HopkinsCinemAddicts

Voice-Over Troubled Waters

I’ve watched a fair amount of amateur film criticism on YouTube, and by far the most frequent complaint I’ve heard about modern movies is that there’s too much voice-over.

There’s lots of people out there who really don’t like voice-over, and they especially don’t like it when films starts with voice-over, which is unfortunate because films really like to start with voice-over.

My guess as to why opening narration is so popular is because it’s an extremely quick and easy way to explain things to the audience. Let’s say your film is set in the future—how do you communicate this to the audience? You could build up a whole futuristic cityscape with flying cars and holograms like at the beginning of Blade Runner, you could show your main character using some sort of futuristic technology, you could follow two characters as they discuss what it’s like to live in the future, or… you could start your film over black with the main character’s voice-over saying, “The year is 2049.” Boom. Mission accomplished in three seconds.

But the benefits of narrated exposition are also the exact reasons why people hate it so much. They say that voice-over is lazy and unsatisfying. Movies are (obviously) very visual and communicate tone, emotion, story, character, setting, etc. through imagery—bad voice-over completely fails to take advantage of that. It’s almost anti-cinematic.

But voice-over remains popular, which isn’t a bad thing because voice-over isn’t inherently lazy or unsatisfying. To clarify: it's bad voice-over that sucks.

Good voice-over can be anything for a movie. Marriage Story has good voice-over. It even opens with it.

The first seven minutes of Marriage Story introduce us to the two main characters, Nicole and Charlie, through two separate monologues. Charlie first delivers a monologue where he talks about Nicole, and then Nicole delivers a monologue where she talks about Charlie. But it isn’t like these speeches formally introduce the two protagonists to the audience; they simply list very personal and specific observations like “She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things” and “He is very self-sufficient – he can darn a sock and cook himself dinner and iron a shirt.” These lines are delivered over visual representations of these observations.

Why is this good voice-over? For one thing, it isn’t trying to force feed the audience. Instead of dumping backstory, this sequence slowly and sweetly eases you into the personalities of two characters who you’ll be spending the next couple hours with. It’s effective because it draws the viewer in instead of pushing them away. Bad voice-over is an easy gripe because it’s very noticeable. When a main character opens the movie with bland world building, it feels like the screenwriter is just lecturing the audience. Boring. Marriage Story instead delivers something that feels organic. The details shared aren’t economical, and they don’t merely pave a roadway for the plot. This voice-over takes its time in giving you an almost romantic sense of Nicole and Charlie. It feels as though the voice-over is adding something to the beginning of the film that a more straight forward scene could not.

Marriage Story’s voice-over is also effective because it doesn’t forget about visuals. By pairing each line with the mentioned character acting it out (“He’s very competitive” played over Charlie raging at a game of Monopoly), the audience subtly gets the feeling that they're experiencing memories. Every snapshot is short and pointed, and it matches perfectly and sometimes humorously with its respective narration. It’s as though the viewer is looking back on a long and lovely relationship with each of the two protagonists. The result is that Charlie and Nicole both feel familiar before their first full scene.

But the best part of Marriage Story’s short voice-over portion is that it’s charming. The music, the laughs, and the slight sentimentality all come together in a really lovely way. While certain specific functions and characteristics of film tropes like voice-over do tend to indicate whether or not it’s being used well, the main qualifier always boils down to this: Did you enjoy it? Everything else comes second.

Who Framed Mark Zuckerberg?

A ‘framing narrative’ is basically a storyline wrapped around another storyline. It’s super popular in literature – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, Ethan Frome – and also noticeably present in all sorts of famous movies, from Titanic to The Social Network. Using The Social Network (directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin), I’d like to talk through what (I think) a framing narrative can add to a movie.

First of all, a framing narrative adds complexity… but not the good kind of complexity. When you frame your main plot with another plot, you clutter the script with all sorts of extra details, locations, time periods, and possibly even characters. At least in regard to mass appeal, simplicity seems to be a filmmakers best friend, so this is a bit of a drawback. In a worst case scenario, the framing narrative can subtract from the actual point of the film. In The Social Network, the framing narrative definitely adds a fair amount of complexity. The main story – Mark Zuckerberg’s journey from undergraduate to CEO – is presented to the audience through the lens of a deposition. In the hands of a less competent director and a way less competent screenwriter, the greater narrative of Zuckerberg’s lawsuits could easily confuse the focus of the film with extraneous legal nonsense.

But moving past the extra weight, there’s also a lot of potential benefits. For one thing, a framing narrative can add context and justify exposition. A really easy question to throw at a movie is: Why are we watching this? A framing narrative can answer that question. In The Social Network, the question is already answered with exformation – everyone in the audience has heard of Mark Zuckerberg, and we’re watching the movie to learn about his experiences founding Facebook. But the framing narrative adds an in-universe explanation as well. We’re watching to find out how Mark got to this deposition, and find out why he’s being sued by three of his fellow Harvard students (one of which is his former best friend). Another plus that goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the context of a framing narrative is that exposition can become far more natural. If the movie is built around someone telling the audience a story, then tools like voiceover and backstory don’t seem so jarring because, well, that’s just how people tell stories.

A framing narrative can also add tension to a movie. Since framing situations often take place in the future relative to the main events of the story, the framing narrative can create useful dramatic irony. If your movie opens with a spy dangling over a pit of lava and that spy turns to the camera and says, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then the explanation becomes exciting. In the main narrative, watching that spy do something as simple as getting out of bed is transformed into a captivating mystery because we know the stakes of his inevitable predicament. The Social Network utilizes this exact arrangement to keep the movie engaging. Watching Mark’s friend group work on their little social networking site is 10x more captivating when you know that they all end up at each other’s throats by the end of the film.

Finally, a framing narrative can target the audience’s psychology. People are hardwired to listen to someone tell them a story (see: books), and movies tend to lack that specific subconscious signal. Watching short intercut video clips obviously makes sense to people, but it doesn’t resonate in quite the same instinctual way in which a directly told story does. Adding a story teller into a movie can patch that hole.

Barry and Using Cinematography to Bring the Stage to Life (Cristina)

Spoilers for Season 1 of HBO's Barry. 

While there are a lot of similarities between theater and film as art forms, one significant difference is the camera's ability to move around a space, which adds a unique element to film's form of visual storytelling. As HBO's Barry follows its titular character, a hitman seeking to become an actor in LA, the show finds increasingly interesting ways to portray stage performances.

In the pilot episode, Barry follows his mark, Ryan Madison, to an acting class where he accidentally gets pulled into the class to perform a scene. As the scene begins, the camera cuts between a series of shots covering the stage from all angles. One angle shows Ryan, head-on from Barry's point of view on the stage across from him. One angle shows Barry head-on, another has Barry looking out onto the audience, taking in the whole stage while Ryan does his monologue for the scene. When Barry finally reads his one line from the script he's been given, the camera enters a long shot, showing the full stage from the theater audience's point of view. From within the audience, it's impossible to deny that Barry is a bad actor. But a few shots later, when their scene ends and the class applauds, the camera enters another long shot, this time taking in the entire audience from the stage and Barry's point of view. While the praise is in no way for his one rotely-delivered line, the shot puts us in Barry's head for this pivotal moment, the inciting incident of the entire series, as he decides to pursue a career in acting.

Throughout the rest of the season, the show continues to take great care with how it frames every exercise and performance within the class. All the while Barry tries to navigate a budding gang war as he ties up all the loose ends from his time as a hitman. These two plots are balanced, the acting class preparing for a Shakespeare showcase, Barry being forced into a plan to kill rival gang leader Cristobal Cifuentes, until Episode Seven, "Loud, Fast and Keep Going".

After the hit on Cristobal goes wrong and to avoid getting turned into the police, Barry makes the difficult decision to kill his friend, Chris. Because of the way his plans have unraveled he's late to the showcase, arriving seconds before he and his scene partner, Sally, are supposed to go on. Once again, Barry has only one line, while Sally will be giving Macbeth's most famous soliloquy from Act 5, Scene 5. 

