HopkinsCinemAddicts

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.

 

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. 

 

Fake News: The Truman Show and Media (Tori)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Are Films a Pretext for Social Dialogue? (Nour)

Until recently, film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good.

                                "Towards a Third Cinema," a manifesto

 

Paris is Burning is a 1990 documentary film by Jennie Livingston. This documentary explores the gay ballroom, drag culture in Harlem. Most of the people interviewed in the film achieved a fair degree of celebrity after its release. In the April of 1993 following the death of the mother of the house of Xtravaganza, Angie Xtravaganze, the New York Times ran a piece titled "Paris Has Burned," an essay about Angie. Here is a paragraph from the essay that is worth quoting at length,

Though she was only 27, Angie had been a mother more than a dozen times. Not in the usual way; she was biologically male. "But a mother is one who raises a child, not one who borns it," Hector [a member of the house of Xtravaganza] pointed out. And as mother of the House of Xtravaganza, Angie had taken many rejected, wayward, even homeless children under her wing; she had fed them, observed their birthdays, taught them all about "walking the balls." Competing in categories like High-Fashion Eveningwear and Alexis vs. Krystle, Angie was legendary, a Queen among queens, achieving in fantasy what the world had denied her in reality.

The characters of these house mothers and the nature of the relations they foster within their houses are relevant to any reading of Paris is Burning. Angie died from an AIDS-related liver disease. She was on hormones to maintain a soft feminine appearance. In the film there is a scene in which a group of men, some of them drag queens but not all, suckle on her breasts. The camera captures a run-down, shabby neighborhood, and then a group of men proclaiming Angie their mother. In fact in Paris is Burning  Angie could easily be mistaken for a woman.

When I watched this film, I became really interested in the house of Xtravaganza because of Angie and also because of Venus Xtravaganza. Venus was killed during the period in which Livingston was making the film. She was a transgender in NYC  who worked as a prostitute in order to save enough money to undergo a sex-change surgery. She was found in a hotel room four days after her death. Livingston interviews Venus only once in the film. During this interview, Livingston asks Venus about her dreams for the future. Venus' reply is arguably understandable, but also surprising. Venus tells Livingston that when she is fully female, she wants to get married, live in the suburbs, have a washing machine. She dreams of the typical bourgeois life. The life-style that she is too different—as a transgender, poor, non-white—to embody.

Paris is Burning enters a space at the fringes of mainstream American society. The expected reaction to have as a spectator watching these atypical modes of existence unfold is to feel uncomfortable, find the images indigestible. The spectator should feel disturbed by sights of awkward bodies that cannot be defined,  movements and gestures that do not fall neatly into the repertoire of appropriate female or male movements and gestures. However, this is not the reaction one gets. It is likely that people come out of the movie-theater feeling that these black (or Latino) gay men are victims. In fact the undertone of the Livingston's remarks on the film reveals that she thinks she is doing them a service. Here is another quotation from the Times "drag queens can't. "If they wanted to make a film about themselves, they would not be able," said Ms. Livingston, who grew up in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Yale University." Livingston is a white lesbian film director. She, however, still has the white-man burden mentality as these comments reveal.

bell hooks wrote about Paris is Burning in her book Race and Representations. Here is one point hooks made about the film:   

 

Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there becausethe film in no way interrogates "whiteness." These folks left the filmsaying it was "amazing," "marvelous," "incredibly funny," worthy of statements like, "Didn't you just love it?" And no, I didn't just love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit.  (149)

hook's observations shed light on the meanings of Venus' dream of living the bourgeois life. Livingston's work in constructed in such a way that she does not "interrogate" whiteness. As such, Livingston does not completely oppose the System, the hegemonic modes of thinking. This is an important assertion in the face of the wide-held belief that Livingston is a radical filmmaker whose films testify to social injustices. This is not to discredit the film, however. Instead, it reveals a necessary aspect of cinema's function in society.

            The film interrogates gender in an interesting way, which undoubtedly has something to do with Livingston's own interests. It reveals some of the causes underlying social injustices. The film might have changed the trajectory of some people's lives by making them celebraties even if briefly. Yet, at the same time the film also has helped maintain a particular relation of power. As hook's comments reveal, this film reproduces ideology in an important way. Cinema's role in society is interesting to explore. Away from close text filmic analysis, it is rewarding sometimes to step away and ask how cinema contributes to the creation and maintenance of social power relations. Although this might not be the most interesting conclusion to some people, it is worth it to remind oneself of the necessary political and historical dimensions of film-making, and film distribution. Let me end with a quotation from Marx: "it is not sufficient to interpret the world; it is now a question of transforming it."

The Night Porter: eroticism and sadomasochism (Nour)

The Night Porter (dir. Liliana Cavani) is doubtlessly controversial. When it came out in 1974 it had a very positive reception in Europe, but in the US it was hailed as a piece of junk. For example, the great Roger Ebert started his essay in the Chicago Sun-Times on February 10^th, 1975 by writing

"The Night Porter" is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering. It is (I know how obscene this sounds) Nazi chic. It's been taken seriously in some circles, mostly by critics agile enough to stand on their heads while describing 180-degree turns, in order to interpret trash as "really" meaningful.

Ebert thought the film did not approach its subject matter in a very fruitful way. It was alarmingly reveling in sadomasochistic impulses and sadomasochistic scenes. According to Ebert, The Night Porter offered a dangerously romanticized view of doom and death. It was disturbing but with style—"Nazi chic" as Ebert puts it. I find The Night Porter confusing if nothing else. One aspect of the film that I find particularly confusing is the connection that the film draws between doom, death, suffering and eroticism.

            The Night Porter is a story about Max a previous S.S. concentration camp officer and Lucia a former prisoner at the camp where Max was stationed. When they were in this unidentified concentration camp, Max used to film Lucia often in extremely humiliating situations. Since it was prohibited that an officer would have any sympathy toward, let alone love, one of the inmates, Max repressed or tormenting denied his feelings toward Lucia. In one scene, Max wounds Lucia's arm using a surgical instrument. He does not sew up the cut, instead he licks it. It becomes the site of erotic bliss.  

        Thirteen years after the end of the war, Max and Lucia run into each other in a hotel in Vienna. Max works in the hotel as a night porter. Lucia is now married to an American orchestra conductor, but she stays behind after her husband leaves. She moves into Max's apartment. One scene that is often cited in this part of the film is the one in which Lucia locks herself in the bathroom. She breaks a bottle of perfume and then invites Max in. He at first accidentally steps on the broken glass, but when Lucia puts her hands under his heel, he steps sharply on the glass. The camera shows Max taking pleasure in the pain and so does Lucia. In the apartment, Max and Lucia live the past. Eventually Max puts on his Nazi officer suite and Lucia puts on a pink dress so similar to the one Max had given her to wear in the camp, they go out of the apartment and are shot to death.  

            A scene which particularly brings up the relation between eroticism, suffering and sadomasochism is the cabaret scene from which the film's most popular poster image is taken. In this scene Lucia seems to enjoy her humiliation. She voluntarily exhibits herself and furthers her pain and victimization. She is half naked in the scene and moves around a room full of Nazi officers, including Max. After the dance is over, Max gives Lucia the head of another officer who bothered her earlier. Max has decapitated him for her sake. Eroticism, suffering, and violence all intersect in this scene.

            If you ever saw Gerhard Richter's Atlas and particularly panels 16-23, you know that he too, as did Liliana Cavani in this film, saw a relation between the horrors of Auschwitz and prostitution. In these panels, Richter combines dreadful photographs of people in concentration camps, starved and on the verge of death, with photographs of prostitutes (or at least women photographed as if they were). For me, the relation between the two is hard to figure out. Beside feeling stunned as my eyes scan the panels, it is hard to see the reason why Gerhard Richter chose to relate the two. Some say that in doing so he has feminized death and doom. 

