HopkinsCinemAddicts

Casting Call (Ceci)

“I accept the role! Thank you.” I let out a sigh of relief. Casting? Exhausting. Getting the final confirmation email? Priceless. Let’s back up though – casting? How did we get here? Where did this process start?

The short answer is: it depends. I wrote my own script, so this process, for me, started nearly two years ago. However, the casting process started a few months ago.  The first thing I did when I wanted to start the casting process was I created an account on the largest casting site available: Backstage. I posted casting descriptions for the two principal roles that I was looking for and then waited. And waited. And waited. I watched as people started applying for the roles (which was equal parts thrilling and terrifying). I was constantly monitoring my email and inviting people to come audition for me. On Backstage I ended up having 118 people submit for the two roles. What a decision I had in front of me!

After posting the casting descriptions and inviting people to come audition for me, I then had to set up the actual auditions. I started booking rooms and setting up times, and then deciding who was going to be in the room with me to make these decisions. I knew I needed at least one other person to run auditions with me. I had scheduled my auditions to be at the Film Centre, which is a swipe-access building. If I needed to be in the audition room, I needed someone to be downstairs to let in the people auditioning. I also wanted my Directors of Photography to have a say in the casting process. I had one of them set up the camera so that we could record the auditions and then had a casting assistant swipe people into the building and send them upstairs.

I scheduled two audition days, from 9 am – 4:30 pm. Auditions can often lend themselves to be frustrating and exhausting – people cancel their audition slots, they’re running late, they don’t show up, or they get lost. The list goes on and on. It seems like the process is pretty much doomed to not run smoothly. But you stay for the end result; at the end of the day, you’re getting your cast. And this is the reason we go through all of this.

 

By the end of the second day of casting, I looked at my crew: “we can cast this.” We had found talent. We had made final decisions. What a relief.

The process wasn’t quite over though. Now we had to send out acceptances! Less exciting - we also had to send out rejections. It’s hard to write a rejection letter to someone regardless, but it’s especially hard to write it when you know someone was excited about the opportunity. Luckily, I was still looking for extras for the shoot, so I was able to offer the ability to be on set, even if it wasn’t for a principal role.

Within 48 hours I had received confirmation from the two principal roles and the one smaller role that I was casting. After a process that lasted nearly 3 months – from posting the first casting description to receiving the last confirmation email – it was incredible to finally have a basis to start shooting.

Next up: scheduling, scheduling, scheduling.

 

Almost Like It Never Happened: Violence Contained By Film (Jin)

The moment we capture an event or person on film, they become unreal to us. They’ve become possessable objects, something to be replayed and thus controlled. Through this ownership, the spectator retains the power to watch without being held accountable for what is taking place on the screen. When the film is that of a real act of violence, the power dynamic becomes particularly apparent: though the spectator may sympathize with the people on the screen, he or she typically feels no sense of direct responsibility. What is happening on the screen remains on the screen. The film is a separate world altogether, one which can be turned off and forgotten, or even replayed again and again until it has lost its ability to shock. How many times have we watched bleeding victims and decimated cities on the news? It may be an evocative sight but not a lasting one.

Benny, the fourteen year old protagonist in Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video, is the archetype of someone lost in an illusionary, dream-world of the seen and the controlled. Born into a wealthy family obsessed with career and social reputation, he himself is lost in delusion, albeit one composed of television screens. Just as his parents’ are trapped in their fear of losing face to their coworkers and friends, Benny is trapped in a self-imposed, psychological landscape of his bedroom which feeds his obsession with videos. There is a video constantly playing in the background while he quietly works at his desk, along with a second television screen showing a live feed of his apartment building’s exterior and his own bedroom’s interior. It is a life of relentless observation, one in which Benny plays the role of stoic, cold spectator.

 

The extent of his psychotic containment reaches its peak when Benny invites a girl over to his home to watch a video he’d recorded of a pig being slaughtered at a relative’s farm. Their sparse dialogue alone reveals a sort of naivety and a disconnect between violence in reality and on film. When asked by the girl, “have you ever seen a dead person – a real one, I mean,” Benny replies, “No. I once saw a TV program about the tricks they use in action films. It’s all ketchup and plastic.” He remains unaware that actions in reality, unlike on video, have real consequences, and when he eventually discharges a slaughtering gun, the same one used in the pig video, on the girl’s chest, he is taken aback by the girl’s agonizing screams.

Proceeding the girl’s death, the greatest moment of horror is when we realize that, despite having murdered a human being, Benny still remains locked in his internal world. The real physical action of violence fail to raise any real emotional response from Benny, and like how the murder scene is shown solely on his television screen rather than being shown in real time, Benny has internalized the incident as an “unreal” event isolated within the video tape. Even when Benny’s parents discover his son’s crime, they show a similar lack of emotive response and immediately begin strategizing how to save their reputation. It becomes increasingly apparent that the absence of consequence is more noticeable than the absence of a life itself. The dead girl remains a stranger, and though she mentioned having a large family, nothing is to be known about the impact of her death. In fact, it is as though Benny’s murder tape carries a higher value than the girl herself and is almost more “real” due to its ability to prove the murder had occurred. Later on, the video tape is the only object capable of bearing any real consequence, by acting as legal evidence and resulting in the family’s arrest. Preceding this, however, the family remain in a strange limbo, spending a whole week vacationing in Egypt.

The loss of a human life could hardly be felt as “real,” when there are absolutely no repercussions against the murderer: how is it possible to dictate one’s actions as being real, if they hold no visible effect? The emotionless psychological vacuum of Benny’s mind is therefore all the more terrifying than any real physical damage he can cause. Ultimately, it is this lack of emotional and social consequence that is felt as being “more violent” than the actual murder itself.

The Garrulous Silence of the Inanimate: Soundscape in Film (Mireille)

Although the birth of film began as silent, sound now dominates the cinematographic experience. Irrespective of the genre or length of the film, the presence or lack of sound and music in a film very often helps build not only the narrative tension, but also the scaffolding for the composition. One excellent example of a short film that uses sound, especially music, to accentuate the mise-en-scène and composition of individual shots is Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956). 

The Red Balloon has only a few words of dialogue, but it is not a silent film. From the very beginning, Lamorisse uses music to create an almost dream-like world into which the characters, as well as the audience, can immerse themselves. The soundtrack starts with the opening credits and continues throughout the film. The music is joyous and consists primarily of major keys and scales, reminiscent of music that is played at a fair. After all, the main character is a red balloon, and though usually silent, magical, and joyous, through the soundtrack, Lamorisse allows us to hear the balloon’s voice and thoughts. Lamorisse pairs the openness of the soundtrack with wide and medium shots that effectively depict the vastness of the world beyond Pascal, a young boy and the other protagonist in the film, and the relationship and struggles between him, the balloon and the environment. With this composition of music and filming even the little details of the everyday Parisian life seem heightened. For example, when Pascal is walking through the streets in the beginning of the film the soundtrack is overlaid with the sounds of city life. The immense grey buildings make the world captured by the frame seem daunting and oppressive, and even more so in contrast to the little boy’s small stature. Many of these wide shots also capture the semi-dilapidated and destroyed ruins of France, a historical reminder of the effects of the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War on the city of Paris. However these shots are brightened with the co-presence of Pascal’s brightly colored balloon and the joyous soundtrack.

Though the tune making up the soundtrack is utilized throughout the film, it is not always light and circus-like. At times Lamorisse alters keys and introduces variation of notes to echo or foreshadow the action and the mood. For example, in one scene, when Pascal unties his balloon from a lamp post, Lamorisse slightly changes the pitch and key of the soundtrack and incorporates minor scales into the original sound while adding 5th minor keys. These alterations create, arguably, the most dissonant sound one can obtain on an instrument, and in fact, in this case prime the audience for the upcoming scene in which the boy is bullied and the balloon is eventually punctured. As the balloon withers away the scene becomes silent as we, the audience, experience the balloon being popped as not only its death but also Pascal’s, and the music which has been their voices until now must necessarily end. The music returns once again and back to a major key only at the very end. It then crescendos so that it becomes the only sound one hears as Pascal floats away with many new balloons.

Although the soundtrack dominates the majority of the film, when the soundtrack is absent Lamorisse compliments the images with the sounds that surround the Pascal and his balloon. This change from strictly soundtrack to simply diegetic sound comes almost as a shock to the audience since the scene becomes attenuated compared to the scenes filled with the soundtrack. For example, when a group of school kids notice the balloon, their calls and screams increase in volume beyond what we may normally expect.  We interpret this shift from soundtrack to diegetic sound as what the balloon is hearing. In fact, the sound of the screams appears to lure the balloon to them. The balloon is intrigued by their sounds and begins to taunt them playfully. Towards the end of the film, the children’s screaming and yelling become even more accentuated just before the final confrontation between them, the balloon, and Pascal. The emphasis of the screaming makes their aggression palpable and the eventual violence inevitable since they have “overpowered” the voice of the balloon.

In The Red Balloon Lamorisse shows us that sound does not have to be presented as dialogue in order to capture the intentions and emotions of a character. Rather, the careful combination of auditory and visual cues can fill the cinematographic experience with subtle messages and themes. In this way, the audience’s emotions are not constrained by the meaning of words, but rather, are shaped by the experience of the sound.

Bresson's L'argent: A New Form of Passion (Jin)

When watching films, we are so often told exactly how to feel through the orchestral score and close-ups of waving hands and facial expressions, that we scarcely have space to perceive the characters’ emotions for ourselves. Bresson, in L’argent, creates this space for his audience in the form of distancing; we are no longer relayed the characters’ exact internal dialogue, nor are we obliged to witness any form of direct emotional outburst. Instead, there is a palpable distance between us and the film, bestowing us with the responsibility of interpreting the characters’ feelings through their actions. It is a retreat into the action of observation, a retreat away from theatricality and clichéd emotional symbols, and it is this retreat that allows L’argent to become an even keener portrayal of human passion.

On the surface, L’argent poses a relatively simple story. Yvon, a working-class man with a wife and young daughter, is wrongfully accused of producing counterfeit cash when he unknowingly uses counterfeit cash to pay his restaurant tab. He is exempt from jail time but loses his job, prompting him to agree in assisting a bank heist. When he is again caught, he is sentenced to prison, leading to a chain of increasingly tragic events. Yvon’s suffering is particularly tragic, because all his grievances can be traced back to the foolishness of two teenage boys, who decided to pay at a photo shop using a forged 500-franc note.

 

Because of the narrative simplicity and Bresson’s use of impassive dialogue and faces, it is easy to mistake the film for being emotionally detached. The actors themselves show incredible restraint, and Bresson’s use of perfect framing and very precise composition give a calculative impression. Both are particularly evident during the scene in which Elise discovers her husband, Yvon, is in jail. Given their scant living conditions and dependent child, we expect Yvon’s wife to feel a great degree of loss and display a look of shock or, at the least, a few sobs of grief. Instead, we are shown her sitting on a plain wooden bench, with her hands demurely folded on her lap and her face quietly bowed. Even when Yvon is sentenced to three years in prison, the only reaction shot that we see of Elise is of her similarly sitting on a bench at court, framed by the stark empty benches around her.

Within this short sequence, Elise’s emotional turmoil, deprived of any dialogue and accompanied only by diegetic sound, is thereby bound within her actions. It is this passive, silent action of sitting, followed only by the simple action of rising to leave the court room, that speaks louder than any verbalized language of grief. This is perhaps because we are invited to discover her emotion through her actions, much like the way we are obliged to do so in real life. Our intimate experiences of others’ intense traumas are never wholly spelt out for us via explanatory narration nor melancholy strings playing in the background. Rather, we are left to piece together their internal despair by quietly observing their actions and interpreting them as emotional symbols. Similarly, when watching Elise sitting down, we experience her grief the same way we experience others’ grievances in reality, constrained to using our imagination to fill in for absent information. Bresson gives us the space to discover her despair for ourselves, and her despair, then, becomes real to us.  

This personalized discovery of emotion is used throughout the entire film, creating an even stronger connection between the audience and the story. When Yvon murders the entire household towards the end of the film, we are informed of the murder through the actions of the dog, as the camera pans along his frenzied movement, up and down, past the corpses. By using the dog as an agent of information, we are given the chance to “discover” the murder, rather than being forthright informed of it, further allowing us to actively participate in the film’s emotional environment.

This discovery-type experience is also paired with an omission of the actual moment of violence. Bresson purposefully cuts straight from the building of tension to the consequences of the act of violence that the preceding shots had been building towards. For example, when Yvon attempts suicide, we see him hiding a mound of pills behind his prison bed before the film cuts immediately to an ambulance pulling away. Later, when Yvon murders the hotel keepers, we are again spared the details of the actual murder and see, instead, blood swirling down a bathroom sink. By sparing us these moments of climax, Bresson also spares us the risk of finding such moments unbelievable. Furthermore, the omissions isolate human action so that we become aware of their limitations: one simple scene of an ambulance driving away is forced to contain the full emotional significance of Yvon’s attempted suicide, just as the Elise’s mute sitting must contain her whole despair. Instead of limiting our emotional experience of the film, these tightly contained expressions heighten the film’s emotional impact. After all, the most difficult form of grief is one in which we are left to our imagination, forced to re-create scenes of death which we’ve never witnessed nor were fully informed of, compelled to guess the exact details as to how a loved one may have perished.

Undressing the Spectral Nature of Human Sexuality in Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl (Mireille)

As society comes to grips with the reality of the spectral nature of sexuality, more and more main stream movies and TV series are being created to depict the lives of individuals who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015) is a film that examines the sexual metamorphosis from man to woman of the principal character, Einar Wegener. Though the film focuses primarily on Einar, Hooper constantly reminds the audience of the fluidity of sexuality that exists for other characters, especially Einar’s wife, Gerda.

Throughout the entirety of The Danish Girl, Hooper reiterates the gender duality theme through carefully crafted mise-en-scène and frame composition. For example, Hooper creates an interplay between the human body and the surrounding geometry. The rigidity of the buildings as well as the harsh vertical and horizontal lines making up the geometry of the rooms in the home where Einar and Gerda live create a sense of restriction and harshness that confine the bodies of the characters in the manner in which the masculine dominated society of the 1920s restrained any attempt at sexual fluidity. At the same time, these geometric restrictions are juxtaposed by repeated shots which emulate impressionistic paintings and are full of the soft pastels of femininity. The resulting effect is a visual duality that mimics the duality of Einar’s experience: a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Perhaps the most powerful scene in the film occurs when Einar stands in front of a mirror and completely undresses himself. Hooper expertly wields the camera moving down the body, never fully showing the male genitalia, but following the path of Einar’s hand. When the hand reaches the location of Einar’s genitals at the same time that the camera does, Einar pushes his genitals out of sight and in between his legs, creating the illusion of female genitalia. The camera lingers on Einar’s full body while reflected in the mirror, and the deception of the form of a woman is compelling. Hooper uses reflection or “mirroring” in another powerful scene when Einar visits a brothel where he watches a prostitute through a glass window as she strips. Einar then begins to emulate her movements in an attempt to learn the female manner of seduction. The woman pauses in bewilderment, but then resumes her seductive poses; however, there is an exaggeration in her movement as she acts and simultaneously watches Einar, almost as if the prostitute knows that Einar’s intent is one of wanting to learn. As a result, rather than becoming an erotic moment it becomes one in which there is a woman to woman connection. 

Hooper also explores the inter-woman connection in terms of the complexity of the relationship between Einar and Gerda. Hooper often shows the couple in intricately framed shots, in which they are divided, but still have a lingering attachment. Hooper frequently uses combinations of shot reverse shots such that Einar and Gerda, despite being in the same film space, are portrayed separately. Even towards the end of the film when Gerda and Einar, who has now become Lili, are arguably closest emotionally, they are separated by a thin veil dividing their bed, yet still have their hands intertwined and enveloped by the same fabric that defined the moment that Einar first became fascinated with women’s clothing. This repetition of Einar and Gerda as separate, but still linked together, leaves the audience to wonder if it is just “love” or recognition of womanhood in each other. As Gerda says when explaining why she married Einar; “It was like kissing myself.”  

Hooper allows Gerda to explore her own uncertain sexuality by allowing her to engage in role reversal. Gerda creates opportunities for Einar and her to switch gender roles. Early in the film, even before it becomes clear that Einar is transgender, Gerda, who like Einar is a painter by profession, asks him to put on some female clothing to serve as a female model for a painting she needs to finish. Then she coaxes Einar into dressing up like a woman to play a joke during a society outing. In another very overtly roll reversing scene, Gerda is completely nude and standing over Einar’s form that is still dressed. Einar’s body image has a strangely feminine allure, and he is also trying to conceal the fact that he is wearing a woman’s nightgown underneath his masculine garments. Gerda takes on the male role of undressing Einar, who has clearly begun to adopt a feminine persona. At the same time, Einar accentuates his femininity by being coy and trying to keep covered up. Gerda’s role reversal does not happen only in Einar’s presence. Hooper utilizes a low angle camera angle or an eye line match with almost all of the male characters that Gerda encounters emphasizing the power position that she has over them. Finally, Gerda becomes successful only when she starts creating portraits of Einar as Lili, suggesting that she is able to express passion only through an expression of the feminine form.

The Danish Girl reminds the audience that the enigma of sexual identity is not a modern concept, but one that is an inextricable part of human nature. Hooper delivers a film that is not only beautiful to watch, but beautifully depicts the inexorable nature of love and human identity.   

Redefining the First-Person Perspective in Film (Jin)

Film calls for a new definition of the first-person perspective. In literature, it is easier to define; the words are arranged so that they mimic the running verbal narratives in our head, and the first-person perspective can therefore be defined as our internal narrator whose role is to identify the visual world via names and labels. Using this internal narration, we attempt to contain and identify our world within one language, our verbal language. However, film carries an ability to transcend from this verbal language into the visual one, thereby also transcending from an absorption of a simple verbal narrative to the experience of a sensory narrative. Therefore, when creating a film in the first-person perspective, we arrive at the question: how does one experience the world?  

The most common way of describing one’s perception of the world is through the consciousness of time. We are, in fact, so conscious of time that it has become a given. We automatically assume that we live in the present by building on the past, looking into the future, and so forth, as though our existence can be carefully partitioned into “the before,” “the now,” and “the later.” When examining the way in which our memories are stored, however, the division of time is not at all central to our stream of consciousness. We do not store our memories as though looking back on certain events from time to time, via some mental filing system. Instead, our perception of the now is wholly interwoven with the past, to the point in which the two are inseparable. We may give labels to our memories (“these are from the far past,” “these are from the recent past”), but our memories, regardless of when they were created, are still inherently in the present.

Therefore, when creating a narrative that is entirely from an internalized perspective of one character, it would not make much sense to have a linear progression of time and a singular building of events. Rather, the narrative becomes a mix of the perception of the present moment via sight and hearing, and the memories that are inherently linked, brought forth by sensory stimuli. Furthermore, the coherence of the plot becomes less significant than the creation of a system of logic specific to the simulated world. It is just as how, when we think, our own thoughts may make perfect sense to us while being entirely nonsensical to others; each of us creates an isolated, internalized system of logic through which we individually interpret our world. Similarly, a film narrative can be created so that, when logically pried apart, the plot may not make much sense, but the viewers, in the moment of viewing it, can make sense of it, because they experiencing from the protagonist’s perspective.

A first-person film could thereby be defined as a combination of this internalized system of logic with the visceral processing of the present, and ultimately, the visual and audial expression of this combination as a cinematic experience. Most films, whether or not attempting to create this first-person perspective, only succeed in accomplishing one of the two components. They can therefore be separated into two categories: films that sustain themselves on an internalized system of logic and films that mimic our visceral processing of the world.

Alma & Elisabet in Bergman's Persona

Bergman’s Persona is an example of a film suspended within the very specific system of logic created by two protagonists, Elisabet and Alma. Elisabet, the mentally ill patient and actress, is under the care of Alma, a nurse, and their two personalities begin to fuse in a series of surreal interactions. These interactions are expressed via specific instants in which the two characters’ physical and mental realities overlap: Alma takes the place of Elisabet when suddenly shown making love to Elisabet’s husband, and Alma’s and Elisabet’s bodies seem to meld when standing side by side or their ghostly faces overlaid over each other. The film is not driven by a chronological progression of events but by an extreme psychological violence expressed within a very systematic exchange of emotional energy. One cannot describe the characters’ twisting relationship as logically comprehensible, but they form their own logic through an association of images: of Elisabet drawing away from Alma in fear, of Alma breathing across the neck of Elisabet who is asleep and subdued, of the two women constantly exchanging roles of the dominant and submissive. The viewers cannot escape from this visual logic that suspends the two characters, and the extent to which the film is imbued with their psychotic internal presence is near suffocating.

The second category of first-person film, the film which mimic our visceral processing, is best observable in experimental films like those of Stan Brakhage. Brakhage most heavily relies on the metaphor of the “untutored eye,” his idea of seeing the world primarily through pure perception. He employs flashing images, repetitive movements, and an intent focus on singular details such as swirling leaves or a swaying cat’s paw to evoke a sensory experience. By isolating physical elements within a tightly woven rhythm of cuts, he awakens a new consciousness of our physical reality without turning it into an incomprehensible abstract. The trembling close-ups of human flesh, the reoccurrence of blurred lights and wavering reflections, are not dense symbols but keen details of the real; they provoke an awareness rather than an obtuse contemplation of what is symbolic. Each of these details are innately tied to a certain sensory feeling, whether it be taste, touch, or sight, and each elicits our own memories that echo such sensations. Brakhage leaves room for us to perceive our own world via his, and his films are like visualized memories inviting us to accept them as our own. 

If Bergman's and Brakhage's works represent two forms of a first-person film, what would it mean to combine the two styles to make one whole? Could one successfully create a film that both sustains the viewers in an internalized system of logic, while also mimicking the sensual perception of the physical world? For us, this reconciliation of two parts is innate; our perception of the present moment and our self-sustained logical interpretation of it are the only true constituents of our consciousness. To have these two parts simultaneously work together within a film would be to create a pure first-person experience and to truly grant the film a real human consciousness.  

Through the Looking Glass: The Art Behind Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (Mireille)

There is no absolute standard that qualifies a film as an “art film”. As such a film can be considered art when it is the result of the careful construction of frames rendering it artful, but it is also art when the film is simply the expression of what the filmmaker beholds with his inner eye as an artist. One film that is widely considered an art film is Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975). The film recounts a young man’s life not only as a function of what happens to him and who he meets, but also through his emotions. The art behind the film, as the name implies, is the manner in which the film has been made, which is by investigating the inner workings of a human mind as a literal reflection. In other words, the viewer only catches glimpses of the main character of the film, but comes to know him only as a reflection of his life. Despite the absence of the physical presence of the character, Tarkovsky’s style of crafting each frame ensures that the presence of the character is always felt and the viewer does not have the feeling of missing something.

Although the plot and even the central idea behind the film are not entirely clear, a mixture of narration and camera movement in each scene conveys the story to the viewer. Tarkovsky interviews the character about his memories and shoots these scenes in black and white, while filming what the character in the film is currently seeing and experiencing in color. This combination of duality of filming and listening to the voices of the main character as well as narration creates the story for the viewer. In the same way that the viewer catches only physical glimpses of the main character’s persona, the viewer learns about the main character’s mind in bits and pieces. As a result, the viewer gradually comes to the conclusion that the main character is dying and that The Mirror is both a metaphorical and literal reflection on life.

Tarkovsky’s incorporation of camera movement also serves to include the viewer in the frames of the film. This use of movement provides a certain personality and “sense of being” to the camera. In other words, the camera is not just a stationary object that observes the actions of the actors and movement in the scene, but rather the camera itself has a personality and plays a role in each frame. In addition to the movement of the camera, a significant amount of Tarkovsky’s shots are also exceptionally long takes. The use of long takes keeps the viewer’s attention engaged and gives the viewer the feeling that s/he is present in the scene, which adds to the feeling of inclusion. This feeling of presence also translates into a sense of omniscience, almost as if the scene were just another part of the viewer’s everyday life. In addition, the almost slow motion like feel in some of these long takes further allows the viewer to take a step back from the motion of the film and really focus on the elements and people in the scene.

Finally, Tarkovsky also uses repetition to great effect.  Several times throughout the film, Tarkovsky repeats certain scenes, which creates a haunting sense of déjà vu that influences the composition of the film as a whole. For example, Tarkovsky repeats a particular black and white scene in which the viewer sees trees and bushes blown about in a strong wind, and then as the camera pans over to a stone table several objects begin to fall over ostensibly also because of the wind. The repetition of the scene allows the viewer to slowly grasp that the scene is a metaphor for the slow death and chaotic existence of the main character.

The Mirror is not a linear film, the meaning or intention of which is grasped as a function of the unfolding of events. In fact, at first glance, The Mirror may even seem out of order and “random”.  However, therein lays the art. The Mirror is a view into the interior world of Tarkovsky’s subconscious. It is an exploration of life and death through filters and metaphor. The very fact that the viewer witnesses the world that Tarkovsky wants to reveal through Tarkovsky rather than through a physical main character that leads us through the story lays bare Tarkovsky’s most intimate musings and recollections. True art does precisely that. It provides a view into the artist’s beliefs, fears, and longings in a manner that many times is difficult to glean immediately, but rather requires travelling through the labyrinth of the artist’s mind and exiting maybe a bit confused, but with enough bits and pieces to leave us wondering for a long while.

 

Cinema as a Medium for Obsession (Jin)

Cinema distinguishes itself by simultaneously being an experience and an object. The combination of these two states of being allows cinema to become the best medium for expressing the psyche and our obsessions. By employing images as a vehicle for memory, film is an experience of other peoples’ obsessions, and by acting as an object to be possessed, film is the obsession turned external. Therefore, cinema is inherently an object of obsession, an experience turned into a tangible expression of our internal world.

No other form of art is capable of matching cinema’s ability to express one’s psyche. Theatre is an experience, but unlike cinema, its live performance cannot be possessed by any one individual nor be replayed. Painting or any other two-dimensional art can be possessed, but it employs the action of observing rather than experiencing. The only form of art that may pose as a viable match is music–-it can be an experience, such as at a concert, or a possession, such as the music we store in our phones. However, music fails to employ the visual, and when it comes to the formation of obsession, the image plays a crucial role.

