sticklers about time, money and such, and that's fine...just means their art isn't to be taken serious...I kid, people. 

What brought me to juxtapose members of the artworld is my current pairing with dancers.  See those from the Dance planet are a very particular species... they are incredible workers, fit for those 16 hour shooting days, it's just that they see things different... like time. When film peeps say be present at 8:30, be there at 8:15 and coil a freakin cord or something. Because most likely something is going to go wrong, or we're going to have to adjust for something...count on that. In fact I don't even want to talk about dancers in relation to film anymore...let's talk time.

Time is of the utmost importance in any production.  Before you go out to shoot you sould sit down and make a preliminary shooting timetable.  The crew should arrive an hour and thirty minutes before the cast. The thirty minutes is an arbitrary time, but this time however much you allot, should be used for crew to eat/warm up to work, or warm up to each other if they haven't met one another, then the next hour is really used for lighting set up, director and DP talks, and grips to dabble in some pre-shooting misogyny.  The call time for the talent should always be after lighting is set up.  So if your crew call time is 7am and you knowit will take a hour to get the lights up, you make the talent call time 8am.  It's rude to make the talent wait around for crew issues. Plus if they get to come in a hour later than everybody else it makes it harder for them to bitch about things, which they'll do anyway.  

And always start as early as you can in a day because most likely, if you can, you will go over time, way over time.  My longest day has been 18 hours, a friend of mines went 48 hours, but he's working on that Avatar flick by James Cameron, who has tanks and fighter planes in a concrete storage area with no windows on one of his private properties.  Also if you are late on set, film people will look down on you, blame you, and fire you if they can (well this is more Hollywood people behavior).  Plus you have to uphold the great tradition of fIlm peeps always being early.  This isn't as true with video people but they prefer tape and squares over film and circles.  Plus, what the hell is a videographer? What a lame title. But yes, time is important in film world, very important.

I'll talk more about time later on but I'm tired, I need some time off. Good night.

Painting & Film: The Work of Salvador Dali (Daniel)