        Maybe death is related to the feminine because of the trauma of birth. Famously, Otto Rank (1924) argued that the moment of birth is a separation from the perfect union with the mother and that the violent circumstances of the moment of birth make it traumatic. Death too represents a separation. I think, Richter's juxtaposition of images of death and prostitution might be a way of referencing the past state of harmony with the mother and the traumatic separation which is the basis of the human experience. Human life is truncated by two severely traumatic experiences of separation—birth and death. The view of life which this outlook creates makes it more understandable, perhaps, that people are sadomasochistic.

            Although Cavani creates an intentionally unrealistic space for the film, The Night Porter inhabits a space so similar to that of actual life. The film ends with death, and starts with a state which is comparable to the traumatic separation of birth. Lucia and Max were separated from each other for thirteen years after they had lived together in relative harmony with most basic needs gratified. Max and Lucia's nostalgic desire to return to the past motivates the whole film. Yet, this past might be in fact the moment before birth, before the original trauma. It might be a wish to live again in perfect harmonious unity with a protective mother (or whatever can stand for "mother"—for example a nation can be "mother"). 

Maya Deren's first film (Nour)

Maya Deren is an Ukrainian-American filmmaker who died in 1961. She is often associated with avant-garde filmmaking and particularly the feminist avant-garde . Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was her first film. She was twenty six  years old when she made it, living in Los Angeles. She was married toAlexandr Hackenschmied. It is hard, if not impossible, to know exactly what was going on in Deren's mind when she made the film, yet there are some interesting historical developments from 1943.

Of course, WWII has not yet ended, and a number of battles took place in 1943. In early '43 bread is rationed in US. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto happens on January 19^th 1943, etc. Many developments are certainly meaningful in trying to reconstruct the socio-economic and political environment in which Maya Deren has worked. One development, though, is of particular relevance. The All-American Girls Softball League, then baseball league, came into existence in 1943. Among other similar developments in women's lives during the war, this type of expansion in women's engagement with society can only point toward a new social consciousness; particularly among young women at the time.

Several issues come to mind when thinking about Meshes of the Afternoon in relation to a newly discovered female consciousness toward the environment, society. Yet, I'll focus on just one: Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon  significantly blurs the line between the inner and the outer, the private and the public.

The film is a non-linear narrative about a woman who falls asleep in an armchair and dreams. She has a dream in which a character with a mirror as a face features repeatedly. Deren plays the role of the woman who falls asleep. The film repeats the act of entrance into the house again and again. Right before the woman enters for the second time, however, we see her observing her sleeping body, then looking outside the widow at the character with the mirror face, all dressed in black, and at herself speeding away from the house. The very famous Maya Deren portrait (below) comes from this scene.      

             MAYA DEREN. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.1943.

(Right after the frame from which this still is taken, the film cuts to the woman herself running after the character with the mirror face. )

This scene is a good illustration of how Deren blurs the line between the inner and the outer and attempts to merge the two spheres. In this scene the woman is both inside the house sleeping,  and outside the house running. Of course the mantra for second wave feminism was "the personal is political" which also blurs the distinction between the political/ the public/the outer and the personal/ the private/ the inner. Deren does seem to engage with this public-private binary, while attempting to situate the female within it. The woman, in this scene, appears as if she is both looking at herself running outside and looking at herself sleeping inside. She knows. She is offered a frame of reference from which she could take a distance and theorize about her position. 

The claim that she  could theorize about her position is problematic though. Looking at the still above, Deren, on the threshold looks, arguably, like a  mime. She can only gesture but not speak. She is able to point but not use language. Her allusion to mime acting helps emphasize her deep involvement with, if not entrapment within, her  body. There lies a paradox. She can look at herself, but at the same time cannot distance herself from her body. It is hard for me to make sense of what this paradox might mean, yet perhaps it is only meaningful within the context of the fantasy or  dream. The film might be postulating that distancing herself from her body, which seems to be a hindrance, is a female dream.

The female body is here situated on the line between the inner and the outer, making it the site of the struggle, or negotiation, between these two spheres. Although something similar could be said about all bodies it is especially true of  the female body which is often considered a matter of public discourse as females are the mothers who are traditionally seen as responsible for the propagation of the species. One could argue, therefore, that the dream of running away from the house in the above referenced scene is in fact a dream of breaking free of her body—a position to which the ending of the film gives credence.

This movement  outside of the body might mean a movement into a plentitude that exists outside of it —a space similar to that which the film creates in which even the law of gravity can be broken . Or if one emphasizes the process of movement toward an outside,  instead of the destination, Deren seems to be deliberately  bringing the public and private (the political and the personal) into dialogue. She is ultimately, thus, a dialectician. Woman is a dialectician. Her capacity to create and inhabit between seeming opposites, merging them within herself, to allow for the synthesis of something in can account for why Deren ensures that the woman observes herself both sleeping and running.

Meshes of the Afternoon has been read and re-read in so many different ways. Partly, perhaps, because in the many years after it was made and till now people, and particularly women's, experiences changed and therefore people saw different meanings in the film. This is one of its particular strengths as a text of course—it ages well. So for example tying the reading to second wave feminism is not an attempt to say that Deren foresaw the movements mantra or whatever. Instead it is an attempt to situate Deren within a larger historical tragectory.  

Avant-garde: Akerman in New York (Nour)

It is astonishing how many people assume identification is the fundamental problem for cinema and by implication for feminist film criticism. Granted it is better to have images of women who are more like real women doing their everyday activities than have images that are so distant from the real woman, yet alone such images of "empowered" women can do little. What feminist film criticism has grown to realize in the 1970s is that the whole politics of seeing—the power of the camera to direct the gaze—the forms for seeing afforded to the spectator, the film aesthetic in broader terms has to be re-envisioned for the true emancipation of women in film. Claire Johnston, a prominent film critic,  wrote in  "Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema" (1973):

If women's cinema is going to emerge, it should not only concern itself with substituting positive female protagonists, focusing on women's problems, etc.; it has to go further than this if it is to impinge on consciousness. It requires a revolutionary strategy which can only be based on an analysis of how film operates as a medium within a specific cultural system.

I would like to supplement this quotation with one from Chantal Akerman. She was talking in an interview with Camera Obscura  in 1977 about Jeanne Dielman:

[t]he content is the most simple and obvious thing. They[the filmmakers] deal with that and forget to look for formal ways to express what they are and what they want, their own rhythms, their own way of looking at things…[it's not] just what it says but what is shown and how it's shown.

 The focus on the forms of seeing in addition to the content shown has allowed filmmakers like Akerman to introduce not only new images, but also new rhythms, a new temporal consciousness, and a new spacial consciousness into cinema. Jeanne Dielman might be a powerful example of this new type of narrative, but it is not the only example--News From Home is another one. 

        This post is in fact about News From Home, an Akerman film produced in the 1976 when Akerman was in NYC. It is usually categorized as an avant-garde film, and understandably so. The camera shows shots of New York as Chantal Akerman's voice-over reads letters which her mom had sent to her from Belgium. There is no real plot line, no characters, etc. It is a visual portrait of NYC as seen by Akerman whose consciousness has been influenced by letters from home. Arguably,  News From Home creates, as opposed to assumes, a female spectator  position as it portrays the unique tempo-spacial consciousness of Akerman—a female! The spectator is not offered any character with whom to identify, supporting the claim that cinema is not only about identification. Unfortunately Hollywood, because it focuses mostly on narrative cinema, had to propose that cinema is about identification only, yet as News From Home, the feminist avant-gardist films, and the structuralist movement have all, arguably, shown, cinema is not only about identification.Now, if cinema is not only about identification, where does that leave us?

    I personally tend to think of a film as a space, that is really nowhere in particular, where a consciousness reveals itself. Sometimes it's multiple consciousness-es. However in News From Home it is only that of Chantal Akerman. She directs the camera towards what interests her, what is meaningful to her in the present, as a result of her past experience. She uses perspective in such a way that the image becomes wholly hers once she has chosen her frames.  If Akerman is communicating her own consciousness as she navigates the streets of the foreign city of New York, then I agree with the claim that the voiceover—with the definitiveness of language—shows the attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Of course the words which are read out loud are not descriptions of the images, or frames. They are words which do not aim to capture, define, or restrict the visual plentitude of the images. However they are aimed to capture something and that is Akerman's consciousness as she walks around New York in the 1970s.