It is through image that cinema is capable of becoming a medium for obsession. This is because image itself is innately tied to the recollection of memory. Film is often mistaken for being an imitation of the way in which we perceive the world, because the camera is thought to be an “eye” objectively capturing our physical reality. However, though the camera may be objective in the formation of the image itself, the images that are produced and then connected together are extremely subjective. As Susan Sontag wrote, “the distinctive unit of films is not the image but the principle of connection between the images, the relation of a ‘shot’ to the one that receded it and the one that comes after.” This connection of images, and the resulting sequences of images that constitute the film, is much like the flickering of memories within our own mind. When we try to recollect a specific person or event, we see image after image of, perhaps, the person’s face, a certain chair, or some isolated action. Our memories are montages of specific images, and film also being a montage of images, speaks using the internal language of our consciousness. Film is not an imitation of how we see the world but rather of how we process the world internally.

To add to its effect, the filmic image is felt as being the most realistic when compared to the images of other arts. This is not just due to the camera’s ability to capture “life as is” but due to the way in which film characterizes its subjects. If we were to only focus on the realism of form, theatre would far surpass cinema due to its employment of live, physical subjects. However, because film is a psychological experience, the weight of its effects lie on the characterization of the subject, in the use of a technique called “off-centering.” When watching a character on screen, we are most drawn to the small details that creates the summation of a character. As an example, Sontag describes “the pingpong toy the schoolmaster toys with in Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah" as being the most potent detail regarding the character. When briefly considered, the inclusion of such details may seem insignificant, but they provide a depth to the characters that, if missing, immediately cause the viewers to perceive the characters as “flat” or “poorly written.” Allardyce Nicoll wrote on the difference between theatre and film, saying, “Practically all effectively drawn stage characters are types [while] in cinema we demand individualization…and impute greater power of independent life to the figures on the screen.” Because theatre employs characters that act as archetypes, each given a specific role that must be fulfilled by the end of the play, the characters are perceived as self-contained “parts” of a larger story, rather than as people whom we can actively relate to. The characters of theatre live and die on the stage, but the characters of film do not. Instead, they remain preserved in the film, in an intimately real world of their own that exists as long as the film remains intact.

Given film’s effect of imitating human memory and its heightened realism, it is unsurprising that film best captures obsession and almost always involves some element of obsession, whether it be a repeated visual motif or a topic addressing the filmmaker's own personal obsession. Obsession is not an activity reserved for those with obsessive psychoses (because after all, aren’t most mental illnesses an over-exaggeration of the mental processes already present in a “healthy” mind?), but an activity that we partake daily, through the conscious or subconscious contemplation of certain reoccurring objects. Therefore, by turning the obsession into the external, an object that we can grasp and better understand, film may be one of our best sources of psychological catharsis or best defense mechanism. Michel Foucault wrote on madness that, "one can escape the present only by putting something in its place" and by the repetition of "the factitious, imaginary past of substitutions." What better substitute exists than film, an art which speaks directly to our inward mind? 

In some films, the presence of obsession is more obvious than in others: Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of the recent Killing of a Sacred Deer, creates in all of his films a specific set of rules which are inevitably broken by a character, who is then punished. For example, in his film The Lobster, a man is caught masturbating, which is strictly forbidden, and therefore punished by being forced to stick his hand in a toaster. In reduced terms, one could argue that this reoccurring theme of punishment is Lanthimos’s obsession brought to life on screen.

However, in other films, the presence of obsession has been given more poignant roles. The most striking example is The Film of Her, a found footage short film made by Bill Morrison. A protagonist of the film is a Library of Congress clerk who, fixated on a specific woman he saw in a porn film as a young boy, is compelled to save a vault full of early cinema paper reels from the incinerator. The film is a montage of the paper reel films, thereby acting as a direct embodiment of the clerk's obsession, while also telling the story of his obsession. His obsession has become its own entity, the film, and even more strikingly, his obsession is with the beauty of images. The images are beautiful, not only because they are being reborn, but also because they are transient. We are reminded that, although film does not fade and revise itself as our memories do, it is a tangible vessel for memories (ours, the filmmakers', the subjects') that when breached, suffers a demise not much different from our own. 

 

Timing Is Everything: Creating The Real and Imagined Timescapes in Film (Mireille)

The passage of time for a character either to portray a “coming of age” or simply to recount the events of a life is a recurrent theme in many films. Unless the piece is a documentary that intentionally depicts the life of a single individual over time, such films most often use will cast actors of different ages to show the passage of time as a character matures. The exception to the rule is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), a feature length fictional film which uses the same actors over a twelve year span. Boyhood is unique in its manipulation of cinematic time. It is the only fictional film, which by virtue of using the same actors over an extended period of time, seamlessly meshes together the changes that the characters undergo as part of the script with the physical and emotional changes that the actors endure as a result of change in age and maturity.  

Though Boyhood follows the lives of all of the members of a dysfunctional family it focuses specifically on Mason Jr., the main character. As such, the film follows Mason Jr. from the time he is in elementary school until he starts college. The strength of Boyhood lies in its ability to capture the authenticity of the cultural trends of each of the moments in time in which the film is being shot without forfeiting continuity. The end result is that Boyhood proceeds linearly and seamlessly. Despite the dramatic changes in Mason Jr.’s appearance as well as that of those around him, there are no moments of hesitation, leaps of faith or incongruence. Rather than specifically indicating a change or switch in time, in this film long periods are condensed into fragments which can sometimes take the viewer by surprise. This approach to the depiction of time gives the film an almost mundane and banal feeling. The passing of time in Boyhood captures the normalcy and individual moments of the film's fictional family without a lot of emphasis and interjection from Linklater or even the characters.

Unlike in Boyhood in which the lives of the characters continue to play out regardless of the outcome and the film persists from year to year, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010) takes the five day experience of a single character and transforms it into an agonizing ninety minute film that provides no respite from anxiety for the audience. In 127 Hours, Boyle recounts the true story of Aron Ralston, a hiker who becomes stranded alone in a canyon after a boulder falls on top of him and traps his arm. Ralston’s suffering in the film is portrayed as a “neo-documentary” as he is able to record his ordeal due to the fact that he had a camera with him during his accident, creating a video diary as events unfolded in real time. In fact, the use of the camera in both films exacerbates the sense of time being manipulated. Although the long shots in Boyhood give the feeling that the camera is acting as an observer over stretches of time, in 127 Hours the camera truly observes Ralston’s attempt to free himself from his situation, and at times is also very intimate. The moments of re-enacted actual footage from Ralston’s personal camera are interspersed with flashbacks of his past memories, which have a hallucinatory feel and give the film a sense of time warping. 

Though Boyhood was shot in segments over a long period of time and is a fictional film, it is still able to provide a feeling of “real time” and authentic setting without so much as a hint of a lack of continuity. On the other hand 127 Hours, which is a true story that by virtue of relying on video documentation must be continuous, still manages to warp time and detach the audience from the “realistic” perception of time. This innovation and genius of manipulation of time in Boyhood, 127 Hours, and many other films rests firmly in the ability to have the audience feel its passage, real or imagined, without lulling us into boredom or disbelief.  

 

Stop-Motion: We the Objects, the Film Our Stage (Jin)

We remain obsessed with dolls– as children, we’d learnt to create for ourselves plastic avatars of our play objects, and now, as adults, we remain trapped in this transference of self and the imagining of scenarios, albeit in a more subtle and subconscious form. Our innate desire to play god by exerting control over self-replicas, which had been so apparent in our childhood, is now forced to manifest itself through other means besides playing with plastic. We turn to the most malleable form of art: film.

Film has become our stage, our new avatar. It is our way of seeking liberation from the present, through both the role of filmmaker and of spectator. A filmmaker, by creating a new reality in film, has established himself as god, or a creator of truth, thereby also creating for us a stage on which we can imagine ourselves occupying via the actors on screen. For the duration of the film, we may briefly forget our own selves and revel in the illusionary power obtained through the observation of a contained, controlled world. Although this experience is applicable for all genres of film, stop-motion film is particularly well-suited in depicting this stage-spectator relationship.

The stop-motion genre is becoming increasingly abandoned, but two Surrealist films, Jabberwocky by Jan Svankmajer and Street of Crocodiles by the Quay brothers, successfully tapped into its potential. Stop-motion reveals its power through its direct and quite literal replacement of people with dolls and objects, all photographed in movement through the real world. There is no greater embodiment of a film acting as a stage upon which we can insert ourselves; the movements that we see are simultaneously real (because, despite their fantastical motions, they are still taking place in the real world, the source of its movements simply hidden in the ellipses of the film) while overtly illusionary (because the actions themselves, i.e. a still object coming to life and dancing, are undeniably impossible). It is this paradoxical juxtaposition of the real and the illusion that grants stop-motion an even greater power: despite the spectator’s constant awareness of its impossibility, the illusion still retains a degree of possibility, because its movements are so directly fixed in the real world.

 

Props from "Street of Crocodiles"

Both Svankmajer and the Quay brothers carefully create their world using everyday objects, and in doing so, construct a type of reality that is synchronously familiar and new. When watching their films, we are instantly familiar with the plastic doll heads, the classic wooden chair, the ordinary metal screw, the lightbulb– it is a new reality pieced together with fragments of our own, thereby reading as a rearrangement, rather than an entirely alien atmosphere, like those created via CGI in Marvel superhero movies. This is the primary way in which the film becomes a more immersive stage, by creating a setting that is strongly felt as a replica of our own, rather than a complete departure. It is the imminently real turned into a tangible unreal. To add on to the effect, the objects themselves are antiquated and gritty, as though pervaded with both the refuse of life and its sentimentality. They are not just objects but relics fingerprinted with the presence of an external world, our own.

Just as they attempt to close the boundary between our world and theirs, the filmmakers also attempt to erase the dichotomy between the real and the absurd, between life and death. Particularly in Jabberwocky, all extremities coexist in the sudden perversion of the childlike, as a cannibalistic doll daintily devours plastic body parts or is torn apart as smaller dolls scramble out of its body. Akin to the traditional Grimm’s fairy tales, there is a natural blending of children- storytelling and the grotesque; the cannibalistic, brute dolls are an embodiment of death merged with life, further highlighted by added scenes of fresh fruit giving way to worms and of a folding knife, when closed on itself, paradoxically stabs itself and gushes blood.

Through Svankmajer’s and the Quay brothers’ ingenious use of stop motion, we find a caricature of both ourselves and our lives. The absurdity of juxtaposed life and death, of dolls rent apart to reveal gore, and of underworlds composed of human artifacts, is felt keenly as a subconscious stage for us to enter and as a replica reality directly born from our own. In the substitution of human actors with doll characters, the films rekindle our inherent affinity for playing god, and through it, hint at an even greater truth. Heinrich von Kleist once wrote on marionettes, insisting that, because they are not bound to the earth like we are, they exceed the grace of any human being, and that only through the self-consciousness of our own limitations, we can achieve a degree of that grace. Svankmajer and the Quay brothers give us the liberation that we need from our human limitations, by instilling in us the constant self-consciousness of their films' illusion, while simultaneously allowing for us to enter the illusion, to play on the stage as spectator-dolls. 

Great Things Come In Short Packages: Why A Film Does Not Have To Be Feature Length To Be Memorable (Mireille)

With the Academy Awards being presented this evening, social media and many news outlets are buzzing about the film nominations, and whether one film will sweep all of the awards. These debates are centered on those films that have gained the most notoriety, and one of the types of film that is all too often absent in these discussion and may not even be readily accessible for viewing, is the short film. I do not intend to overgeneralize and say that wide attention is never given to these films, but they rarely receive the spotlight that feature length Oscar nominated films bask in.

Shawn Christensen’s Academy Award winning short film Curfew (2012) is, in my opinion, an extraordinary piece that depicts the typically human struggles, namely one’s own mental health and the frequent dysfunction that exists in families. By packing each frame of the film with rich music, color, and geometry, Christensen successfully conveys the horror of an attempted suicide, the ravages of drug abuse and domestic abuse, the dysfunction of families and the power of the human spirit and enduring love/blood bond between family members. There are full length feature films that are less successful than this short at touching the audience to its very core with a range of emotions that are real and never trite or banal.

The opening sequence of Curfew immediately shocks the viewer and sets the dark psychological tone of the film. At the same time, the hyper pigmented colors and the composition of the frame nudges us to question the reality of the situation. The film begins with a bloodied hand reaching for an old fashioned rotary telephone, painted in the same color tones as the blood tainted hand. The use of high contrast lighting projected on the phone adds to a growing dystopic feel. Christensen, who also plays the principal character Richie, cuts to a high angle shot of himself submerged in a bloodied bathtub while he listens helplessly to the woman on the phone who is pleading with him to take care of her daughter. At this moment we have the confirmation that we are witnessing a suicide attempt. It is, however, depicted in almost a picturesque manner, thanks to Christensen’s specific color palette and positioning of his own body almost as if posing for a painting. To complete the sense of detachment and other worldliness, Christensen incorporates the famous Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé, a piece normally associated with joy.  

As the film progresses, the audience is introduced to the complex relationships between the characters in the film. Richie’s sister, Maggie, has a daughter named Sophia whom Richie does not know but is responsible for taking care of her. The initial dialogue between Richie and Sophia sets the tone for Sophia’s apathy and defiance towards Richie, which is emphasized by Christensen utilizing very strong geometry in many of the shots throughout his film. The characters are initially separated by harsh vertical or horizontal lines which emphasize the divide between Richie and Sophia. However, as the film progresses Sophia begins to cross these constructed cinematographic boundaries to join Richie. These subtle gestures show that Sophia, although a young girl caught in familial and custody troubles, begins to develop a greater understanding and compassion for the situation and is able to sense the longing within Richie. This understanding arrives as a result of incessant questions and answers as well as sequences in the film that lead us to believe one thing that turn out to be another. Christensen juxtaposes the violence and ugliness of the drug world with the innocence of a child and the inevitability of man who loves his sister and niece. He interjects the hallucination of a man on the edge of self-destruction with the whimsy of child’s play.

By the end of the film we have returned to Richie contemplating his suicide in the dystopic and removed setting of his bathroom. The phone, in the same cyclical and rhythmic pattern that drives the film, begins to ring once more as Richie submerges his body into the bloodied water of his bathtub. However this time Richie disconnects the phone in a symbolic move to disconnect himself from the family that has re-entered his life and yet rejected him once more. However, without any warning, Richie violently reconnects the phone, and the film comes full circle with a plea from his sister to watch Sophia except this time it is not a desperate demand, but a conciliatory offer for peace between them.

I would venture to guess that this beautifully crafted and well-acted film that has won multiple awards, including the Oscar, is not on everyone’s short list of favorite or must see films. Why is that? Certainly one reason has to do with its lack of big name producers and actors that wield sufficiently prominent name recognition that draws audience into the light that they effuse. Nevertheless, Curfew is no less worthy for not being a feature film. My challenge to you on the eve of this Oscar night is to give the “shorter guy” a chance. Watch the Academy Award nominees for the short film, whether live action, documentary, or animation, and if you find them worthy perhaps help spread the word by allowing them to ride the crest of the wave of social media that they hardly get swept up in.

Finding a New God in Film (Jin)

 

 

The vampire movie genre has become so hopelessly imbued with the increasily cheesy image of Count Dracula and the overtly romanticized Twilight vampires, that it’d be a waste of time to argue that the film Let the Right One In could redeem the genre as a whole. When watching this film, it is best to forget the vampire context entirely and instead judge it with fresh expectations: not as a horror or romance movie, but as a film reframing human loneliness.

Oskar, the protagonist, with his elvish white hair and equally pale skin, is the perfect picture of adolescent frailty. Nothing conveys loneliness better than the spindly twelve-year old kid being viciously assaulted by school bullies. He is entirely defenseless against his tormentors, and when set against the stark landscape of Swedish winter, his despair is painfully palpable.

By the time his unlikely savior appears in the shape of a small scruffy girl, Eli, we’ve already grown a strong attachment to Oskar. Despite showing hints of nascent homicidal tendencies, such as collecting newspaper clippings of murder cases and habitually play-acting stabbing his bullies, Oskar and his alienation in his divorced home background and complete friendlessness stirs our own childhood memories of loneliness. He carries a deep-rooted longing for understanding that is seeded in each and every one of us, and watching Eli finally fulfilling Oskar’s aching need of a friend is nearly cathartic. The fact that she happens to be a centuries-old vampire and that she possesses a pedophilic, middle-aged caretaker, Håkan, fades away into the background when watching her and Oskar experience emotional intimacy for the first time. As they are lying in bed together, Eli playfully tapping her fingers along Oskar’s back, she is no longer a brutal murderer and he is no longer the troubled child. They are simply two children, bound by a keen longing for companionship.   

The film’s poignancy rises, not just from its ability to draw out our empathy, but on its contextual dissection of the human condition: isolation. Each character, such as the bullies, Håkan, and Oskar’s neighbors, are all marked by traces of loneliness, whether it be helplessly tormenting Oskar in fear of being bullied himself or living alone in a dim apartment broiling with cats. More importantly, each one has found themselves an object of worship: the schoolkid worships the bully leader, the isolated neighbor worships his cats, Håkan worships Eli, and more. Though the film does not rely heavily on religious references, Eli serves in clearly establishing the film’s existential worldview. Oskar, in his suffering, has created himself a religion. First, by poring over the murder-case newspaper clippings and recreating himself as a brutal avenger in his imagination, then by selecting Eli as his physical deity. Eli becomes his messiah, in a fitting reflection of her namesake, the Biblical prophet Eli.

Oskar’s obsessive reliance on this self-imposed religion, however, is not portrayed as a perversion, but rather, an innately human experience. It is a clear portrayal of carnal longing, the desire to fill an inner loneliness, that we, by nature, can fully identify with. Here, the real enemy is not violence nor the loss of morality, as many gore-ridden films are prone to depicting, but isolation. Isolation is the ultimate enemy that everyone fights individually, regardless of situation or social position. In other words, in the film (and perhaps in reality), isolation is humanity’s universal condition. Regardless of how much love one may receive or pour into another, the inner void can only be partially filled, and one is thereby forced to constantly seek objects of worship as temporary alleviation. Isolation is the greatest problem that remains unsolvable, and therefore, any attempt to solve it, no matter how destructive or morally ambiguous, is fully justifiable.

This worldview is further heightened by the film’s use of realism. Violence itself is presented as a natural act; it is an examination of human nature running its course, or rather, human nature given its chance to reveal itself. Stylistic choices, such as showing most of Eli’s attacks as long shots, having the massacre to take place off-screen, and avoiding the use of visual clichés such as jump-cuts and rapid cutting, allow for an objective consideration. Such assaults seem like a matter of survival: Eli finds no joy in killing her human victims, and when Håkan, her helper, murders for her sake, there’s an emphasis on his human clumsiness and horrifying matter-of-factness. Håkan is forced to drag a corpse on a red, plastic sleigh, comically grunting and slipping through the dense snow, and even shoos away a passerby’s poodle that starts lapping at a pool of blood. The violence becomes all the more understandable and relatable, because the film purposefully includes the messy, physical details that precedes or preludes the real killing of people.

The film surpasses most standard depictions of deity worship by redefining what is the ideal god. Eli has spent centuries in alienation, receiving one-sided love from a series of human servants. This indicates that Eli, despite possessing the incredible strength that Oskar needs in defeating his bullies, has equal need of Oskar and his love. This is the exact god we want for ourselves: a god who, despite possessing the greater power we desire, loves us because it needs us. It is not a god that only demands worship, but rather, returns our worship. Perhaps this is why this film so effectively draws us in– it is the depiction of an equivalent exchange, like an ideal human relationship, and of a god figure stunningly made sympathetic. 

Behind the Trigger: Gus Van Sant’s Depiction of Adolescent Violence in Elephant (Mireille)

Over and over we read, hear, and talk about yet another school shooting. In less than one month, two different high school students slaughtered their peers. A handful of films have been made to bring to light the horror of living through such an event often focusing on the psychological disturbance of the assassin. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) chronicles the events surrounding the massacre of students at a high school by two other students to capture the atrocity of the act and the trauma of the victims and shooters themselves. Though Van Sant provides a backstory for the motivation of the disturbed individuals responsible for the shootings, the film is not devoted to the psychological profile of the murderers. Rather, Van Sant uses cinematography, sound design, and editing to make horrifically real the experiences of the individuals victimized in such a tragedy.

Van Sant loosely based Elephant on the events that occurred during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Elephant recounts the story of how two high school students plan the massacre of members of their school due to the fact that they have been bullied by other students and disenfranchised by the school administration. The film chronicles the events in a linear fashion by glimpsing at the perspectives of several students as they struggle within the school system. Throughout the film, Van Sant uses repetition not only to emphasize the different manner in which each character in the film interacts with his/her surroundings, but also to create suspense and a sense of chaos. One particular scene that Van Sant repeats again and again shows individual characters walking down a hallway. At first glance these individual hall scenes appear unconnected and do not seem to have any particular point. However, towards the end of the film Van Sant makes clear his intent for the repetition. The audience realizes that all of the characters filmed in the hallway are interconnected and have something in common, namely, they are all victimized by the shooters the film. Van Sant also uses unsettling long takes of the shots that are part of this sequence to accentuate the awkward insecurities of high school and to create an ominous feeling.

Elephant also utilizes an intriguing sound design. The majority of the film is mostly minimalistic diegetic sound that is eerily quiet. This state of “low sound” creates an unsettling mood, but also sets the tone for the banal and muted lifestyle of high school students trying to finish up their day. A few times throughout the film, Van Sant does use music, but not necessarily in a context one would expect. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is a morose almost funereal lamentation, is heard during the introduction of one of the less prominent characters; however, the piece is muddied with traditional school setting sounds. The sonata lingers as Van Sant draws out an exceptionally long behind-the-shoulder take of this character until he begins interacting with other students. This same sonata makes a re-appearance, but this time one of the shooters is actually playing the piece on a piano.  The music is not competing with any other sound; however, the shooter makes frequent mistakes while playing. Van Sant’s choice of music creates conflict within the audience as the sonata does not remind us of high school, nor does it seem coherent that a student who is planning the assassination of his peers should be delicately playing the piano. Furthermore, the mistakes that the shooter makes while playing are not random errors from misplaced fingers. Instead, the errors themselves end up creating new chords that result in the piece being played in a completely different key, adding now auditory unease to the already visual tension that builds up in the film.

Van Sant ends Elephant in a particularly hair raising manner. The main shooter discovers two students hiding in a meat freezer in the cafeteria. One of the students is none other than the student was first associated with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. At that moment it becomes clear that Van Sant’s musical choice served as a premonitory tool.  In this final sequence, the frame is almost entirely filled by the placid face of the shooter, who is taunting his victims with a game to determine who he will shoot and is surrounded by hanging meats and carcasses. The audience does not see the two students cornered in this nightmare scenario, but solely hears their voices. The framing of the elements in the freezer creates a very claustrophobic feel that is, however, at once intimate and almost unrealistic. Elephant is brought to a close with Van Sant cutting from this last scene of the shooter in the freezer to the same shot that was utilized in the opening of the film: a neutral sky and benign power lines, a metaphor perhaps for the fact that the horror of gun violence has become almost ordinary in today’s society. Van Sant also does not show us who the shooter chose to kill. He prefers to leave the audience with the horror faced by the victim rather than to glorify the final act of the assassin. 

On the Beach at Night Alone: Are We Spectators or Participators? (Jin)

Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone is strangely aloof and just as strangely piercing. At first glance, it is hard to grasp why the film strikes such an emotional chord; the story is clean and simple, lingering on scene after scene of leisurely smoking, drinking coffee, and clinking soju shot glasses. However, with each alcohol-heavy conversation, a strong poeticism takes shape that encapsulates more than plain loneliness.

The film explores the emotional aftermath of a forgotten love affair between an actress and a film director. The main character, the actress, speaks in a peculiarly straightforward manner, to the extent in which her words waver between poetic and sparse. The film, despite being executed in a similarly straightforward manner, also wavers between dream and reality, a tasteful performance and improvised outbursts. When examining the film background, the lack of clarity is understandable. The film is a metaphor for a real love affair that had occurred between Kim Min-hee, who plays the actress protagonist Young-hee, and the already married director of the film, Hong Sang-soo. The film was released shortly after their infamous scandal, and just as the film’s stylistic choices mingle the narrative and real fact, Young-hee seems to push the boundary between scripted acting and real revelation.

 

Director Hong Sang-soo with actress Kim Min-hee

To the South Korean audience, who violently condemned the adulterous love, the underlying question was glaring: how will Kim Min-hee and Hong Sang-soo justify their relationship? The film, surprisingly, leaves room for interpretation. It is far from being a gimmicky allegory or desperate plea for public sympathy. Instead, it is reminiscent of the primitive driving force behind all cinema: the expression of universal emotions. Cinema, at its core, is both an imitation of the real life and an imposed reduction of reality into something more understandable. By masking unavoidably real people in a metaphysical, semi-fictional setting, the film awakens the audience’s awareness of this intention.

The film invites the audience to become witnesses of an objective documentation of human emotion. Conspicuous zoom shots are a constant reminder that the actors are real human subjects shot on camera, and the blunt dialogue erects a barrier just thick enough to cast a slight emotional distance between the viewer and the film. We are obliged to take a step back and become observers, or perhaps judges, of a quiet cinematic argument. We have the warm satisfaction of having the power to clearly examine the whole situation; we can easily read the emotional context and motives behind the characters’ words and actions, whether it be repeatedly claiming that someone looks older than his age or hurriedly pouring another shot of soju.

Just as we are getting comfortable in this position of power, however, Hong Sang-soo throws in shockingly direct verbal confrontations between the protagonist and other characters. A drunk Young-hee lashes out, violently spitting words across the dining table at her equally drunk accompaniment, declaring, “You can’t love! You are not capable of love and you do not deserve to be loved!” With her outburst, we are abruptly dragged into the heat of the moment and forced to reckon with the full force of unbridled emotion. We are no longer spectators but participants guilty of playing the same messy game of love.

Overall, the film's quiet revelation of human thought suggests a sort of beauty born from conditional ignorance. We are beautiful because we are unaware; despite how the world may seem frightfully simple, we are hopelessly trapped in our inward distresses. It is only when this inner turmoil becomes mute and when one becomes a distant observer, that one is able to then notice a hushed poeticism hiding in daily conversations and actions. Through film, Hong Sang-soo grants us this privilege of lingering on others’ suffering as though we do not suffer from our own. We are, very briefly, gods.