As Sally begins her monologue, the camera stays with Barry backstage as he breaks down, reflecting on his decision to kill Chris and imagining how his wife and child will have to take the news. When we return to Sally on stage from a similar long shot as the scene in the pilot, she and the audience wait for Barry to come on stage to deliver his line. 

The camera cuts closer, showing Sally as she looks off stage and sees what the audience can't, Barry doubled over in his grief. When he turns and starts to walk towards the stage we find ourselves in his point of view, the camera moving from backstage, centered on Sally. Although we're with Barry in the framing of the shot, we like Sally have no idea what Barry is about to do. Once he steps onto the stage, we see Barry again, in a medium shot from where Sally is standing at center stage. Crying, he delivers his line ("My lord, the Queen is dead.") a clear channeling of his grief from Chris's murder. A following show contains both Sally and Barry before Barry walks back off stage, still crying, leaving Sally, who we then see in a close up as she delivers her monologue ("She should have died hereafter...") in a deeply nuanced way, almost tearing up, clearly transformed by Barry's addition to the scene.

In these brief moments, the cinematography is able to communicate the show's philosophy about acting as a means to channel emotions. Aside from being visually compelling, the decisions the camera makes show the movement of Barry's grief and regret from where he is off stage, to his performance and over to Sally, who's removed from Barry's emotional state but is able to embody and convey it in her monologue through the power of the stage. All of these intricate nuances are captured through the camera's ability to move around in the space.

The Office: The YouTube Edition (Yaejin)

    Originally created to be a video-sharing platform, YouTube.com is currently the second most visited website globally according to the Visual Capitalist. Shows produced by prominent television networks such as ABC, NBC, and CBS are now also promoted on the site, capitalizing on its massive audience. Networks release teaser clips to promote their series as well as upload highlights. Among the multitude of channels that serve this purpose, that for the American adaptation of The Office truly shines.

    The Office US uploads content three times a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. These are not just clips, but are complication videos devoted to individual characters: “Best of Pam/Ryan/Darryl/etc.” They include slices from throughout the show’s nine seasons and attract millions of views. Watching a character grow through the years can leave even non-fans with a peculiar fondness for them. While showcasing the most iconic moments, these small features leave you wanting to see more.

    There are videos dedicated to rivalries, bloopers, and inside jokes. The people behind the YouTube channel feel like genuine fans themselves. Some videos are dedicated to popular conspiracy theories, catering to the imagination of its audience. The creators encourage viewers to actively engage by upvoting or leaving comments.  A month-long tournament to determine the most loved character resulted in an April Fool’s prank. Every day of March, the channel polled the audience, pitting two characters against each other to see who was favored, narrowing to an ultimate showdown. However, the prank resulted the choice of an insignificant character whose picture is shown in only one episode, as its winner.  The tournament required daily participation from both channel and audience, which displays their synergy. The channel really understands its fans, tailoring the prank to their humor. 

    Not only are the creators accessible through YouTube, the comment section supports direct conversation among fans. Anyone with a Google account can write, upvote or downvote, and reply to comments. Because the most popular opinions are at the top, the comment section is a quick way to gather perspective. While most are rather silly, some comments can be insightful. Over six thousand viewers agreed with one in particular by Daniel Rios: “A part of growing up is realizing that Karen really didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that she wasn’t Pam...” In The Office, Jim starts dating Karen after Pam initially rejects him. 

    Yes, while some characters are written to be hated, Karen is friendly, hardworking, and fun. These qualities are usually appreciated, but some people justify their adoration for Pam as a reason to dislike Karen. For so many to share this irrational reasoning conveys their emotional investment in The Office. This show has convinced its audience that these characters exist in some other world. Although Karen is fictitious, real people react emotionally to her. 

    Although it should elicit reaction, great script writing helps its audience reflect and grow with the story. That thousands were able to recognize their own growth through the show struck me. The character relationships must be engaging yet realistic for the audience to dislike someone who disrupts this environment. However, they must also be nuanced enough for people to reflect on their biases. Attracted by the ongoing popularity of the YouTube channel and convinced by the conversation generated, I started watching The Office myself.

The Good Place and Redefining the Sitcom (Cristina)

Despite critical acclaim and decent ratings, this past Thursday marked the final season premiere of NBC's The Good Place. Where many sitcoms of similar success find themselves running for upwards of six seasons, ending the series after just four was the choice of the creator Michael Schur to preserve the show's narrative integrity, continuing its tradition of subversive television storytelling.

The Good Place stars Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, an Arizona deadbeat who dies and finds herself in an afterlife neighborhood in the titular Good Place, a non-denominational heaven. The only problem: she has ended up in the Good Place by accident, mistaken for a different Eleanor Shellstrop who dedicated her life to helping others. Slowly her presence and less-than-savory personality begin to have dire physical consequences on the environment around her.

While slightly more fantastical, the show situates itself like most modern network sitcoms, centering around a group of diverse personality types in a unifying location. Where Friends has Central Perk and the apartments, The Office has the office, Parks and Rec has the parks department, The Good Place has the neighborhood. As its first season starts up, the groundwork established, the episodes remain mostly episodic, following Eleanor and her allies as they help her avoid detection and teach her to fit in by becoming a better person.

However, a mere seven episodes in, the show begins making bold narrative choices. Season 1 Episode 7, "The Eternal Shriek", follows another antic filled day. This time Eleanor and her friends must murder the pseudo-robot neighborhood guide, Janet, in order to keep Eleanor from being discovered. Just when they escape the day unscathed, seeing her friends wracked with guilt for their actions and stress over maintaining their lies, Eleanor announces to the entire neighborhood that her placement in the Good Place was a mistake.

This pivotal turning point completely changes the structure of the show from an episodic comedy to a plot-driven adventure. For the back half of the season, every episode pushes the plot forward as stakes increase. It becomes necessary for the audience to watch every episode in order to understand what's going on. 

Situational comedies have a long and noble history on broadcast television. A hallmark of the genre is repetition, the necessity to return all characters and relationships to their starting point at the end of every episode, no matter what has been accomplished by the plot, to preserve established dynamics and tensions. For example, a 'will-they-won't-they' dynamic holds two characters with romantic potential right at the edge of a relationship for as long as possible to continue to use the tension of the situation. Missing an episode or tuning in to a later season should have little effect on the audience's ability to enjoy the show.

The Good Place rejects the sitcom's repetitive nature. The characters begin to change drastically, most notably Eleanor who genuinely becomes a better person as the show progresses and whose actions as a good person disrupt any possibility that the situation can exist in perpetuity. Where the conceit of the show depends on Eleanor's selfish actions jeopardizing her position in the Good Place, her learned honesty and selfless actions disrupt the status quo of the show's world.  

The season one finale ushers in a plot twist of monumental proportions, redefining the entire season and establishing that the content of the show will never be the same. The Good Place is self-aware of its changing nature as it moves from a mere subversion of the genre into a meta-commentary. The final scenes see our main characters have their memories wiped, literally reverted to their states at the beginning of season one because their character development was a threat to the sustained existence of their neighborhood. 

Season two and three become even more plot-heavy and dedicated to worldbuilding, the midpoint of season two seeing the characters abandon the neighborhood altogether and go on a sprawling adventure through all corners of the afterlife and then the real world. And every time the characters grow, internally and in their relationships with each other, some magical force will inevitably revert them back to their 'default' state, until they inevitably grow into their better selves. 

As we approach the finale, it's impossible to say where the story and characters will end up. By deliberately choosing its end, I have no doubt The Good Place's conclusion will be as narratively satisfying as the previous three seasons. 

 

Finding One's Voice in Cinematographic Practice: The Work and Style of Bradford Young (Mireille)

Although Bradford Young has been the cinematographer for many films, including Selma (2014), A Most Violent Year (2014), Pawn Sacrifice (2015), and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), his photographic style, albeit subtle at times, is recognizable in each of his works. Young gained much notoriety after being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). In Arrival, but also notably in Pawn Sacrifice and arguably his other films, Young’s cinematographic practice is revealed through his choice of color palette and lighting, which include a variety of lighter greys and muted low contrast natural pastel colors that add a slightly somber, but pensive tone to his films. That being said, there are moments in the two films when Young introduces shades of fuchsia and lighter pinks especially during moments of heightened emotion or narrative climax. He uses this interchange of color contrast to take the viewer through a moment of impending change or realization. For example, at one point in Arrival one of the main characters suddenly realizes that her future may be about to change. At that moment of understanding, Young introduces the different color palette, but then quickly returns to the more subdued coloration that sets the undercurrent in the film. Even in Pariah (2011), in which Young uses a dramatically more vibrant color palette primarily saturated with neon reds and blues, he inserts subtle pinks in the walls and curtains of the bedroom of the two primary characters during their moments of intimacy and during their discussions that center on the nature of their respective sexualities.