        The juxtaposition between the voice over and the elusive images of New York is hypnotizing. For me at least, precisely because it shows an attempt to make concrete what cannot be made so. How would one make sorrow concrete, or nostalgia, or just the fact of missing one's family? How can ambition be made concrete, freedom or the like? A part of the film that I like a lot is the very last scene. While listening to the sound of the Hudson river the camera shows a seagull flying up and down. There is a sense of exhilaration in that composition, it shows an ambitious Akerman, one that ran away from home (without telling anyone as the letters reveal) for a reason. Why else would she see meaning, and focus her camera, on a flying seagull?

        A film like News From Home changes the spectator in ways that are solely hers. How one reacts to this film is essentially a result of who one is. As such its language is so different from words, though it uses words, since meaning is yet to be created for each spectator as (s)he watches the film. I have always found this amazing to think about. After watching the film one person might find herself crying another might feel a determination to go out into the world. The meaning (for each person) lies in the act of negotiation between "me" and the film such that the spectatorial position is assumed (from the beginning of the film's production), yet is not part of the film. Akerman's consciousness expressing itself in images does not need a viewer to be a meaningful act—contrast this with a film that is for entertainment only (No Strings Attached for example) where the act of consumption is precisely where the meaning and function of the film lies. Such type of film is only a commodity to be consumed. In News From Home, the spectatorial position though assumed is not sutured into the film. This latter type of film is the one that can be deemed feminist. 

(I will write about Meshes of the Afternoon in my next post since I ran out of space here!)

 

The Language of Cinema (Nour)

When I went back and reread my last two blog posts here, I discovered that they (severely) lacked in methodological clarity. I will therefore use this post to provide a more explicit sense of  direction and uncover the standpoint from which, and the  presuppositions and mechanisms through which my last two posts are more meaningful.

The first blog post was about Ehky ya Scheherazade  a film in which women are reduced to their image, appearance, exterior. Although the film professes to show women fighting back, presumably by telling their version of the story of the oppressive patriarchal  order, they are in fact denied access to the realm of the symbolic—they are still to use L. Mulvey's distinction "bearers of meaning" and not creators of it. The stories they tell are told through the language of patriarchy. It is important to add that the film also dabbles into discussions of class. The relation between gender and class is complicated. However, as my blog post, albeit obliquely, has suggested the language of the film is best understood as one resting on sexual desire and not desire for material gains or upward social mobility. I will not argue extensively for this point, but I will point out that the women who "tell their story" in this film, although belonging to different socio-economic strata, display no interest in either moving away from their own strata or in critiquing the very structure which allows for and maintains the division of society into well-defined socio-economic  strata. 

The second blog post was about Run Lola Run. This film posits some difficulties when the critic (any type of critic) conceives of its language as one which rests upon visual sexual desire, the desirous look(ing). One important thing that the seminal Mulvey essay "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema" has done is that it has shifted the focus from an analysis of the images of women exhibited on the cinema screen to an analysis of the mechanisms which condition and even necessitate certain modes of seeing which are detrimental to the woman. With this in mind, Run Lola Run's complexity comes to occupy two levels. First it provides an unorthodox image of the woman, and second, it allows for a visual, or more generally cinematic, grammar this is radical. We often understand radicalism through an opposition to the mainstream and not by focusing on an act by itself. I will go with this folk notion to define the radical.

(By way of a side, I was speaking to a friend earlier about Mulvey's essay and with a dismissing hand gesture she pronounced the essay old and irrelevant. She could not have been more wrong. Although feminist film criticism has gone beyond the argument in "Visual Pleasure," this essay is still a force to be reckoned with and assertively a foundational text that cannot be irrelevant and old.)

When reading Run Lola Run as part of this language of desire, the film becomes radical in two ways at least. The woman is the ultimate creator of meaning and in fact of the whole world order. She is wrapped in time and space, hence her uniqueness as a singular woman is preserved. Lola's appearance emphasizes this point further as you cannot really see Lola as belonging to the deep blue sea of women about whom predictions can be made. Lola remains mysterious to the on-looker. A skeptic critic reading this post might say: "Ahah! There. Lola is essentially Woman. She is the other. The position of the signifier is still male." Of course, this critic will build a more elaborate argument, which will be most likely valid. I am offering another reading and not discarding one which upholds the language of desire as understood within a patriarchal framework.

To be more direct, in the blog post on Run Lola Run I was suggesting that the center of the cinematic grammar in this film was not exactly the voyeuristic, fetishinzing, and scopophilic phantasy look. Instead it was a look that is more sadistic. If it takes pleasure, it is because it witnesses suffering and pain. The language of desire which Mulvey has suggested involves the creation of an ideal ego (a hero) on the screen, one whom the spectator can desire to be like, one who seduces the spectator.  It also involves assumptions about the isolation of the individual members of an audience in a movie theater looking from a point of safety, indulging in the pleasure of looking. A pleasure which to Mulvey stems directly from being the voyeur.

This type of mechanism is possibly part of Run Lola Run but again this film seems to assume more of its spectator so that moving beyond the appetitive desires become a possibility when watching Run Lola Run. Successfully, or unsuccessfully, the film tries to appeal to the mind and not to the body. The film starts with a narrator saying something close to:

  Mankind, probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of open questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we believe to know? Why  do we believe anything at all? 'Innumerable questions looking for an answer, an  answer which will raise the next question and the following answer will raise a following  question and so on and so forth. 'But in the end, isn't it always the same question and always the same answer?'  Security guard  Schuster: 'A football is round, a game lasts 90 minutes. That's for sure. Anything else is merely  hypothetical. Off we go!

If the film aims to direct the 'looking' onto the patterns of action rather than the bodies in action, then it could be the case that it is attempting to provide a cinematic experience that is less gendered. In other words, the position of spectator is assumed to neither be female nor male. Instead, only a rational mind is assumed to occupy this position. The film is appealing to the faculties of reason and cognition (I hope the beautiful and sublime distinction in the title now makes sense: Kant, "The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment").

The language of desire is not the only language available to cinema. Nor is it the only organizing force behind story-telling in general (this is a bit problematic, but I'll hazard to say it). Yet, it is so hard to elude the grip of such language without some avant-garde techniques. Tykwer turns Lola into an animated cartoon at some points in the film. He turns her into a supernatural hero at other points. What this implies is a split between content and mode of production (the difference between form and matter or content). This break 'activates,' so to speak, the spectator. Mulvey writes in the book Visual and Other Pleasures that the "[s]plits in the cinematic sign (the film essentially) allow ideas to interact with finction and thought with fantasy." ¹  Tykwer is putting his film in opposition to the conventional, traditional, or mainstream. He is opposing the past and the history of cinema. 

My next blog post will be about two avant-garde films that are made by women directors and that are of particular interest to feminist film critics. I will write about Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Chantal Akerman's News From Home  (1977). This next post will try to dabble into the radical aesthetics movement through the works of two increasingly influential feminist avant-gardists.

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¹Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

 

The Beautiful and the Sublime: a distinction revisited (Nour)

 Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) is a Tom Tykwer film, produced in 1998 and released in the USA in 1999. Tykwer's film career is fascinating, yet, this post is concerned with only one of his earlier films, namely Run Lola Run. In doing this film, Tykwer was director, screenplay writer and composer. Needless to emphasis, he had a considerable degree of artistic freedom in relation to this project. A probable line of inquiry is perhaps to discover how the film relates to Tykwer as an artist, director, and generally as a thinker (he studied philosophy). His relation to the film can certainly propel a lot of insightful discussion, but is not the subject of this post. Instead, these following questions are the starting point: What is the role of pain, as an emotion, in this film? Is pain related to passivity in Run Lola Run?