Sleight of Hand or Hallucination? Magical Realism in Film (Mireille)

Magical realism. The genre in which the real, the natural, and the fantastical are intertwined. But what truly defines it? Take for example Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), the most recent example of a rather more mainstream magic realism film. In this film, Del Toro plays on the theme of “Beauty and the Beast”. However, in his version, the “beauty” is desirable, but also mute, and the “beast” is an immortal alien creature with supernatural powers, and not a transfigured handsome prince. Though they do fall in love, and “beauty” does save the beast, the beast ultimately also saves the beauty by resurrecting her from the dead. Thus, Del Toro’s magic is established by making possible true romantic love between two different species and also by defying death.

However, Del Toro’s approach is not one that can be applied to all films that address magical realism. Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films that can be categorized under the same genre often take the opposite approach. Rather than relying on the creation of something fantastical, Iñárritu relies on blurring the premise for reality, and shakes up the audience’s ability to determine what is real and what is not. For example, in his film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), the audience is never really sure if the main character Riggan Thomson, an actor who used to play the role of a super hero, actually possesses supernatural powers or is simply delusional. Iñárritu’s use of cinematography cleverly confounds the boundaries between what is actually happening and what may only be happening in the mind of Thomson. For instance, a scene is cut to create the impression that objects are breaking through telekinesis. In another scene, the audience is privy to a bird’s eye view of the cityscape as if Riggan were flying, but they never actually see Riggan in the sky. As a result, the film in its entirety has a surrealistic feel that nudges us into believing that the impossible may actually be possible. The ending of Birdman actually puts that question to the audience directly when Riggan’s daughter searches for her father by looking out of a window and into the sky and then starts smiling as if she has found him. The film cuts to black there, so we never really know, though the thought that Riggan is flying out there gnaws at us like a real possibility.

Another one of Iñárritu’s films that touches upon some of the same ideologies is Biutiful (2010). The film begins with a dreamscape sequence that features Uxbal, the main character. The sequence has almost no sound, and the ethereal quality of the filming creates a sharp demarcation between it and the rest of the film. The story is a view into the life of Uxbal, who is a working class man. In contrast to the peaceful opening scene, Uxbal’s life is noisy, difficult, dirty, and complicated. However, this film is also, and I would argue mostly, about death due to Uxbal being slowly killed by a terminal disease. The magic that Iñárritu injects into this film has to do with the mystical uncertainties of death and the process of dying. Throughout the film Iñárritu flashes images of death that are unexpected or implausible. In one scene, dead bodies are clinging to the ceilings of a building. In another those same dead bodies are now washed up on a shore, like beached whales. Uxbal also has a "gift" that allows him to hear what the dead have to say so the families can accept the death of their loved one. The audience views all these scenes without having the certainty that anyone other than Uxbal is also witnessing them. Iñárritu reiterates the feeling of uncertainty in more banal scenes as well such as when Uxbal’s brother and ex-wife Marambra are engaged in intimate activity and the camera is angled above them without showing Marambra’s face. The viewers are suddenly startled with the appearance of crimson liquid spilling from what seems like Marambra’s body. In the next cut, however, it becomes clear that it is spilled wine and not spilled blood. Iñárritu uses “sleight of hand” techniques such as this one to make the audience jittery about what is really taking place and what is being imagined in our mind, and perhaps also in Uxbal’s mind.

In sum, throughout all of Biutiful there is no clear cut boundary between what is real and what may be a manifestation of our imagination. In my opinion this blurring of reality creates an even more potent magic realism film than one in which fictitious, fantastical creatures are made up to create the magic. 

 

Dr. Strangelove Revisited or How I Learned to Keep Worrying Indefinitely. (Gabe)

For my final post of the semester I want to take a moment to discuss a film that in our current political climate seems as relevant as when it was first released during the Cold War. Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a potent indictment of the ever-growing power of the military industrial complex in America, and a dark assessment of where this may lead us.

When watching this film, I was first struck by the fact that it is shot entirely in black and white. This directoral decision creates a sense of detachment from reality, just by virtue of its color palate. The separation between the world of the film, and our world itself, is misleading, and perhaps intentionally so. By deliberately creating a dimension of fictionality for this black comedy the viewer is freed to enjoy the humor of the piece without being entirely browbeaten by its political themes. In turn, the comic relief creates space for its harder hitting elements, such as the turn to fascism at the film’s conclusion, to resonate with viewers. In so doing, the audience has not been desensitized by the rest of the movie, and the comedy’s juxtaposition with heavier aspects of the plot and subject matter, makes the film as a whole more easily digestible for a wider audience, thereby increasing its chances of disseminating its message.

The next thing to grip me was the decision to cast Peter Sellers in three very different roles. While it is obviously an incredible task for a performer to delve fully into the minds of multiple, competing characters in the same film, I thought that thematically it suggested the blurring of lines between different groups in society, ultimately proposing that the characters might not be so inseparable as they initially seem. The three characters Sellers plays are a British ranking officer, who is utterly ineffectual and does nothing substantial to undo Ripper’s belicosity. Next there is the American president, an effeminate buffoon who can’t control his country’s nuclear arsenal. And finally, Dr. Strangelove himself, a Nazi nuclear scientist who defected to the United States following World War II. While their significance might not be immediately apparent, I thought the decision to cast these three characters with the same actor creates a link between them and suggests a sense of shared complicity in the events that unfold. If all three of these men are ultimately the same actor underneath the makeup and accents, then perhaps the characters themselves might are also not so different from one another. It might not take much for their differences to melt fully away, exposing the single, scared human, who lies beneath.

This connection between characters heightens the film’s disconcerting ending. When all seems lost and the atomic bomb has dropped, triggering the Soviet “doomsday device,” everybody in the Situation Room turns to Dr. Strangelove for guidance. This moment is chilling, for all it takes to make the government of the United States gravitate towards fascism, is fear of death and losing military supremacy. I thought this spoke to the true, insidious nature of fascist ideology. Furthermore, it struck me as an indictment of human behavior as a whole. In the film, these are the people who have been elected to represent the interests of the American public, but when their own lives are imperiled they flock to an unabashed Nazi for comfort and advice, even while he is frantically and uncontrollably saluting Hitler, and leap at the chance to save themselves. When Dr. Strangelove suggests a plan for living underground in mineshafts, they agree. In fact, their cowardly and enthusiastic abandonment of American ideals for the comfort of fascism is so empowering to the wheel-chair-bound Dr. Strangelove, that his legs are healed, prompting him to stand and exclaim the final words of the film, “Mein Führer, I can walk.”

Part of what makes this ending so jarring is the sense of inevitability in the prior events. Once things are set in motion there is little chance of stopping the attack, which smoothly transitions to a grateful acceptance of fascist policies. Here it just takes the relatively small push of a single general acting alone, to shift the entire course of human history. While it may seem a ridiculous possibility to the optimistic inhabitants of our modern world, this no longer feels so far-fetched. At the risk of betraying my own political biases, it is worth noting that this film made me seriously consider the checks and balances we have in place for taking unilateral military action, and how, when considered against the reality of a nuclear war’s consequences, they are a very small comfort. This is where, for me, the film finds its greatest success. Years after its creation, Dr. Strangelove provokes sober thought about our current political environment and way of seeing our place in the world. In my opinion, this should be among the goals of filmmakers everywhere: to show the world as they see it, so that others can join them in societal self-examination. Perhaps in so doing we can improve our country and the world at large, but sixty-three years after its creation, this film has not lost a bit of resonance, and I don’t know whether to find that comforting or profoundly alarming.

Violence In To Kill A Mocking Bird: Mythologies Subverted & Perpetuated (Gabe)

To Kill a Mockingbird handles and presents violence in ways I had not previously noted in other works of cinema. During the film’s dramatic climax, in which Gem and Scout are attacked by Bob Ewell and subsequently rescued by Boo Radley, the film limits the horror of the attack while simultaneously subverting the society’s racist, ruling stereotype of black male sexual violence towards white women.

The specific sequence under examination begins at 1:52:10 when Gem and Scout are walking home through the woods from the Halloween pageant.  A detail of the staging that demands attention is that during medium-close shots, both children are isolated in their respective frames with one notable exception. While Gem is shot wholly on his own during coverage, Scout’s close-ups are instead formally dominated by her brother’s hand, which rests on the top of her costumed head. This kindly touch serves as a reassuring point of contact to Scout, whose vision is sorely impaired by her ham-shaped suit, and is juxtaposed by the ensuing violence, whose presence is first visually announced by a pair of hands flying at Gem into the tight frame. Here we see a direct thematic contrast between the gently innocent hands of a protector, and the raging hands of brutality. The reason for the hands’ disembodiment here is that the camera is mirroring Scout’s view of the events. This continues as the second man enters the scuffle. Instead of using a camera masking effect to attain the same cinematographic goal, the director chooses to stage the fight within the unimpeded shot so that it occupies the entirety of the frame while still limiting our, and thereby Scout’s view of the events. This choice unsurprisingly results in furthering our suspense because the viewer cannot tell who this assailant is due to our limited vantage point, but more importantly, by staging the blocking in this way without masking, the hands become a dominant feature of the mise-en-scene. Additionally, there are many quick shots in this sequence that are constructed with at least one adult male hand in the foreground, and thereby while enacting violence on the characters in the story, the hands also present a visual violence by disrupting and overpowering multiple shots. Often the hands enter the shot before any other part of the body, which we see both in the first attack on Gem, and later at 1:55:15. This helps create an effect of fetishization, while additionally endowing the hands with a sense of autonomy, for according to our view, they are literally leading the charge on these two children.

Through the hands of two mystery men dominating the shots in the fight scene, a new and subtle effect is achieved. Here the hands are presented as the perpetrators of violence, in place of the men themselves. Their hands are fetished and become stand-ins for male violence in general. This may seem like a bold claim when taken without contextualization from the rest of the film, so allow me briefly to refer to prior events in the story. In the courtroom, when a black man, Tom Robinson is tried for the alleged rape and assault of a white woman, Mayella Ewell, a great point of focus for the legal arguments is whose hands could have possibly hurt her. Therefore, that scene too presents hands as being intrinsically tied to violence, but instead the narrative at play here is the supposed violence of a black man towards a white woman. This ideology of hatred towards black men as being predisposed to evil lust for white women is subverted by the structure of the later fight sequence, because while the hands are almost all we can see of the two adults fighting, we can clearly tell that both pairs are Caucasian, not black.

This set up an interesting contradiction for me in the film’s content. The crime Atticus is charged with defending is based upon societal racism which mythologizes the lusty black man as a dangerous animalistic figure who must be confined in order to protect the white woman’s honor. However, the only violence the film actually shows is perpetrated by white men, most notably in this fight scene, but also when Atticus shoots a rabid dog and when the lynch mob attempts to enact vigilante “justice” upon Tom. Black male violence doesn’t even exist within the film itself, while white male violence is pervasive. However, the film’s refutation of the mythology of violent black men comes at the cost of perpetuating the idealization of white female purity. In the fight scene, Scout is sheltered from the sight of violence and its physical perils by her brother’s heroic efforts, and then by Boo Radley’s intervention. She is never hurt at all, despite a few tumbles, and escapes entirely safely. The struggle centers around the attempts by white two white males (both an adult and a child) to protect a white female from harm. I thought this was an interesting thematic decision by the narrative’s author, which only slightly undercut the otherwise incisive dismantling of racist mythologies.

Bong Joon-ho: Balancing Politics and Cinema (Faith)

When Bong Joon-ho’s Okja premiered at Cannes this year, it was quickly surrounded with controversy. The news circulating was less about the film itself, however, and more about Netflix’s role as a producer. While the future of streaming services in the world of film is an legitimate debate, I was more interested in Okja for its content—specifically, how it would compare to Bong’s previous film, Snowpiercer (2013). Both films take place in the near future, feature ensemble casts, and tackle similar themes, from capitalism to environmentalism. Based on these similarities, I expected Bong’s eccentric and artistic style to convey these themes with equal strength in both films. After watching Okja, however, I realized that this ability to weave politics into cinema was a careful and tenuous balance, one which wasn’t struck properly in Bong’s newest film. When I asked myself what about Snowpiercer enables it to explore some of the same political themes as Okja without feeling incoherent and sanctimonious, the titular setting stood out to me as a possible answer.

Snowpiercer takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, where the last survivors of humanity withstand a new Ice Age in the confines of a train (called the Snowpiercer) where rigid hierarchy separates citizens into different train cars. The train travels immense distances during the film, but its nature as an entirely closed system keeps the characters tightly packed together. This physical immediacy effectively streamlines the social structure within the film world (car passengers increase in social status as one moves toward the engine) as well as the physical action and goals (the tail section must progress through the cars in order to reach the engine and take control). These two elements are so clear, precise, and simple that the film can be comfortably sprawling in other aspects—in particular, Bong is able to explore distinct and heightened visual styles without derailing the narrative or losing sight of the gritty reality of life aboard the Snowpiercer. This ability is particularly clear when the rebellious tail passengers violently storm a series of cars, as the viewer is subject to a series of distinct environments, from a dimly lit car of heavily armed guardsmen, to the bright and clean schoolroom car, filled with the smiling faces of children. These visually disjunct spaces are threaded together with a constant forward movement, as well as the tail passengers themselves—dirty, in drab and threadbare clothes, these passengers act as constant, sinister reminders of the true situation on the train. These characters are also given the crucial freedom to be ambiguous, complex, and contradictory without muddling the political issues that Bong explores. The protagonist and valiant leader of the tail car revolution, Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), is revealed to have a dark and troubled past. A father-daughter pair of genius drug addicts (Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung) are driven by pure self-interest, but become vital to the success of the rebellion. None of these or other characters are allowed to remain on the same moral footing that they were introduced on, however, as an increasingly dire situation prompts developments and revelations regarding their personal codes of ethics. Even the real nature of the revolution that Curtis leads, when it is finally explained, utterly upends expectations about good and evil, while the clear imagery about the evils of hegemonic government and the power of fear tactics remain as clear as they were when our knowledge was still limited to the reality of the tail car.

The action in Okja takes place over a much wider space, split evenly between the United States and South Korea. The film follows a young Korean girl, Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), and Okja, her pet “super pig,” a species created by the sinister Mirando Corporation to make meat production more efficient and (supposedly) sustainable. The plot necessitates an ensemble cast, which is split into two general groups: those working with Mirando, and members of the Animal Liberation Front (AFL). Conflicts between these groups arise through the film, as both attempt to secure their own fate for Okja. As direct as these interactions may be (hijacking a Mirando truck, breaking into their facilities, and disrupting their operations), they lack much of the intimacy and immediacy that made Snowpiercer so visceral. That’s not to say that Okja isn’t violent or jarring at times, but these moments don’t land with the same effective artistry. One of the most violent scenes in Snowpiercer comes in the car of guardsmen, where an utter bloodbath takes place as the train passes through a tunnel. Bong plays with perspective and light here, portraying the violence with an obliqueness that makes it all the more grotesque. In contrast, violence in Okja mostly comes in the form of violence against Okja herself. Bong elects to show these scenes of animal cruelty completely, which serves as important motivation for the AFL but lessens their visual impact. In a similar vein, Okja’s action sequences are rooted much more in realism, further limiting opportunities for Bong to play with the extremes of his visual style, as well as opening a door for more specific political tangents that are ultimately more distracting than it is illuminating. One example of this allusion to modern politics that caught popular interest was a frame featuring the leaders of Mirando grouped around a table, watching a disastrous newscast on the activities of the AFL. The positions and appearances of the characters are designed to mimic the famous photo of the White House Situation Room following the killing of Osama bin Laden. The image is an interesting artifact of satire when viewed in a vacuum, but in the context of the film, however, political statements like this feel less clear—is the film about militarism or corporatism? Is the US government that subject of ridicule, and if not, who is? Because Bong decides to deal with such varied political topics, story coherence is instead found in the consistency of character morals. From the start of the film, those involved in corporate and commercial exploits, particularly the whimsically evil Mirando sisters (Tilda Swinton), have purely impure goals: that is, to continue with the cruel super pig program in order to maximize profit. On the other side of the spectrum are the members of the ALF—a sizable cast in themselves, these characters are almost all on the same page politically, and the complexity of their tactics of direct action are left mostly unexplored. When one member of the AFL makes a morally questionable decision, this is characterized as a personal fault rather than a systematic one among its members, making the reversal of the mistake a simpler narrative task.

Bong Joon-Ho is a filmmaker unafraid to make a statement, whether it be in the form of inventive visuals, eclectic storylines, or controversial politics. While Okja is the film of Bong’s that seems to be making more wave, both in terms of its production and its content, I feel that it’s Snowpiercer which deserves this notoriety. Of course, both films are visually striking and constitute noble forays into an eccentric and stylized world of sci-fi. But when it comes to politics, Snowpiercer is far more effective at delivering the message.

The Silent Horror of War in Film (Mireille)

It is probably fair to say that the theme of war is one of the most pervasive in film. Whether for propaganda, critique or shock value, cinema relishes in the recreation of the marching footsteps, the gun blasts, the frenetic flight of those in distress, and the reenactment of violence. I have probably had my fill of these, particularly the mainstream variety that tend to have a similar feel and construct. Specifically, the type of film that is loaded with sounds so intense that it becomes uncomfortable and has a vivid language that is as subtle as a bludgeoning instrument. These films also often follow a rigid plot line with a predictable outcome. It is almost as if humans want the full visceral horror of war, but then need to absolve themselves of the evil, by giving the film a conciliatory ending. The newest Hollywood war film, Dunkirk (2017) by Christopher Nolan in my opinion is no exception. This film once again reverts to the formulaic audiovisual assault, this time almost without respite, and perhaps that was the point. Any chance of uncovering the psychological struggle of characters or the subtle insinuations of humanity questioning its actions is muddied by the inability of your nervous system to recover from the stimulatory onslaught.

Don’t get me wrong, not every mainstream war drama fits this description. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) twists the cacophony of light, sound and carnage together with a captivating psychoanalysis of the characters that leaves viewers captivated and not just exhausted. Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) focuses on the human spirit not with respect to war, but with respect to art as the battle rages around the central character. However, there are other ways in which to convey the horror of war that may also leave us with enough strength to take away a message that is long lasting and meaningful. Fortunately I have discovered two very different films that do just that: Hungarian film Son of Saul (2015) directed by László Nemes and Zaza Urushadze’s Estonian-Georgian film Tangerines (2013).

In the Son of Saul, Nemes uses the camera to study the psychological makeup of the characters as they live the war rather than depicting the obstreperous elements of the war itself. This approach conveys a type of horror that, in my opinion, is more impactful than the buckets of blood and the gratuitous violence typically shown in war movies. Nemes creates a persistent haunting feeling by shooting on traditional 35mm film in a square aspect ratio. This tight aspect ratio creates claustrophobia and inescapability. The audience feels suffocated by the palpable anguish experienced by the principle characters. Nemes masterfully uses on the point-of-view and handheld shots to thrust viewers into the midst of the concentration camp and allows them to participate in the sadistic labor the prisoners are forced to carry out. The camera movement is slow and the depth of field is quite shallow, allowing the audience to linger in a confused and anxious reality. Nemes has no qualms about showing naked corpses being dragged to incinerators by prisoners or the unceremonious scattering of the ashes from the crematorium into a river to hide the evidence of the crimes committed. Nemes leaves out no detail and punctuates it against a backdrop of a mixture of muted diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The horror has both explicit and implicit components, but requires no brassy elements to bring it to the forefront. The edginess comes from the growing awareness of what is happening rather than a physical response to an exaggerated stimulus. In my opinion Son of Saul is the first film to capture realistically the relentless brutality of World War II.

Tangerines is almost the diametric pole of Son of Saul. Urushadze sets the film during the war in Abkhazia in the 90s. The film is shot in a single location in the Georgian countryside where two friends stay behind as the war erupts in order to harvest their crop of tangerines. In this way Urushadze is able to separate the audience from the war both physically and psychologically. This is in stark contrast to Son of Saul where the single location kept the audience locked into the inescapable horrors that the war creates. In Tangerines there is a utopic feel because there is never any explicit evidence of the war raging around the principal characters. As in Son of Saul, there is no need for the din of war paraphernalia. Rather, Urushadz, like Nemes, chooses muted sounds and background noise in order to bring the audience into the scene. The war becomes part of the narrative when the friends take in two wounded soldiers from opposite sides. The war thus becomes a question of tolerance and resistance of primal urges. Urushadze draws attention to compassion and the moral best that humanity can achieve during war time, a diametrically opposite message from that in Son of Saul. What truly stands out in Tangerines in comparison to Nemes’ film is the occasional punctum of color that occurs when the audience sees the main character picking the actual tangerine fruits from his orchard. This intense coloration enhances the peaceful surroundings in which the whole film takes place and lends it an aura of hope without the need for cliché happy endings. It is in fact the simple fruit, the tangerine, which serves as the symbol of unification allowing the wounded soldiers from different factions to transcend their cultural differences. In this way Urushadze concentrates on educating the audience about the other face of war: the possibility of peace and compromise and resistance to violence.

In the end, the approach to war as film genre could be bifurcated into two factions. One that barrages us with stimuli in the hopes of shocking, but in the end desensitizes, and another that leaves us with a lasting memory of evil or peace. In my opinion, the former may be more exciting, but the latter is more enlightening.

(Pseudo) Silence: A Short Study of Visual Comedy (Faith)

This year is the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest silent comedian’s first on-screen appearance—in 1917, a young Buster Keaton was featured in Fatty Arbuckle’s two-reeler The Butcher Boy, beginning his career in film. Coincidentally, this year also saw my first exposure to Keaton’s work; after watching The General, the director was transformed in my mind from a distant figure of history to a true genius of comedy. Though his greatest films are nearing a century old, I was struck with their lasting comedic power. Keaton’s films captured my interest on both a historic and cinematic level, but held my interest through something harder to describe: a kind of dual quality of familiarity and novelty. Some instinct seemed to draw me towards these films as undeniably funny, and yet, when I consider recent comedies, I saw nothing quite like Keaton’s work. I wanted to know more about how silent comedy has influenced films and what modern comedies can learn from its techniques. Delving into this topic quickly took me to the works of Jacques Tati, a filmmaker who was directly influenced by Keaton, and whose work Keaton praised repeatedly. To see where similarities and evolutions in comedy were present in the directors’ works, I decided to take a closer look at the films widely regarded to be each’s masterpiece—for Keaton, The General (1926); for Tati, Play Time (1967).

One of the most obvious similarities between these films is the relative lack of dialogue. Of course, this is partly because The General is silent, but Keaton also deliberately kept his use of title cards far below that of his competitors. In Play Time, a similar aversion to dialogue doesn't erase character speech altogether, but makes what little appears mostly nonsynchronous. This stylistic choice makes the sparse dialogue, whether it's the tittering of the tour group or ruckus of nightclub patrons, feel more like another component of the shot, rather than part of the narrative. This decision adds a particular sense of depersonalization to Play Time’s modern setting, but for both directors allowed a focus on more cinematic elements of comedy. Of course this didn’t entirely exclude sound—sound effects (or the lack thereof) are used in both films in the service of gags, and are always come hand in hand with the director’s understanding of how to play with perspective within the frame. A perfect example from The General is when protagonist Johnnie Gray (Keaton) rides his train across the front lines of battle, remaining oblivious to the war being waged right behind him simply because his back is turned. Using the lack of sound effects to his advantage, Keaton suggests that Johnnie’s perception is limited to that of the audience—what the viewer can’t hear is accepted as silent, and we’re able to both marvel at and believe in his ignorance. This interaction of sound and perspective appears throughout Tati’s films, and is used to masterful effect in Play Time. One scene early in the film follows Monsieur Hulot (Tati) as he waits in a sleek, modern office building. Tati exploits the environment—here, the clear glass walls—to repeatedly withhold the sound of Hulot’s motions. This initially postpones the audience hearing the sound of the squeaking chairs, for instance, and subverts our expectations of synchronous sound when Hulot begins slipping on the waxed tile floors. Instead of hearing the scuffles of his strained movements, our sound perspective is moved outside the building, where we hear only passing traffic. This manipulation of sound is simple but effective, as the audience is left with both the gleeful task of filling in these sonic blanks as well as the implication that Hulot is on display to the city around him.

For both directors, geometry is a crucial part of both their artful cinematography and the construction of jokes. Though the implications of each world is different, both Tati and Keaton construct highly stylized and perfectly orchestrated environments, the mechanics of which are exploited for our amusement. In one scene in Play Time, the camera rests outside a modern apartment building, where we see multiple families sit down to watch TV in a cutaway view made possible by their massive single-pane windows. Tati turns the camera degrees to the left and right, establishing each family’s positions as they sit in front of their screens. As the camera returns to the initial angle, however, the barriers of the apartment walls become invisible, and we’re suddenly able to imagine that the families are watching each other, rather than TV, combining their actions and reactions in unexpected ways. All the while, beneath the scene is Tati’s commentary on the ways in which modern technology structure lives and limit connection; though it seems that the families are interacting, the truth remains that they are each physically separate, confined by the box of their own window.

Though it has an entirely different tone from this scene of Tati’s, Keaton’s classic cannon gag in The General similarly utilizes the geometry of the film world in order to surprise us. By a series of unfortunate circumstances, train engineer Johnnie Gray (Keaton) finds himself hanging off of a moving engine, in the line of fire of a cannon being pulled along behind him. Everything about the geography of this scene is used to increase our anticipation: sharp lines and symmetric framing trap Johnnie in his situation; constant forward motion builds tension; the futility of Johnnie’s small and rapid movements contrast with the unrelenting stillness of the massive cannon. What ends the gag and saves our hero is an expected change in geometry—a curve in the railroad tracks sends the cannonball off at an angle, just missing Johnnie and nearly striking his enemies’ train instead.