    Painting and film have always been intimately intertwined.  Many painters, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci and Jan Vermeer, were acquainted with the camera obscura, a sort of proto-camera used by many artists for meticulous image analysis.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of Impressionism’s founding fathers, also begot Jean Renoir, the towering auteur behind films like The Grand Illusion (RAC, 1937) and The Rules of the Game (Nouvelle edition française, 1939), both of which have been counted among the greatest films ever made.  Andy Warhol, one of modern art’s most iconic figures, dabbled in cinema for a significant portion of his career, adding over sixty films to his name.  But beyond these somewhat gimmicky parallels, painting and film are fundamentally united as visual media.  They are different dialects of a shared aesthetic language.  Painting has informed nearly every film with which I’m familiar, or at least every film with a sophisticated cinematographic approach.  It is a fundamental, and what’s more, inextricable part of all visual culture.  There is Rembrandt van Rijn in The Godfather (Paramount Pictures, 1972) and its chiaroscuro lighting, there is Andrew Wyeth in Days of Heaven (Paramount Pictures, 1978) and its pastoral vistas, there is Edward Hopper in Dark City (New Line Cinema, 1998) and it’s urban nightmares; there is paint behind every frame of celluloid. (Plow, Spring 2008)
    This past summer, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the synergy between painting and film with an exhibition devoted to the cinematic endeavors of Salvador Dali.  Dali dabbled in film for over thirty years, writing and directing with a flare found only in art’s most outrageous practitioners.  In 1929, together with Luis Buñuel, Dali set out to make Un Chien Andalou (Billancourt studios), a film now considered to be the touchstone of surrealist cinema.  At the time, Dali, and many surrealists like him, had become disillusioned by art and all it had come to represent.  Dali was disgusted with conventional conceptions of beauty, with anything that smacked of aestheticism.  Art had fixated on that which was pleasing to the eye, failing to do what it did best: reveal in stunning fashion the truth and beauty of experience.  So Dali fell on film as a weapon in the war against art.  Film, because of its uniquely revelatory properties, was to be Dali’s “anti-art,” Dali’s medium for change, his Barack Obama, if you will.  Thus, Un Chien Andalou was a film on a mission.  The mission: to shatter art at its core, to shake the very foundations of beauty.  But Dali was a shrewd warrior, an artist unwilling to fight such a momentous battle from a single front.  Dali’s offensive can be seen in all his paintings from this period.  These paintings hover over all of Un Chien Andalou just as Un Chien hovers over all of them in turn.  The two share a sort of whispered dialogue, a dialogue that exemplifies the give and take painting and film have enjoyed since the latter’s inception.
    Un Chien Andalou’s most famous sequence, its opening sequence, is perhaps the closest the film comes to metaphor, or allegorizing of any kind.  In this scene, Simone Mareuil’s eye is seemingly sliced in two by a sharp, shiny razor.  This shocking, brutal image serves as our induction into Dali’s world.  For Dali, the eye represented everything he was trying to debunk: the mind’s constant, tedious effort to make sense of the sensual world and the eye’s constant and equally tedious thirst for visual pleasure.  Dali would not subject himself to the eye of the viewer.  He would not make things make sense, nor would he make things look pretty.  Dali chose to shock and challenge his audience rather than cater to their expectations.  In fact, the cutting of the eye, alludes to a particular mode of Dalinian agitation: the body as object.  Throughout Un Chien Andalou and many of Dali’s contemporary paintings, the human body is degraded and defiled to the point of total objectification.
    At one point in the film, Pierre Batcheff gazes thoughtfully at his hand as a swarm of ants scurry forth from a hole at the center of his palm.  This sort of ant-orifice image was something that haunted and inspired Dali for most of his life, and, like melting clocks, became an essential part of his artistic signature.  It is a symbol that appears in Dali’s First Days of Spring (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg) and his Accommodations of Desire (Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/ARS, New York), both of which were painted around the time of the film’s debut.  Dali harnessed the body for its ability to astonish.  That jolt of revulsion, that was the lightning Dali used to rouse his viewers from their aesthetic slumber.  It was a jolt that went especially well with the cinema, with the meticulous, visceral eye of the camera.  Film rendered the human form in a way no other medium could.  Film had a kind of ocular exactitude that made any assault on the body all the more horrifying.
    Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (Musée du Louvre, Paris) was a painting that fascinated Dali for its focus on objects.  Dali believed that even the most mundane objects should be recognized for their transcendent poetry.  He loved Vermeer for the quiet way he would weave magic into a pillow or whispers into a book.  Dali nods to Vermeer and his emphasis on the overlooked in Un Chien Andalou.  When Simone Mareuil throws down her copy of the The Lacemaker, Dali signifies his commitment to the task of object elevation.  Simone herself seems bent on bringing objects to life.  In one scene, she lays out Batcheff’s eccentric outfit as if to call him forth from his clothing.  His tie, shirt and petticoat are all arranged in the form his body would take should he be somehow conjured into his clothing.  It’s as if objects have a soul that can be summoned under the right conditions.  Sure enough, in the next shot of the bed, Batcheff lies there fully clothed.  His position seems to suggest that he has indeed materialized to fill the sartorial outline.  Thus, for Dali, objects boasted a sort of anthropomorphic poetry.
    “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  The surrealist slogan hails from Le Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), a poetic novel lauded by surrealists as one of the signal precursors to the movement.  The phrase encapsulates much of the punch behind surrealist imagery: the discordant, arbitrary juxtaposition of objects.  One can see this sort of emphasis on objects and their “chance encounter” in Dali’s Study for Honey is Sweeter Than Blood (Private Collection).  The putrefying donkey, the dismembered body, the needle-like figures in the background, all are arranged as anecdotes amid a severely disjointed composition.  Dali lets each object tell its own story.  The donkey, the body, the needles, each image has its own sense of visual autonomy.  But it is their arrangement that gives the painting its energy.  It is the way these objects have been thrown together, the way they have been given a sort of miscellaneous unity.  It is their chance encounter on a canvas that is so compelling.
    Dali made use of this chance encounter in Un Chien Andalou.  In one stunning sequence, Batcheff advances upon Mareuil.  Straining against the weight of two grand pianos, Batcheff dutifully drags them both across the room to reach her.  Donkeys lie rotting atop each piano’s lid while two clerics (one of them Dali himself) slide along their backs underneath.  Again, the image resonates with Lautréamont and his sewing machine.  The pianos, the donkeys, the clerics, simply stringing the words together evokes something of what Dali was trying to accomplish
    The paranoid-critical method was perhaps Dali’s most important contribution to Surrealism.  The method was an artistic technique built around man’s paranoid tendency to detect causal relationships between unrelated stimuli. Dali went about provoking these sorts of delusions by embedding double-images into many of his works.  Offering up two images, Dali left the viewer locked in a maze of interpretive contradictions. Dali’s Invisible Man (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) exemplifies the paranoid-critical method in its depiction of a figure embedded into, and comprised of, his surroundings.  The viewer perceives the invisible man and yet cannot shake off the feeling that he might merely be the figment of an addled imagination.  The composition is so fluid that one can’t really tell where one figure ends and the other begins.  All the images seem to bleed into one another, creating a morass of overlapping ambiguities.
    Dali found an even greater fluidity in film and its ability to literally lay one image upon another.  In Un Chien Andalou’s most famous dissolve we are taken from Pierre Batcheff’s ant-ridden hand, to his spindly armpit hair, to a spiky sea urchin, and finally, to a severed hand rolling about in the street.  This procession of discordant images perfectly expresses the paranoid-critical aesthetic and its ability to encourage hallucinatory associations.  Batcheff’s hair and the spiny sea urchin are in no way connected to one another.  They are not linked by any sort of narrative cause and effect, nor do they share any inherent or symbolic properties.  They merely suggest one another; they have strong visual associations without sharing any sort of causal connection.  This may be the paranoid-critical aesthetic in a nutshell.  Thus, again we can see strong stylistic parallels between Un Chien Andalou and the paintings Dali did during the same period.
    Painting and film have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.  The two are simply different windows into the same sort of mimesis.  Salvador Dali exemplifies this brotherhood as a surrealist who straddled the line between both media, dipping into one or the other at will.  Dali was a great painter and a great filmmaker.  But above all, he was a great artist, and that is what matters most.