 Manni, Lola's boyfriend, needs to find 100,000 DM in twenty minutes or else he might be killed. Lola is set on a run by a phone call at 11:40. She has till noon to find the money and deliver it to Manni. Lola has of course, as anybody who has watched the film would know, a striking appearance and an unusual physique. Her hair is flaming bright red, she is in army boots for most of the film, and although she is constantly running, rarely looks tired. Lola can also shatter glass with her scream, this is her most prominent superhuman physical quality. As she runs, the film reveals the anxieties and pains involved in running for survival. In fact, the pains caused by this running. It is significant to ask why Lola  runs, as opposed to ride a motorbike for example (although the plot gives reasons for this, one can question the filmmakers decision).

On the surface level, Lola runs to save Manni's life. However, one can also argue that it is, to a significant extent, her own life that she's attempting to salvage. When Lola  is dying in the very first chain of events, she remembers when she had told Manni that it is possible she would decide soon about their relationship—in other words, whether they would continue together or not. When she's about to die, she says "but I don't." The wish to have acted differently in the past, to have said something else, to have done something nicer to another human being, if allowed to dominate one's existence, becomes a life defeating force. The past, time in general, is oppressive in this sense—it is beyond our reach in its entirety.  Lola might be attempting to salvage her own existence by standing up against the most oppressive force—time. Lola is in a race against the clock.

This is an avant-garde film thus one cannot say it is concerned with a realistic representation.To put it differently, it is hard to claim that Run Lola Run belongs to realism (as a school of representation), but it has a relation to reality. It might be said to re-presentation that, which to its filmmaker, lies at the heart of human existence. Run Lola Run  features time, causality, a version of the infinite-recurrence in the Nietzscheian sense, and suffering. This last feature is perhaps the most important one if a claim about the relation of Run Lola Run to reality can ever be grounded. Just refer to, for example, the scene when the security guard tells Lola that all people have bad day as an attempt to comfort her. The expression on her face reveals a lot. At this point in the film she has just discovered that her father is not her biological father. Any human being put in this position, while on a time-bomb so to speak, could be reasonably assumed to have felt pain. He, on top of all this, refused to help her calling her a freak. Lola had to continue running though. The physical act of running eventually becomes a metaphor for pain and even suffering.

This is markedly a new attitude to past philosophical interpretations of pain. Pain  has often been associated with passivity—like for example when Lola receives the news about her real father—but in making running a metaphor for it, pain no longer signifies passivity. The consequences of this shift in perspective might be very profound. Because it takes-on complex questions about human existence, this film is multi-layered. It would not be surprising, as critics have often done in the past, to pose questions about reality, the construction of it, and the reality of this construction in relation to the film Run Lola Run. All this have been very meaningful lines of investigation.

One more idea can be added to the present thread. In a NYT article about Tom Tykwer, published in 2011, the author Dennis Lim states that Tykwer has previously emphasized the "value of distraction" in his work. Distraction implies a challenge to human perception. Run Lola Run  certainly causes an adrenaline rush, mostly because the film over-stimulates the sense: Lola with pounding boots, the images saturated with colors, Lola's flaming hair, and shattering scream. Pain and suffering as they bring us closer to our bodies and the physical, material, realm allow us to see differently. So does the over-stimulation of the senses in this film. The relation between the pain and suffering put on the screen, and their mode of representation in this avant-garde film allow for a claim like this one. When in pain we might not be as passive as once assumed because we can use pain to reinvent our world. Lola uses suffering as a motivation to run, and her running cases different chains of events--the world order thus changes.

Écriture féminine or not really... (Nour)

    Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Youssry Nasrallah, 2009) is an Egyptian feature film which explores problems faced by women in contemporary Egypt. The title of the film makes an explicit reference to One Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells Shahryar, the king, stories in order to stay alive. Indeed, storytelling is a prominent narrative tool within the film. Even more, the connection to One Thousand and One Nights suggests that the women in the film had to tell their stories in order to stay alive. The film uses the talk show as a vehicle for women to publically discuss their concerns. Hebba—the lead character who is a TV hostess—invites a number of women to her show, all of whom with their particular stories to share. Stories about the search for a husband, women's sexual restraints, and the social traditions which propelled them to seek refuge in marriages they did not really desire, among other concerns.

    A reasonable question to ask at this point is: Does the film belong to women's cinema? Typically women's cinema is concerned with a set of problems and issues which help identify it as such. To this extent, the film is a women's film. It is concerned with problems similar to those picked up by the so called women's cinema. Nonetheless, only one thing is really certain about this film. Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Tell me a Story Scheherazade) has a dominantly female cast. Thus, an alternative way of approaching the connection to One Thousand and One Nights is to think of the film itself as a Scheherazade narrating in order to save the society it depicts from further damage. In this view, women are the boat-rockers. They, perhaps because of their status as shown by the film, are more likely to demand social change.

    Yet, what is the nature of their status?  In this article in Salon, Prof. David Jacobson, a sociologist from the University of South Florida, made a linked women's "sexual" struggles to the more encompassing struggle "over the nature of self." Women, as depicted in the film, seem to undergo a search for selfhood, or feel a need to recreate such self. In this light, the complexity of Ehky Ya Scheherezade is better understood. Through storytelling, these women search for who they are, and who they wish to be. As the narrators of their own stories, they have the freedom to rewrite the parts of their history that they wish to reinvent. The film is a universal journey toward self-discovery and freedom. The film starts inside Hebba's nightmare. She wakes up gasping for breath: "there are no doors" she says. She is trapped because, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that she is not offered the chance to recreate her past through the medium of storytelling. As the one who does not tell her own story until the very last scene in the film, she is given the least creative power. Her story is essentially told by the camera and not herself (the film even closes before Hebba tells her story).

    Hebba is hidden behind a glamorous façade. In a scene where her husband Kareem attempts to scare her away from visiting poor neighborhoods (ironically by citing rape) he is shown painting her lips with a bright red lipstick. He is maintaining the façade with which he is comfortable. Although it is true that Hebba sometimes uses this pretty façade to manipulate others, mostly her husband, it does not seem to be a philosophical choice. In other words, she is not intentionally thinking of her appearance as a means for achieving greater freedom (even if freedom just means achieving the ends she desire). Instead, Hebba is trying to maintain a particular appearance for reasons other than freedom. If I am to describe this appearance, I will say neat, tidy, well-kempt.

    Kareem—her husband—provides further insight. Kareem is a journalist who works in a daily newspaper. He is anticipating a promotion. More importantly, he thinks that the only way he would get the job he wants is by pleasing the "right people." Although Hebba does not seem to realize it, she is a lot like Kareem. They both feel a need to noticeably belong to one group and not the other(s). At a basic level, she maintains an image that separates her from a group(s) of people. The motivation behind this need to belong to one group and not another can only be explained through the benefits associated with belonging to either group. Without attempting to negotiate which groups Hebba aims to belong to, it is clear that such motivation to belong or not belong to any particular group is mediated by a clear recognition of social values and social value systems. Hebba, as is Kareem, does not seem to be able to construct a notion of self away from society, its traditions, norms, etc.              

    Expectedly enough, Hebba likes to be noticed. She dresses to be noticed. Thus far, she could be compared to the film itself. She is dependent on the act of looking—the observation of her audience, her fans, the lustful looks of her husband, and the disdainful looks of the poorer women on the subway. Like Hebba, some of the film's images seem too polished, neat, hyper aestheticized. Yet, in relation to Hebba this hyper aestheticization of the frames gains a greater meaning. In the case of Hebba, one can argue that she is maintaining a façade. In relation to the film, however, maintaining a facade becomes maintaining control over the images on the screen. This film is consciously a controlled environment. This control of the frames draws the viewers' attention to the boundaries within which the women--and men as well--search for their individual selves. Within this boundaries such search is not only acceptable, but also less disturbing to a watching audience.