This scene also works as a microcosm for the film’s take on the world, a view which The General shares with Keaton’s other works. Johnnie, though he has a different name and inhabits a different setting, is essentially the same as Keaton’s other protagonists: a plucky young man in a bewildering and hostile environment which can only be conquered with a combination of human ingenuity and sheer luck. Keaton uses the frame of the Civil War to create an underdog protagonist (meaning, unfortunately, that Johnnie wears the uniform of the Confederacy) and exploits the technology of the time in service of gags—principally through trains, but with other military equipment as well. Beyond this, however, the film’s setting is ultimately unimportant; it’s the greater greater struggle against an automated world which defines Keaton’s comedy. In contrast, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot is a constant throughout his films, down to his signature coat and pipe. This difference is vital to developing some of Tati’s themes: namely, the stark ways in which Hulot is at odds with his modern environment, constantly teetering on the brink of being utterly left behind. Whereas Johnnie is a literal engineer of his world, always able to move himself through his surroundings with determination and a little elbow grease, Hulot feels more like a tourist in his own life, moving with an uncertain rhythm between one attraction to the next. Play Time is also uniquely tied to its setting, as Tati uses Paris to draw our attention to the obliviousness of the tour group—the camera only ever glimpses the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe in the reflections on the gleaming glass doors the women pass through—and comment on the commercialization of culture—the travel agency features the same dull-looking skyscraper in its posters for France, America, and India. And unlike Keaton, Tati doesn’t try to suggest that his world is conquerable; Hulot doesn’t save the day and get the girl, after all. Instead, Tati uses the film to show us the absurdity of modern life and encourage us, if we can’t change it, to at least revel in it. If this idea wasn’t already evident in the core of the film, the final scene punctuates it perfectly. Given Tati’s artistic touch, we watch as the ritualized chaos of a endless traffic circle becomes a carousel, a symphony of pattern and sound that is all at once ridiculous, biting, and beautiful.

While Keaton and Tati certainly crafted very different worlds in these films, they nonetheless share striking similarities in their cultivation of cinematic comedy. Since the arrival of sound films, comedies have had dialogue as something to lean on for laughs. I find that too often, comedies simply feature characters delivering lines, letting us forget that we’re watching a movie rather than trying to exploit the medium to any artistic ends. Keaton’s origins in the silent era clearly pushed him towards these innovations, but Tati is the perfect example of how this legacy can persist, evolve, and flourish—if only directors are willing to look beyond dialogue and play with silence.

Dunkirk and the Evolution of the Modern War Film (Gabe)

I love to go to the movies, but my seemingly boundless physical inertia keeps me screening films from the comfort of my couch unless a true outlier comes into my life. However, over my summer in Los Angeles, my cousin, with whom I was staying, worked at the local movie theater, a five-minute drive away. After a full week of the latest releases like Baby Driver and the latest Planet of the Apes we rushed in to see Dunkirk, which led to our fiercest, but not our longest, cinematic debate of July.

My cousin was underwhelmed by the film because in his opinion the film’s structure prohibited emotional attachment to the individuals we saw portrayed because we never got a chance to know them individually. Rather, it was almost entirely nonstop action after the film’s initial commencement, and the dialogue was minimal to say the least. He additionally thought that these decisions by Nolan reduced his ability to empathize with the characters in a meaningful way because they were overwhelmed by the spectacle of the piece. This meant that in the balance of the story, individuals were given less attention. I however, while agreeing with his analysis of the film’s focus, disagreed as to its effect on the viewer and what Nolan’s directorial intention may have been.

It seemed to me that the fact individual humans were dwarfed by the combat was in many regards the point of the film. This movie didn’t read like his previous works in which he focused on specific characters and their evolution over time in the face of superhumanly long odds. This was no Memento or The Prestige in which the audience was being actively bonded with the protagonists and shown depths of their interiority that only film as a medium can capture and display. Here instead, Nolan seemed to be doing the opposite, and intentionally. By making a conscious decision to rework the war movie formula he presented battle in a new way that struck me as a departure from much of its genre. For example, the classic war film Saving Private Ryan, consciously and intentionally draws the viewers’ attention to the horrors of war in direct relation to the individual. Humans are horribly and bloodily butchered in all manner of traumatizing ways, and the camera forces you to look at it in excruciating detail. The camera swings around grotesque scenes where young soldiers hold their now detached limbs in anguish while still others are mowed down by machine gun fire all across a red misty canvas. I pointed out to my cousin that in avoiding these tropes, Dunkirk opted instead to present the events of this battle with a sense of historical reenactment that was not simple entertainment. I said that the film isn’t interested in forcing you to grapple with the brutal realities of war for individuals, it is instead showing you something so massive in scale that it cannot be fully appreciated by the casual viewer. I demarcated this difference in form and content, and suggested that perhaps his perspective might be informed by his preconceived expectations about the structure and focus of war films. This film relies more heavily on the viewer being able to separate out and individually note different elements of each shot, which neither of us had been expecting, so I saw how perhaps a perceived bait and switch had alienated him.

A scene I suggested as evidence of my theory was when the young British soldiers are trapped in the hull of a grounded civilian boat when they begin taking on machine gun fire. The bullets pierce the hull, water starts pouring in, and because the soldiers have no way to escape without being shot down they must plug up the holes with their fingers to avoid drowning, all the while as more shots whistle through the boat. This scene was perfectly emblematic of my perspective because the camera made no attempt to focus the viewer on the specific men being injured and killed by the firing. The attention was instead on the situation as a whole and the onus of actively participating in the that portrayal is squarely on the viewer. Additionally, it served to disguise the scope of the violence on screen by showing it as it occurs and not providing additional commentary. The lack of gore and extreme close ups of wounded men belies the film’s brutality and creates a separation between the audience and the film that only the viewer can close.

I articulated these points less succinctly and significantly more loudly than I have here, and despite my exquisite communication skills I think my cousin and I were simply on different pages. For me, this film has found room for innovation while operating in a genre that has a great propensity for stagnation. That alone held my attention.

When Films Put Words in Animals' Mouths (Mireille)

Let’s admit it. We have all watched films that feature pets, usually endowed with the power of speech, struggling to be reunited with their owners. They tug at our hearts as we drip in sobbing despair, and we love it. I have cried each time I have watched Duwayne Duhnam’s Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993) or Lasse Hallström’s Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2008), even though I know what’s coming and how it will end. I ask myself now why we are fascinated by the film portrayal of the hardship of animals? Furthermore, do we feel it is necessary to anthropomorphize an animal so that we can better relate to it? Or, do the film makers need an easy way of allowing the animal to tell us how it feels by giving it human language?

Two films that strike me as particularly interesting from the perspective of these questions are Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2014). These films tackle the theme of the relationship between animals and humans by taking completely different approaches that have to do with how language and behavior are used in conjunction with camera and filming techniques to convey the expression, perspective, and in the end, the very “psyche” of the animals portrayed in the films.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes starts with the story of Caesar, an ape raised by humans after its mother was killed. Caesar becomes a member of the human family as a pet. Though Caesar starts to exhibit very high levels of intelligence, he also becomes more aggressive towards humans and eventually has to be placed in an animal sanctuary. The film then takes a dramatic turn in both the plot and filming techniques. It becomes clear that Caesar not only has human intelligence, but also has human language. When Caesar bellows “No”, stunning zookeepers and apes alike, he essentially moves from non-human to human. Naturally, mayhem ensues and the primates invade the city, and by the end of the movie the audience knows that the apes will dominate not only the planet, but the humans themselves.

Director Rupert Wyatt captures the evolution from primate as pet to primate as human then to primate as dominator by shifting the camera from a more “personal” approach that incorporates medium and close up shots, to extreme wide shots and long aerial takes. The coloration of the film also shifts dramatically from warm toned frames to underexposed and darkly colored sequences. This shift in coloration helps the audience move from the warm, fuzzy “pet” feel at the beginning of the movie to the dark, violent feel, created by the apes, who in a god-like fashion, begin changing the nature of the world. As the movie progresses so does Caesar’s humanity. He now begins to exhibit the unique human qualities of revenge and spite. Ironically, although the intent of the apes’ rebellion is to obliterate the human race and its cruel traits, as they do so they themselves begin to take on these very traits. Wyatt brings home this concept by showing us the war between the two species through extreme long shots, creating an acute representation of the kind of war humans wage against each other. In this movie there are no sentimental buttons that are being pushed. Rather, this is a war movie in which humans battle their endearing “pets” only after the pets have been infused with the human qualities that make them able to engage in human war. As in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes uses language as a vehicle to jolt our consciousness and to humanize our pets. The goal of the former is to create a mirror for empathy, the goal of the latter is to strike fear in our hearts.

In contrast, the director of White God does not use human language to communicate the feelings of the pets. This Hungarian film recounts the horror and abuse suffered by a dog after it is forcibly removed from its owner’s care and abandoned on the streets of Budapest. This sequence of events is not unlike what happens to Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the end result, the revolt of animals against humans, is also similar. However, the similarity ends there. In White God, the audience never hears the dogs speak. In place of language, Director Kornél Mundruczó incorporates Franz Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 as the sole method of “communication” between humans and animals. Mundruczó also films the animal revolt against humans in a drastically different manner. The camera is almost exclusively positioned at the eye line level of the dogs, playing an integral role in capturing the action and allowing the audience to interpret the emotional experience of the dogs at a personal level. Most of the shots are handheld and quickly cut, which only intensifies the difference in perspective between humans and animals. The entirety of White God is also filmed in a particular coloration and lighting that does not change when the dogs revolt against the humans. This choice creates homogeneity in the perspective of the dogs acting like dogs without having to take on human characteristics to achieve their goals. This film has no need to create a human-like scenario or obvious human character traits to bring the point home. The audience itself must decide to anthropomorphize the dogs or simply witness the action as pack mentality fighting in unison against a common enemy.

In the end, I cannot conclusively state if our desire to anthropomorphize our pets comes from a place of love or insecurity. When our pets are endowed with the traits that we consider make us human, we are at once touched and horrified. Yet, what I do know is that the anthropomorphization does not have to be blatant to be effective, we are perfectly capable of creating our own illusion of what our pets’ intentions really are.

Violent Expectations in No Country for Old Men (Gabe)

[SPOILER ALERT]

No Country for Old Men is a unique and bizarrely effective way to battle a bad mood. Early morning contemplation of extreme violence is not how I usually begin my days, but in the course of watching the film I was thoroughly struck by the way it handled and commented upon patterns of human brutality. The film alternates between a stark and unflinching display of the scope of human violence while also rebelling against the viewers’ expectations for what we will and will not see. For example, when one of the main characters, Llewelyn, is gunned down the viewer isn’t shown his final fight or how he is slain. Instead, our last view of him alive, is when he chats with the women tanning by the pool. Decades of action films have conditioned viewers to expect a proverbial blaze of glory as the hero attempts to shoot his way out against impossible odds. Instead, we are shown the surviving gunmen escaping as the lawman Ed arrives. Llewelyn is just dead. There is no attempt to glorify his demise, he has just been erased. This flies in the face of the cannon of American westerns and crime films which generally fully depicting the final moments of a hero’s journey. An additional effect this created is that Llewelyn is utterly removed from his pedestal as a protagonist and is instead left among the ranks of all the other dead characters. He becomes just another nearly anonymous body, despite the fact that we’ve spent most of the film following his story. Through this choice, the film makes a statement about the real consequences of violence for everyone involved.

Often when watching a film, I get so swept up in what’s taking place that I never consider how a character got to where they are now or how the events depicted fit into their lives as a whole, but the film’s touch on father-son relationships was a gently grounding companion theme to the rest of the film’s brutality. Beginning and ending the film with these quiet stories gave the plot a tangible sense of humanity even while exploring the crushing violence the characters each encounter. Of course, a character’s entire life is too much to convey within a film (Boyhood excluded), but this film achieved a similar effect simply through these opening and closing monologues. I then found myself considering why all these characters, pushed to their absolute extremes by the forces around them, were behaving the ways that they were. Perhaps, as an aspiring actor, analyzing and imagining a character’s childhood and adolescence is more interesting to me than for most other viewers, but considering that each of these characters had a father and family brought me further into the world of the film. I found myself yearning to understand them and what drove them to behave the ways they were. I wanted to thumb through their photo albums and peruse their childhood homes. I don’t remember the last time I felt that way about any character in a film. Imagining the characters’ childhoods while watching their shocking exploits was a surprisingly harmonious and contemplative experience and not what I had expected.

Director to Watch: Taika Waititi (Faith)

New Zealand director Taika Waititi first appeared on American screens in 2004, when he received an Oscar nomination for his short film Two Cars, One Night. In his signature comedic style, the filmmaker made an impression on audiences by feigning sleep as the nominees were read. In the years following this auspicious start, Waititi’s career in New Zealand has exploded, with his films becoming some of the country’s most successful. This year, his work will be returning to the American film scene in a form I find as unlikely as it is dangerous: as the Marvel Studios blockbuster, Thor: Ragnarok. Waititi’s directorial style is strikingly unique, especially when compared to the typical American superhero flick. The stories Waititi tells are small and relatively simple, following short and meaningful episodes in the lives of ordinary people. His second feature film, Boy (2010, US release: 2012) is both the director’s most masterful film to date, and an embodiment of all these qualities that seem so incompatible with the Marvel model.

Boy is, at its core, a film about reconciliation. The story, set in 1984, follows 11 year-old “Boy” and his troubled relationship with a long-absent father who has returned to their home in the New Zealand countryside after serving a prison sentence. The coming-of-age story avoids cliché simply through its authenticity–something that comes in part from Waititi’s personal experiences growing up in New Zealand. The film finds the difficult meeting point of immaturity and maturity and presents this juncture in a way that feels wonderfully true; full of both pain and humor.

Through both plot and visuals, the film equates maturity with the acceptance of difficult truths and immaturity with fantasy. Truths press at the characters–and the audience–from every angle; among them, the truths that mothers will die, fathers will hit their children, and people will ostracize those who are different from them. Boy’s younger brother, Rocky, acts as the film’s personification of youthful innocence, and responds to these truths with the power of his imagination. Early in the film, we see him berated by schoolchildren on a passing bus, to which he responds by raising a hand, scowling, and channeling his supposed psychic abilities to challenge them. Interspersed in the shots are images of stop-motion children’s drawings–we see Rocky’s imagined powers come to life on the page, exploding the bus. This vignette is just one example of the film’s use of fantasy, which appears again in the form of Boy’s collages, his father’s sparklers, and a dream sequence depicting his father’s fistfight with a biker gang. In these moments, we see artistry in hidden places–a stylistic choice that removes us from the linear progression of the plot but doesn’t distract from the narrative and in fact, provides a richer picture of our characters’ psychologies.

The quiet and artistic genius of Boy is what initially endeared the film to me, and that’s exactly why I worry that Waititi’s collaboration with a studio like Marvel could be disastrous. Those with even a passing knowledge of modern blockbuster films likely know that Marvel’s level of oversight is far-reaching at best, and hegemonic at worst. How could a director like Waititi, known for his unique sense of humor and whimsical, heartfelt stories, be able to develop a film that fits his own vision in this kind of environment? While I have no doubt that this will be a challenge, I have managed to find some hope for his successful foray into the world of blockbusters in his most recent film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016).

When Hunt for the Wilderpeople was released last year, it quickly shattered the New Zealand box office record (a record that was being held at the time by Boy). This improvement in box office performance is just one the ways that Wilderpeople constitutes a transitional piece. In terms of content, the film balances many of Waititi’s classic characters while incorporating striking and new visual spectacle through action. The film follows its 13 year-old protagonist, Ricky, and his foster father as they traverse the New Zealand bush together, unintentionally sparking a nationwide manhunt. This synopsis reveals the most obvious similarities the film shares with Boy: both feature a young protagonist and his father figure as they grapple with the nature of their relationship. The two share thematic similarities as well, tackling issues of maturity, grief, and trauma–but it’s how these ideas are explored which leads to their stylistic differences, and, in the case of Wilderpeople, gives audiences a glimpse of how Waititi might craft an action film for a multi-billion dollar studio.

For the most part, Wilderpeople feels more fast-paced than Boy. In places where the earlier film would have made its points quietly, exploring the bittersweet truth of its deadpan humor, Wilderpeople presses forward in constant motion. This pace is paired with a sense of intensity, seen in the snappy dialogue, the skillful use of montage, and even the depth of color that characterizes the New Zealand wilderness. The film also explores this intensity through visual dynamism, constantly building tension between wide shots and close-ups of varying tone–violent, as Ricky applies mud to his face like war paint; flashy, as a young girl rides horseback in slow-motion; delightfully macabre, as childish handwriting composes a forged suicide note. The intensity and pacing, though they don’t allow for the same exploration of Waititi’s artistic abilities that audiences saw in Boy, work in service of both the nature of film’s themes on the search for family and emotional connection, as well as the narrative’s scope–this journey involves more than just a family or town, but pulls in the entire nation (and its police force). The stakes that have been built up throughout the film culminate–in typical Hollywood fashion–with a car chase. Waititi is able to use this scene for more than just its spectacle, however, and deftly weaves in crucial dialogue (both comedic and tragic), necessary characterization, and artful composition.

While Boy show the artistic height of Waititi’s abilities, Wilderpeople contains something equally exciting for his fans: a potential bridge with the world of the blockbusters. It would be foolish not to fear that Waititi’s creativity and spirit will ultimately be hidden behind the flash of big-name characters and in the overly-complex, intertwining plots of the Marvel universe. But for those more inclined to optimism, I present Hunt for the Wilderpeople as reason enough to hope that the director can overcome these obstacles and produce something genuine.

Go West!: Reenacting American Mythologies in Cinema (Gabe)

    In the course of preparing a presentation on One False Move I discovered I had too many thoughts regarding its portrayal of American cultural myths and how the film represents them to be contained within my discussion. Here is what intrigues me the most regarding the way the film operates as a critique of idealized American fantasy.

    On a macro scale, it is a darkly nostalgic pseudo-noir western film. To briefly contextualize, it’s worth noting that the female protagonist and nuevo-femme fatale, Lila, left her small-town home of Star City, to go to Los Angeles and pursue her dream of being an actress. What she found instead was a violent, cokehead boyfriend and an increasingly destructive cycle of drug fueled crime. Just this simple plotline evokes the metropolitan violence and intrigue that marks traditional noir classics, and the American idealism of the west. For Lila, Los Angeles is equivalent to a modern American frontier: a place of seemingly endless possibility for self-improvement or total destruction. When considering the facts of this backstory in connection with the film’s gory opening sequence, a brutal killing spree and robbery, the threads between this film and classic American cinematic traditions are clear to see. However, by drawing upon these archetypes the film is able to critique them.

    One of the ways the film frames these critiques is through the character Dale, as played by Bill Paxton. He is the police chief in Star City, but he dreams of being more and potentially someday joining the LAPD. He is in many ways playing the cowboy archetype, except in this film the wild frontier in need of taming is Los Angeles. The “wild west” is now an urban arena, not the wilds of the prairie. He hopes to realize the dreams of the old west colonials by making a name for himself in uncharted territories, but his dream is fantasy, and this much is obvious to everyone but himself. We see this when his wife tells the LA investigators that she “reads nonfiction” while he “watches TV.” His concept of that western ideal is shaped by fiction, much like so many actual Americans. Additionally, his casual racism towards the black characters in the film is reminiscent of the cowboy heroes of yore, except with the context of this film we can see that it is no longer acceptable in the modern world. Dale is a shadowy relic of America’s past who cannot appreciate his own anachronisms.

    The most interesting part of this to me is that his character is so fully driven by these maverick ideals that his eventual downfall is precipitated by their influence on his behavior. Instead of calling for backup to adequately bring down Ray and Pluto, he attempts to face them alone as a mythic American gunslinger would. This made me wonder in how many subtle ways fictional narratives have come to influence real ones. Obviously, Dale is a fictional character in a Hollywood film, but his obsession with the Western archetype is echoed in varying ways by many real Americans today. The myth of the frontier is one of our greatest national mythologies, and in the film, it destroys him. I couldn’t help but wonder at how much of our national psychology has been altered by the narratives we see in television and film. We are mimetic creatures by nature, and humans continually reenact and imitate things we see represented on TV, regardless of how ridiculous they might be. Falsely idealized narratives surround us and it can be extremely difficult to determine our place in the increasingly fictionalized world. In the film, Dale certainly couldn’t. Particularly within our current political climate there seems to be a concerted push to return to a past ideal in which America was great, as opposed to today. Nostalgia based fiction is insidious and destructive because it creates a tantalizing false reality which cannot be attained.

    When the film is viewed through this light, One False Move presents a surprisingly resonant societal critique of idealized cultural narrative which, unfortunately, seems more poignant by the day.

 

The Third Eye View of Avant-Garde Cinema (Mireille)

For a while now, and especially this summer, I have noticed a marked paucity of more conceptually and cinematographically intricate films. Though a smattering of movies released within the last couple of years managed to break the “typical” mold of strict continuity and predictable plots frequently evident in the traditional blockbuster, all too often new releases and their audiences are satisfied with repetitive content that is frequently vapid. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that production is most often guided by market consumption, mass appeal and economics, but I still wish that some of the more artistic and experimental films would gain more attention and possibly spark a greater interest and openness in the general population. The reason for this is that avant-garde films provide heaps of fodder for contemplation. It’s true that experimental films may sometimes defy logic in their approach to storylines or seem a little over-the-top when it comes to the cinematography, but they almost always stay with you for hours or maybe days, leaving you to contemplate for a long while on the visual experience you have just had.

Two short films that are wonderful little introductions to the world of experimental and surrealistic film are Bruce Baillie’s film Here I Am (1962) and Ben Rivers’ Ah, Liberty (2008). Both weave together the interplay between innocence, environment and identity through the eyes of children. Although each film approaches this theme with very different narratives and subject matter, in both the eerie feel and otherworldly mood is sublimely conveyed through shot composition, framing and use of sound.

Baillie’s Here I Am opens with a series of unsteady hand held shots of the tree line and horizon in a non-descript neighborhood. The presence of a distorting fog as well as the contrast between the crispness and dullness of the elements in the frame create a heightened sense of tension and anxiety. Baillie also uses a high frequency ring in this opening sequence that only adds to a growing sensation of foreboding and insecurity. In fact, you start to feel that you are entering a world that represents a separate reality. Equally discomfiting is that Baillie has yet to introduce any human element – until suddenly the camera becomes extremely personal. It literally comes face to face with a little girl on a swing. The camera allows the audience to experience the movement of the child on the swing, lulling it into a sense of peacefulness. Without warning the movement becomes extremely disorienting, and the audience catches glimpses of the child grimacing. At this point the sound has also transitioned from the eerie high frequency pitch sound to completely diegetic sound that pulls the audience into the scene. And then, Baillie forcibly shifts the audience from the emotionally laden moment by cutting to a static shot of the little girl continuing to swing. This time, however, the camera is removed from her immediate personal space. The swing and the little girl are confined to the left hand third of the frame. This change in shot removes the immediacy of the little girl as well as the detail and the emotion present in her face and replaces it with a view of her as simply another element in the frame. Now, the audience must passively accept what is happening in the environment, at once taking in the whole, but also acknowledging the restriction and oppression of the child. Welcome - you have now entered the world of avant-garde film where intensity is not merely a visceral sensation, but one in which you are transported by the camera to look at the world in a different way. The camera now functions as a “third eye” that allows you to see into the psychological makeup of the different “personas” it thrusts in front of you.  

Although Ben Rivers’ Ah, Liberty also begins with a series of shots that display only natural elements and no human subjects, Rivers shoots his beginning sequence with a static camera. His focus is on the intensity and grandeur of the natural world. Rivers chooses simply to capture any motion within the frame, while leaving the camera itself as a still component of the shot. As the film progresses, Rivers begin to incorporate the human subject, and like in Baillie’s film, these are children. However, Rivers chooses to depict children in action, rather than focusing only on facial expressions. Nonetheless, Rivers does incorporate the use of visages. In his film the children put on elaborate masks, which allow them to metamorphose into components of incredibly ornate and complex frames. By the end of the film, the children’s identities have been effaced. They simply become objects among other objects within the shots. In other words, the children have been transformed from protagonists to small informalities present in the vast landscape that Rivers depicts throughout the film. In this way, Rivers has used the camera to erase the individuality of his subjects. Rivers wants the audience to witness the nearly silent swallowing of the insignificance of the individual against the larger world.

Through their films both Baillie and Rivers attempt to convey their intent of effacing the individual. However, whereas Baillie’s cinematographic techniques pull and push us through the convulsive psyche of an innocent child by using camera movement and artificial sound, Rivers silently allows us to bear witness to the enormity of the world where the child is but one small element. Baillie erases identity by physically moving the focus away from his subject; Rivers confounds his subjects within a landscape. In very different ways, both have successfully downplayed the importance of individual identity. Both have left you questioning what your place in the world might be. So, maybe next time you have to watch some experimental work, remember that what might at first glance seem like randomly assorted artistic shots, may actually be beckoning to look at things through a new third eye.

 

August: Dukes County (Gabe)

As my summer internship came to an end, I traveled to my family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard where I planned to spend the last hours of freedom hidden from the real world. Just getting on the ferry felt like a release, and by the time I’d gotten to our small and remote cottage, I was in full-blown vacation mode. Gin and (far too much) tonic was rapidly poured into a pink glass and the quiet wrapped itself around me. Without cell service or wifi there was no way of connecting with the mainland: the racing rats of LA could not follow me. It was nice.

But after 48 hours, the quiet set in. I spent my days herding goats (actually) and my nights stretching out on the sand and enjoying my seclusion. I had some movies saved on my computer, and I finally decided to watch one I’d been avoiding. I’m not sure why it takes me so long to get around to watching certain films, but August: Osage County has been on my computer since it came out, and I hadn’t even tried to start it. Maybe my subconscious had a preemptive allergic reaction to the British actors’ half-hearted Oklahoma accents. In any event, I took my spiritual benadryl and pressed play. Here’s what I thought.

In this film, the incisive, yet drug-addicted matriarch presides deliriously over the collapse of her family, while one of her children tries to unsuccessfully hold the pieces together and limit the mother’s collateral damage. Not really anything new there, except for the scope of the depravity. The plot and structure have all the standard, recycled components of a typical, American realist production, but it attempts to differentiate itself through the size of the disaster. In most ways, it translates as a hick Long Day’s Journey into Night with roid-rage.

I was most immediately struck by the hefty imbalance between its stunning performances and surprisingly thin plotline. It felt like a series of free-flowing character studies, underpinned by a plot barely thick enough to carry its protagonists toward their inevitable emotional crises. Yet I didn’t care about any of the plot’s shortcomings, because I was watching some of the greatest actors of all time share a screen. Sam Shephard (RIP), Chris Cooper, and Margo Martindale brought the house down, along with the film’s unsung hero: Juliane Nicholson. Meryl, as everybody can assume, puts on a masterclass in dynamic play while surrounded by some of her greatest dramatic contemporaries. In fact, the only letdown of the film was Benedict Cumberbatch, whose blind stabs at talkin’ southern lived up to my uncharitable expectations.