Bibliography

Gale, Matthew, ed. Dali & Film. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. 06-238.

Plow, Brian. Lectures on lighting and cinematography. 061.348, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Spring 2008

Film: The Gesamtkunstwerk (Daniel)

 

    The gesamtkunstwerk or "total work," was a term first coined by Richard Wagner in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution ^[1] .”  For Wagner, the term referred to a new kind of art. This new art was to hearken back to the tragedies of Ancient Greece, the dramas that had enfolded all the media with which we are familiar today.  As Wagner saw it, rhetoric, sculpture, painting and music had all worked together to produce an art form that rivaled all others.  Wagner’s breed of opera was to pick up where the Greeks had left off.  Music, painting, sculpture and writing would all help to render the libretto, score, vocals and set design of a Wagnerian opera.  The gesamtkunstwerk was to wash over audiences like a wave, sweeping them up into a crescendo of spiritual ecstasy.  It was fashioned as a seamless, integrated force of artistic expression.  In this way, Wagner sought to gather together the shards of an expression that had shattered so many centuries ago. 
    Film too has been compared to a gesamtkunstwerk, an integrated, multimedia experience.  It is indeed a convergence of many arts: writing, music, acting, and cinematography, to name a few.  It is also immersive in a way Wagner would have appreciated, enveloping viewers with a similar kind of gusto.  Film does depart from the Wagnerian opera in one fundamental respect: it is emphatically modern.  It is newer and more different than anything that has come before it.  The cinema is still very much a child in the grand scheme of artistic expression, and like a child it is often treated with condescension.  For many, film represents the middlebrow.  This may be why I find this discussion of the gesamtkunstwerk so compelling.  To recognize film as a work of many arts is to recognize it as the inheritor of all man’s creative impulses.  Film, perhaps more than any other medium, draws on its antecedents.  Film is part and parcel of all the arts to which it is so disdainfully compared.  Film is photography, painting, music, theater and literature.  Film is a gesamtkunstwerk, a medium that demands the kind of thought and reflection paid to its component parts.
    In the following three entries I will point readers toward the many ancestors of film, and illustrate the ways in which this venerable patrimony has informed the language of cinema.  I hope to explore the richness of cinema as an art of many arts and demonstrate the intentionality behind filmmaking, an intentionality I find recognized in many other arts but so often overlooked in celluloid.  In short, if you can perceive the genius in Rembrandt van Rijn and his paintings then perceive it in Francis Ford Coppola and his films.