Young uses not only color, but lighting to unveil emotion or give voice to the inner life of the characters on the screen. Young primarily incorporates natural light sources not only for lighting a scene, but also when highlighting and illuminating specific characters. The choice of natural light allows for shadowing in his films, as well as definition of silhouettes. The presence of obscured personas in a more darkened setting is especially evident in Selma and Ain’t Them Body Saints (2013). In these films, Young incorporates extreme close ups of the expressive visages of the characters after they have been previously masked in shadow. The natural lighting authentically captures the features of a person’s face, allowing the revelation of the raw emotion as it is played out on it.  

A major inspiration behind Young’s filmic composition is artist and photographer Roy DeCarava. DeCarava’s images also incorporate the use of shadow and silhouetting of personas, along with oppressive and strict geometry within the mise-en-scène of the frame. Young has additionally implemented these techniques and structured of geometry, most notably in the opening sequence of Arrival. The film begins in complete darkness and shadow, followed by the camera slowly tilting down to a large window divided by harsh vertical lines, tinted in muted blacks, greys, and blues. This shot then transitions to a tight close up shot of one of the main characters, filmed solely in natural light.

Young’s cinematographic language and choices are true to his family history, culture, and heritage. When discussing his work, he stresses that for him it is crucial to keep in mind the concept of visual grammar and visual language. Young gives equal if not greater import to visual language relative to the narrative arc of a film. By not paying close attention to the visual language, Young argues that one runs the risk of disregarding visual intricacies and details present within the filmic frame which contribute to a story. Furthermore, when conceptualizing a film, or any form of artwork, Young insists that maintaining one’s own personal language and developing a visual acumen and competency is not only pertinent but critical. In particular he emphasizes that optics, color science, and historical and personal content are key to the incorporation of visual language and grammar in cinematography and film work.

Bradford Young has stated and reminds us that “It is crucial to embed your DNA in your work. Don’t let imagination die, and represent yourself in cinematography.” Young stresses that regardless of the type of film, a cinematographer must be cognizant of their practice and style and these should be apparent in all of their films. Apart from establishing a style, it is more a question of freeing oneself from the notion of self and connecting your work to personal experiences.  As he puts it, “you [should] strive to become one with your body of work, and be able to divorce yourself from other [elements] that may distract you from your style.”

Over the week of February 18^th, Bradford Young visited the JHU Film and Media Studies Program and offered not only an artist talk hosted by the SNF Parkway Theater, but taught a three day workshop to a group of FMS students about his film practice and techniques in cinematography.

Piercing the Image: The Dichotomy of Studium and Punctum in Film (Mireille)

If you have ever studied film theory, most likely you have come across the Latin terms studium and punctum. Roland Barthes, the theorist who coined these terms, describes the studium as that moment that reveals the cultural intention a photographer, or in this case a filmmaker, wishes to impart to an audience. The studium, in effect, is a generalizable impression in which each of us participates culturally. The studium is clear and is absorbed in a natural way, usually impassively. The punctum, on the other hand, is that part of the image that disturbs the studium. It is the element that “pricks”, “stings” or “cuts a hole” in the studium for the individual viewing the image.

Carlos Reygadas’ film Post Tenebras Lux (2012) embraces the dichotomy between the studium and the punctum by creating an intentional interplay between familiar, almost mundane moments, which are frayed by shocking incongruities. In contrast, Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) uses every frame to shove the viewer into altering his/her preconceptions. In effect, Korine creates an amalgam of puncta to create the studium that represents the culturally accepted “normal” for the tragic inhabitants of Xenia, Ohio.

Throughout Post Tenebras Lux, Reygadas allows the spectator to witness moments of mundane life in rural Mexico through lengthy shots and sequences that create the impression of a still image in the manner of the studium. These long takes whether of a person, place or thing allow the spectator to inspect the scene and receive it as a recognizable moment. For example, the film opens with a young child running through an open field inhabited by a few farm animals and a few dogs. The camera follows the child, pausing every now and then to “study” a moment of this very long take. Reygadas allows you to have a good long look at the child in an impassive manner, albeit with perhaps a sense of curiosity. In this way, Reygadas creates for us a studium of the pure innocence and freedom of a child unencumbered by any other constrictive elements.

In a similar manner, Reygadas shows us the interior of a house almost as a series of still lifes, which capture the serene sense of home and family. This time, however, the serenity is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of an animated and dystopic red devil. It is Reygadas’ intention to introduce this element of shock and perplexity as a counterpoint to the images of home and quietude. In this way, the devil is not the punctum, but rather is still part of the studium. The punctum arrives when Reygadas utilizes an exceptionally long take to “watch” a little boy as he stands in his bedroom, ostensibly looking at the devil standing in the doorway. This image “educates” the audience, in the manner of the studium, by showing us all of the elements of a typical boy’s bedroom. However, something about the scene is disturbing. You are drawn to the manner in which the boy is shown. He is standing in the middle of his room, yet there is nothing in his room that would have allowed him to ascend or descend from the top bed of a bunk bed, where he was obviously sleeping. The punctum in this image is positional. It cuts a whole of uncertainty in an otherwise mundane image, and leaves us unsettled.

In sharp contrast to Post Tenebras Lux, where studia and puncta are interwoven to put the viewer on shaky perceptual ground, in his film Gummo Korine provides us with no clear studium. We never have the sense of consensual perception of location or feeling of familiarity. Rather, Korine clutters each frame of the film with countless different elements that create a shock effect that shakes us to our core. The entirety of each frame is jarring, and we perceive the contents as a collection of puncta that leave us searching for a studium. For example, towards the end of the film Korine shows the main young character sitting in a tub filled with filthy water and eating dinner from a TV table placed across the tub. A child in the bathtub should be an easily recognizable studium, but nothing in this frame resonates with a culturally accepted norm. Should the punctum be the child’s peculiar appearance and striking profile that give him an otherworldly look? Or should it be the foul and unhygienic bathroom and bath water? Or perhaps it should be the fact that the boy is slurping down grotesque food while he is bathing in increasingly darkening bathtub water.

Korine has utilized the camera to capture the inhabitants of a town in Ohio, and he is telling us that the studium is one that we should not recognize because it belongs only to the accepted perceptual experience of this specific population. As a result, the studia in Gummo are culturally locked and alien, and difficult to assimilate. All of the scenes leave us with a sensation of a near normalcy that has been horrifically twisted. Though both Reygadas and Korine used non-actors in their films, Korine’s intention was to capture the very real condition of a non-fictional location. The images that Korine shows us represent what is actually occurring in a society that is not commonly portrayed in film. In fact, in an interview with IndieWire, Korine states that he is interested in studying societies that other directors do not want to particularly address.

Though originally conceived as theoretical constructs for still photography, the studium and punctum can also be used to great effect in film. One could even argue that the multi-dimensionality of film allows for a more versatile and interesting use of studium and punctum that can introduce an extra layer of interest and provocation.

The Camera in Film: Active Persona or Passive Observer? (Mireille)

What is it about the filmic apparatus that entices us? And what is the camera’s role in the depiction of a reality that often spawns from a single mind, but then is manipulated by many? In some films the camera simply is an observer of the action, but in others it seems to have its own personal agenda. For example, in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) the camera takes on the persona of both tool and protagonist. In contrast, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) the camera distances itself from the chaos that surrounds it and simply observes. Whether the camera should be a potent machine that conceives images that should always alter the reality it tries to capture, or if it is simply “just capturing” what is occurring on the other side, it is, nevertheless, the job of the film to transport us into the reality created by its auteur.