Finally watching this film made me question why it had taken me so long to get around to it. I knew everything about the cast years ago. I love these performers, but my personal inertia had conquered my curiosity. I decided to just get around to watching good movies without delay, instead of letting preconceptions about how dark and intense the film would be keep me from its exploration. It was a long overdue resolution, and when I get around to watching 12 Years a Slave in five years I look forward to remaking it. 

What's Your Favorite Movie? (Tori)

My sophomore year at Hopkins will be tied to a lot of different things.  It’ll be tied to my double in McCoy, meals at Nolan’s, and long rehearsals of Spring Awakening in Swirnow Theater.  It’ll be tied to my friends here, new and old, and the moments we’ve shared together.  It’ll also always be tied to film blogging.  Film blogging has been an integral part of my sophomore year.  I have been constantly on the lookout for films to watch and concepts about which to write.  This post will bring my film blogging to a close, so I knew I had to choose something epic and rich in order to end the year on the perfect, exciting note.  I looked directly to Alfred Hitchcock.

Alfred Hitchcock has completely transformed my relationship with films.  I, like many others, I’m sure, detest being asked what my favorite film is.  My cinematic preferences are constantly changing based on my mood; when I’m frustrated I’ll want to watch something very different than when I’m elated.  But if I were forced to choose—a gun drawn to my head—Rear Window might be the one to slip out due to its emphasis on some of the themes I find most interesting in the world like metacinema, voyeurism, and the male gaze.  It’s one of those films you can watch a million times and still not pick up on all the themes and techniques employed by Hitchcock to tell the gripping story.  Obviously, I am a big Hitchcock fan.  Yet, shockingly, I had never gotten around to watching perhaps his most renowned film, Vertigo.  Until now.  I decided it was fitting, for my exciting final post, to write about what is known as one of the most epic and rich films to ever be created.  I was not disappointed.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

As our protagonist, ex-detective Scottie, is about to enter the church at the end of the film, he states that there is: “One final thing I have to do…and then I’ll be free of the past.”  Throughout the film, I picked up on a preoccupation with time and the contradictory feelings of both nostalgia and disdain for the past.  Characters grapple with the question: is it possible to ever be free of the past?  Near the beginning of the film, Gavin Elster, an old friend of Scottie’s, discusses San Francisco, the setting of the film: “Well, San Francisco’s changed.  The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast…I should have like to have lived here then.  The color, the excitement, the power, the freedom…”  He is clearly sentimental about the way San Francisco used to be, yet it seems that is a distant memory. 

When researching Carlotta Valdes, the woman it seems has possessed Elster’s wife, the bookstore owner explains: “So [Carlotta’s husband] kept the child and threw [Carlotta] away.  You know, men could do that in those days.  They had the power and the freedom.”  Once again, we are reminded of the power and freedom people had in the past, but this time the sentiment of nostalgia is complicated, as power and freedom are tied to the mistreatment of Carlotta by her husband.  Scottie, throughout the film, is set on doing away with the past; he desperately wants to “stop being haunted.”  But perhaps this is a lost hope.  Scottie puts together the different aspects of his deceit by Elster and his mistress, Judy Barton, who was pretending to be Elster’s wife the entire time.  He realizes that Elster was the mastermind behind everything and now has access to: “all of his wife’s money and all that freedom and power.”  Again, we hear these words “freedom and power,” but now in a very different context.  Elster has succeeded in becoming that free and powerful man of the past.  Additionally, he abandoned his wife just as Carlotta’s husband abandoned her long before.  What is more, Judy’s death transpires in the same way the real Madeleine’s death did; they both fall out of the same church window.  All Scottie wants is to stop being haunted—by the death of the police officer at the beginning of the film, by his vertigo, by Madeleine after her death, but it is no use.  Vertigo suggests that the past is not something one can ever escape.

It is crucial to understand this idea of “freedom and power” in relation to gender in Vertigo.  Do any of the women in this film have any freedom or power?  At the end of the film, Scottie interrogates Judy about Elster’s use of her in his grand scheme: “He made you over just like I made you over…Did he train you?  Did he rehearse you?  Did he tell you exactly what to do—what to say?”  The men of Vertigo are consistently controlling the women.  Like Carlotta’s husband controls Carlotta and Elster controls both Judy and his wife, Scottie similarly controls Judy when he implores her to change her appearance to look more like Madeleine.  The idea of the male gaze is incredibly prevalent in this film.  Just as Jeff becomes interested in Lisa after she has become the subject of his voyeuristic gaze, Scottie becomes interested in Madeleine solely after watching her.  In this way, he is introduced to her less as a person and more as an object to be observed.  It is true that Scottie is manipulated by Elster, but I would argue that the women of Vertigo are the ones truly being controlled.

Upon further reflection, I probably could have written about a different aspect of Vertigo for every single one of my blog posts this year; it’s the kind of film that clouds your mind with thoughts.  However, one thing is absolutely clear to me: I think I have a new favorite movie.  

It's Tough Out There for a Broad (Madison)

Well, folks, this is it. As I am posting this, the final week of classes is winding to a close; exams are being prepped for, parties are being thrown, summer plans solidified. Spring Fair has come and gone; the library is packed with students in the throes of an end-of-semester panic; your timelines are undoubtedly inundated with invitations to oddly-themed a cappella concerts. This spring--the last of my undergraduate career--has been marked by a series of bittersweet benchmarks I can’t help but notice as they pass (far too quickly) by.

 

 

Oh, I found myself thinking the other afternoon, I just skipped the last lecture of the last science course I ever plan on taking (Sorry, Professor Rawlins). And after wrapping up a class on American Women Poets, I was struck by the realization that I might never again have cause to be in room 138 in Gilman hall (and that, drafty as it is, I’ll miss it). I learned, just today, the trick to getting free drinks from the vending machines in Hodson, only to remember that I won’t have time to test out the method.

I am forced, in confronting these Lasts (and the capital L feels proper, here), to turn, also, ahead: if these are the things that I am leaving, what am I heading toward? On the one hand, the answer to this question is simple: I’ll be making my way to grad school in Iowa City (home to an amazing bookstore, plenty of cornfields, and a natural history museum which features a replica of a 10-foot-tall prehistoric sloth). Still, on the other, I have no idea what the next few years will look like.

 

For the first time, I’ll be paying for my own insurance. For the first time, I’ll be more than a two-hour drive away from my mother’s house. For the first time, I’ll be living in a place that is very unlike my hometown (a bit of relevant trivia: the population of Philadelphia is 1.3 million; in Baltimore, it is 623,000; and in Iowa City, the population hovers around a miniscule 73,000).

As I often do when I am forced to forge into unknown territory, I turned to television for answers (answers, of course, that come with a heaping side of escapist fantasy). There are plenty of movies and shows, these days, that explore what it means to be a young woman trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in the world (however you might feel about Lena Dunham, her Girls did pave the way for the moment we find ourselves in now, in which a plethora of lovably-struggling femme millennials fill our screens).

 

I’ve sampled many of them: 2 Broke Girls is a bust for me, feeling somehow stale and forced; New Girl is charming, silly, and consistently entertaining, even if its glory days are somewhat behind it; Jane the Virgin has its appeal, even if it borrows a bit too much from the telenovela to help me navigate my own, admittedly more mundane, life. On the silver screen, Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012), Tiny Furniture (another Dunham offering, this one from 2010), and Adventureland (Mottola, 2009) are worth a watch (Legally Blonde, too, qualifies as a post-college film, in my view!)*

Still, among all these offerings, one show has become my far-and-away favorite, the one I watch over and over again, the one that makes me feel entertained, reassured, and vaguely aroused (a joke), and the one I binged (again) in preparation to leave the Johns Hopkins nest: Broad City.

 

The Comedy Central hit began as a web series in 2009, when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the show's creators, stars, and writers, met in New York City while taking classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade; it made its way (with the help of one Amy Poehler) onto television in 2014. It has run for three seasons, with a fourth and fifth upcoming (not soon enough, of course; season 4 isn’t scheduled to run until this August--I am in agony).

In part, my love of the show comes from my identification with Abbi Jacobson. Both she and her character (also named Abbi) grew up on the Philadelphia Main Line, ten minutes away from my childhood home. She went to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) for her undergraduate degree, which, as most of you know, is only a very short bus ride away from the Homewood campus. She’s not good at public speaking and hopes that her career as an artist will “blow up any day now!” In my preemptively-nostalgic, pre-graduation phase, this is enough to make us soul sisters. Watching her navigate what everyone tells me is the hellscape of your young twenties gives me particular comfort, as if I’d sent a body double ahead of me to test the waters; she seems like she’s doing well--maybe I can, too. 

 

Of course, the appeal of Broad City is much deeper than hometown pride. The show is hilarious; in one episode, Ilana becomes latched onto a garbage truck after trying to wear an industrial chain as a belt; in another, the duo is kicked off of a plane when their MacGyver’d tampon is confused for a bomb. It’s also oddly sweet; it’s clear that Ilana would do anything for her best friend Abbi, including grilling potential one-night-stands about their sexual health, mothering her after the removal of her wisdom teeth, and spending hours tracking down a stolen cell phone.

 

And for all its fluffiness, the show is smart, too, with a feminist sensibility that is always present but never pedantic: the leads are two Jewish women who share a friendship that would make even the best bromance movies jealous, and who talk frankly and frequently about their active sex lives—and not in an I-had-another-steamy-affair way, in an I-just-peed-out-a-condom/I'm-looking-at-my-labia-in-a-Topshop-dressing-room/a-guy-asked-me-to-peg-him kind of way.

It matters to me, too, that Ilana is bisexual, and shows no signs of being killed off. Her liaisons with women are never fetishized, or even addressed as unusual. There is no moment of coming out, no older, predatory lesbian seducing her, and no sense that her friendship with a straight girl is strange or suspect (admittedly, one of the quirks of the pair’s friendship is Ilana’s oft professed love for Abbi—this, though, feels more like a running gag than a comment on the impossibility of friendship between queer and straight women). It is the kind of representation one seldom gets, as a bisexual woman. To see oneself rendered likably and fully on screen, not tokenized or tortured, is an opportunity that is hard to come by; even as Broad City makes me laugh, it gives me the chance to feel real, to take a delight in my queerness that can be otherwise difficult to maintain in the current political climate both at home and abroad. 

Beyond all this, Broad City has a surrealist bent that allows it to stand out amongst other shows of its ilk. The use of non-diegetic sound, fantasy sequences, and absurdist humor make each episode a surprising one: you’re never sure when a giant Bingo Bronson (a stuffed blue cartoon toy) might make an appearance, or when a piece of particularly shocking news will be accompanied by the sounds of a bomb detonating (complete with aftershock and ringing in the ears). It is equally likely that the girls will find themselves at a swanky rooftop cocktail party as in a subway car filled with Hasidic Jewish men or human fecal matter.

 

There is something about this show that defies description; it's difficult to explain why it feels like the suitable topic for my final CinemAddicts post. After all, what can I tell you I’ve learned from watching Broad City? I’m still scared to leave my friends and Baltimore behind; I’m not any closer to understanding how to do my taxes; and it’s true, it isn’t my dream to work as a cleaner in a fitness center or as a temp at a failing startup, so there isn’t much in the way of inspiration to be found in that arena. I suppose, though, I have learned some things: how to sneak an offending BM out of a toilet and into a trash shoot if the power is out and the man I’m crushing on is stopping by for a visit; that “for every ten pounds a man loses, he gains a visual inch”; a recipe for a s’more made with marijuana.

 

I can see, as I’m writing it, how insufficient this list may seem. What I did not include on it, for fear of being sentimental, but what I hope I've made clear throughout this post, is this: Broad City allows me to imagine myself, one, or two, or five years down the line, living a wonderful life. Ok, Abbi and Ilana are messy; ok, they don’t have dream jobs; ok, they live with crummy roommates. But their friendship—the most convincing and compelling female friendship on TV today, in my opinion—is not only enough to sustain the show, but to sustain them through all of the absurd drama of their not-yet-figured-out lives.

So, I’ll finish this Last—my last post on this blog—with a question. Do we have any readers in Iowa City? I’m looking for an Ilana to my Abbi. After all, I hear it’s tough out there for a broad.

 
*I’d like to recognize that this list is hugely incomplete, and (for the most part) only presents a selection of white, straight, middle-to-upper class stories. If you have any recommendations that escape these pitfalls, I’d love to tune in!

The Annoying "What Ifs" (Jaeyoung)

 During the course of my film-watching career, I have been cursed with a special strain of skepticism. It began in elementary school, when I was watching the “Pirate’s Life for Me” scene in Peter Pan. In this scene, various pirates were throwing knives at a door, very nearly missing the unaware Mr. Smee who was coming out from it. I must have had a strong realist mentality when I watched this, because I asked myself, “How in the world did he survive that? What would happen if a knife didn’t miss his head?” This drove me to distraction, and I was annoyed every time the characters narrowly escaped death. (Ironically, I didn’t question the fact that children could fly, that another world exists, etc.)

 This fixation carried over to other movies I watched, especially action films. Every time the protagonist dodges a bullet or narrowly misses a large boulder, I would contemplate the sheer luck the character must have had, and consider what would happen if the protagonist actually died midway through the movie. I understood that this was the wrong way to watch movies (in the battle against realism and story, story should always take precedence), but this was the film-watching equivalent of biting one’s nails; I couldn’t help it.

 The Other Guys helped me to wrap my mind around this issue. In the beginning of the film, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson play police heroes, parodying the hyper-masculine and ridiculous action plotline akin to the Fast and Furious series. As they chase a group of criminals to the top of the building, they find that the criminals have already escaped to the ground. Driven by misguided confidence, they decide to jump off the building and, in deadpan humor, fall to their death. This was the rare moment when the thought, “There is no way they can survive that” is immediately followed by “Oh, they did not survive that.” The protagonists’ protective cloak was pulled from right under them, and they died in the most humorous way possible. When I saw that this trope could be played with, I stopped caring as much.

 The worry resurrected again when I watched Mad Max: Fury Road. Max and Furiosa are fighting over the control of the oil rig, and Furiosa triggers the gun against Max’s head. Luckily for Max, the gun was void of bullets. I couldn’t help asking, what would have happened if there were bullets in that gun? Of course, this would break the narrative in a couple ways (abandoning Max’s journey of redeeming himself, eliminating the challenge for Furiosa to trust a stranger, etc.). But I think this hypothetical asks the interesting question of whether Furiosa and her cadre of female ex-slaves could fend for themselves without the help of a male figure. Usually hypotheticals lead to some silly conclusions, but this helped me come to the thought that there should be (at least one) big-budget action film that doesn’t depend on the help of a male counterpart (yes, Spy might count, but perhaps one that isn’t also comedy).

 But after much thought, I re-realized that dabbling too deep into the “what ifs” takes away from the movie itself. The focus should (obviously) be on the story. The 2002 Chinese film Hero makes a point of this, as the majority of the film is visual interpretation of the story Nameless tells to the Chinese Emperor. Some parts of the story are fabricated, some parts are truthful, but all parts explode with human expression and explode human limitations. The swords and men of an entire army are slashed and destroyed by a couple passionately in love; swordsmen fly when stakes are high; thousands of scrolls in a library are completely unfolded by a single stroke of the sword. Each fight aches with the conflict between obligation to one’s country and the loyalty to one’s friends and lovers. By foregoing realism, Nameless is able to tell a story that strikes a human chord in a novel way. The film is also layered by the story that happens in the present time, or the conversation that occurs between the Emperor and Nameless. Even this is a retelling, or reinterpretation, as the filmmakers were developed their own vision of a historical assassination attempt. The characters’ fate, therefore, is not determined by chaos of the natural world, but by the stories that are told and passed down. To address my weird fixation, a character’s luck is just another way of filmmakers saying, “your time has not yet come.”

All Show Business (Tori)

Recently, there has been a widespread trend of making films into Broadway musicals.  There’s School of Rock, Groundhog Day, Sunset Boulevard, Amelie, Waitress, and countless others.  But what about when it’s the other way around?  How do you take a highly successful stage musical and turn it into a film?  I looked to Chicago, arguably the most famous of this smaller number of film-turned-musicals, to attempt to answer this question. 

“It’s all a circus, kid.  A three-ring circus.  These trials.  The whole world.  All show business.”  Lawyer Billy Flynn says this to Roxie Hart, a young aspiring performer who murders Fred Casely, the man with whom she is having an affair.  A few months ago, I wrote about a musical entitled The Scottsboro Boys, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who also wrote the music and lyrics for Chicago.  Kander and Ebb are notorious for the way in which they point out flaws in our society.  They are masterful at holding a mirror up to nature.  Chicago focuses on the problems surrounding crime and the media.  It condemns our entertainment-centered society by depicting a world in which there is virtually no difference between being a murderer and being a performer.  Roxie Hart is able to gain fame and fortune because of this crime she commits.  Thus, the fame of a performer and the infamy of a criminal are depicted as one in the same.   This relationship is shown starting with Roxie’s arrest after committing the murder, as she is trailed by hoards of photographers taking her picture.  When discussing her future as a performer with Matron Mama Morton, Roxie states: “I don’t even have an act yet” to which Morton responds “Killing Fred Casely was your act.”  Roxie’s life post-murder is less the life of a criminal and more the life of a big star. 

Chicago was (and still is) undoubtedly a huge stage success.  It currently holds the title of the longest running American musical on Broadway and the second-longest running musical of all time.  I was lucky enough to see this show on Broadway several years ago, and it is truly one of the most astounding shows I’ve ever seen.  Part of the reason why I loved it was because of its meta-theatrical nature, particularly surrounding its songs, which are incredibly self-aware.  By this I mean that characters know they are performing in front of an audience when they’re singing.  They break the fourth wall and sing right to the crowd.  Each song is introduced by an emcee; it is almost like it’s a cabaret show dispersed throughout the musical.  A plot point will occur, and a corresponding song or act will be announced and then performed.  For example, Roxie is brought to her press conference by Billy Flynn.  The song “They Both Reached For The Gun” is announced, and we watch a song and dance number in which Billy Flynn functions as a ventriloquist and Roxie is his dummy.  He tells her exactly what to say to win the world’s sympathy.  Another example: it is revealed that another woman in the jail was said to be guilty and is sentenced to death.  Then, a sort of circus act is announced: The Hungarian Disappearing Act, which she then performs, symbolizing her hanging.  This structure is invoked seamlessly in the stage musical, but becomes more difficult in a film.  How do you preserve the meta-theatrical nature of Chicago when it is no longer performed in front of you on a stage?

I think Chicago is a successful film because of the way that it actually emphasizes this meta-theatrical nature of the story through the use of techniques unique to cinema.  There are two different “worlds” present within the film.  First there is the world of the plot, which takes place in 1920s Chicago, on the streets, in the jail, in the courtroom, etc.  Then there is the world of the songs and acts, which take place on a stage in a theater.  We see the bright spotlights and dazzling displays behind the performers as they sing and dance.  We literally become a part of the audience, as the camera is often stationed behind other audience-members, putting us right in that crowd.  It emphasizes the fact that these moments are incredibly performative.  Then, it is able to beautifully weave these moments of performance into the narrative through the usage of tactics such as eyeline matches and close-ups.  My favorite of these moments is a number that is only found in the film and not in the musical.  This number occurs during Billy Flynn’s cross-examination; he discredits a piece of evidence in a masterful way, extremely powerful with his words.  As he walks confidently across the courtroom floor, the camera follows his feet.  We then cut to his feet on a stage, and he begins performing an unbelievable tap dance.  We constantly switch between him in the court room and him tap dancing, blurring these two “performances” together in a way that can only be done on film. 

There is really nothing like live theater, sitting in the audience and watching performers right before your eyes.  It’s unpredictable, and there is a thrill of knowing that each and every performance is unique in some way; there will always be small differences between performances of the same show, and this is a truly thrilling feeling.  Yet I got a similar sort of thrill when watching the film of Chicago.  I think Chicago works because it is somehow able to preserve this sense of live performance onscreen. Moreover, through techniques unique to cinema, it is able to even further emphasize the theatrical nature of our justice system, our media, and our world.  The film, maybe even more so than the musical, makes it clear that the world is all show business. 

Hollow Glamour: the Mise-en-scène of Fascism (Conor)

           This week I will be analyzing The Great Dictator (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1940) and Duck Soup (dir. Leo McCarey, 1933) and how both films undermine the mise-en-scène associated with fascism in order to deconstruct the self-importance of the fascist myth.

          The Great Dictator does an excellent job of outlining the ridiculous pomp and circumstance that surrounds Fascism. The Great Dictator gives audiences a limited glance into the life and routine of Adenoid Hinkle, the fascist leader that rules the fictional country of Tomania. Through the mise-en-scène, Chaplin levels a striking critique into the heart of the image that fascism cultivates for itself. Consider the ridged ceremony that accompanies all of Hinkle’s actions: the first time he appears on screen he occupies most of the frame, he wears a sharp uniform obviously inspired by military dress while all of the men seated behind him are dressed almost identically. There is a highly codified ritual associated with his speech, the audience cheers and is silent on command. Fascism in this film is extremely orderly, despite the chaotic violence leveled against the Jewish people in the film, the Fascist forces are depicted as highly organized with incredibly rigid schedules. Hinkle himself compartmentalizes his day into many discrete parts. He has a set time to do everything from playing the piano to sexually accosting one of his secretaries. Hinkle's and the film’s fascism in general cannot even spare an extra minute to examine the supposed innovations being developed by his own government. This extreme fastidiousness manifests itself in the set decoration for Hinkle’s palace. The sets are clean, organized and comprised mostly of sharp and regular lines. Neoclassical busts and statues fastidiously punctuate the sets at regular intervals, adding both an air of historical legitimacy to the palace and a stifling uniformity even in decoration.

           Hinkle’s personal interpreter, who serves as a narrator for some of the film. Gives the viewers a view into what Hinkle must think about himself: he is extremely self-important. Hinkle can be seen as an extension of the mise-en-scène used to characterize his administration. Chaplin then proceeds to undermine the very functionality of fascist fastidiousness in order to show the absurdity of Hinkle’s created image. Hinkle’s efficiency is absurd and manages to accomplish far less than it appears. The “innovations” that his government works on are abject failures, he cannot secure finances for his bloated military and even initially fails to launch an invasion against his neighbors. Nevertheless, Hinkle is both aware of the cosmetic nature of his rule while still buying wholeheartedly into his own myth. His personal filing cabinet is actually a hidden mirror; it holds no files other than Hinkle’s image itself emphasizing the importance of appearances in the film. The fascists are constantly failing to live up to their own myth; Hinkle awards and revokes obscure military honors at will, making a mockery of the entire process of commendation. The ceremony surrounding Napaloni’s visit illustrates this perfectly; first his elaborate arrival is bungled, making him look like a fool. Later Hinkle’s obsession with psychologically manipulating Napaloni displays the fascist obsession with displaying power and the fundamentally silly way in which that power is expressed.

            Similarly, Duck Soup (dir. Leo McCarey, 1933) is another film that manipulates the mise-en-scène of fascism to undermine its attractiveness and authority. Duck Soup was released in 1933, a time in which fascism itself was acceptable enough in America that prominent businessmen planned a fascist coup of the US government. Groucho Marx’s Rufus T. Firefly gives a striking portrait of a fascist leader: he is a populist who manipulates the dissatisfaction of the general population with establishment politics to enact a series of oppressive legal reforms –another situation that feels all too real in today’s America. The musical number "Laws of the Administration” in particular is so eerily accurate to our own political situation that on some level it ceases to be funny. “The last guy nearly ruined this place, he didn’t know what to do with it/if you think this country’s bad off now then wait till I get through with it” sings Firefly. Like The Great Dictator, the Silvanian setting are full of elaborate gilded decorations and are restricted by the elaborate nature of their rituals. Footmen wear either elaborate military uniforms or powdered wigs and many actions Firefly takes are accompanied by literal fanfare.

            Every character in the film is obsessed with getting Firefly to conform to the visual and ritual rigidity of fascism except Firefly and Chico and Harpo’s Chicolini and Pinky. In fact, the brothers seem dead set on undermining the importance of ritual at every given moment. In two of the musical numbers, “Laws of the Administration” and “This Country's Going to War,” the Marx Brothers even violate the elaborate choreography of the numbers themselves. Firefly ends up impersonating a footman, to everyone’s embarrassment, in the former, while in the latter the Brothers end up desecrating the uniforms of their own men by cutting the plumes off their helmets. Later, Firefly wears a different military uniform across every single cut in a battle sequence, co-opting and subverting the attractiveness of military aesthetics ranging from Imperial French to American Confederate. Simply put: Firefly’s actions reveal the silliness inherent to fascist pomp and circumstance. By reducing the fascist image to its barest and most absurd form the Marx Brothers reveal the almost hilarious sense of self-importance that permeates fascist thought.

            Both films do excellent work stripping the terror from fascism in order to expose its silliness-–although Chaplain’s film I must admit does an equally excellent job of describing precisely what that terror is and how it manifest itself for oppressed people. The dictators here are devoid of their public images, the audience sees them not as gods or geniuses, but as fools who cannot see their own shortcomings. By not allowing the fascists to create their own iconography and iconology surrounding their ideology, these films expose that ultimately all fascists are people and that their power comes not from their righteousness or their rituals, but from their monopoly on violence. Extending this logic to the Trump administration, it is plain that the very seriousness with which it takes itself exposes its ridiculous shortcomings. Every bombastic catchphrase or plan is accompanied by a bungled press conference, every so called serious achievement is coupled with a patent display of ridiculousness. Now it seems apparent that Trump is rattling the saber of the American war regime in an attempt to cement a more serious image for himself. Whether he is successful or not, these two films suggest that it is better to challenge fascists than let them create their own narratives on their own terms.  

Fake News: The Truman Show and Media (Tori)

When I logged into my Facebook account yesterday, I was greeted by an alert describing a new experiment on the popular social networking site.  This trial will introduce banners teaching Facebook users how to “spot fake news” given the recent controversies regarding the accuracy of news sources.  Also, users will be given the opportunity to mark unreliable news stories as “disputed.”  The media plays an influential role in our world today—we are constantly bombarded with news everywhere we look.  I think it’s good that Facebook and other sites like Google, which has recently unveiled plans for a similar experiment, are taking an active stance in attempting to improve the way users consume media.  But is that enough?  Can we be certain that what we know is true?  To tackle these questions, I turned to one of my favorite movies, Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. 