First up:

Painting & Film

A look into the work of Salvador Dalí: painter, surrealist and filmmaker.

^[1] Richard Wagner, “Die Kunst und die Revolution,” Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen: Volume III (1849): 16-24.

A Narrator's Ability to Manipulate Film (Alexandra)

    Narrative has always been a crucial element of a film, even a central part of its theme.  From the establishment of film, going back as far as Lumière’s silent films, many movies have used and manipulated narration.  Some films, such as Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (United Artists, 1925) and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (Edison's Manufacturing Company, 1903), utilized subtitles as their means of description because the use of sound remained undiscovered.  These silent films would incorporate slides that simply narrated what was about to happen or what was happening in a scene.  It was then up to the viewer to interpret the plot with the knowledge they gained from the slides.  Once sound was incorporated into films however, directors were able to create a new type of narrator to verbally explain a film’s plot. 

    Narration in films can be as simple as a voice over that describes who is who and what is what, the kind of narration that’s in detective films that sets the scene for the audience.  But these voice overs can reveal much more, as well.  Narrators may be biased or omniscient.  They can reveal a character’s true emotions or trick the audience into believing something false.  Some films even rely solely on a narrator to tell the story.  In short, narratives can skew an entire film.  Three films that exemplify such strong narratives include Dan Harris’ Imaginary Heroes (Sony Picture Classics, 2004), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (Orion Pictures, 1986), and Emmanuel Mouret’s Un Baiser S’il Vous Plaît (TFM Distribution, 2007).  Each uses voice over narrative but utilizes it in a different function. 

   Imaginary Heroes follows a family after their golden-boy son commits suicide.  The film’s narrated by the family’s youngest son, Tim Travis (Emile Hirsch), who is also the protagonist of the film.  Tim’s narrative is biased, the audience only sees through his perspective and no one elses. Yet, while the spectators are only aware of his point of view, it seems to be the most important view because Tim was the last person to see his brother, Matt, before his suicide.  Tim therefore knows more than anyone else.  Yet, the most interesting aspect of a first-person narrative is that the narrator has the ability to tell only what he wants to, and he also makes the audience believe anything he says.  Just as though Tim was telling the viewers a close personal story, they believe everything he says and trust that he is not only telling the truth, but also telling the whole truth.   Imaginary Heroes breaks our trust in the narrator though.  The film shows us narrators like Tim can lie and distort our view of an entire film. 

    Imaginary Heroes begins with Tim talking about his brother’s extraordinary talent for swimming, that he was the best at it, that he had countless awards, and was on track to go to the Olympics.  But Tim says that he knows something no one else does – that his brother hates swimming because his father pressures him into doing it and gets zero enjoyment out of winning.  Cut to Tim’s brother sitting at the edge of his bed, anxiously looking up at Tim.  Shortly after, Matt kills himself.  Because of the relationship between the camera and Tim’s narration, the audience is meant to believe that this was the last moment Tim saw his brother (before finding his dead body in a pool of blood).  As the film presses on, the audience learns that Tim has been physically abused and has the massive bruises to prove it.  Tim makes it seem like he was just another victim of his high school’s bully.  And of course, the viewers accept and believe Tim’s story.  The family’s depression changes Tim by the end of the film, and his suppressed anger is revealed.  With this anger also comes honesty.  A quick series of shots reveal that it was Tim’s brother that was beating him up; their relationship was deeply troubled.  Now the camera becomes the narrator, showing the spectators that on the evening of his brother’s suicide, Tim knew what Matt was going to do. The previous angle of the camera that showed Matt sitting on his bed looking at Tim is moved higher now to show Matt holding a gun.  He asks Tim if he’s going to do anything to stop him.  Tim just walks away.  Tim now tells the audience that it was the only time his brother asked for his help and he let him down. 