French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry argues that with respect to film, the camera as an apparatus and instrument actually produces specific ideological effects. Baudry suggests that since film is simply a series of still images that have minute differences, the projection of these images during a movie creates a whole new experience, an epiphenomenon of sorts, which the still images alone are incapable of producing without the machine. This idea is consistent with Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s approach, which he called “cine-eye” (kino pravda). Vertov believed that the camera is able to capture information beyond what the human eye can. Rather than using the camera to attempt to mimic reality, Vertov’s “cine-eye” creates a new perception that the audience would not be privy to without the aid of the apparatus. In his Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov intentionally manipulates the film such that the camera and what it is capable of portraying, rather than the story, is the most important and relevant feature of the film.

The camera is surrealistically large, and Vertov creates a superimposition in which he, as the camera operator, is shown standing on top of the camera. In this way, Vertov exaggerates the supernatural ability of the camera to capture much more than what is simply observable. Although in his film Vertov depicts common city life and the banal activities that unfold within it, he pays particular attention to geometry and composition such that every element in the mise-en-scène of a particular shot contributes to the unworldly feel of the film. For example, in the portrayal of laborers working in a mine/factory, Vertov uses high contrast lighting to show the workers completely cloaked in black shadows and almost “swallowed” by the harsh and darkened horizontal and vertical lines that compose the frame. Then, Vertov cuts to a shot where the audience can see someone with an actual camera filming the scenario, and at this point, the faces of the workers and details of the scene become obvious. In this way, Vertov shows us that the camera can capture events that are occurring in a given reality, but also that the camera itself has individualism and power that render it capable of manipulating reality and creating a “new dimension” in the film.

In contrast, Hitchcock prefers that the camera simply observe. One could argue that this is virtually impossible due to the effect of auteurism, which consciously or subconsciously impacts the making of a film even if only minimally. However, in Rear Window, Hitchcock attempts simply to “unmask” the reality that is taking place in front of the camera. Normally, this type of camera use is mainly reserved for documentary films; however, in the case of Rear Window Hitchcock intends to convey that the camera is removed from the action and need not interfere with what is occurring between the characters.

Throughout Rear Window, Hitchcock utilizes static extreme long and wide shots, resting on the action for lengthy takes at a time. The characters present in the film also never truly leave their filmic space, and are “captured” only when the camera “comes” to their location and does not interfere or follow any other action that may be happening when off camera. Additionally, Hitchcock utilizes geometry to emphasize the separation of the characters in the film, allowing the audience to peer into the individual realities without any heavy handed direction or influence from other characters or even the director. Slow and smooth pans between the windows of the apartment complex in which the film takes place create a voyeuristic perspective not only for the main character Jeff, in fact the camera is primarily present in his apartment, but also for the spectator. Hitchcock’s use of geometry also limits what the spectator can see, and as a result, influences the viewing experience of the audience. This begs the question of whether the camera is simply capturing the drama that occurs in the secluded apartment complex as an impartial observer or if there is some inevitable auteurism behind the lens.

Though it may not be the job of the audience to understand completely how images in a film are created or what the camera’s intentions are in a particular film, the fascination behind the “magic” that a camera can capture often has the power to push an audience’s perceptions and awareness. This power comes from an amalgamation of technology, technique, and auteurism. Whether or not, and how much, a camera influences the reality it tries to capture is a matter of opinion. However, it is less a matter of opinion that every film has the potential to influence other films, other art forms, and even personal lives.

 

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.

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.  

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. 

 

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.

 

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. 

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.   

True or False? Reality and Illusion in Metafiction and Metacinema (Tori)

In the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" from the compilation Labyrinths by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, we come face to face with the meta.  Here, the meta, or metafiction in this case, is a type of self-conscious writing, or writing fiction about the act of writing fiction itself.  As an English major, I constantly find myself writing "meta" in the margins of the novels I'm annotating; it is far from a rarity in writing, and also in film.

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" tells the story of a world called Tlön, invented by a secret society, complete with invented countries, invented inhabitants, and even an invented language.  The first-person narrator of this story, possibly Borges himself, though it is never revealed, stumbles across a mention of Uqbar, a place in Tlön, in an encyclopedia and finally, after laborious exploration and inquiry, uncovers the history of this world, fully unaware of its inherent falsity.  It might sound ridiculous, but how could he know if this world were real or not?  The most unsettling part of this story is that there is no basis to which the narrator could know of this world's falsity; it seems to be a real world.  As the story progresses, the line between imagination and reality is inextricably blurred; the fantastic world intrudes upon the real world, and there is no going back.  The story ends: "If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.  Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe.  The world will be Tlön."

This story is a fantastic example of metafiction.  It concerns the process of creation, but it truly becomes meta when one considers how this story is actually about itself as a story.  Borges is inventing this entire story, yet there is truth within this imaginary tale concerning how humans interact with reality and with illusion.  In my opinion, the meta is one of the most powerful tools an author can use in his or her writing.  It is impossible to read something meta and not think of its myriad implications within the text and also in regard to your own life.  The meta demands self-reflection, and thus you can learn a lot about yourself and about the world around you through your engagement with it.

I read this story by Borges a few weeks ago in an English class and found it fascinating, and I have been thinking about the meta ever since.  Thus when it came time to watch another film for this blog post, my mind immediately jumped to meta films.  Though there are countless films that interact with the subject, there is one that is widely believed to be the ultimate in "metacinema," as it is called, and after watching it, I found many echoes of the stimulating ideas suggested in Borges' story as well as new ideas about the nature of filmmaking in regard to reality and illusion.  It is safe to say that the 1963 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini entitled 8 1/2 is both one of the strangest and one of the most thought-provoking films I have ever seen.

The story follows film director Guido Anselmi, played by Marcello Mastroianni, who is dissatisfied with the big new science fiction film he is in the process of directing, while simultaneously dealing with a complicated personal life due to his cheating on his wife, Luisa, with another woman, Carla. He is consistently bombarded by his production team, as well as a film critic, with ideas and questions about the film.  Yet, the appeal of this film is not in the specifics about the plot but in both the structure and dialogue that prompt this film to be considered one of the great pieces of metacinema.

The film opens with a man sitting in his car.  He is trying to drive across a bridge, but traffic has come to a standstill.  At first, everything seems normal, but then we notice a man in a neighboring car is staring directly at this first man.  Then, another man looks right at him, and then a woman does the same.  We are next given a wide-angle shot of a bus full of people with their arms dangling out the windows, facing right at this first driver, and everybody in the standstill traffic jam stares at him.  This is a terrifying image; these people are all frozen and look almost like wax figures.  They do nothing except stare.  The scene just gets more strange from here.  First, the man fiddles with his car windows and doors and starts to panic.  It seems as if he is stuck.  Yet, we then see him climbing out of the roof of his car, and then he begins sailing through the air, his coat blowing behind him in the wind like a cape.  He is flying.  The camera then tilts down to the ground; we are now on a beach, and a different man is holding a rope.  It looks as if he is flying a kite, but we soon realize that at the top of this rope is the flying man, who is then pulled down to the ground.  Right before he hits the ground, we cut to a shot of a man in bed with his arm outstretched.  It was all a dream.

Odd scenes such as this one occur throughout 8 1/2.  At first, just as in the opening scene, the line between reality and illusion is pretty clear.  The scene starts off normally, but it then becomes so fantastic that it must be an illusion.  Guido next imagines himself interacting with his parents, both of whom we learn are dead, and then he imagines a scene outdoors with a beautiful woman.  He also has multiple flashbacks to his childhood.  These scenes are all relatively easy to follow; it might not be understood at the very beginning that they aren't really happening, but the audience can catch on relatively quickly.

Yet, as the film progresses, this line between reality and illusion begins to blur more and more until we get to the final scene, in which truth and fiction are completely indistinguishable; it seems to be both real and an illusion at the same time.  The final scene features every character in the film, including Guido's deceased parents, his childhood self, and the beautiful woman we initially thought was only a part of Guido's imagination, as they perform together in a sort of circus act.  As Guido states at the end of the film, "Everything is true."  We can no longer figure out what is imaginary.  The world has become Tlön.