The Truman Show tells the story of a TV show starring a man named Truman Burbank.  The twist is that everybody knows the show is a TV show except for Truman himself.  The town Truman lives in, Seahaven Island, was created just for him.  His friends and family are all actors.  Truman was born on camera and has gone his entire life believing that this constructed studio world is all there is—it’s all he has ever known.  After a couple of things go wrong on the show (a studio light falls from the sky, Truman hears cues being given as he drives down the street, and Truman sees extras waiting in a green room) Truman begins to question everything he has ever been told.  In the end, Truman finally discovers the truth—or, rather, falsity—of his situation. 

This type of show is very appealing to viewers both within the film and in our world.  Shows like The Bachelor, The Real Housewives, Keeping Up with the Kardashians are some of the most widely watched and talked about shows on television.  While billed as “reality” shows, these shows are calculated to a high degree to ensure engaging drama and high ratings.  Within the film, viewers also cannot get enough.  A man is consistently shown watching Truman in his bathtub; it seems his entire life revolves around the 24/7 footage of Truman’s life.  We even see waitresses watching the show at a Truman bar, in which people can go watch the footage and buy Truman merchandise.  So why are these types of shows so appealing?  Marlon, Truman’s best friend on the show, explains about the show: “It’s all true.  It’s all real.  Nothing you see on this show is fake.  It’s merely controlled.” It seems this is exactly why it’s so appealing.  Though it’s controlled, people feel that the show contains a degree of realism due to Truman himself.  But is that a legitimate distinction to make?  Can something “controlled” be real?  Isn’t calculation and falsity the same thing? 

I am fascinated by the complicated concept of truth, and perhaps that’s why I find myself watching this movie over and over again.  How can we ever be sure what we’re being told is accurate?  Christof, the creator of the television show, is asked in an interview at one point in the film why it took Truman so long to begin questioning his life.  Christof responds: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”  Though this clearly applies to Truman, who accepted the reality of his world for thirty years, this also applies to each and every one of us on a smaller scale.  We are endlessly bombarded with facts and information from varying sources.  If you aren’t willing to scrutinize—to dig deep and work hard until you can determine what is true and what is not—you can really be led to believe anything.

It seems that this scrutiny is exactly what Facebook and Google are trying to do with these new tools.  But my question is…what if that isn’t enough?  The Truman Show has a happy ending.  Truman is committed to figuring out what is going on and doesn’t give in until he has discovered the truth.  With this ending, the film seems to say that the media is inherently calculated and misleading, but its deceptiveness is not impossible to overcome.  The truth is out there waiting to be uncovered.  However, I think this might be an old-fashioned, idealistic hope in today’s society – a society in which technology is further integrated into our lives every day, and thus falsities become easier and easier to disseminate.  The perpetration of inaccurate information is more concerning than ever.  Is it possible to escape The Truman Show in 2017?

My first time with "The Bachelor" (Madison)

April is the month for trickery; national poetry month; and, according to Eliot, the cruelest month. It has always seemed a mistake, then, that Valentine’s Day doesn’t fall during these first few weeks of spring; April feels designed for love and love’s vicissitudes. Sudden storms thunder in the morning, then peter out in time for the birds to chitter at the receding sun by dinnertime. Heavy coats are tucked into storage, then brought back out again as a wintry afternoon inserts itself in a week of 60-degree weather. Cherry trees blossom so suddenly that, in a blink, whole streets are covered in a flowery snow.  

And now that I’m in my twenties, I’m even more aware of spring’s potential for romance. My happily-coupled friends spend evenings discussing their post-graduation plans to buy houses and host engagement parties. Even the advertisers on my podcasts seem in the mood for love; a chipper woman from Match.com implores me to try the site that “leads to the most second dates!”

For the terminally single, the season of the birds and the bees can start to lose its luster quickly. A truly cynical girl might, on a warm, weekday evening, even find herself turning to the truly absurd for comfort: the latest season of The Bachelor. This show is bafflingly popular among my female friends, especially the younger ones, but I myself had never seen it until I began writing this blog post.

It is hard to escape the cultural zeitgeist that is The Bachelor, it’s true; I’ve watched a close cousin of the show, I Wanna Marry Harry, which saw twenty-odd American women competing for the heart of a Prince Harry look-alike (the fact that their suitor was not actual royalty was hidden from them until the final episode), and have partaken in the parody series Burning Love. Lately, as a salvo to the show itself, I started watching Unreal, a Lifetime series (I know, but stay with me) about the dramatic lives of the producers of a Bachelor-type program.  

It feels difficult to write anything truly novel about this sort of show; everyone knows that the world of reality TV is highly contrived, oversexed, and nakedly misogynistic (or, at the very least, post-feminist, relying as it does on a divorce of individual narrative from social context). There are hundreds of blogs poking fun at the poor suckers who really think they can find true love on cable. But as I watched my first episode of The Bachelor (Nick flew one of his darlings to Finland, first class), I didn’t want to laugh. Scoff, sure—the bachelor’s self-assured smile, his stilted conversations (one romantic dinner was filled with chatter about whether or not an iron or a steamer is better for getting wrinkles out of clothes), and the very fact of his having dated up to 29 women at a single time, made the whole premise difficult to take seriously.

But I didn’t find the episode hilarious. The women all seemed so sincere, so ready to love a near stranger; an invisible hand behind the camera was clearly prompting them to confess deep feelings to their suitor, and several tearfully admitted to having fallen in love with the scruffy-but-personable Nick. Watching them I felt, uncomfortably, that I understood where they were coming from. After all, I’m trying to date, and have an intimate knowledge of how truly terrible it is (a memorable one-liner from the Tinder-sphere: “You want to be my cardio this evening? It’s cutting season.”) If you’re going to couple-up in the modern age, why not get a few months’ vacation in a mansion as well?

And, though the environment is obviously staged for the screen, the fairy-tale effect is never quite punctured; despite myself, the sweeping orchestral score and the lights of cabin windows glittering on a fjord made me quickly invested in the (thin) narrative (the Southern belle has never had an orgasm, and can’t figure out how to tell her beau). It is easy to believe that the pair are sharing an intimate exchange over dinner when one is distracted by candlelight, by the stylish fair-isle sweaters, and impeccable makeup.

This is partly what drove me to watch Unreal; one always suspects that the contestants’ every move is choreographed to maximize interest, that the editing is, at best, misleading and at worst malicious, and that the results are predetermined, and watching these suspicions unfold in a Lifetime drama is undoubtedly satisfying. One gets to feel not only that they were too clever to have been duped by reality TV, but also that they are no longer complicit in reality TV’s bullying and, therefore, can indulge in the drama without doing harm to any real people.

And it’s true, Unreal is as dramatic as any afternoon soap; 6 episodes in and the main character has already been blackmailed, her boss has nearly died of a heart attack, a contestant was outed on national TV, and a girl has jumped off of the roof. Watching the self-serving behind-the-scenes world of reality TV production is entertaining, if slightly nausea-inducing. But, still, it can’t quite compare to what I felt watching the real deal.  

Even with the glitz and the glamour attendant to The Bachelor, there is something searingly genuine about it. If the impulse to display one’s love life to an audience of millions is foreign to me, if the contestants seem chillingly like American standards of beauty personified, if the much-discussed “Fantasy Suite” smacks a bit of coercive sex, the overwhelming desire to be close to another person (any person, even a person who wears too many turtlenecks and makes you wait in the cold while he sips whiskey with the host) is so… normal. It is so much like the April afternoons I spend here, in Baltimore, downloading a dating app for the fourth time (even though I swore after I deleted it last time that I was done for good), that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at the people on my screen. In this season of love, I’m not that unlike them. The Bachelor might have won itself another fan.

Choose a Song. Choose Life. (Jaeyoung)

 Spoiler Alert: Ending of Trainspotting discussed

 In my Digital Productions class, I had very little difficulty choosing songs for my first two projects. For some strange reason, there is an ocean of very unsettling, experimental music that are available as public domain. For each film, I have spent an hour (or less) in determining my soundtrack. Since my chief goal was to unnerve and frighten my fellow classmates, I simply had to choose the song that best unnerved and frightened me.

 For my latest class project, I decided to script and shoot a short comedy. It is currently in the editing stage, and I have had some difficulty with song selection. The rules of the (song choosing) game have been more complicated for comedy than they were for my horror shorts. For instance, it is not a matter of choosing the funniest song (I can’t simply jam in my favorite Weird Al Yankovic songs and expect my film to be tonally coherent).  The song(s) I choose need to 1) not distract from the story, 2) be light-hearted, and 3) be sensitive to the feelings of the characters. As I scrolled through the edgy-music-filled library, I could not find a song satisfying all three categories.

 I may be thinking about soundtracks in the wrong way (Of course I am! I am a novice). Perhaps I should be more concerned about how the music adds to the movie, rather than how it can be inoffensively inserted. Imagine, for example, Marion’s driving scene in Psycho; without the chilling, intense orchestral piece, it would only be a minutes-long sequence of a woman staring forward and turning the wheels left and right. The music provides an urgency that the images, by themselves, might not fully provide.

 Although the soundtrack to Psycho is a classic, I think that the songs in Trainspotting engage the audience in a more complex way (also, Trainspotting would be more helpful to my current situation because I’m working in the realm of comedy). From the very beginning, with Iggy Pop’s upbeat “Lust for Life,” the audience is introduced to the happy-go-lucky lives of heroin addicts. The enthusiastic drum beats and the reckless, raspy voice of Iggy Pop already complicates the idea that “all drugs are bad, bad, bad.” The seemingly happy, carefree music is in harmony with the thesis of the “Choose life” soliloquy: “I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. The reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reason when you’ve got heroin?”

 Shortly after, when Renton tries to quit heroin using the “Lazy Boy Method,” the music hints to Renton’s eventual failure. Although “Habanera” from Carmen is, for some reason, an omnipresent piece in film, it serves a specific purpose in this film. It pokes fun at Renton’s attempt to overcome addiction, even though he appears hard-set on becoming free.

 My favorite song selection of this movie may be Underworld’s “Dark and Long (Dark Train),” which is played during Renton’s withdrawal hallucinations. The techno trance, sustained by syncopated percussions and a forward-driving, hypnotic motif, is extremely unsettling for a song that is not horror. It is as though the song is teasing Renton. The emotionless song contradicts the horrors that Renton experiences, most notably being a dead baby climbing his ceiling. The song is disorienting in its inhumanity and (if I may indulge in some bad poetry) elucidates the idea that drugs do not care about the people who abuse them. What makes the song even more thematically important is that it continues beyond the hallucination scene. It serves as the undercurrent when he goes to the hospital, plays bingo with elderly people, and visits a friend. The effects of heroin linger, even after the worst parts.

 Underworld’s “Born Slippy” may be the most popular song on the track list, and for good reason. Played during the last scenes of the movie, it is the only song in the soundtrack that communicates any semblance of sadness. The melody that undergirds the singer’s (seemingly) nonsensical lyrics carries a sense of longing and finality that later bleeds into a catchy drum beat when Renton steals the drug deal money from Begbie. It isn’t until the very end that the music resolves to its more emotional melody. Perhaps it is the sparseness of emotion in this song, as well as the sparseness of the emotion in the overall soundtrack that displaces the audience’s own emotional expectation. It seems as though the music doesn’t allow the audience to feel sad, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, it forces the audience to make sense of any perceived sadness while also making sense of the world of drug addicts.

 So.

 How can I apply these lessons learned from this highly nuanced movie soundtrack to my own film? I’m not sure. But a lot of Trainspotting has to do with subverting the audience’s expectation (in both sounds and images), so I may borrow that attribute to forge some sort of new creative avenue. This might mean perusing through more edgy, experimental music.

Use Your Imagination: Violations in Amélie (Tori)

When discussing films with my peers, a critique I have heard more than once is that someone did not like a film because it wasn’t realistic.  In fact, this is a critique I’ve heard about other art forms, too, such as novels, plays, and musicals.  This sort of criticism has always seemed problematic to me.  Why is it assumed that art forms are meant to be realistic?  Why do we care if art is true-to-life?  The 2001 French film Amélie, also known as Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, is decidedly unrealistic and thus provides the perfect case study when exploring these questions.

The audience is made acutely aware, from the very first few minutes of the film, that Amélie knows it is a film and does not pretend otherwise.  It sits itself very firmly on the avant garde end of the spectrum.  This is a sort of film of consciousness.  It is emphatically a story, and it is emphatically artistic.  At the very beginning of the film, the narrator explains that at a young age, “Deprived of playmates, slung between a neurotic and an iceberg, Amélie retreats into her imagination.” Amélie’s vivid imagination is crucial to her survival amidst a difficult home life.  It is only fitting that the audience is given a glimpse into that imaginary world, as well.  The result is a multitude of cinematic violations in which common conventions are routinely broken.  These violations are made in order to convey this deeply subjective, creative, dream-like experience of the world.    

One of the most commonly used cinematic violations in Amélie is a violation of a dramatic convention: the breaking of the fourth wall.  Characters in the film, particularly Amélie herself, are constantly looking directly at the camera in a sort of wink to the audience.  The film is seemingly trying to say that it knows the audience is there, and it is not going to pretend as if it doesn’t know it is being watched.  A perfect example of this comes near the beginning of the film, as the narrator explains: “In 48 hours, [Amélie’s] life will change forever.”  While this is being said, Amélie, knowingly, looks right at the camera.

Another example of this occurs at the very beginning of the film and poses some questions about the function of these cinematic violations within this particular film.  As the audience is first being introduced to the world of imagination Amélie has created for herself, the narrator explains: “In this world…the neighbor’s comatose wife has chosen to get all her life’s sleep in one go.”  Then, this woman, at first lying motionless in bed, sits up and says straight to the camera: “After this, I can stay awake day and night.”  Amélie’s imagination is the only way she is able to make sense of the complicated and confusing world she experiences.  This method of dealing with the world will continue throughout Amélie’s childhood and into adulthood.

There are countless other departures from cinematic conventions throughout this film that support this idea of the necessity of imagination in a world that can be so difficult to comprehend.  A violation of consensus reality is made when Amélie falls in love with a man named Nino, and we are given a shot of in which her heart can be seen beneath her clothing.  It beats visibly, and it glows.  When Amélie is upset, she watches TV and views her own funeral, with a huge crowd in attendance mourning her loss.  When Amélie undergoes a moment of realization, the screen becomes lighter and lighter until her image fades away; she is both literally and figuratively enlightened.  Additionally, practically every scene in this film is given a sort of green tint to it; thus imagination is quite literally depicted onscreen.

“If Amélie chooses to live in a dream and remain an introverted young woman, she has an absolute right to mess up her life!”  Though Amélie does, eventually, act on her feelings and begin a relationship with Nino, she does not ever leave the dream world she has inhabited her entire life that is visibly shown through these cinematic violations.  In the final scene, she and Nino ride happily along the streets of Paris.  There is still a greenish tint to the screen.  The scene is sped up, the camera shakes, the image is blurry, and Nino and Amélie even make faces directly at the camera.  Even after acting directly on her feelings and beginning a relationship with the man she loves, Amélie unapologetically remains a dreamer.

Amélie is undoubtedly unrealistic, like many other forms of art, but it is enjoyable not in spite of its unrealistic nature but because of it.  So I think the question isn’t whether a film is realistic or not, but why a film is realistic or not.  Does it make sense for a film to be unrealistic?  What is its purpose?  Is the film’s purpose to be realistic?  I believe Amélie’s purpose is to be an embodiment of imagination so the audience can truly understand what it is like to live in a dream-world.  So, yes, Amélie is unrealistic, and that’s exactly why I liked it.

It Did Happen Here, Part Two: Conformity and Violence in Fascist Governments (Conor)

    The November election of Donald Trump will undoubtedly prove to be one of the more significant events in recent American memory. We Americans are now standing in a unique place in history: we are living under a regime that inarguably has fascist characteristics and now must decide how best to face that threat. Films can give us both insights into fascism and the way it affects human beings and potential appropriate responses to fascism. This week I will be examining Come and See (1985, dir. Elem Klimov) and The Conformist (1970, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci) to examine the violent and non-violent strength of Fascism.

    Come and See is a profoundly dirty film. Everyone down to the last extra is absolutely caked in filth for the entire movie. The sound of buzzing flies and a profound sense of decay can be found in almost every scene. The effects of the German occupation of Belorussia on the bodies and souls of the peasants manifests itself through this filth; the evil perpetuated by the roaring tide of fascism is so extreme it makes the entire world unclean. Come and See is unique for its singularly accurate and unglorified depictions of the war on the eastern front. Civilians are massacred, an entire village is herded into a church then burned alive while a female SS officer eats lobster. There is no glory fighting for the Soviet partisans either; they are forced to steal from villagers and conscript young boys into their ranks just to survive. Worst of all they cannot protect Florya, the young protagonist, from the absolute horror and atrocity of the fascist occupation.

    The oppressiveness of the world in Come and See is largely expressed through the manipulation of sound. Dialogue in the film is often drowned out by sounds that would normally be insignificant background noises. When Florya and Glasha are eating in Florya’s house after the rest of village has been massacred, the sound of flies becomes so overpowering that it is almost impossible to hear anything else. The frantic unnaturalness of this effect mirrors the ever more frantic and deteriorating mental state of the characters. Similarly, an earlier scene uses an incredibly loud ringing noise, meant to mimic hearing loss after a bomb goes off, to show the total disorienting effect of violence on the protagonist. The overwhelming sounds amplify the feeling of helplessness and fear that permeate the entire film.

    The world of the film is constantly unpinned. Most of the camerawork is handheld and shaky, and many of depictions of the atrocities are done in long takes. The disorienting cinematography, the misplaced sounds, and even the appearance of the film itself–as it was shot on tape–all bely the intense distorting effect of fascism on the world of the villagers. Fascism is not some abstract evil for these people, it is destroying the physical and psychological fabric of their lives. The formal construction of the film constantly reminds its viewers of how devastating fascism is for a population. A captured SS officer tells the villagers to their faces that they must be eliminated: “some nations have no right to exist” he calmly explains to the faces of the survivors from a village freshly razed by the Nazis.

    Contrasted with this, The Conformist explores the nonviolent strength of fascism, and outlines a very different set of concerns regarding fascism than Come and See. The protagonist, Marcello Clerici, wants nothing more in his life than to be normal. The film often portrays him as an outcast, he is frequently following or spying on others, always looking from the outside in. He even marries a woman he does not especially care for just so he can raise a family in order to more closely conform to societal norms. This drive to go unnoticed and not upset the status quo traps him into becoming a fascist.

     The film expresses this largely through Clerici’s relationship to the setting, and more specifically to the fascist architecture of Italy. He is constantly going to meetings in enormous marble chambers that resemble giant mausoleums. The walls of these buildings are decorated with neoclassical Italian frescos and Italian Futurist murals, demonstrating the fascist obsession with a mystical past and the drive towards a more efficient and technical future. Clerici is completely dominated by these alien fascist landscapes. They limit his movement, ensuring he walks only in straight lines with a short, almost shuffling step. Fascism here enacts a subtler violence against the individual: instead of destroying the body it confines it and forces it to adhere to certain guidelines. Here Clerici’s will to conform can only result in his active collaboration with the fascist system. The desire not to upset the status quo can only result in explicit support for dominant fascist system.

    Because of this it is easy to condemn Clerici for ordering the assassination of his old college professor and his wife, a former prostitute who is also Clerici’s lover. Even though Clerici refuses to actively participate in the murder, leaving it up to his fascist cronies instead, his guilt is palpable. He may not have ordered the assassination, but he provided the assassins with the information they needed to get the job done. The film makes a strong statement that being involved with fascist bureaucracy is morally equivalent to murdering people in the name of fascism. Clerici’s desire to conform ultimately dooms him by associating him with the fascists. There are no innocents, even those who do not directly pull triggers are still equally complicit in fascist violence than those who do.

    Come and See lays out the explicit danger inherent to a fascist regime and shows how fascist atrocities destroy the physical and emotional lives of their victims. The Conformist reveals that those atrocities are only made possible through legions of otherwise innocent civilians who cooperate with fascism out of complacency or a desire to conform to social norms. The great violent evils that fascism is capable of are supported through the nonviolent desires of individuals to conform and be accepted.  The Trump administration has begun normalizing racist, xenophobic, and nationalistic behavior, and if the American people do not explicitly reject this behavior and continue protesting the rightward shift in America, they may become implicit supports of fascist violence.

Who Rules This Domain? (Tori)

    

    Followers of my posts must be acutely aware, at this point, of my love of theatre in addition to my love of film.  So, unsurprisingly, when I saw a class offered this semester called “Stage and Screen,” I added it to my cart immediately.  We started the semester by diving into some Shakespeare, and a few weeks ago we watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which is based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear.

    I could easily devote multiple blog posts to this one incredibly rich film.  In class we primarily discussed how an epic tale like King Lear can be adapted for the screen, taking into account factors like the storm, the madness of Lear, the massive-scale battles, etc.  What I was most interested in, however, was one particular character in the film whom we discussed briefly in class but whom I want to explore further.  What better place to do that than in a blog post?

    One of the most thought-provoking discrepancies between Ran and King Lear is a major gender-swap that occurs.  Instead of the king dividing up his kingdom amongst his three daughters as he does in the play, Hidetora divides his kingdom amongst his three sons in Ran.  When we initially discussed this modification before watching the film, I was apprehensive.  There is definitely some justification for making this choice.  Ran is set in Medieval Japan, in which men held immense power over women.  Yet I still found this choice problematic, as the daughters are so central to my vision of anything remotely based upon King Lear.  Additionally, the other Kurosawa films I’ve seen, Seven Samurai and Rashomon, are also both male-dominated, and I was frustrated by the fact that Ran, with this gender-swap, looked like it was moving in the same direction.  However, my frustration did not last long.  Ran definitely is dominated in quantity by male characters, but Kurosawa actually does give authority to women through his implementation of a female character who I would argue is an extremely powerful and intriguing character.

    Lady Kaede is the wife of Taro, Hidetora’s oldest son.  From her very first appearance in the film, we become aware of the extreme power she has with words.  It is after Taro has moved into the First Castle in the kingdom to assume his position as head of the house of Ichimonji that we first meet Lady Kaede.  Hidetora has just made the announcement that he will be dividing his land among his sons due to his old age, yet he will keep his title as king.  We encounter Lady Kaede sitting on the floor in the middle of the throne room, staring into space.  The different levels in this scene stand out immediately; Kaede’s positioning almost makes her look subservient in the presence of Taro, who stands.  She immediately inquires as to the whereabouts of a banner that used to hang in the throne room.  This banner is in the possession of Hidetora.  Taro explains that he gave the banner to his father’s men when Hidetora gave Taro the First Castle.  Lady Kaede says simply “My Lord, it belongs with the head of the house of Ichimonji.”  Taro responds: “But Father is keeping his title and insignia.”  Kaede explains: “Without [it], you are a shadow.”  Taro answers, confused: “What do you mean?  He made it clear that I am now in command.”  Kaede answers, “In that case, behave as if you are” and swiftly leaves the room without another word.  Taro remains, and it is clear that Kaede’s words have resonated deeply with him.  Upon Kaede's exit, he quickly stands up and runs from the room to give the order to his men to seize this banner from his father.  It does not seem as if Lady Kaede would have any authority in this scene.  She sits throughout and is thus situated in the very bottom corner of the frame; she takes up almost no space.  Additionally, she makes no eye contact with her husband at any point; she merely stares into space.  Yet, it is her words that set the entire story in motion.  It is only after this moment that Taro becomes power-hungry and begins to take away the little power Hidetora left for himself upon the division of his territory.  And this is only Kaede’s first scene. 

    In subsequent scenes, her masterful way with words only grows; she blackmails, maims, and seduces her husband’s brother and slowly usurps the entire Ichimonji family.  She functions as a sort of Lady Macbeth character within this King Lear narrative, yet I actually think her character is more fully developed than Lady Macbeth because of the clear motivation for the evil acts she enacts.  We learn throughout the film that Hidetora killed her entire family; thus, her motivation is to enact revenge.  Towards the end of the film, she is beheaded, but she has done what she set out to do.  Though again only occupying a small portion of the frame, she forcefully declares her final words: “My sole desire was to avenge my family by watching the house of Ichimonji fall and seeing this castle burn.”

    Ran is a very long film, and Kaede does not get very much screen-time as the trials of Hidetora are explored.  Then, when she is onscreen, she often takes up only a small portion of the frame, and she is almost always shown sitting.  She is even sitting when she is killed.  Yet she still manages to achieve immense power over the men in the film through her words.  As a general says at one point in the film to Taro’s brother: “Who rules this domain?  You or Lady Kaede?”  Though Ran is, once again, a male-dominated film in terms of quantity, this film proves that women are capable of being powerful, even in the immensely patriarchal society that is feudal Japan.

My first, and favorite, female superhero (Madison)

The superhero is having a moment. Some readers of this blog might say that this particular moment is lasting a little too long; one can’t throw a stone without hitting a spandex suited savior these days, on both the big screen and the small (e.g. The Avengers, Supergirl, Batman vs. Superman, Daredevil, to name just a few). The genre is well on its way to feeling stale, and has long been plagued by (rightful) accusations of sexism (where, where, where is our Black Widow movie?!) and racism (the whitewashing of Asian characters has been particularly relevant of late, with Doctor Strange and Ghost in the Shell emerging on the scene). And one has to wonder; does Hollywood have anything new to offer us?

Yet, for all of this, we keep tuning in (the season 1 finale of Supergirl garnered 6.1 million viewers; The Avengers grossed $1.52 billion at the box office). I’ll admit, I love a good superhero flick; if I’m cynical of Hollywood’s heroes, I’m also under their sway (I was one of the 6.1 million watching Supergirl).

So, when I found myself without anything to watch, I turned to what might be one of the foundations of today’s obsession, and the first superhero I remember from my childhood; Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is different than the heroes we see on screen today; indeed, some might not call her a superhero at all (where is her costume? Where are the spaceships, the ray guns?) But when I was a kid, she was TV’s woman of steel. I was born too late for Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, and the more fully rendered heroines of recent media—Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch—were a long time coming. Buffy (whose show ran from 1997-2003) was part of the cultural landscape I grew up in, and made a space for complex female heroes like Jessica Jones to fill in the years following.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I was both too young and too cowardly to really follow the show when it was playing (I was only two when it premiered; I was frightened by an episode of Hey Arnold that featured a cartoon vampire). But Buffy was a presence in my life; my best friend in middle and high school watched it obsessively, and I recall many a sleepover spent with my head under the covers, cowering from the demons on screen. And when, a week ago, I asked a friend what series I should start watching she said, without hesitating, “Buffy. You’re a feminist; it’s basically required.”