    The film is a controlled unit where true freedom cannot really be achieved. "Gender war in Egypt: a film about women who fight back" states the film's poster, but what is the nature of this fighting back? Are women really boat-rockers or are they put in situations where even their "fighting back" is pre-mediated by society—controlled by social traditions, structures, norms and orders. Is their mode of resistance real fighting back? If this film is indeed showing a gender war, who has the upper hand ? The struggle seems to encompasses both genders, indeed all human beings in modern societies. The filmmakers chose to create a restricted space in which the stories told by the women do not upset the established order. Rather, these stories and their narrators all fall in place as calculated parts contributing to a greater whole that is restricting to all individuals within it.

   This film depicts a controlled struggle. Ehky Ya Scheherazade is a women's story, but one not told by the voice of women. It is told by the voice of that who/which controls women (and men for this matter). Order is created, maintained by and for the camera—not challenged by it. The camera moves from space to space showing individuals each carrying out his/her designated role. Even those who seem to rebel are playing out a role to which they've been assigned. The relation that this film has to women's cinema is not straight forward. Assuming that the film is a Scheherazade, the audience is the king. The film seems to negotiate the relation between the two. Even if by the end of the film the women do not seem to have fought back, the film (by offering a frustrating narrative) allows for a kind of resistance.  

 

Beat Halloween: Sidney Peterson's The Cage and The Potted Psalm (Shauna)

I believe there are two sorts of moods conjured up at Halloween, and they are both tied to anxiety. The first involves lust for gore, fright, heart palpitations and being generally unnerved. Films in this vein do not necessarily have to reach the gruesome, cathartic extremes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Hooper) or Silence of the Lambs (1991, Demme), although they may. What matters is not so much the content, but that the filmic form of that content effectively manipulates emotions. The mood (primal insecurity, agitation, pure fear) need not be connected to cannibalism. The same primitive human angst can be exploited through a variety of genres, including the slasher, psychological thriller, horror and even war films. What they share are momentary or prolonged emotionally manipulative sequences. I’m thinking of the gripping feeling Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock) evokes as Scottie, in an awkward sweaty panic, follows Madeline up the campanile at San Juan Bautista. Or, channeled through more grotesque visual language, the shots of Leatherface’s kitchen littered with animal skeletons, feathers and detritus; the icebox containing the body of his teenage victim in Massacre.

The second type of mood connected to Halloween is slightly more cerebral. The main driving question for this mood is not “What is the capacity for others to wreck violence against me?” but rather, “How far do I have to venture to detect the truly bizarre and unfamiliar within the familiar?” Anxiety is still a factor here, for we have to make the conscious decision to set aside normalcy, congruence and linear thought. If the slasher film relies on visceral responses and our most primal human fears, then surrealist and experimental films challenge our intellectual pursuit of narrative progression, reason, meaning and causality. Sometimes none of these exist, and sometimes they exist only to very small degrees. So experimental films are unnerving, not because they threaten our corporeal security, but because they problematize the conventional ways in which we think about the world.

Of the two Halloween “moods,” I believe the second is more difficult to achieve. Or at the very least, the industry has invested less time and fewer resources into its development. Hollywood is quite good at exploiting our instinctual, animal-like need for security. It is slightly less adept at illuminating the absurd. So, while films that agitate, terrorize or unnerve are not the exclusive purview of mainstream media, movies that venture —even briefly— into the surreal and avant-garde are generally treated as art cinema. Nevertheless, I would argue that these sorts of films are essential viewing at Halloween! Gore alone is insufficient. We also need a dose of the slightly strange — not supernatural, and not wholly divested from the objects and spaces of everyday life, but the distorted anatomy, jarring stop-action, and the playful conglomeration of store windows, shabby things for sale, reflected pedestrians and bifurcated vehicles. I’m advocating that all of you sit down and watch two shorts: The Cage (1947) and The Potted Psalm (1946), both by filmmaker and beat poet Sidney Peterson.

I first came across Peterson in Art Cinema, which classifies his work as surrealist. The point of that movement, according to Young and Duncan, was to "reestablish links with the 'primal mind.'"¹ I would argue there is no more appropriate time than All Hallows Eve to reaffirm such a connection.

The Cage and The Potted Psalm function as a nice pair, diverging subtly in the mood, but also complementing each other. Viewed together, they provide excursions (amusingly absurd in The Cage and somewhat more ominous, though still not ghoulishly so, in Psalm) into the unfamiliar side of seemingly normal people, interactions and material things. In The Cage, Peterson establishes a surprisingly coherent visual language reminiscent of the Soviets' Kino Eye. He warps and distorts images, spins the lens across axes of symmetry, collapses space and captures pedestrians navigating San Francisco backwards. Surveillance is a motif that permeates both shorts. In Cage it is articulated explicitly: an escaped eyeball rolls, maneuvers, appears and disappears along the California streets and around an amusement park, spawning a protracted chase. What we perceive as a narrative progression perhaps makes The Cage more digestible than Psalm, but the internal logic of Cage is also undercut by the existence of the protagonist's alternate personas, and the wrought-iron spiraling bird cage that encloses his head.

Peterson also seems to communicate a fascination with the threshold between life and death. Resurrection is suggested almost continuously throughout the film. For instance, early on, cooked ducks in Chinatown windows are juxtaposed with live pigeons. The film also constructs an indeterminate space which could arguably function as a world for the living or the dead. Cars and people move in reverse, as though sleepers moving through a dream. The carnival space becomes doubly unnerving as its visitors and rides predominately move in reverse. The physics of rotating rides and bullet-like cars tunneling through space seem simultaneously graceful and precarious, and the odd forward running march of the group chasing the detached eye connotes them as social misfits. To us, they look both militaristic and hilarious.

As weird as things get, they never stray too far from an inner documentary basis. True, a man may lose an eye, butter his bread with fresh oil paints, and inhabit different bodies, one of which buries itself in the sand. But at its core, the short investigates the possibilities of the absurd built into the textures of everyday life. A female thief who steals a bundle of onions strikes us as odd as the male companion threatening to shoot the stray eyeball with a rifle (and later a dart). The two become nearly interchangeable. They both characterize what we possibly fear most about ourselves: that we are driven not by rational thought, but by instinctual, even animalistic inclinations.

If The Cage strikes contemporary viewers as "playful," then The Potted Psalm is notably less tame. Clownish makeup, graveyards populated by tropical flora instead of the typical hemlocks, and distorted women all render gothic horror motifs slightly exotic. Whole sequences seem devoted to the "body mischievous," a theme communicated through elongated limbs, goiter-like necks and mannerist torsos. Things get stranger as the film progresses: most notably, women submerged and abandoned imply the aftermath of violence, but not the violent acts themselves. Yet, even in Psalm, Peterson exercises great restraint. He does not manipulate viewers, or at least he does so subtly, so that we feel we have come to all the conclusions on our own. At the film's closure, a woman runs a considerable length, shot at variable distances. She stumbles, yet persists, and this time the hilarity of the small steps and brisk cadence that characterized the chase in The Cage is replaced with a sense of urgency. The force that pursues her is imperceptible; the lack of dialogue or even other humanity is acutely felt. And whenever she is captured in a frame with another human form, it is only herself, superimposed and dissolving briefly on an overexposed horizon.

 

1. Young, Paul. Art Cinema. Ed. Paul Duncan. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2009. Print.

Candyman (1992): A Self-Conscious Slasher Film (Colin)

Of course, the above title may sound rather redundant. It is difficult to think of a more self-conscious genre than the slasher film: not only have there been a plethora of obvious pastiches, but even the ostensibly serious Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises often poke fun at their own favorite clichés. Every film begins with a group of sexually active teenagers who must listen to the ravings of the obligatory toothless old man (or some other familiar harbinger of doom) before being promptly dispatched ingeniously (or not, depending on how cheap the SFX are) by Jason, Freddy, or whatever other relentless killer the screenwriter has created. The heavily formulaic nature of the genre has caused it to accrue as many critics as fans; indeed, it became commonplace in the eighties for older horror authors like Robert Bloch to unfavorably compare the new outcrop of slasher films with the traditional ghost stories and psychological thrillers of former eras.