The dialogue in this film presents some confusing and incredible ideas about the nature of truth and falsity in relation to film.  The words "true," "real," "honest," "lie," "clear," and "understand" come up countless times in the dialogue.  The film asserts itself as a piece of metacinema very early on, when the film critic gives Guido feedback on his science fiction film idea, proposing "One wonders what the authors are trying to say.  Are they trying to make us think?  Do they want to scare us?" which are exactly the thoughts we, the audience, are having at that moment in time about 8 1/2.  Moments like this occur throughout the film, as the characters express exactly what we're thinking, thus blurring the line between the world of the film we're watching and our own world.

A key moment in the film occurs when Guido's film and his personal life are shown to be irrevocably connected.  As he attempts to find an actress to play the role of his wife, Luisa, in his science fiction film, the real Luisa storms out of the theater.  Guido follows her, imploring "Did something you saw offend you?  It's just a movie" to which Luisa replies, "Another fiction, another lie.  You put all of us in it, the way it suits you."  These lines are very loaded.  Guido tries to comfort Luisa by assuring her it's just a movie, but it is clearly not just a movie; the movie is their relationship.  Guido puts everybody in his life into the movie; he has cast the people of his world in this film.  Therefore, he functions as a director of the film, but he also functions as a director of his real life.

This film, like metafiction, raises many self-implicating questions.  Throughout the film, we are trying to understand what is going on.  We are making snap judgments about each scene: is this scene real?  Is this another illusion?  Is this real or fake?  But, as reality and illusion become more and more inextricable, we come to realize that these questions are useless.  As with Tlön, the real world and the imaginary world come to a merging point.  Like Guido at the end of the film, we have a realization: "I'm no longer afraid of telling the truth about what I don't know, what I'm looking for, what I haven't found."  We finally have to accept ambiguity, something Guido is forced to avoid by those around him who constantly ask him for clarity.

Fellini provides us mainly with questions rather than answers in 8 1/2, but one thing he does assert is the profound importance and power of the unknown.  Why is it so hard for us to come to terms with ambiguity? Why is it so hard to admit and accept that we don't know?  Why do we care so much about coming to a conclusion about what is real and what isn't when Fellini beautifully shows that illusions can actually be just as real as reality?  Acclaimed author Tim O'Brien writes in his novel The Things They Carried, "I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."  Films are all about story-truth.  Though they are directed and calculated and technically illusions, 8 1/2 proves that the world of cinema, perhaps even more so than the real world, can, in fact, provide us with truth.

Short, Sad, and to the Point (Madison)

With February fast approaching, it seems appropriate to write a post about that problematic behemoth of the film industry, the Oscars. I admit to being fairly new to the scene: typically, my interactions with the Academy begin and end with me Googling red carpet looks the day after the awards ceremony. This year, though, I wanted to be a little more in touch. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to dive in to all the complicated (and frankly upsetting) politics of the bigger categories like Best Film or Best Actor. I decided to start small; or rather, short. For this post I watched the 2016 nominees for Best Live Action Short Film, an emotionally taxing set of five films with casts and crews from all over the world.

 

 

The list includes Ave Maria (Palestine, France, and Germany), directed by Basil Khalil, Shok (Friend) (UK and Kosovo), directed by Jamie Donoughue, Alles Wird Gut (Everything Will Be Okay) (Germany and Austria), directed by Patrick Vollrath, Stutterer (UK), directed by Benjamin Cleary, and Day One (USA), directed by Henry Hughes. Although these films offer much-needed international perspectives, you will notice that all of the directors are men; even in less popular categories like the Short Film, the tendency of the film industry (and particularly the Academy) to prioritize primarily male voices, stories, and perspectives is readily apparent, and should be considered critically. Still, putting aside questions of identity politics (however necessary they may be), I will begin by heartily recommending that you watch these films, difficult as they are to sit through without shedding a few tears.

 

 

I have never been one to watch short films; they often don’t play in most theaters, and they can feel somehow inaccessible, made solely for the film fanatic who is particularly literate in the finer points of film technique. After all, these short movies just don’t have the space to tell long stories; out of a sort of necessity, their strength often comes from careful attention to design and cinematography. These films, though, proved me wrong. It’s true that I thought each was well shot (Shok giving its viewers a careful contrast between the beauty of the Kosovar countryside and the ugliness of state-perpetrated violence and poverty; Alles Wird Gut moving the audience skillfully from the bright lights of a fair to the cool, colorless space of an airport), each also told an essential human story with impressive precision.

Because of the brevity of these films—the longest clocked in at half an hour—every line of dialogue, every shot, had to be meaningful. There could be no wasted action. Thus, these films packed every minute with an emotional force that I don’t often see in feature length movies.

 

 

Each of the nominated films open on a scene that gives us a sense that something important is at stake, at risk, or in danger of being lost: within the first few minutes of Ave Maria we hear (but do not see) the sounds of a car crash; the camera moves outside, where we get a close-up of the head of the Virgin Marie statue, knocked off in the crash, oozing what looks like blood onto the sandy earth. Stutterer opens on the main character, Greenwood, trying to overcome his debilitating speech impediment to call the telephone company; the woman on the other end repeats, “Hello? Is anyone there?” as we watch his mouth working frantically to produce sound. The use of close-up in both cases feels particularly powerful; the emotional crux of the piece literally fills the screen (in the former, the darkly silly and accidental meeting between people of differing faiths is pictorialized in the wounded statue; in the latter, a man’s struggle to connect despite his stutter is made visual with a prolonged gaze at Greenwood’s lips.)

 

The other three films also open on a weighted scene: a speeding car almost runs over a child’s bicycle lying in the road (Shok), a man paces in front of a gated house, buzzing the doorbell over and over (Alles Wird Gut), a woman tries to operate a makeshift showerhead and a man barges in on her (Day One.) The viewer is thrown immediately into the action, waiting for what will happen next and knowing that it must happen soon. Each film becomes something of a masterpiece in tension; even those without scores, like Alles Wird Gut, evoke mood very effectively through the use of diegetic sound (especially those sounds of modernity: the whine of a motorcycle, the whoosh of a highway, the ding of a cellphone, all of which create a feeling of manic speed or stress.)

 

 

Though the films vary in lightness (ranging from an unflinching reflection on the Kosovo War to a sweet piece about a young man’s first date with his online girlfriend), none of them lack for emotional honesty. Above all, they are believable: in Stutterer, Greenwood sends flirtatious messages over Facebook (“6 months? Have I really been enduring you for that long?”); in Ave Maria, Moshe’s wife and her mother-in-law bicker constantly throughout their fifteen minute ordeal. These conversations feel like the ones we have with our own friends and families every day; thus, even as the characters’ worlds are different from our own, they never venture into the realm of film set. Because we are allowed to see these quotidian, or even goofy moments—Lea, in Alles Wird Gut, sticks her tongue out in her passport photo; in Shok, Petrit begs his mom to let his friend sleep over—we are willing to follow these characters into whatever dark places the filmmakers take them. And, almost without exception, we are taken somewhere dark.

 

 

Even in Ave Maria, a comedy set in the West Bank, there is the sense of a lingering threat despite the light, humorous tone; the Israeli family, when presented with a vehicle by the silent nuns, worries about passing the checkpoint in a car that looks “too Arab,” saying that the guards “would shoot [us] on sight.” In the end, the family transforms the “Arab” car into a Christian one, roping a neon cross on top and blaring hymns from the windows, and the threat of violence disappears in the sheer silliness of the image.

The other films, for the most part, offer no such relief. More often than not, things seem to go from bad to worse; children get shot, mothers die in childbirth, a father clings, sobbing, to his young daughter as the police try to rip his hands away. As a fellow theatergoer said, “My takeaway is that everything is definitely not going to be okay.”

Still, this level of emotional drama may be somewhat par for the course for short films like these. Shorts require far less funding than feature length films (although most of the budgets were not yet available online, Stutterer’s listed budget is a meager $7,200; a small sum, compared to movies like Brooklyn, which has a budget of roughly $10 million); this means that the filmmaker has a bit more creative freedom to do as he (or she, in other cases) pleases. With longer films, it’s hard to sustain the intense misery present in these shorter pieces: for one thing, two hours is a long time for a filmmaker to stay on one painful note; for another, the audience simply wouldn’t stand for it. With films as short as these, however, there is enough stamina to maintain a somber attitude, and less of a need for a film to be friendly to a broad audience.