    The audience is meant to be shocked.  The narrator made them believe one thing for almost two hours, just to suddenly change everything that the film created.  Again, that is one of the most important aspects of such a biased narrator.  Because the audience only gets one view, this narrative can manipulate them into believing anything, which also allows for more suspense and, in a film like Imaginary Heroes, can even create more drama.  Tim’s narrative was more than simply explaining the plot, it instead furthered it.  The narrative kept the audience captivated.  Though a biased narrative functions to do this, other types of narratives can create similar emotions in different ways. 

  Narrative is a strong determinate of emotion.  A narrator can explain deep, powerful emotions that may not be apparent on a superficial level.  Suppressed emotion is common in war films because they depict a type of person who is not supposed to show sentiment, but clearly has very strong feelings.  That’s why looking at the narrative of Platoon is important. Private Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), the protagonist, narrates the film.  Not only does the film follow Chris through the tribulations of the Vietnam War, but also gives a first hand perspective of a novice in war.  The characters in the film are burly men who are there to kill; the audience sees very little emotion from them in any other form other than hostility towards others.  But Chris shows us a softer side through his voiceovers.  He confesses that he has no idea what he is doing and is too tired to function properly.  He says, “Somebody once wrote Hell is the impossibility of Reason.  That's what this place feels like.  I hate it already and it's only been a week .”  He is honest and brings the audience fully into his inner thoughts.  Chris explains what exactly his platoon is doing but goes deeper than just plot.  He elucidates the difference between good and evil among men that are at war.  He brings all the underlying feelings of those in war to surface.  New York Times reporter Vincent Canby says, “Another measure of the film is the successful way Mr. Stone has managed to create narrative order in a film that, at heart, is a dramatization of mental, physical and moral chaos.”  Platoon’s narrative is less about plot twists, though the film is full of them, and more about emotion.  Just as Platoon works with the audience’s feelings, some narratives function strictly to tell a plot. 

    Un Baiser S’il Vous Plaît/Shall We Kiss? utilizes a narrative that works mostly to move the plot forward and to tell a story.  A woman meets a man.  She is in the city for work, but only for that single day.  The man is charming and handsome and naturally the two hit it off.  They go out to dinner and when it comes to saying goodbye he tries to kiss her, but she hesitates.  Her reasoning lies within the story of her friend.  The man does not understand and asks her to explain, so she does.  She begins the long tale of her friend who kissed a man, who was not her husband, and fell into a deep hole of adultery and unhappiness.  As the woman tells her story, the audience is no longer watching the woman and man on their date, but instead this new story (narrated by the woman).  Emmanuel Mouret, the director, uses the two parallel couples to not only tell the story, but also to show the depth of temptation.  The narration of Shall We Kiss? moves in and out of voice over, and back and forth from each couple, the couple that the story is about and the couple that is destined to repeat the other’s mistakes.  The audience is once again dependent on narration because without it there would be no story.  So even though Mouret has clearly set up the couples and the narration to show one’s desire, he also uses it to simply tell the story. 

    Films don’t need to have a narrator, there are many other cinematic means of portraying emotion or plot and adding twists and turns to a film.  But it’s clear that narration can be a successful technique in which character’s sentiments can be represented or just an interesting way of telling a story.  There is much more to narration than is usually assumed.  Its development from silent films to its complicated usage today is extraordinary.  Perhaps in the future, directors will find even more ways to manipulate this technique into something even greater.