            One could argue, however, that it is within the very predictability of these films that their appeal lies. This familiarity causes them to feel more reassuring than unsettling; it is not only “the final girl” who will make it to the film’s credits – it is ourselves, the audience. The sequels sustain this sense of survival: we are familiar with the entire history of a certain slasher, all his quirks and traits, and no matter how improbable (or often contradictory) his sequel-spawned history may be, this knowledge gives us a further sense of security. Like a hardened explorer wading through familiar territory, we know that no matter how bewildering it might get for the unfortunates onscreen, whatever happens will still remain reassuringly familiar to us. Like fairy tales and urban legends, slasher films seduce their audience into a world in which routine sets of clichés and formulae are not only the commonplace fallbacks of lazy screenwriters but are actually embraced by the audiences themselves: a world in which Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees become modern bogeymen and in which every victim’s death is seen as a memorable milestone, hailed at once for the originality of its execution and the predictable place that it occupies in the film’s overall plot structure.

            Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) is a different sort of slasher film, however; one that is self-aware but not comedic; a movie that explores the mythic space that urban legends and slasher tales inhabit, focusing on why these tales absorb our imaginations so deeply and suggesting that there is some mysterious draw even greater than the comfortable familiarity that these gruesome fairy tales have. Based on “The Forbidden,” a novella by British author Clive Barker, its titular supernatural antagonist resembles neither the wise-cracking Freddy Krueger nor the silent, masked killers in Friday the 13^th or John Carpenter’s Halloween. Rather, Tony Todd plays the character of the hook-handed Candyman with an intense, seductive charisma, transforming him into a monster who functions both as a supernatural killer and as an almost allegorical embodiment of all that seduces and terrifies us in the slasher mythos, or even in horror fiction in general. Barker’s work both in literature (The Books of Blood, The Hellbound Heart) and in film (Hellraiser) constantly connects the twin emotions of terror and desire as two related impulses and the dynamic found in Candyman between the film’s heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen) and her terrifying antagonist is no exception. The most compelling moments in the narrative are Helen’s encounters with Candyman – those enigmatic interchanges in which he implores her to “be his victim” and asks “what is blood for if not for shedding?” The point of his appeal is that there is a certain glory in being counted as a legend: if Helen becomes a victim of Candyman, she will become – as he terms it – one of those tales “to frighten children, to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.” She will become immortal like him precisely because she, too, will become a legend of terror. To attain the status of legendry, “the blessed condition” as Candyman terms it, is perceived as a higher spiritual state, the cost of which is, in his eyes, far outweighed by the reward. She will no longer be merely a curious audience; she will, in fact, become a horror tale herself.

            The beauty of Bernard Rose’s film is that it can be enjoyed in the same manner as any other slasher film, for like all the others, it charts the familiar territory of hook-handed killers, flattering us with our knowledge of grisly urban legends while delivering a healthy amount of gore and scares. But for those who choose to contemplate the titular villain’s mysterious seductions more deeply, it holds perhaps the key to what it is that makes many of us not only enjoy Horror but even wish to create our own tales of terror. Candyman is not only an avenging ghost: he is a legend, a horror story himself. Stories are immortal, therefore Candyman himself is immortal – and, moreover, being a legend as well as a ghost, he is an immortal being whom lovers and children both revere, fear, and yet all the same enjoy whispering of. Any lover of Horror can understand how this “blessed condition” could be perceived as quite seductive.

            And, if the opportunity to unravel the philosophy of Horror is not enough to entice the reader to watch this film, then let me also add that the ending of this film gives an entirely new (and rather eerie) meaning to the common slasher film cliché of the “final girl”…

Russia, Mongolia and Hollywood: A Silent Hybrid in Storm Over Asia (Shauna)

 

 When it comes to Soviet Montage, at least from the American perspective, Eisenstein is the dominant figure, Vertov the experimental artist, and Pudovkin the peripheral character defined in terms of his relation to Eisenstein as friend and aesthetic rival. Perhaps this hierarchy reflects the paltry selection of modern English translations of works by Pudovkin and the comparative wealth of resources by Eisenstein. Or maybe it reflects Eisenstein’s deft capacity to theorize and simultaneously self-promote. In “The Fourth Dimension of Cinema,” he routinely cites his own works as “classic”[1] examples illustrative of all the most crucial formal elements of film art.

Eisenstein was not above criticizing, and occasionally dismissing, works by Pudovkin, particularly when he construed them as veering too far his own artistic vision of montage. Eisenstein cites Storm Over Asia (1928) as an example of metric montage gone awry. The technique, he argues, fails when it is paired with “complex rhythmic tasks.”[2] True, the religious procession to honor the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is highly complex and orchestrated, even prior to the added intricacies of cutting and splicing. The sequence is not Pudovkin’s most glorious in Storm. However, it is neither inherently flawed nor fruitless. The awkwardness, which Eisenstein describes as the “forcible application” of metric montage, suggests an inability to convey all of the nuances of this Mongolian ritual practice. We are inundated with visual information (compounded by the vigorous, ethnic score), yet the meaning of vast ceremony remains oblique. The best moments are those in which Pudovkin exercises restraint, for instance, when the static camera fixates on the exotic dancing bodies, filmed in horizontal and diagonal lines, and finally in a curve that snakes from background to foreground. The slightly jarring cuts, which juxtapose accelerating dancers with static musicians, suggest a level of uncertainty, as though meanings and symbols inevitably elude the westerner.

Pudovkin transplants the viewer to a space that is neither fully human nor divine, but rather exists on the threshold of both of these worlds. He does not impose a vision or attempt to contrive meaning from the indigenous dance and music. Rather, he allows the Mongolian masks and costumes, the formations and the dances, to speak on their own terms. The content is beautiful and enthralling, even if the metric montage is occasionally awkward. The sequence evokes the experience of an outsider far more than it characterizes the Mongolians. We empathize with the camera’s gaze, which is incapable of focusing on a single dancer or musician for long. Who is to fault Pudovkin for evoking the experience of walking in on a ceremony performed by a foreign people or culture — that is, the experience of witnessing but not belonging?

 

One of the reasons Storm Over Asia resonates so profoundly in the silent film canon is its thematic, if not contextual, connection to the Soviet heritage and worldview. Although the film does not address Soviet woes, routines, or spaces directly, it grapples with a powerful and pervasive question present in the Russian psyche: To what extent should Russia be construed as “West” or “East”? Pudovkin alludes to the historical debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers through cinematic language, rather than blatant, polemical statements. Few Russians appear in the film, with the exception of the partisans. But the Russians' naturalistic style creates a visual parallel with the seemingly ancient Mongols — suggesting deeper connections to the Mongolians than to continental Europeans.

Storm suggests an underlying ambivalence in terms of Russian identification with either the West or East, though the film tends to empathize with the Mongolians. The sentiment is conveyed through (1) landscapes that manifest an Asian aesthetic in their graphic simplicity and still depiction, (2) the intimacy and sensitivity with which the nuclear Mongol family and its prized ornaments are filmed prior to the son's departure, and (3) the implicit connection between Anglo characters and unnatural processes, including surgical repair of the body, the hygienic and materialistic "rituals" before the visitation to the Buddhist Temple, and the infiltration of technology into the primeval environs of the Steppes.