Because each of these films is truly the vision of its director, they are quite different from one another. Still, if there is anything that ties these many films together, it is their searing humanity. If the material is at times familiar (the two boys in Stok make perhaps an overly likely pair, with the one being too big for his britches, and the other playing the innocent who dies in the end to teach the former a lesson; in Day One, divorcee Feda begins by proclaiming that she never wanted children, but emerges from the movie singing to a stranger’s baby with a rapturous look on her face), it is never unconvincing. Because of the elevated stakes, the fast pacing, and frankly wonderful performances (I found the child actors particularly impressive), I could forgive the things I could not understand about each film. Even those pieces that left us with an unresolved ending, as Alles Wird Gut did, felt persuasive; in fact, the fractured, brief nature of these stories mimicked life almost more effectively than a longer movie could. The form felt true to the disordered pace of life in the ‘real world’, where stories don’t always arc perfectly, and there often isn’t a discrete ending.

 

 

As I have learned from the above films, sometimes it is better to be brief, so I’ll leave you with this: the short film, though it may seem intimidating at first, is a medium well worth exploring, and the nominated films this year are especially impactful. To quote the Bard, “though [they] be but little, [they are] fierce.” You can watch the 2016 Live Action Oscar Shorts in theaters now (if you’re in Baltimore, the Charles has been showing them nightly!), or wait until February 23^rd, when they will be available online. Be sure to bring some tissues with you when you go.

What Film Can Do: Storytelling in 'The Fall' (Nicola)

I’m a double major in writing and film. This means that for the most part, you can find me submerged in far too many writing-intensive courses, drowning in a sea of words, half-formed ideas, and coffee – but I digress. My point is, between reading, writing, and watching, stories consume the vast majority of my time. Regardless of the medium, if there’s a story to be had, I’m all over it.

Storytelling is an art form. It’s a transitive experience that takes its recipients from one state of being to another. For me, the best narratives are those that speak on a personal level – stories into which I can insert myself and just escape for a while. Novels, films, personal anecdotes, illustrations, music, and even food – all of these are means of expressing emotion and thus, in my mind, fit the criteria for storytelling. Depending on the intended message, a project might be better suited to one particular medium or another, but film holds a special place in my heart. Film is special. There’s something about it that is so entirely immersive, bringing things to life in a way a single person could never manage on their own. That’s why I want to talk to you about a movie that only came to my attention recently; a movie that wholeheartedly encompasses the essence of film and what it can contribute to a story.

Tarsem Singh’s 2008 film, The Fall – you may or may not have heard of it . I find it extraordinarily vexing that, somehow, this film has slipped under the radar and has not received nearly enough recognition for what it attempts to conquer – itself. The Fall is a film about what it means to be a film (insert dramatic ‘BRWAAAM’ from the Inception soundtrack). Whereas most films want you to forget that you’re watching something on a screen, The Fall seems to actively work against this tradition, wildly pointing to cinematic qualities and how they interact with real life. 

The Fall centers around the relationship between stuntman Roy Walker and a 5-year-old Romanian girl named Alexandria. Both have been hospitalized for fall-related injuries – Alexandria due to an orange grove tumble and Roy for a bridge stunt gone wrong. Roy constructs an epic tale for his hospital companion, hoping to manipulate her into bringing him enough morphine pills to commit suicide. The film weaves between fantasy and reality as Roy’s desperation and depression grow. 

The Fall has received mixed reviews, some praising it for its mesmerizing beauty and others calling it a ridiculously expensive “vanity project” and “visual orgy” that opts for style over substance. But this outlook misses the point of the movie entirely. It takes issue with the absurdity of the fantasy instead of trying to see what Singh is saying through then absurdity. The Fall makes no effort to curb its fictional aspects and purposely blows them out of proportion. How else would you describe a situation in which a masked bandit, a muscular ex-slave, an Italian explosive expert, an Indian, and Charles Darwin must escape from a desert island on the back of an elephant? (no, I’m not joking - this is actually how their story begins). The ludicrous flaunting of make-believe is an homage to the tradition of suspending disbelief. 

As a medium, film lends itself nicely to such a practice. Film structure – at least within the context of continuity editing – manipulates reality to create a cohesive whole. In filming a single scene, a task can span the course of days, weeks, or months, but film makes it look seamless. With editing, two individuals standing fifty feet away from one another can overcome the distance dividing them with a single step. Done properly, the audience won’t even notice the incongruities because we will be so absorbed in the narrative. The Fall purposely promotes the opposite effect, pulling us out of the narrative with wild leaps of imagination in time and space to challenge the our concept of reality.

Because Singh isn’t necessarily concerned with continuity or believability, he unchains himself visually. The Fall was shot over the course of 4 years in 28 countries (Yup. Count ‘em. 28) and used no computer generated effects. This is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen, and I think that this beauty stems from the time Singh takes to capture the quintessential characteristics of each and every location – the soul, if you will. Because there is no CGI, the visuals in The Fall have an undeniable tangibility to them. Rather than spend time on special effects, Singh works to elevate those aspects that make film so unique – the elements of movement, sound, light, and color. Combined, these elements have the ability to make a film a truly immersive experience. If anyone is searching for inspiration in the realm of mise en scéne and cinematography, look no further.

   

Immersion in a film is one thing, but beyond that is the idea of ‘insertion of self.’ I think everyone has that one movie or that one book that speaks to them so profoundly its almost as if it was written for him or her. We find a part of ourselves in these films and consequently insert ourselves into the story itself. The Fall encompasses that exact feeling in the way it gradually incorporates people and items from reality into the fantasy that Roy creates. Though Roy is the one telling the story, all the visual output the audience receives is from little Alexandria. We know this because the descriptions given by Roy and the picture on the screen often differ. For example, Roy speaks of Indian and his squaw but the imagery we see is of a man from India because Alexandira has no concept of a Native American. The story and characters are fluid, fitting Alexandria’s pre-existing schemas and perceptions of the world. The duality between fiction and reality is what makes film so special, and is in part what makes The Fall so special.

Love it or hate it, the artistry of The Fall is undeniable. So whether or not the idea of a movie within a movie intrigues you, the piece is utterly gorgeous and is worth watching if only for the visual experience. I personally love the film, but that’s the thing about stories – they’re subjective. I urge you to watch it and form an opinion of your own.

 

On Loving Flowers, and Saying Odd Things (Madison)

As some of you may know, April is National Poetry Month (and according to T.S Eliot, the cruelest month, but that's besides the point.) In honor of the occasion, I thought I would dedicate this blog post to a few films that deal with poetry and great poets, ranging from a broadly appealing romance about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, to an examination of an old South Korean grandmother suffering from dementia. With this post, I am trying to understand how we (the 'we' represented by a filmmaker creating movies for an audience) understand poetry, what examining poetry allows a filmmaker to do, and how this literary art translates onto the big screen. 

On the list for today are Poetry (2010), directed by Lee Chang-dong; Slam (1998), directed by Marc Levin; Howl (2010), directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffry Friedman; and Bright Star (2009), directed by Jane Campion. I've tried to compile a diverse group of films; films that look at the same subject in different ways, and that might enrich my own conception of poetry and what it should do. 

I think all of these films, different as they are, are asking the same question: what is poetry? They ask it in a few ways: some, like Poetry or Bright Star, have protagonists who want to learn how to write it; Howl shows us the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who published Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl) where witnesses are asked to define literature and literary merit; Slam considers whether poetry can act as a form of non-violent protest, or as a means of rehabilitation. There is something opaque about poetry, something that keeps an audience removed; a film must necessarily overcome that barrier between content and viewer if it is to be well received, and one way of doing so is to try to answer that one fundamental question: what is poetry?

The answer, though, is never simple. In Poetry, Mija’s daughter defines a poet as “[someone] who loves flowers and always says odd things”; another woman says, “If you have feeling, you can write poetry.” In Bright Star, John Keats, trying to teach his next door neighbor how to read and write verse, explains, “Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” In some films, poetry is defined by its inability to be explained; an astute witness in Howl explains to the prosecutor, “Sir, you can’t transpose poetry into prose—that’s why it’s poetry.”