Even beginning my viewing as a woman in 2017 who has watched (dare I say endured) a surfeit of superheroes, I’m captivated by Buffy Summers. In a week I’ve seen 26 episodes, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule. I have been thinking about what makes Buffy such a cultural cornerstone. It’s not the special effects (the 90’s era CGI is quaint at best, painful at worst, making the monsters less threatening than they might be), nor, admittedly, the show’s sense of pace; the episodes often introduce seemingly apocalyptic obstacles, worry over them for thirty-five minutes, then wrap them up with two minutes of hand-to-hand combat, sending their heroes back into the halls of Sunnydale High to reflect on their latest sweethearts or homework assignments. A sense of suspense is often noticeably lacking (particularly when one doesn’t have to wait a week between episodes, a fault of my own consumption rather than of Joss Whedon’s direction).

Yet there is something compelling about the fast-talking, stake yielding Buffy (played with panache by Sarah Michelle Gellar) that is worth watching, even if one has wearied of world-savers. Part of the appeal is that the stakes (hah) feel real, here, in a way that they don’t in the sanitized world of Disney’s Marvel universe or the CW’s National City. The violence, while often aimed at monsters we know to be less-than-human, is almost always shown rather than implied. The heroine even, at times, takes a perverse pleasure in causing pain (Season 2, Episode 11 sees Buffy giving a vamp a protracted beating after having walked in on her mother making out with a slimy new boyfriend; she enthusiastically slices into a 7-foot-tall praying mantis long after it is dead Season 1, Episode 4).

When a villain is killed, they are not whisked off-screen; they are stabbed to death in front of us. It’s true that they dissolve into ash, bloodless, but the camera takes a fierce joy in the moment a ghoul is staked. Each fight scene is the delaying of that gratifying moment when our heroine snaps some sign post in half and plunges it into her enemy’s chest.

The self-conscious sexualization of the protagonist also makes this series an interesting watch. Buffy has undoubtedly become a feminist icon—and Whedon intended her to be, wanting to subvert the trope of the blonde slasher-film victim—but she is also a conventionally attractive (slim, white) woman performing roundhouse kicks in high heeled boots and mini-skirts. That is, she performs normative femininity while embodying a masculinized form of power (namely, physical strength and a preternatural ability to kick ass); this is no witch, that icon of feminine power, nor is her gift one of shapeshifting or laser vision. What she does is go blow for blow in fist fights with the undead. It’s an emphatically physical power, perhaps more masculinized even than Superman’s—after all, Buffy isn’t immune to bullets, and she can’t fly. She’s super merely by merit of her grit and her ability to square up. And she does it all with a fresh coat of lip gloss to boot.

If Buffy smacks of a man’s fantasy girl it’s because, in a sense, she is. Her creator, Joss Whedon, is quoted by Patricia Pender in her book I’m Buffy and You’re History as saying, “I definitely think a woman kicking ass is extraordinarily sexy, always… if I wasn’t compelled on a very base level by that archetype I wouldn’t have created that character.” And it can’t be ignored that some of the combat has erotic undertones; Buffy is repeatedly choked, tied up, threatened with sharp teeth against her exposed, lily-white neck.

This is one of the more uncomfortable parts of watching the slayer: after all, she’s just a girl. More of a girl, even, than our modern Supergirl (today’s Kara Zor-El comes with an office job and well-furnished loft). Buffy is sixteen at the series’ beginning, a sophomore in high school. The pleasure viewers take in watching her lithe fighter’s form is complicated by the fact of her youth; and when she starts dating a 250-year-old vampire, we naturally feel a little strange about it.

Yet her girlishness is also part of the series’ appeal; Buffy’s charm lies how relatable the eponymous lead is. She isn’t the sunny, saccharine Supergirl, nor is she the brooding, tortured Batman; she’s more or less an average sixteen-year-old. She is unaccountably moody sometimes; she gets jealous when her best friend starts hanging out with someone new; she bickers with her mother. For the first time, with the advent of the Slayer, a typical teenage girl is cast as super. It is enough for Buffy to be just who she is, and occasionally kill a vamp or two. The series developed a cult following, and retains its place in the cultural lexicon, because it allows teenage girls to see themselves on screen and in power.

And I know I’m only scratching the surface; soon, I’m told, there will be lesbian witches, advice on leaving an abusive relationship, and a guide through the grieving process. But halfway through season 2, I’m already sold. If the superhero is having a moment, let it linger. And if you’re disenchanted by the current offerings, I suggest taking a look behind you; Buffy won’t disappoint.

Audience's Thirst for Retribution (Jaeyoung)

   

 SPOILER ALERT: Middle part of Moonlight discussed.

    When it comes to watching movies in the theaters, audience participation is strongly encouraged in movies such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (“WHY THE F*CK IS THERE A BILLBOARD IN THE MIDDLE OF A CEMETERY!?”). It’s funny, it’s bawdy, and everyone’s having a good time.

   And then there are films like Oscar Best Picture Winner Moonlight, where audience participation should exist solely within the silent, emotional dimension of one’s soul. In other words, no one should be talking at any point in time.

   Of course, human beings are imperfect, so at least some verbal litter is inevitable. However, when I watched Moonlight a couple weeks ago, one person’s comment irked me so much that I wanted to scream.

   It happened in the middle of the movie, when Chiron becomes lost in a fit of fury and approaches his bully during class. This bully has turned his lover and friend against him and forced him to lose the one glimmer of hope in his sad, oppressive life. Thus, he betrays his gentler character and becomes the monster he’s been running from. He picks up a chair and strikes his adversary on the head, dolefully indulging in the violence that characterizes his society.

   And then from behind me, a stupid, gleeful “yes!” is uttered from someone’s mouth.

   My (elitist) blood boiled. Whoever it was that said this obviously missed the emotional significance of this scene and mistook it for a cheap revenge sequence. This is not that kind of movie! It annoys me to this day, how one person’s knee-jerk reaction pulled me out of the exceedingly tragic denouement of the second act.

   However, I should be fair. After all, aren’t the audience conditioned to respond in this way? Whether violent justice is an innate human desire is a matter for philosophers. But with movies like Kill Bill and Gladiator (both awesome films, don’t get me wrong) making their mark on the public conscious, aren’t audience members wired to desire the violent end of a villain?

   The answer is yes, at least in the eyes of film production studios. Take, for example, Taken. In order to exploit this animalistic response, they pit child sex traffickers as the bad guys, which basically sets up a premise close to the Nazi-killing genre: aggressive violence that is unquestioned and justified. Consumers are able to completely indulge in ass-kicking and throat-slitting without having to weigh any sort of moral repercussions. We crave Liam Neeson’s murderous rampage, and the more pain the child sex traffickers feel, the more endorphin pulse through our veins.

   I suppose Taken would be the one revenge film I could think of right now that is unforgivable with regards to violence (I think I became a truly worse individual coming out of it). Smarter films utilize revenge to achieve something beyond just base pleasures. For example, John Wick utilizes revenge to drive forward its ultra-stylistic action sequences. Inglorious Basterds utilizes revenge to develop a plot that ultimately criticizes the audience for their blood lust. Gladiator utilizes revenge to explore not only Maximus’ character, but also that of Commodus, who is undeniably evil yet heart-wrenchingly pitiful.

   But even when revenge is given intelligent treatment, it cannot mask the prevalence of audience blood thirst. Even in Netflix’s Daredevil, where the main villains are given incredibly sensible characterization, there are countless scenes where shady henchmen are beat up gratuitously and mercilessly. In this case, it is impossible not to pander to the audience’s thirst for violence; logistically, the show can’t go through each henchman and assign deep human characterizations.

   Therefore, is it possible to reverse this trend? I don’t think so. Even smart revenge films will continue to be misconstrued by many as being “awesomely violent” (as opposed to “violently awesome”), and studios will continue milking that cow because of capitalism, etc. For many movies, violence will continue to be their main selling point.

   Moonlight, of course, is nowhere close to being a revenge film. Yet, I am pushed to believe that the conditioned responses perpetuated by these types of movies made its way to the theater those weeks ago. Perhaps I should be more forgiving and try to understand why that person said, “Yes!” Maybe she said this because, mistaking aggression for assertion, she believed that Chiron was finally standing up for himself. Maybe if I had asked her why she responded in this manner, she could explain exactly what was going on in her head. Maybe, if I pressed on, she might apologize for caving in to the wide-spread audience blood-thirst that the film industry has hooked society on. Who knows.

   Or how about this: maybe, we should all remind ourselves that some movies are not Rocky Picture Horror Show and that people should keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves when they are at the movie theater.

A Fortunate Decision (Tori)

I know it’s always a bad idea to start watching a new TV show during the semester, particularly during a week riddled with midterms and essays.  Yet recently I started watching Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and I’m immensely grateful I made that unfortunate decision.  

The show, based on the popular children’s books of the same name, follows the trials of three siblings: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire.   After the death of their parents, they are taken in by the malicious Count Olaf—a man driven by greed as he attempts to usurp the Baudelaire fortune left to Violet when she comes of age.  I remember reading the first book in elementary school and then trying to check out the other 12 all at the same time because I was so eager to find out what would happen next to the three orphans.  So, of course, I was very interested in the Netflix television series when it was announced, and it did not let me down.  The show manages to be both hilarious and heinous simultaneously.  This juxtaposition is best seen through Neil Patrick Harris’ characterization of Count Olaf.  He is ridiculous and theatrical at some points and abusive and frightening at others.  The way this show is able to blend the scary and the silly is masterful. 

The show’s premise isn’t out of the ordinary: three children, mistreated by adults in their lives, must prevail in the face of adversity.  It reminds me of a Matilda vs. Miss Trunchbull or Annie vs. Miss Hannigan story; we are not strangers to the theme of children vs. oppressive adults in literature and film.  Yet I would argue that this show is still extraordinary due to the narrative and visual choices made to bring the series' pages to life.

The books themselves are narrated by their author, “Lemony Snicket,” who sets up the story at the very beginning and is consistently appearing and reappearing, offering everything from warnings to anecdotes to vocabulary lessons.  This feature poses the difficult and extremely important question of how to handle Lemony Snicket’s presence onscreen.  The decision made was to cast an actor as Lemony Snicket who would make frequent appearances onscreen in order to incorporate Snicket’s clever quips seamlessly throughout the episode.  Thus, like Lemony Snicket’s narration in the novels, he commences the story and is consistently popping up.  Using Lemony Snicket in this way, rather than employing some other technique like a voiceover narrator, was the only way to portray this function of the novel really accurately.  A voiceover, though it would function similarly, would take away from Lemony Snicket’s character by making him seem omniscient.  While that choice works for many films and TV shows, it is crucial to A Series of Unfortunate Events that Snicket is not just an all-knowing, nameless, invisible voice but a subjective character with thoughts, ideas, and motives. 

The design elements are just as key to the success of the show as the choice to portray Lemony Snicket as a narrator.  The design of the show is almost cartoon-like; for example, the contrast between Justice Strauss’ bright, colorful, welcoming, immaculate home that is the embodiment of good and Count Olaf’s dark, crumbling, haunted mansion that is the embodiment of evil right across the street could not be more stark.  In a show devoted to the power of children, this design is perfect because it gives the viewer a sense of unrestrained childlike wonder in which extremities are not avoided and something like a house can feel truly good or evil.            

As an English major and a life-long lover of reading, I sometimes get nervous when novels are adapted for the screen.  It can be frustrating to see a world you’ve envisioned in such detail in your head come to life in a way you did not imagine; then that film-world is what you see in your head every time you come back to the novel.  I was concerned about all of this when watching A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I shouldn’t have been.  Through the narrative and visual choices made, the world of the Netflix series was just what I imagined the Baudelaires' world would look like in my mind when reading the books in third grade.  So, maybe, in retrospect, I should have waited to start watching this show and avoided the late nights it spurred.  However, this is one of those shows that’s worth it.

It Did Happen Here: Now What? (Conor)

 

    The November election of Donald Trump will undoubtedly prove to be one of the more significant events in recent American memory. We Americans are now standing in a unique place in history: we are living under a regime that inarguably has fascist characteristics and now must decide how best to face that threat. It is absolutely critical that in the very near future we develop strategies for coping with the damage the Trump administration has already done, mitigating the future damage he has planned to cause, and ensuring that something like this cannot happen in America again for a very long time. Looking films that deal with the rise of fascism and responses to it can provide us with interesting and topical information on how best to understand and respond to the fascism presented to us in the present day.

    A Face in the Crowd (1957 dir. Elia Kazan) offers a sobering and realistic take on the potential rise of a fascist or proto-fascist leader. Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes is a fiery blues and country artist who, upon being discovered in prison by a small radio program uses his considerable rhetorical and musical talent to grow his influence and power to extreme heights. The film portrays Rhodes slide into Fascism in a brutal and unflinching way. Easily the most relevant and disturbing aspect of his transition is how silently every other character in the film takes it. Anthony Franciosa’s Joey DePalma best voices this frustrating inaction in a short piece of dialogue towards the end of the film: “all those months he was calling me ‘Vanderbilt ‘44’ and ‘Frontal Lobe’, I should’ve been punching him in the nose”. But DePalma does not punch Lonesome and so he is free to continue spewing his vitriol on the public airwaves.

    DePalma plans to reveal the truth about Rhodes in a book he is writing, but even this proves insufficient. It is Lonesome’s poor manipulated manager/girlfriend Marcia Jeffries who takes him down by directly interfering with his show, exposing him to the masses for what he really is. Even then Marcia’s responses to Rhodes earlier in the film are so detestable that her final action is not nearly enough to absolve her. When she is trying to rationalize her tacit acceptance of fascism to DePalma she finally remarks: “and well, there’s an awful lot of money at stake”. Jeffries and DePalma allow Rhodes to continue on his trajectory because it is profitable to them. At the end of the day, Marcia’s desire to stay with Rhodes in order to help reign in his wilder impulses only enables Rhodes to grow to further and further heights. The film condemns both Rhodes and the milquetoast response to his growing influence. Collaborating with fascists, even in an attempt to control them, is hardly a worthwhile pursuit. Think of how easily the democratic party and the #nevertrump republicans folded and either demanded that the public give Trump a chance or ended up voting to appoint his disastrous cabinet choices. This is a perfect example of precisely what the film warns against: you cannot expect to reform fascism from the inside, and that anyone who collaborates with a totalitarian government is ultimately doing it out of their own self-interest and cannot be trusted to lead any sort of effective political resistance to fascism. Going with the flow, or attempting to keep out of trouble tacitly supports the status quo; when the status quo is dangerously nationalistic, xenophobic, oppressive, and violent then supporting it is one of the most dangerous things anyone could do.

    Casablanca (1942 dir. Michael Curtiz) provides a much more concrete example of acceptable responses to fascist or totalitarian regimes. The antagonists in the film are literal Nazis, so there are absolutely no disguised or muddied definitions here: they are explicitly fascist. Like A Face in the Crowd, most of the people appear to tacitly accept the existence of fascism. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick spends most of the film trying to keep his head low. He profits directly from the terror the Nazi’s inflict on the refugees there by selling them exit visas despite his history as a committed anti-fascist. Captain Renault is far, far worse, using his position of influence and power to extort money and sex from helpless refugees while not hesitating to sell any of them out to the Germans.

    However, there is a much stronger undercurrent of rebellion in Casablanca than in either of the other films. Rick’s jaded cynicism is eliminated by his connections with other human beings, most notable Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund and Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo. Laszlo, an escapee from a German concentration camp, is open about his desire to escape occupied Europe so he can more effectively lead resistance against the Nazis; he continually acts in the best interests of the oppressed even when it endangers his life. It is Laszlo’s revolutionary conviction and Ilsa’s profound love for others that convince Rick to take the fight to the fascists. Rather than be cowed or act in his own self-interest Rick risks his life to ensure that the resistance leader can escape and in a striking act of moral fortitude he does not hesitate to shoot the Nazi Major Strasser when he attempts to interfere.

    While Rick does delay in deciding to help fight, it is only for a few days and not for a few years like in A Face in the Crowd. Bogart identifies the fascist menace and takes the necessary steps to ensure that it is weakened. In the face of a more and more tyrannical state Casablanca reminds viewers of the power of human connection and interaction. In essence, Casablanca proves the necessity of strong personal action in the face of fascism while remembering that these actions are more effective if they are organized and directed. By betraying the fascists, Rick immediately joins a huge community of others who oppose fascism. Even the crooked Renault is somewhat absolved by Bogart’s cleansing violence. He orders his men to carry Strasser’s body away without reporting Rick, putting his responsibility to fight fascism above his own desire for personal greed.

    In order to effectively combat Trump’s fascism, we will need to place our own moral responsibility over many of our other desires. As Casablanca and A Face in the Crowd suggest, if you are not actively making trouble for the fascist state you are implicitly supporting it. There is no longer an option to stay uninvolved, you either openly oppose fascism and are willing to organize against it or you tacitly support fascism by supporting the fascist status quo. Trump’s America is both cruel in its message like Lonesome Rhodes’ television shows, and oppressive in its action like the Vichy regime in Casablanca. Effective resistance can only be achieved through concrete organization with other people and a willingness to engage fascism not just within the system but outside of it too. It is not enough to, like Marcia Jeffries or Joey DePalma, let fascist action slide in order to avoid making waves or losing money. Trump is a bully; he is obviously smart enough to manipulate an enormous part of the country to support him and his message is increasingly violent and dangerous. In order to oppose him it is imperative that we act more like the active and organized heroes of Casablanca and take the fight directly to fascism every day and in every way we can.

When Tragedy Becomes Entertainment (Tori)

   

    When I first heard about the movie Patriots Day, I was shocked.  As a proud Bostonian, the horrific events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon have a personal effect on me, and I was appalled when I heard that a film recounting the attack and its aftermath was going to be made.  There were people who wanted to use those terrifying few days as entertainment?  Less than four years after the event took place?  Spectators re-living a real attack that took and changed lives forever?  I remember that day so clearly.  I remember thinking how unreal it seemed; how it was as if real life had become a film as my family watched the news and listened to sirens blazing and stayed locked down in our home as a manhunt took place.  I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a movie.  It was real.  It was frightening and disturbing and actually happening.

    Now, it is important to note that I have not actually seen Patriots Day, nor do I know anybody who has seen it, and though I find the link between tragedy and entertainment interesting and thought-provoking, I will not watch this film.  That this painfully real event was turned into a movie so quickly doesn’t seem right to me.  It’s as if the creation of a film could diminish the actual event, as real people are made into characters, and horrifying actions are accompanied by background music and artistic cinematography.  But this is certainly not the first film to depict a tragedy.  In fact, this sort of thing happens all the time, and it is not something I always find so disturbing.  Why is this?  Is it just because of my more personal connection to the marathon bombing?  Is it ever okay to link tragic events with entertainment? 

    Over winter break, I saw a musical called The Scottsboro Boys at the SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston that raised many of these same questions.  The 2010 musical, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, composers and lyricsts of other renowned shows such as Chicago and Cabaret, tells the true story of nine black teenagers in Alabama who were sentenced to death in 1931 for the rape of two white women—a crime they did not commit.  I was actually unfamiliar with this particular story, something I now find appalling, as it is such an important one to know and is thought to have been a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.  At the same time, the story is horrifically familiar, as it is reminiscent of modern day injustice for black men in the court of law.  I found it particularly evocative of the infamous Central Park Five/Central Park Jogger case of 1989.  I received tickets to this show as a Christmas present, and honestly, upon entering the theater, I was very unsure what I was about to see. 

    Musical theater does so many things.  It can provide a means of escape from everyday life.  It can capture you in nostalgia.  It can transport you to faraway places and it can be uplifting and poignant.  But I had never before seen a musical based entirely upon a horrific, disturbing, and, most importantly, true tragedy.  The musical is told through the medium of a minstrel show, a choice that is controversial and provocative given the long history of terrible racism against African-Americans in that particular genre of performance.  The show features big dance and song numbers and on paper sounds as though it could be extremely offensive and destined to be a massive failure.  But, in my opinion, it somehow works.  This musical punches you right in the stomach in the way that it confronts this tragedy in an extremely creative, thoughtful, and heartbreaking way.  It is consistently demands self-reflection.  It asks a plethora of questions—questions about the truth in regard to race (one chilling line that has stuck with me ever since I saw the show was when a lawyer states: “you’re guilty because of the way that you look”).  It asks questions about what it means to be free in the world and in your own mind.  It asks questions about ingrained prejudice and bias in each and every one of us.  This show is truly impossible to accurately convey in words because of the constantly conflicting emotions it incites in you.  The Scottsboro Boys  is so much more than a retelling of a tragic event.  It starts crucial conversations about the long history of racism present in our country.  The music is fantastic, and the choreography is stellar, but you are simultaneously loving it and hating it. 

    Those who know me are familiar with my adoration of musical theater.  Throughout my 19 years, I have managed to see and listen to a multitude of different musicals, and each one has affected me in its own, unique way.  But I can easily say that The Scottsboro Boys provided me with the most profound musical theater experience I have ever had.  However, it is true that what the Scottsboro boys went through is not something I ever have to or ever will have to worry about happening to me.  As a white woman, can I even decide that this musical is justified?  I’m not sure I can.  But I do think that condemning a show like The Scottsboro Boys would prevent crucial conversations from being held.  It would stop people from gaining a better understanding of the tragedy of racial injustice in America.

    So maybe I have misjudged Patriots Day.  It is certainly important to keep these types of stories alive through film and performance and to use these stories to better the world in which we live.  Often people forget what entertainment is capable of doing and how powerful it can really be.  It’s great to go see a film or a musical and forget about your life for a while, as you focus only on the characters and the fictionalized world you see in front of you.  But these types of art forms are capable of so much more.  They can make you think profoundly and painfully.  They can hold up a mirror to reveal the injustices in our world.  They can pose questions so poignant and powerful that you can’t stop thinking about them.  The Scottsboro Boys does all of this.  I’m not sure about Patriots Day, but perhaps it does, too.  The connection between tragedy and entertainment is always going to make me a bit uneasy, but if done right, it can provide a means of improving ourselves and our world.   

The Perfect Electric Man (Conor)

    The fundamental question that Videodrome (1983 dir. David Cronenberg) is concerned with is a question that naturally arises from increased interaction between humans and machines: what are the limits of the human subject? Are the machines that human beings rely on effectively a part of humanity? In a world where the average American watches multiple hours of television a day is it fair to assume that the television has moved beyond simply being a source of entertainment and that it now can be considered a part of human beings no different from their own brains?

    Max Renn, the protagonist is representative of an archetypal film or television audience. His constant urge to observe reflect the voyeurism inherent in any film audience. The camera itself moves through the movie like an unseen stalker, forcing the actual audience to approach the film with the same perverted intensity that Renn does. By making the audience to respond to the film the same way Renn responds to Videodrome, Chronenberg is exploring how persuasive film and television really are.  The audience ironically considers how much of Renner’s thoughts are his own because of thoughts the film has planted in their minds.

    In this light, some of the fear that Videodrome inspires is based around the realiziation that there is no functional difference to Renn whether his thoughts are his own or not. As Jack Creley’s Brian O’Blivion himself says, “there is nothing real outside of our perception of reality”. Good science fiction should examine questions of how changing technology would affect humankind, and Cronenberg’s is no exception. He is taking a critical look at the relationships between modern media and the very idea of human identity. The TV, Cronenberg implies, may as well physically be a part of the human brain.

    The uncomfortable meshing of man and machine is expressed through the uncomfortable violation of Renn’s own body. The disgusting slit in his stomach that allows him to receive programming via VHS tapes is a physical representation of how television influences audiences.  The sometimes gratuitous special effects Cronenberg employs become physical representations of the anxiety of losing personal individuality that permeate the film. The constant deforming and violation of the human form represents the same ideological defilement that occurs when human beings allow machines to become such an integral part of their everyday lives.

    Ultimately Cronenberg’s film is both cautious and pessimistic. On one hand, he implores the audience to think critically about the effect of introducing media machines into such a large part of their lives but on the other hand he recognizes that it is pointless to attempt to differentiate the human and the machine. While the anxiety towards so drastically altering the human subject is well placed, it is pointless because there is absolutely nothing to be done to prevent the television from becoming an integral part of human thought. Videodrome is a rare film which uses the pure metaphysical pathos inherent to the medium of film to create a warning about how powerful that pathos really is.

Trains, and Where They Take Us (Jaeyoung)

 

  [SPOILERS AHEAD]

 As someone who lives somewhat far from campus, I am no stranger to long hours on public transportation. The trip between Baltimore and Massachusetts takes ten hours by bus, which is quite tedious. But it also gives me a lot of time to reflect (and nap). And every now and again, my brain asks me this question (probably primed by the fact that I’m on a moving bus): “Where am I going in life?”

 And I would respond, “I don’t know, what does that question even mean? Next question.”

 However, in the Korean films, Train to Busan and Snowpiercer, the idea of direction is crucial. Given that these films involve a train and a destination, it is not surprising that they both approach this theme. But Train to Busan is pretty blunt with this, as we already know from the title that the protagonists are trying to reach Busan… by train. Now the question this film poses is how this journey shapes the characters: their emotional direction. And if I could be perfectly honest, I don't think that's very interesting of a question.

 To be fair, I should note that Train to Busan is a zombie film; therefore, it is somewhat confined by and borrows from other movies of that genre. The behavior of the zombies is strikingly similar to that of World War Z (fast and maniacal), and it delves into the same ethical dilemma explored by The Walking Dead (who do we let survive, and who is part of our people?). But to its credit, it does break from other zombie films in that it invokes a lot of class-conflict overtones.

 Perhaps the most pertinent example of this comes from the interactions between Seok-woo, a young hedge fund manager, and Sang-hwa, a gruff but charismatic every-man. Their first encounter isn’t pleasant; as Sang-hwa is being chased by zombies, Seok-woo initially decides to sacrifice him for the safety of everyone else. There is a shot where Seok-woo looks like a heartless corporate monster. And then he has a change of heart and lets him in, only for Sang-hwa to scold, “All of you people are the same.”