Throughout the film, the agrarian and uncultivated landscapes range from chillingly vacant, to tranquil, serene and sublime. Ultimately, though, the Steppes pulse with a voracious life force: a mysterious and aggressive wind decimates the British colonial presence. Pudovkin elevates and restores the dignity of the indigenous Mongols through this ostensibly natural (though seemingly supernatural) force. Pudovkin wrote that D.W. Griffith was highly influential in molding his cinematic consciousness. Indeed, the scale and graphic potency of Pudovkin’s landscapes do reveal parallels between the directors' works. But the shots in Storm overlooking the sand dunes, mountains and conifers of the Steppes, are also entirely unique. Prior to Storm, no one had ventured into the rural, nomadic domestic spaces of the Buriat-Mongolian Republic with a movie camera. Pudovkin had attended film school with Valeri Inkizhinov, the actor who played the protagonist, and thereby entered a world previously invisible to film. Had he employed a strictly Hollywood approach, the product would likely not have contained the languid series of stills, dissolving one into the next, forming subtle conflicts of plane and scale, which infuse Storm with a distinctively Eurasian atmosphere. The director complemented his Soviet montage technique with an awareness of Asian art, establishing graphically simple, yet emotionally stirring landscapes, with just the slightest degree of movement (shuddering leaves, shifting ice, or the slow, almost viscous flow of a river).

Storm constitutes an exquisite portrait of Mongolian life, integrating graphic landscapes (in which the individual is frequently subverted to the grandeur and scale of the natural environment) with humanizing close-ups of the native people and the indexical signs present in their lives, such as the amulet that had belonged to the lama, and the prized skin of the silver fox. The Mongolian hunter's family appears aged, crouched, tanned, and wrinkled, yet their faces embody a spirit and spontaneity that is totally absent from the visages of the British Army Commander and his bejeweled and powdered wife. The lighting in the interior of the Mongolian yurt is fascinating and quite beautiful. Whatever wrong Eisenstein perceived in terms of metric montage in the religious dance is fully compensated by the tonal complexity within the shot! The crisscrossing of cast shadows simultaneously gives the impression of individuals trapped within a colonial economic framework, and integrated with the natural space. The continuity between anatomy and environment suggests a higher level of authenticity. These individuals, bound by the complex of shadows, are close to the earth and to each other, in-tune with the seasons, the wildlife, and the hours. In contrast, the British delegate and his wife shroud themselves in unnatural pieces of finery: a long satin sheath wrapped around an obese male torso, the whale-bone corsette cinched unnaturally at the waist, and layers of lotion and powder set on the skin.

The naturalistic quality of the Mongolians makes the surgery performed on Inkizhinov's character all the more loathsome. The victim, after being bound and brutally shot, is essentially reawakened from the dead and brought out of the natural space of the sand dunes into the civilized Anglo interior. Sanctioned violence is followed by sanctioned medical penetration to revive the human form. The body, bound like a mummy, and restricted in its movements, constitutes a mannequin or dummy. It is the physical manifestation of the Mongolian's diplomatic function as a pawn of the British Empire's. The surgical repair is unnatural in that it is totally divested from any spiritual healing (i.e. the sort of healing presented in the earliest moments when the lama prays for the father's recovery).

The Mongolian is wholly castrated, unable to quench his thirst or articulate his thoughts. The moment when he attempts to drink from the fish tank, an action wholly outside the purview of civilized European decorum, is quite poetic: his head on the slick floor, surrounded by the thrashing fish, constitutes a visual metaphor for all the trauma and exploitation he has endured, and his inability to thrive within this world. Yet, like all of the images infused with pathos, it is neither sentimental nor contrived.

The closing scene is perhaps the most unambiguous example of Soviet montage. Pudovkin employs the fastest tempo, the wildest mise-en-scéne, and rapid inter-cutting between a savage, fully restored Mongolian hunter and the intertitles, producing negatives of the image that seem monstrous and supernatural. Yet, it is highly telling that the British defeat is staged without bloodshed: the wrath of the wilderness is the only outpouring of violence. The men fall back, rolling and somersaulting like weightless dolls blown down. It is as though this culminating struggle occurs outside the bounds of mortal life: it is no mere territorial dispute, but a recovery of the dignity and humanity that was lost.

 

 

 

---

[1] Sergei Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Reader, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell(London: BFI Publishing, 1998).

[2] Ibid.

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.

Out of Time: The Passion of Joan of Arc (Kelsey)

Carl Theodor Dreyer directed The Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928.  And yet, despite this unequivocal fact, the film does not belong to the year 1928.  It doesn't seem to concretely belong anywhere; indeed, the film is strangely atemporal.  Instead, the film belongs to a world where a close up can be stretched out over 85 minutes; where an entire world can be built on the physiognomy of a face.  And this world is built upon the face of Maria Falconetti, a face unadorned by make up but imbued with the ability to turn the most subtle of facial ticks into a moment of emotional anagnorisis.  The entire film is like a prolonged flash of revelation, and though Falconetti's eyes get increasingly wider and more desperate, they never stop conjuring up that which remains unspoken.

The film, if the opening titles are to be believed, dutifully follows the written record of the trial, imprisonment, and death of fabled martyr Joan of Arc.  She is not the only character shot almost exclusively in close-up; the men who decide her fate are shot in a similarly close range, though admittedly to very different effect.  If the camerawork acts as an hour an a half long elegy to Joan, it is effectively putting the men who judge her on trial.  They are captured in harsh black and white tones and even harsher facial expressions.  They are the ugly, jeering men whose faces keep no secrets but tell only lies, and the camera pans across their faces as if they were Roman portrait busts riddled with imperfections, at home in a museum but never at home in Joan's psyche. 

And it is in Joan's psyche that the film takes place: these leering men stand in for the Satanic visions they constantly accuse Joan of having, and the look in Joan's eyes as they turn upward towards heaven does in fact seem to emanate the ethereal.  And these awful faces get closer and closer until they seem to close in on Joan entirely, violating her space and the space of the film.  And all of this is filmed with extreme attention to detail: from the warts on the faces of her accusers to the insects that occasionally land on Joan's face.  And it is this strange detail, enlarged and crystal clear, that allows the film to escape any form of realism.  By creating a film based on minutiae, tiny little flaws and facial movements that would be unremarkable in a wider shot become absurd and surreal, and through attention to the mundane, the film is able to portray the ethereal.     

In the last scene of the film, Joan is burned at the stake.  As flames engulf her tiny body and her shorn head, the camera pans across a different sort of people: not the judges who assigned this fate to Joan, but regular people, openly weeping at the sight before them.  And the claustrophobic close-ups all of the sudden seem a bit less claustrophobic, as Joan begins to disappear into the smoke and tears roll down the faces of grown men.  The image of birds soaring across the sky is intercut with the flames of the stake and the mounting anger of the people.  And with this moment of emotional synchronicity, the disparate close-ups are no longer at odds.  It is as though the discordant elements of Joan's tale have come together, and the film, which oftentimes feels like an 85 minute reconstruction of a second, is finally able to end.  And the stake goes up in flames, and Joan is finally set free.     

 

The Brothers Quay: Exploring the Czech "Tactile Experiment" (Shauna)

Recently, I rediscovered the stop-action animated shorts of the Quay Brothers, two Czech experimental filmmakers.  I was first exposed to their works as a kid stuck on the couch with the flu.  My dad brought home the video, and prefaced it with a mention of my great-grandfather who had escaped Czechoslovakia trekking around Europe before coming to the U.S.  Symptoms gave way to awe for the quality of movement of the puppets and props.  Whoever had crafted and manipulated these figures, I thought, had given them a unique spirit.  Indeed, the Quays endow each figure with a dark and surreal brooding, an element they refer to as “pathology.” 

Frequently in Quay films, visual relationships, particularly the spatial and temporal links between a figure and its “poetic” universe, supersede narrative associations.  Although narrative structure exists, it is embedded within the visual and abstract.  Compositions and movement through space emphasize transformative processes and the tactile experiences of life and dreams.  Dialogue is largely absent.  Language that does exist fulfills a primarily graphic function.  Often, words allude to the genre of Czech surrealism, or provide an Eastern European contextual heritage for the mise en scène. 