Even as our protagonists read it, write it, recite it to us, they are unable to pin it down. We are, instead, ushered into a sort of understanding through the use of unconventional film techniques. Howl is half animated: as James Franco reads Ginsberg’s famous piece in voiceover, we are shown cartoon scenes of “angel headed hipsters” crawling through the streets, jumping off buildings, copulating. The film switches from black and white shots of Ginsberg reading his poem in 1955, to colored scenes of an interview Ginsberg is giving, and the obscenity trial in 1957, then to these odd, bright hued cartoons playing over frenzied jazz music. It is something of a jarring switch: the literal man to the drawing, the clean lines of a black and white café to the uncanny CGI version of a world ruled by a bullheaded monster, Moloch. It doesn’t make sense; but then, that departure from literal sense is an attempt to capture what poetry is, what it means.

Even when the rupturing of reality is not quite so extreme, it is there: in Slam, in between narrative scenes, blurry, overlapped clips play, depicting things we have already seen in the film—a man getting shot, Ray running from the cops—blurring into the future, with Ray in cuffs, and into scenes that have no temporal signature at all: frames of graffiti, sad-eyed boys, crowded sidewalks. Poetry, too, makes some unusual choices. There is no soundtrack except for birdsong; we see frames filled only with glimmering water; we spend stretches of time watching an apple turning in the sunlight or an apricot fallen to the ground; in the last scene, we hear a girl who we saw in the opening drowned in the river recite a poem, we see her face the camera with a half smile before the screen goes dark; we do not know what happens to the protagonist, Mija—she leaves the film before the last five minutes, and we are never given closure. These are odd decisions, things that feel unusual, but that also fit into the landscape of the film, make sense in the artistic context.

These breaks with expectation are the filmmakers’ way of explaining to a viewer what poetry is; if it cannot be stated verbally, if Mija’s teacher cannot explain when one will find poetic inspiration, if Keats cannot tell Fanny Brawne how to become a poet (“if poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all”, he says during their first lesson), then it can be communicated visually. The business of poetry is breaking expectation, making the familiar seem unfamiliar—how better to do that than to disrupt the narrative flow of a film, to use the camera as a poet uses words, featuring images that might otherwise go unseen, forcing the viewer to look, to be confused, to feel something that cannot be identified even as it is familiar.

This focus that poetry allows is a wonderful tool to look at people on the margins of society; people who, like Allen Ginsberg, are gay, like Ray Joshua are black, are prisoners, like Mija are old, suffer from Alzheimer’s, like John Keats are poor, or dealing with depression. This vehicle allows us to look closely at people who might otherwise be ignored. Arm them with images, with a pen, and they speak: poetry becomes a very real force for social change as it allows the stories of marginalized writers to be shared. Poetry is a place, a cultural location that exists through change; unlike many other traditional social spaces, poetry is meant to evolve, to be altered, to tell many stories and take on many forms. It is the ideal vehicle for the ignored, as it is so amenable to change, so easy to take with you. As Ray says when offered a place in a prison gang, “No. All I need is some paper and a pen, then I can figure this out.”

Poetry also allows us to look at subjects that are otherwise uncomfortable, or ignored; sex, in particular, is addressed in surprising ways in these films about poetry. In Slam we see a woman receiving oral sex; in Poetry we watch an old woman have sex with a stroke victim; in Howl we are faced with a forest of (it makes me cringe to write this) playful penises waving in a cartoon wind. All of this is out of the ordinary: women are seldom the recipients of sexual pleasure in film; old people are portrayed as asexual; male genitalia are hidden at all costs. But in these films, the directors use poetry as a vehicle to confront these things, to look unflinchingly, even goofily, at those parts of our sexuality that make us so uncomfortable.

Mental illness too, is examined: we are familiar with the artist as a depressed figure, yet are often more comfortable ignoring mental health problems. These movies shine a spotlight on the depressed, the people who “have been half in love with easeful Death” like Keats, been forced into insane asylums and given shock therapy, like Ginsberg’s friend Solomon, have started forgetting nouns, who have become overwhelmed and confused like Mija. When looking at the biographies of poets, the presence of mental illness cannot be ignored; when looking at poets through the unflinching lens of art, mental illness cannot be left unaddressed or unexploited. 

Poetry, then, can do a lot for the marginalized, the outsiders; it may be confusing, may even seem inaccessible, but film allows us to understand visually what we might not be able to on the page. Film, too, allows us to hear poetry rather than read it; we are immersed in it, experience it unfiltered by sight, by the blankness of page margins. As we hear it we cannot look away, we can only let it wash over us. The act of hearing a poem is immersive and complete, allows us to experience a poem in a different way than we do when we see it on the page. Poetry, then, shares a special relationship with film: as it is interpreted visually, it is also delivered orally, presenting the viewer unique access to pieces that may seem alien in a book.

I’m afraid I’ve run out of space, so I will conclude with this: I have heard, as I think most people have, that poetry is dead or dying at best, that maybe a long time ago people got fired up about sonnets, but you'd be lucky if you met someone today who even knew what the word 'sonnet' meant. It was in the hope that what I've heard is wrong that I pursued films about poetry, and why I wrote about them today: poetry, if it can be a part of films like this, reaching audiences who most comfortably navigate culture through screen, is still very much alive and kicking. As poetry is adapted to film it maintains a place in our cultural landscape, and evolves to target an audience who, though they may no longer have Shakespeare or Keats or Ginsberg, have, as all humans do, a basic need for creative expression. 

 

 

Defiance - An Adventure in Transmedia (Sophie)

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Smaller Screen: Television and the Internet (Sophie)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out H+ for yourselves on their Youtube Channel.

The Role of the Storyteller in The Princess Bride (Chris D)

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

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

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

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

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

 

Multiple Cities and Multiple Films: Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG (Kyle)

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

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

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

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

-----------------------------------------------------------------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------------------------------------------------------------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Mind Trip: Movies for a New Era (Leela)

“I see dead people.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Painted Screen: Le mystére Picasso, The Mystery of Picasso, The Picasso Mystery (Mike)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

---

 

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

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

Production Journal #5

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

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

Still from my next project Panic

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

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

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

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

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

Diana.

Organic, no additives (Inhye)

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

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

Its “Vow of Chastity”¹ states:

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

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

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

 

Works Cited

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

Taste the Rainbow (Diana)

Production Journal #4

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Until next time,

Diana

a + b = c (Diana)

Production Journal #3

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time,

Diana P.

Havana, Lisbon and Wim Wenders (Shauna)

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Coulais' Soundscape in Coraline (Shauna)

Why is it so difficult to remain attentive to sound while watching a film?  And why is it so rare that we fully appreciate and internalize a musical score?  In a culture that bombards us with visual emblems, cues and representations, image frequently subverts sound, particularly in retrospective analysis.  We subconsciously relegate the musical score to the background, assuming it is more of an embellishment than a fundamental structural component.  Yet, a soundtrack can elicit intense emotional responses and deserves independent analytic and artistic investigation. 

The mise-en-scene acquires a notably warmer pallet in the alternate universe; costumes, props and visible light sources furnish a deceptively enticing fantasy world. Coraline. Creative Commons.¹

The challenge of formulating a non-verbal audio accompaniment to a narrative cannot be overstated.  In constructing an audio landscape, directors risk imposing a generic emotional atmosphere.  Such moods are frequently sentimental or melodramatic.  Exploiting sound to elicit calculated audience responses is highly problematic: a musical score that reduces the climate to shallow, one-dimensional emotions undermines the audience.  Characters and environments tend to lose their originality under the oppressive weight of music that “tells” viewers how to feel.  In turn, audiences habituated to overt musical scores lose the ability to formulate original thoughts about characters, relationships and environments.  A score might inspire angst, pity, joy or elation, but one-to-one equivocations between musical styles and emotions are rarely interesting.  When music is manipulated to induce a calculated response, it fosters complacency among viewers and dulls their capacity to think critically about the music in relation to the mise-en-scene, framing and characters. 