 But this is exactly the trap Train to Busan falls into: generic characterization. Seok-woo is the yuppie with the heart of gold. His daughter is the innocent “eyes” through which we see a cruel world. Sang-hwa is the masculine comic relief. The list goes on, with a Romeo and Juliet-esque young couple, an unfeeling, dogmatic middle-aged man who serves as the antagonist, and many more in this cornucopia of archetypes.

 And the development of these characters builds like this; Seok-woo, who is only slightly caring in the beginning of the movie, becomes very caring by the end. The young couple, who were flirting in the beginning, die and become zombies together. The antagonist, who is mean in the beginning, becomes even meaner by the climax. Therefore, the direction of this film follows the same predictable manner the title does (and in the way most blockbuster films do). It has a Newtonian storyline, where the force manifests as zombies while objects manifest as the characters.

 In Snowpiercer, we are also led to believe that the story will follow a unidirectional story. In this film, humanity is contained in a single train that is protecting it from an icy post-apocalyptic world. The train is divided into two main parts: the upper class and the “scum” in the tail cars. The story follows Curtis Everett, who leads the tail-car-people in a revolutionary struggle to the front engine. The plot is simple enough.

 But the plot isn’t everything; as Curtis and his crew advance, each compartment is carefully observed; from the vanity of the garden to the debauchery of the dance club, every aspect of human livelihood is carefully recorded. In addition, every loss of life is significant, as Curtis places the burden on himself. Each step becomes harder and weirder as the crew encounters a crueler and wilder world.

 It is evident, then, that director Bong Joon-ho doesn’t just settle for character development. Instead, he allows their environment to change too, creating a dynamic relationship between the train and the revolutionaries.

 And, it turns out, the Snowpiercer is not unidirectional. When Curtis finally reaches the Front Engine, Minister Wilford, the creator and caretaker of the engine, subverts both Curtis’ and audience’s expectation by ceding power to him. Curtis realizes that even if he were in power, nothing about the violent system would change; order and balance is far stronger than any human emotion. And as the perpetual motion engine continues to revolve, the film reveals that Curtis hasn’t reached the finish line. He has only made a full circle, ending up in essentially the same place.

 However, Snowpiercer presents yet another direction with Namgoong Minsu (a security expert) and his daughter, Yona are presented. Namgoong continually reminds Yona to be aware of the outside world, what lies outside the window. While everyone else is focused on what’s happening inside the train, Namgoong has the acuity to see that the world is becoming habitable. Since the train completely derails by the end, destroying the microcosm everyone has been so obsessed about, Namgoong’s prescience prevails. If anybody “wins” in this movie, it is those who (literally) think outside the box. Perhaps this could be a lesson for other filmmakers.

 Now let me ask myself the question I posed in the beginning of this entry: “Where am I going in life?”

 My current answer: “Forward, and then some.”

Whom Do You Trust? (Tori)

(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Whom do you trust?  Do you trust your friends?  Your family?  Classmates?  Professors?  Politicians?  How about the films you watch?  Do you think you can trust them?

The films Rashomon, The Usual Suspects, and Atonement each deal with this question of trust between the audience and the film in their own, unique way.  However, all three coincide in the way they force the realization that the audience is all too willing to trust what it sees.  Why is it that the camera is able to so easily convince us that we are witnessing the truth?

The great Akira Kurosawa's renowned 1950 film Rashomon provides the perfect jumping off point to delve into this question, as the film's impact is truly remarkable.  For example, it coined the term "the rashomon effect," which is a psychological concept used to describe the phenomenon when one occurrence is perceived in distinct ways by different witnesses.  The film follows three men: a woodcutter, a priest, and a commoner, as they discuss the case of a murdered samurai; the two men assert that they have never heard "such a strange story."  The woodcutter claims to have found the body of the murdered man, and the priest claims to have seen the samurai earlier walking with his wife in the woods.  Thus, the two were brought into court to testify.  There, they witness the testimonies of the particulars surrounding the murder, first from a "notorious bandit," Tajomaru, then from the wife of the samurai, and then from the samurai himself, speaking through a medium.  Each character introduces his or her story, and then the camera cuts to what initially seems like a flashback, but actually proves to just be a visual aid to the story they tell, accompanied by a voiceover narration of their testimony.  Eventually, the voiceover stops, and the audience becomes fully immersed in the world of their story.  As each testimony begins and ends, you find yourself believing whichever version of the story you are watching and hearing, yet they cannot all be true.  After the third testimony, the woodcutter reveals that his initial account of the discovery of the body was a lie; he claims that he actually saw the murder take place, as well, but pretended he did not in order to stay out of the situation.  An objective truth is never revealed; the audience remains lost at the end, unsure of which story is true, or if any of the stories are true.  Overall, this film provides the perfect introduction to understanding the power of the narrator, as the film suggests that stories depend wholly on the person telling them.  Thus, it is the narrator who has the ultimate power to determine the truth of the film for the audience.

The 1995 film The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer, plays brilliantly with this fact—that the narrator has an extraordinary power over the audience.  This film has a non-linear chronology, jumping around in time as the events of a bloody raid on a boat come to light.  This raid was carried out by five criminals, led by a former police officer named Dean Keaton, under the orders of a man named Keyser Söze, a criminal mastermind who is unknown to all.  The facts of the crime, and everything leading up to it, are all revealed to us in the present by one of these five criminals, Verbal Kint, one of the two survivors of the horrific battle.  The story is told to us through flashbacks and voiceover as we once again become fully immersed in the narrative.  It is difficult to describe in words exactly how brilliant the structure of this story is; the audience is constantly thrown back and forth in time, trying to piece together the different parts of the story being told.  After Kint concludes his story, his interrogator shocks him by proposing that Keaton himself was the mysterious Keyser Söze.  Kint is incredulous; he feels betrayed and pleads that Keaton was his friend.  As the story concludes, Kint leaves, and we feel sure it will not be long before he is killed by Söze for the part he played in the story and the information he knows.  Yet, it is moments after he leaves that his interrogator, sitting in his office thinking over the story he just heard, suddenly drops his mug of coffee.  The entire story comes flying across the screen in a matter of seconds through bits and pieces of the facts given by Kint, along with random words written on posters in the interrogation room that popped up in Kint’s story, and finally, a sketch done of Keyser Söze from the last remaining survivor of the boat raid that clearly resembles…Kint himself.  Kint, our narrator, has been lying to us the entire time.  Kint is Keyser Söze.  Singer, in the last couple minutes of the film, completely uproots everything you have come to take for granted throughout the film.  Just like Kurosawa, he asserts the insurmountable power of the narrator.  The entire story, as in almost everything we have seen and heard, has been delivered through Kint.  We somehow forget that Kint is a person with an agenda as we listen to his story.  We believe him to be telling us the objective truth of what happened without a second thought.  In every way, it seems that his story is true.  But each and every narrator has a subjective experience; there is no objective truth, and our forgetting of this crucial fact is catastrophic in the case of this film.

The final film I analyzed was the 2007 film, Atonement, directed by Joe Wright.  This film was based on the 2001 novel of the same name written by Ian McEwan.  This novel is one of the ultimate contemporary novels concerning the use of an unreliable narrator, and I was interested to see how it was dealt with in the film versus in the novel.  The story first follows Briony Tallis, an avid writer, at age 13, as she misinterprets an encounter she witnesses between her sister, Cecilia, and the son of a servant, Robbie Turner.  This misinterpretation spirals out of control as she further and further misconstrues who Robbie is and concludes he must be a sexually crazed criminal, where in reality, he and Cecilia are in love.  When Briony’s cousin Lola is raped, Briony tells the police Robbie committed the crime due to her firm conviction as to who Robbie is.  As she is the only witness, the police arrest Robbie, and he eventually enlists in the war in order to get out of prison.  The story then follows Robbie’s life in the war and finally his reunion with Cecilia.  It is the very end of the story, however, that is truly fascinating.  In the novel, the postscript is entitled “London 1999” and is written in the first person from Briony’s perspective, which is an abrupt change from the third person omniscient narrator to whom we had grown accustomed.  In this postscript, Briony reveals that she is a successful writer and is publishing this story as her final novel, for she is dying.  Thus, this third person omniscient narrator was, in fact, Briony, telling her own story.  But is it the true story?  Briony reveals that, though the characters of Cecilia and Robbie reunite in her story, the two actually both died right before the end of the war.  Thus, the happy ending we received was not true.  It was fiction.  Wright chose to frame this revelation in the film as a TV interview with Briony as she promotes this book.  As we are watching 18-year-old Briony leave Cecilia and Robbie, to whom she attempted to apologize for her wrongdoings, and suddenly the screen goes black.  We hear in a voiceover an older woman’s voice saying: “I’m sorry.  Could we stop for a moment?”  Numerous images of cameras are then shown, showing this woman on them, as we realize that it was this woman who had been telling the story we had been watching, though it seemed like we were watching an objective truth, or a factual telling of past events.  Thus, it is revealed that we were understanding this story through the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is telling a fictionalized version of the events of her past. 

All three of these films intelligently display the immense power of the narrator to truly determine what is real and what is not in a film.  What is more, in my opinion, films are able to even further convince an audience due to the connection between the camera and the story.  We see before our eyes the story that our narrator is telling us.  Thus, that old saying “you have to see it to believe it” comes into full play; we are seeing a story play out right in front of us in a fully believable way.  Yet each of these three films argues that, particularly in the world of film, seeing is not always believing.  Just because we are seeing something doesn’t mean it is the objective truth.  Stories you hear are always coming from somebody else’s subjective perspective.  Thus, it seems that there is no objective truth in the world.

However, these films seem to differ in their ultimate understanding of this fact of the impossibility of objective truth.  The Usual Suspects ends by instilling absolute shock in the viewer; you are left speechless, wondering how you could have possibly been so deceived throughout the film.  You are thus left with a very skeptical outlook on life: absolutely nobody can be trusted, for truly anybody can be deceiving you.  Rashomon seems like it might have a similarly bleak ending, but the final scene takes a surprising optimistic turn.  The priest says, close to the conclusion of the film, “maybe goodness is just make-believe.”  The conflicting stories have him upset and baffled, much like us as viewers, the witnesses are lying and there is no telling what the truth actually is.  He states: “If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.”  Yet, upon the discovery of a crying, abandoned infant, the woodcutter decides to take the child and raise him or her with his family.  After seeing this incredible act of humanity and kindness, his bleak outlook on life shifts, and the priest says to the woodcutter: “Thanks to you, I think I can keep my faith in man.”  Thus, Kurosawa’s film suggests that mankind can still be good despite the inescapable culture of lies it has created.  Then, in Atonement, at the very conclusion, Briony Tallis explains why she lied in her novel: “But what sense of hope or satisfaction could the reader derive from an ending like that [in which Robbie and Cecilia both die and are never reunited]?  So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life.  I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness.  I gave them their happiness.”  Thus, lies are not all inherently evil, or done in order to confuse or hurt others.  Briony was an unreliable narrator for the sole purpose of achieving this final act of kindness that became impossible to accomplish in reality. 

So, perhaps there is no such thing as objective truth.  Perhaps we are being constantly deceived by unknown subjective experiences pretending to be utterly real.  But this may not mean that “this earth might as well be hell,” as the priest in Rashomon says.  It seems that there is still goodness to be found in mankind despite the untrustworthy nature of storytelling; furthermore, there is even a sort of kindness or beauty in deception itself.

Art in the Age of Corporate Cynicism (Conor)

    I am not really interested in superhero movies. The last one I saw was Guardians of the Galaxy (2014 dir. James Gunn) and for one reason or another I never ended up seeing another one after that. Well I broke my personal embargo to watch Captain America: Civil War (2016 dir. Anthony and Tony Russo). Ultimately the film was neither entertaining nor challenging. It was a completely standard and boring superhero flick that failed to excel in any category. It was too long, confusing, completely devoid of substance and poorly constructed with the exception of the ending twist and the appearance of Spiderman; both of which served as welcome breaks to the monotony and the incredible lack of nuance in the film’s politics.

    The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a beast so great that preserving it has overtaken the studio’s desire to actually make compelling cinema. Because an audience would potentially need to see twelve other films and One hundred twenty four episodes of television to get a full idea of the background for Civil War it is impossible for the film to effectively build tension or suspense, do justice to its characters, or adequately wrap up a narrative in this film or in any of their future films. It is almost impossible to follow the meaning of the narrative or the growth of the characters because it is spread pretty thin among an absolutely immense amount of material.

    The natural extension of this of course, is to introduce a character in these movies to entice viewers to watch other movies both past and future to learn more about them. In this way Spiderman, while entertaining, is also one of the worst parts of the film: he is nothing more than a huge advertisement for a future Spiderman film. Worst of all, this model of filmmaking has made such an astronomically huge amount of money for Marvel that other studios are falling in line and copying it. Both the Harry Potter and Star Wars series already have myriads of interconnected spin-offs and sequels planned. This entirely profit motivated model has overtaken the entire industry and it appears that we will be trapped within it for years to come.

    Ideologically, the film is a mess, boring, and sickeningly pro-status quo. It attempts to play at the only truly interesting question surrounding the superhero genre today: is it responsible to have super powered individuals intervening in world politics wherever they see morally fit? The Avengers in this film are a clear stand-in for American military interventionism. The opening scene outlines an action scene that could very well be in any American military movie, and one of the superheroes might as well actually be called “Captain Drone,” considering how his talents are used and the completely impersonal way in which he indiscriminately kills bad guys from a position of safety.

    While the film comes frustratingly close to examining whether or this kind of arrangement is moral it never actually develops the opposing opinion to a point where it would threaten the ideological safety of the superhero universe. The film makes a clear stand on which side is morally in the right and with absolutely no surprises it is Captain America (Steve Rodgers) and his rag tag band of underdogs who of course represent all the forces of American military intervention. The film even ends with Tony Stark, the Iron Man–who represents the bureaucracy of the state but also its responsibility to regulate itself–allowing Captain America to break his fellow super-conspirators out of prison, clearly indicating that Rodgers’ methods and plans are the right ones.

    By having Captain America–-who is the living embodiment of American values and the American state in the Marvel universe–-as the lead the film even manages to dissociate the cruelty perpetrated by the state in the film from a notion of the “True America.” The moral cowardice exhibited by the American government in the film is not really a part of America but the result of bloated bureaucracy run by people out of touch with the “true American values.” Separating a state from the politics of the state is ideologically dangerous and allows the film to use the horrors perpetrated by the state not as criticism but to support the American military interventionist policy embodied in Captain America and his cronies; like the only solution to combatting politics is letting a group of super powered ideologues wreak havoc in other sovereign nations.

    The ideology expressed in the film is inextricably linked to the corporate model in which it was made. A system of filmmaking based entirely around profit is not equipped to discuss actual social issues. In order for these films to make money they have to be as ideologically “safe” as possible. This is cynicism of the highest order.  We live in a time where police indiscriminately kill people of color in this country and put down peaceful protests with incredible violence. A protofascist has been elected to the highest political office in the country and the enormous ideological divides that have been hidden away for so long have angrily and disgustingly boiled over to the forefront of the American political reality.

    Instead of attempting to address these issues through art Hollywood continues to churn out boring politically safe films that re-affirm the corrupt fantasy of a wholesome and powerful America that is rightfully enforced by a group of incredibly unfairly powerful few who should be accountable to none because they are more profitable. Superhero movies and their insidiously corrupt corporate model are destroying the film industry and failing movie watchers around the globe. An art that has so much potential to entertain, inspire and challenge is now relegated to only challenging the status quo in ways that are ultimately unimportant and meaningless.

To Serve Man (Conor)

    The Servant (1963) is a cold, cruel film. Tony, the young aristocratic protagonist, is established as listless, confused, and prone to alcoholism. His house in the opening reflects this. It is totally bare, a fresh canvass waiting, like Tony, for someone or something to show up and provide it with some kind of direction. Tony choses to let Barret, his recently appointed manservant, model his home and by extension, his life. This threatens Tony’s girlfriend Susan, and Tony’s house becomes a battlefield for control of Tony’s life.

            No one treats Barret worse than Susan. She speaks to him brusquely, callously orders him around and enjoys mocking him and forcing him to demean himself in front of her. While this treatment is somewhat justified considering Barret’s ultimate motives, her treatment of him is still off-putting; she is needlessly cruel. Susan is a good aristocrat, she is aware of her place in society and constantly reminds the servants of theirs. We get a glimpse of the type of life she would lead with Tony during their stay at the Mountset estate. The Mountsets are parodies of the extremes of aristocratic life. They sit in stiff, unnatural positions in a house replete with extravagant and expensive decorations and talk about nothing that matters.  The sound design for their house is quite unlike any other scene in the film. The noise they make is extremely reverberant, suggesting a large and empty house that, like Xanadu in Citizen Kane (1941), sounds more like a tomb than a home.

            His life with Barret however is not seen as a useful alternative. Barret begins taking control over more and more aspects of Tony’s life, and even after Tony fires him he cannot break free from his influence. Barret ends up back in the house but the relationship between master and servant is all wrong. Barret is no longer the quiet and calculating manipulator but the bold and terrible tyrant. In an effort to retain his agency, Tony lashes out at Barret to pick up his tea dregs, but it is too little too late.  The two men play a ball game upon the stairs and Barret remarks “I’m in the inferior position, I’m playing uphill” but by the end of the sequence Barret stands victorious at the top of the stairs while Tony fetches him some brandy. The enormous and ominous shadows they cast on the wall betray the importance of this encounter, Barret has not only won the ball game but also the role of master.

            The film is obsessed with the pettier, crueler side of human nature. The mise-en-scène is covered with mirrors and the scenes themselves are constantly shot in reflection, giving the world of the film a cold, narcissistic quality. Mirrors also reverse the images they reflect, as they do in the bar scene where Barret apologizes. The scene starts in reflection and then switches to a normal point of view, deliberately switching the relative positions of Tony and Barret just as their positions as master and servant are being switched in the drama. One particularly ugly convex mirror constantly appears in the film, and the reflections inside it are twisted and pinched, suggesting that mirrors and reflections themselves have the ability to reveal the psychic state of the world. In this way the narcissism and materialism inherent to the mirrors also becomes the truth about the world.

    In The Servant, some things really are just skin deep. There is no deep revelation as to why Barret treats Tony the way that he does just like there is no deeper reason given for Susan’s treatment of Barret. The characters in the film are cold, stupid, and above all cruel. Their eventual slide into pure decadence–the movie does end in an orgy, after all–reflects only the parts of them that were already there. Tony’s boredom and laziness reduces him into a shadow of his former self while Barret’s cunning ambition turns him into a brute. Only Susan remains untouched by the corruption, but her ready acceptance of her place as an aristocrat suggests that she will end up like the Mountsets. There are no real survivors in the film and no better alternatives are given. The lethargy and apathy of the aristocratic life is taken to its extreme and it is horrifying to behold.

The Horror of Romantic Reality (Jaeyoung)

Spoiler warning: plots of The Graduate and Anomalisa discussed.

Unless I am with other people, or if I’m feeling unnaturally brave, I will never watch a horror movie. The suspense, stress, cringe, and anticipation of jump-scares are all too strenuous for me to handle on my own. Therefore, during this Halloween season, I have watched no horror movies to recount on this blog.

Yet the feeling I’ve had watching those movies, the squeamishness, the dread, the “No, don’t make me watch this,” came up unexpectedly in a movie of a totally different genre--The Graduate.

And it wasn’t the part where Mrs. Robinson tries to seduce him, or when Benjamin asks for his hotel room, or when Benjamin brings Elaine to the strip club. No, it was the very last scene, after Benjamin crashes Elaine’s wedding and escapes with her, when their excited, smiling faces fade into regret and disappointment. It was uncomfortable to watch, and I was tempted to stop the movie before it got to the end credit.

Of course, I had questions. What happens next? Where are they going, and what is their future? Benjamin has even less idea of his future than he did in the graduation party, and the life to come will probably be worse than the life he just escaped. In the topic of horror, perhaps this fear can be categorized in the Terror vs. Horror paradigm; Benjamin’s impending fate is terrifying, while his unseen, painfully awkward future would be horrifying.

But one could say that the scene itself is horrific-- (the idea of) Elaine was the closest thing he could get to happiness and normalcy, but he loses her. After ripping through California on car and by foot, he realizes that he became bored of her more quickly than he did with her mother.We see in Benjamin’s face that he truly loses everything.

In Benjamin's defense, who hasn’t daydreamed about their ideal romance, imagining every perfect scene with the person they love? Everyone is their own private filmmaker. The Graduate simply does the dirty deed of realizing these romantic fantasies, only to muddy it up with hopeless reality.

The same romantic idealization is seen in the R-rated stop-motion picture Anomalisa, directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson. In a world where everyone is voiced by Tom Noonan, Customer Service expert Michael Stone finally meets Lisa Hesselman, a woman with a unique voice. In his hotel room, he appears completely infatuated with her, relieved that the many years of grim mundanity are finally coming to an end. In fact, after Lisa sings an unimpressive rendition of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she exclaims, “Oh my God, are those tears?”

And to no surprise, Michael falls into the same trap Benjamin did--he shoves his hopes and dreams into a stranger he’d only recently met. And he faces great disappointment, as Lisa starts to displease him and sound more like Tom Noonan (aka everyone else). Unlike Benjamin, however, Michael attempts to shape her back into his idealized woman, chiding her for letting food hang out of her mouth and telling her she’s “too controlling.” But Lisa’s charm is irreparably broken, and Michael’s only hope in life is lost. The sunlight in the room becomes obnoxiously bright, suggesting that (the idea of) Lisa has just been a meaningless dream. Just when life was looking up for Michael, that one breakfast scene thrusts Michael back to misery.

But Anomalisa actually has obvious elements of horror. Not only are the puppets somewhat unnerving (unlike normal puppets, their faces appear pasted onto their heads), but also there is a nightmare sequence in which everyone, from the hotel manager to the staff members to Lisa’s friend, are “all one person" and are after Michael. The hotel grows ominously dark as Michael (who at one point drops his animatronic face) frantically plans his escape. But even in his nightmare, Michael has (the idea of) Lisa to hold on to, a last hope.

And then he wakes up, and (the idea of) Lisa is lost. Reality becomes worse than nightmare.

Women have no responsibility to conform to a man’s idealization. But we (as in mainstream audience) still expect romantically-satisfying endings. We are primed with movies and shows that have protagonists “winning the girl” or rekindling a waning relationship. Hollywood constantly peddles these opiates, and when movies like The Graduate or Anomalisa come around, we're kicked in the gut.

So who needs ghosts or zombies for a cinematic scare? With the right dose of wishful thinking and a swift counter-punch of reality, anything could be a horrifying thriller.

House of Madness (Conor)

Warning: this article contains spoilers for the film House of Usher and by extension, the story it is based on. However, the original story is old enough and has entered so deeply into our cultural consciousness that I see no problem with discussing the plot points here. 

    House of Usher (1960) is a special low budget horror movie. Directed by the great Roger Corman, the king of B-movies and a pioneer in the world of independent filmmaking, the film is truly unsettling. Corman faithfully adapts the original story by Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps not always in plot but in theme, and the sickly psychedelic visual style adds a unique and appropriate spin on Poe’s gothic horror classic.  

            Vincent Price masterfully depicts Rodrick Usher as a kind of supreme protestant fatalist: he is certain of his own family’s evil and of the deserved judgment coming to him. Following this a feeling of intense guilt pervades the entire film. Rodrick explains his family’s atrocious history to Philip Winthrop–-who is betrothed to Rodrick's sister Madeleine and takes the place of Poe's original nameless narrator–-with the help of wonderfully insane psychedelic portraits painted by the character.  The repeated visual allusions to and depictions of crucifixes create a clear sense of generational guilt.  The Ushers are suffering from a kind of original sin, only in the film there is no redemption for them.

            The most effective horror films amplify to the extreme anxieties and fears that are basic to humanity. The intense fatalism that permeates the film helps illustrate two of these major anxieties: the inevitability of death and the fear of mental illness. Death is everywhere in the Usher household. The land it is situated on is dead and the decay in the house mirrors that of a dead and rotting corpse. Even Rodrick’s affliction-–best described as an extreme sensitivity to the senses–-slowly forces him closer and closer to a corpse by taking away his enjoyment in using his own faculties, dooming him to a bland and dark existence closer to death than to life.

            There is an incredible dream sequence in which Philip sees all of the past and present Ushers–-usurers, prostitutes, assassins, and even mass murderers–-energetically beckon him towards an open casket with a decorated skeleton inside it. The whole of history seems to be beckoning towards death and the fatalism so obviously displayed in Rodrick has manifested in the outer world of the house as an intense meditation on the inevitability of death. Like the original short story, both Rodrick and Madeline die and in the end Rodrick’s fatalism wins out over Philip’s optimism. Death may be inevitable, the film says, but it should still be feared and if Rodrick is to be believed, it is no release from the suffering of life.

             The corruption and insanity of the film is wonderfully reflected in its mise-en-scène. The oversaturated colors that contrast so intensely with the run down house seem sickly, not vibrant and it is no mistake that the palette of the house perfectly matches the palette of Rodrick’s grotesque psychedelic portraits of the ancestral Ushers. The numerous high angles in the film suggest that the portraits look down on the characters like menacing predators waiting to pounce. The madness so evident in their twisted visages is too strong of a corrupting force, and in the end not even Phillip’s love can save Madeline. She goes mad and strangles Rodrick before the house collapses on them, killing them both. Madeline develops the same madness that influenced the ancestral Ushers’ evil acts. Despite her innocence, she belongs not to his world but to the world of the house, who’s enormous fissure reflects the fractured psyches of those that dwell within it.

            What makes House of Usher truly horrific is that it presents the problems of death and insanity as inescapable. There is no grand solution offered to these anxieties in the film; Instead they are validated and strengthened by the events and visual style of the film. In the end it is no longer clear that Rodrick was the antagonist, something the film appears to establish very early on. It is no longer clear if Rodrick was the ultimate cause of the corruption in the house or simply another victim of it but the film hints that the latter is true. The only thing that is clear at the end is that Philip failed; that love cannot conquer death and madness. This bleak view of the human condition is the essence of the horrifying, and House of Usher delivers not just cheap, spooky thrills but also a bleak and terrifying view of human existence and the nature of suffering.