Ident commissioned by BBC2 (1991). Creative Commons.¹

The Quay Brothers tend to emphasize the creation and revision of atmosphere as the basis for their filmic process.  In one interview, they compared inventing and sustaining a climate to choreographing a ballet.  Both film and dance hinge on the integration of lighting, décors, bodies in motion and, perhaps most critically, music.  These elements coalesce to form the dynamic environment that engages, isolates or opposes characters.  The necessity for music in dance is completely self-evident.  The role of music in Quay films differs somewhat.  Music does not dictate the physical patterning of puppet movements; rather, it infuses each shot's universe with a lifeblood.  Music exists in lieu of dialogue.   Verbal exchanges would add an unnecessary redundancy to the subtle, abstracted drama provided by the musical score.  The brothers acknowledge that passive viewing yields few insights into their work.  Attentive sensitivity is absolutely necessary to fully appreciate each sequence.  

Quay Brothers at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee Switzerland. Creative Commons.²

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, an entire kingdom is encapsulated in a wooden cube, whose linear architecture, small geometric windows and high-tension wires suggest that an alien modernity pervades the derivative mythical world.  The brothers reconfigure the epic myth to fit within the constraints of a brief, though precisely executed, pilot.  Gilgamesh's kingdom, spatially estranged and bordered by strong currents of wind on two sides, serves as the motivation and vehicle for his fatal encounter with rival bird-man Enkidu.  Enkidu's venture out of the Enchanted Forest and into Gilgamesh's domain triggers the contriving of the beast's trap.  The trap exploits Enkidu's carnal instincts and subdues his psychological discomfort in the realm of the kingdom.  The "sandbox" kingdom becomes an acetic, almost clinical foil to the forest, and the trap starts to resemble a grotesque operating table.  The musical score adds a disconcerting dimension to the muted palate of the kingdom.  Seedy saxophone music plays during Enkidu's lewd encounter with the trap.  Following Enkidu's demise, Gilgamesh emerges, accompanied by childish carnival music.  The tune is a sound approximation of his sinister, clownish features and diminuative feet, pedaling madly on his tricycle.

In The Street of Crocodiles, the brothers again appropriate a preexisting narrative as the skeletal foundation for their filmic universe.  However, once more, space and geometry subvert narrative structure.  The decors plays a critical role in evoking the precise climate of a Polish retail complex shrouded in dust, debris and refuse.  The environment's essence, in the Quays' words, is "degraded reality."  Yet, the imperfections, indentations and reflections are acceptable, even wonderful, in the cool diffused light.  The most interesting aspect of this environment is the "breakdown," conveyed by the deranged movements of mannequins, screws unscrewing and the reforming of a knot in a string that serves as the gateway into the labyrinth of dust and decay.

In an interview in Paris, the Quays distanced themselves from filmmakers Nick Park and Tim Burton, two key contributors to the genre of stop-action animation.  While technical similarities and a common choice of medium unite these filmmakers, distinctions of equal weight can also be made.  The Quays' works are informed by their Eastern European heritage and surrealist aesthetic, while Nick Park captures the essence of the suburban domestic U.K.  Park (Wallace and Gromit), frequently expresses cynical attitudes towards the status quo (see Creature Comforts), but these sentiments are couched in comedy.  Even at its darkest moments, his work retains a ludicrous hilarity to which we can relate.  Moreover, the narrative structure remains paramount.  Even Wallace's absurd gift of mechanical pants serves a narrative function in The Wrong Trousers, advancing the plot towards the climactic heist scene.  In contrast, the absurd image of a broken tennis racket strewn over high-tension wires in Gilgamesh's domain serves no such function.  Rather, it is merely an artifact of the brothers' village memory.

The Quays are equally hesitant to draw analogies between their shorts and the works of Tim Burton, suggesting that his mise en scène is more closely related to the tradition of horror.  Indeed, graveyard scenes in The Nightmare Before Christmasemploy chiaroscuro and exaggerated angles that hearken back to German Expressionism.  Burton composes a narrative that integrates the qualities of a musical: imaginative backgrounds and songs advance a linear plot.  The Quays instead compose a non-verbal cinematic dance.  The musical score and environment of that dance are the primary concern, and the narrative is far more cryptic. 

Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers, 2007. Zeitgeist.

1. Photographer: "The Justified Sinner." Dec. 27, 2008. Creative Commons.http://search.creativecommons.org/

2. Photographer: Hendrick Speck. Nov. 22, 2008. Creative Commons. http://search.creativecommons.org/

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

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

 

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filmic Swagger (Dik)

 I’m sorry folks, I posted something earlier tonight (technically it was yesterday but I was rushing to get some school work in so I didn’t check if it actually got posted) and it didn’t go through… so I’m back for you guys.  Things have been hectic, but hey they always are when you’ve been done with academia since the 7th grade and you’re in the 16th grade.  But it’s how you approach your problems right?  If you approach them with fear and doubt, or swag (that’s the ebonic truncation of the word swagger) and style, and with that our topic for tonight is style.

 

 People always talk about a director’s style.  Oh, that’s Scorsesse’s style, or that’s Lucas’s style (I guess for Lucas he only made 3 different kind of films, or should I say 2 and a ½, but you know him so I picked him), that’s Tarantino’s style, et cetera… it’s all BS -at least to me.  Style is connected to the content; to talk as if it’s totally detached is wrong.  And I’m not trying to say that some films are not all about visual style, but that doesn’t mean those films don’t have a story, or are not about something.  (I remember some girl telling me in 4th grade that a particular film didn’t have a story…for some reason that statement pissed the hell out of me… just because a film didn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean we’re all that narrow minded).  Films always have something to translate to you if they don’t tell you through dialog. Let me paraphrase a great film quote I heard:

Film… Some tell a story and leave you with a feeling.  Some tell you a story, leave you with a feeling, and give you an idea.  Some tell you a story, leave you with a feeling, give you an idea, and reveal something about you and the people around you. How you tell that story relates to what the story is about –if not, you as a filmmaker are neglecting a vital part of film. 

 

 I mean don’t you think that’s what style is… the way in which you tell a story (just say yes – it makes things easier)?  Once you decide what a film is about, your whole crew -whether it’s you and your friend, or hundreds of people- mobilize to portray that story in the best way possible.  Form follows function.  Now you can talk about all this auteur hoopla, but lets take a look at one auteur and from there analyze why so many auteurs seem like that have one distinct style seen in all of their films. Lets take Godard for example… in their simplest forms, how many of his films were about contemporary culture of the time (both French and bastardized American) that starred either Anna Karina or another beautiful woman with a suave male?  So many.  This is not a knock on his brilliant work at all, but this basic template seen in his early work was certain to make his films have a certain style.  Plus you add the certain techniques, limitations, and crew he used in many of his films (especially Raoul Cotards very natural camera work)…damn right he is gonna have a distinct style.  Now look at any auteur and tell me that they don’t work with certain players for a good amount of their films, DP’s, story types, and so on.  I bet you can’t find one without a constant trend.  Let’s move on to how style comes into the film making process…for me.

 

 I decide on style a few different ways. Usually, I examine what the film is about and try to create a visual language to accompany the philosophy of the film.  I like philosophy, so this always comes up.  For example, if the film draws inspiration from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations work (a philosophical treatise about the increasing non-reality and mediation of our lives through technology and society), I might tell the DP to make sure the camera works as much as a frame within a frame in the film (shots of windows and mirrors, and shots of different media objects in the film, etc.).  Sometimes the style I’ll pick is apparent because the film is a blatant genre piece, ala film noir, western, et cetera.  Many times it’s based on accentuating the particular actors that are in the film.  You will decide on style depending on your character, the story, and your crew.

 

 Film is composed of thousands, and sometimes millions (I hope I am alright with these numbers cuz math is not my strong suit) of frames you have to set up (I’m lying you don’t have to set up every frame, but that leaves hundreds of set ups unless you want one of those Andy Warhol films of someone play masturbating in one place, in which case you can pretty much say screw style), all different to come together and make one coherent film.  It is best you and your crew know how you are going to represent it visually.  If you know this and successfully execute it, you can make a brilliant film out of the most mundane or hackneyed story.  Lets not forget, film is a visual medium.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

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.