Last weekend, I ventured into Muvico 24 to see Henry Selicks’s acclaimed stop-action film Coraline in 3D.  Until then, I never had a reason to visit Arundel Mills.  But after seeing the film in 2D at The Charles, a trek down to the Mills was my only option if I wanted to see Coraline in all its stereoscopic glory.  The first thing you notice as you enter Arundel Mills is the ridiculous scale of things.  The whole mall is divided into "neighborhoods," each complete with streets and massive cafes facing massive stores selling computers and televisions.  It’s like an airport, only exponentially larger.  During the trailers, the sound was overwhelming and obtrusive, functioning only to amplify the impact of mass destruction, mechanical failure or human brutality.  In a way, the trailers' sound quality and volume conformed to the grotesque scale of the theater and mall.  I consider this type of sound to be exploitative because it obstructs our sense of cinema's visual language and fails to illuminate subtle connections between sound and imagery.

A successful sound universe generally develops an environment's complexity, widening the number of possible associations and interpretations, rather than confining a scene to one monolithic mood (i.e. "melancholy" or "happiness").  Part of what makes Coraline such an intriguing piece of art is the musical score's capacity to evoke new sentiments with multiple viewings.  Instrumental details and subtle shifts in tonality, volume and timbre are integrated with a level of craftsmanship that merits the meticulous language of stop-action animation.  My emotional response is never identical or formulaic.  Rather, I experience conflicting senses of familiarity and refreshing newness each time I listen to the score.  Moreover, within the context of each investigation, it is possible to discern conflicting elements: desire and repulsion, harmony and discord.

It would be a disservice to the film to try to analyze the extensive array of technically brilliant elements, including the interiors and landscapes, the characters' physical forms and movements (angular or wobbly, and often "twitchy," according to Selicks) and the lighting (cool/diffused versus warm/hard).  Instead, I hope to analyze three realms – Coraline's ordinary home, the art deco theater, Bobinsky's circus tent and the other-worldly garden – to investigate how the musical score and mise-en-scene interact to reveal parallels between characters and their micro-environments.  

Bruno Coulais is the film's French composer.  He is also well-known in the U.S. for his compositions in Les Choristes, a film that ardently asserts the power of music to counter repressive regimes.  The presence of youthful singers from Nice in Coraline identifies the musical score as Coulais'.  His work is original and inventive, oscillating between contemplation and agitation.  Perhaps the most challenging aspect of writing a film score is to ensure it is unified without being redundant.  Coulais achieves such a sense of unity by relying on a core group of instruments: horns and oboes, harps, vocals, piano and percussion instruments, along with synthesizers and bells.  He avoids the typical musical motif, instead opting to use certain melodies, rhythms and tones to color specific characters.  Thus, individuals and their environments acquire musical personalities that complement their visual impact. 

Neutral tones, cool accents and diffused lighting predominate Coraline's ordinary domestic existence. A raked stage intensifies the sense of confinement in the drab interior. Coraline. Creative Commons.²

In Coraline's home, a neutral dinginess pervades the dining room.  The accumulation of cool neutral elements - tiles, chipped cabinetry, fogged windows, metallic chairs, kettles and cutlery - cement the sense of ordinary.  Her parents are so embedded in the minutia of domesticity that they seem to become human appendages of the monotonous environment.  In the office, her father's gaunt, hunched body is echoed by precariously piled boxes and canted camera angles.  Coraline's restless form reflected in his computer poignantly encapsulates the gap between her boredom and his frustrations over work.  When he sends her on a mission to list the doors, windows and "everything that's blue," Coraline conveys curiosity, insight, independence and slight brooding.  Her quest is accompanied by Coulais' "Exploration," a light ballad performed with the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra.  A single angelic voice and accompanying harps and piano endow Coraline's childhood with a balance of beautiful innocence and potential darkness.  Using the synthesizer, Coulais compiles harmonies (from the solo vocalist) to create an illusion of multiple intertwined voices.  The result is a sound metaphor for the paradigm of the only child, who relies on her imagination for companionship. 

Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, retired British theater performers. Coraline. Creative Commons.³

Within the universe constructed by the "other mother," one of three luxuries used to entice Coraline is an elaborate art deco theater.  There, imitations of Coraline's two elderly neighbors, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, perform an opera complete with intricate costumes, two-dimensional sets and an elaborate pulley system for hoisting figures.  It is a testament to the convincing characterization and deft manipulation of the puppets that we perceive the scenario to be authentic.  Suspended in the world of Coulais' musical composition and Selicks' animation, we embrace the notion of sculpted characters consciously performing against their own two-dimensional mise-en-scene!  Spink's fleshy body is firmly encased in a fish tail and Forcible's voluptuous form is scantily clad in sequins. Rarely in popular cinema is the elderly female body so brazenly displayed, and in this sense, Selicks departs from conventional Western constructs of feminine beauty.  However, Coulais' musical score grounds the scenario in a performance culture, where such absurdity seems natural. The music is highly dramatized and full of affectations.  And perhaps because the sequence is so flamboyant and unexpected, the lyrics assume a greater weight, even a sense of urgency.  It is difficult to ascribe a particular meaning to the opera's narrative, yet the warnings to sailors hint at an ominous future.

Music plays an equally critical role in the faux Bobinsky's circus tent.  It lends a sense of magical-realism through vaguely Eastern European melodies and frantic orchestral maneuvers.  There is a childish quality to the music, which seems to oscillate and glimmer alongside the synchronized mice.  Small bells, cymbals, percussion and fluttering high-pitched brass instruments give the sequence a ephemeral, dreamy aura.  But the music also echoes the eerie oboes, horns and chimes earlier associated with the authentic Bobinsky, blurring the threshold between the two parallel worlds.

The final other-worldly wonder is the Fantastic Garden, endowed with luminescent crocuses, tickling ivy and swarms of hummingbirds.  The garden brims with color, warmth and movement - pulsing with the vitality of an intricate ecosystem.  The visual elements are built up gradually, each striking component giving way to another, until the entire garden is viewed from above to reveal a fauna mosaic Coraline head.  The music develops in parallel fashion: what starts as a few lone violins culminates in a jazzy conglomeration of percussion, cymbals, bells, horns and strings.

After viewing the film in 2D and 3D, I have to say that the 3D format undermines the potent textural impact of Bruno Coulais' musical score.  Although it certainly adds a technically impressive element to the opening sequence, in which needle-thin metallic fingers deconstruct the fibers, fillings and hair of a doll, it deprives the movie of its cinematic essence, giving it the feel of a video game.  Coulais' music, influenced by the French pianist Eric Satie, renders the animation deeply emotional, at once delightful and disconcerting.  Coulais' sound scheme renders Selick's work more vivid, immediate and lasting.  His impact far exceeds anything stereoscopic effects can achieve.

In an interview regarding the film's fastidious attention to detail and craft, Henry Selicks asserted that his main job was "to keep the beauty under control...to knock down the beauty."  Excess beauty is a very real risk when a project involves so many talented people, each engaged in one small component of the whole.  But Selicks, through figure twitches and grit, successfully combats perfection.  He relies on visual language to convey characters' behaviors and mannerisms, and trusts Coulais' music to inform their deeper emotional complexities.  For this he should be commended. 

 

Image Credits:

1. "Pic by Focus Features." Creative Commons. Joanneteh_32. January 30, 2009.

2. "Coraline's Normal Life." Creative Commons. Joanneteh_32. January 30, 2009.

3. "Miss Forcible and Spink." Creative Commons. Joanneteh_32. January 30, 2009.

 

 

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

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

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Citizen Kane too wrestles with the cloud of subjectivity, giving us the man of the title through several of his associates, each with a different version of the truth.  The first witness called to the stand is the March of Time newsreel, offering an account of Kane’s life that underlines the central problem of testimony: Kane's empire, in its glory held dominion over thirty-seven newspapers, two syndicates, a radio network.  An empire upon an empire.  The first of grocery stores, paper mills, apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners.  An empire through which for fifty years flowed, in an unending stream, the wealth of the earth's third richest gold mine.     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

Film: The Gesamtkunstwerk

 

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

First up:

Painting & Film

 

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

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

A Narrator's Ability to Manipulate Film (Alexandra)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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