HopkinsCinemAddicts

An Unconventional Cut

Showing up to fourth grade picture day after a botched haircut and hearing, “What happened to your head?” from a classmate haunts me to this day, and likely will forever.  Even so, that experience pales in comparison to that of a man with no social experience and scissors for hands, thrust into a too small town of gossiping housewives and their unconcerned husbands.  Such is the fate of Edward Scissorhands.

Created in a lab, with his progenitor now deceased, Edward spends countless months alone in a gothic castle which looms over the nameless suburb.  As with many aspects of the film’s presentation, the contrast is stark and definite but not heavy handed. Completely unaware of the world outside of the castle and its beautiful gardens, tended to by Edward’s own blades, a hapless door-to-door saleswoman, Peg Boggs, stumbles in and brings him into town. 

The things which typify a suburban environment, such as pastel homes with near identical floor plans and freshly trimmed lawns, are so utterly homogenous that they only serve to unsettle.  The set design and cast of intrusive neighbors highlight societal norms which are often taken for granted, and become oppressive in their conformity.

Edward is clearly an outsider, and the nosy townsfolk take note before he can get settled.  Beyond the obvious, his face is pocked with scars from self-inflicted wounds.  In his first attempt to dress in civilian clothes, he tears them to shreds and slices clean through a pair of suspenders.  Edward is effectively an infant when it comes to etiquette and social matters, rarely speaking and often misunderstanding what is said to him.  He doesn’t even respond when referred to as Ed, likely because he fails to recognize it as a shortened version of his own name. 

In a town where your business is everyone’s business, Edward’s quirks quickly turn him into a novelty item.  He is constantly paraded around town, encouraged to give eccentric haircuts and coerced into handling the neighborhood’s gardening duties.  That is until the differences become too stark and the sheen begins to come off.  Outliers are only used as showpieces, not to be truly accepted into society.

The film doesn’t stop its critique at a community level, but brings it to a personal, familial level.  Seated around the Boggs’ family’s dinner table, Mr. Boggs poses an ethical question to Edward, concerning what he should do if he stumbled upon an unmarked briefcase full of money.  With childlike charm, Edward claims he would like to give it to his friends, but Mr. Boggs, is quick to remark that the proper thing to do is to take it straight to the authorities.  Kim, the family’s daughter and Edward’s crush, speaks up for Edward.  It is one of the many instances in which we see the personal good compared to the common good, and individual desires set against public expectations.

There are further questions prompted concerning spirituality, as well as the contrast between the organic and the artificial.  Edward is a manmade construct, and despite his stunted social nature, he possesses all interior aspects of a human.  He clearly feels love, sorrow, and shame, yet the religious zealot in town curses him and calls for a return from whence he came.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to say what defines a human, but it is a question which the film doesn’t hesitate to bring up.

Despite its weighty nature, the film does not take itself too seriously and is full of enchanting moments.  In a tender encounter between Edward and Kim, she tells him, “Hold me,” to which he replies, “I can’t.”  It is a dismal scene which highlights Edward’s own defects, but in a self-aware, lighthearted manner.  It is moments such as these, in which abnormality and empathy are married, that the film works best – and there are plenty.

As always, Tim Burton beautifully places the mad, strange, and misunderstood at the forefront of the story, doing so in his signature style, which despite its bright colors and eccentric costumes retains a peculiar authenticity.  Edward Scissorhands is far from your traditional heartwarming Christmas story, but it is an endearing tale which will resonate with the insecurities in all of us.

Domestic Captivity in Selick's Coraline

From Coraline’s first moment, Henry Selick has the viewer uneasily engaged. Eerie bells jingle and voices hum as a small doll, with black buttons for eyes, effortlessly floats in through a window, sheltered from the night’s star-spotted skies. Spiderlike, metallic hands are there to greet it; hands which gently place it onto a table alongside myriad sewing tools and cutting instruments. Rarely is a simple toy handled with such care. We come to see that the doll’s handler is not mending, but rather undertaking a complete reconstruction, as mechanical hands clinically guide scissors through the doll’s spine. Eventually, the doll is reborn, now with freckles, blue hair, and a yellow raincoat, but still black buttons in the place of eyes.

We are then whisked away to the Pink Palace Apartments, a gloomy yet ornate home, bordered by towering mountains on each side. It is here where we meet the true Coraline. Upon seeing her, it is clear – the reconstructed doll is a skillfully crafted depiction of her. However, where the hands of unknown owner so tenderly tended to Coraline in miniature, her true parents continuously neglect and chastise her. Coraline wants nothing more than a romp in the mud or an afternoon in the garden, but her parents are too occupied with work to entertain a word she says.

Understanding her role as a nuisance to her parents, Coraline occupies herself by exploring the surrounding area. She first stumbles upon Wyborne, or “Wybie,” and his black cat, as he terrifies Coraline by nearly running her over on his bike. Wybie is the young grandson of the Pink Palace’s landlady and the first of the film’s many absurd, dual-natured characters. Despite coming off as a spooky daredevil, Wybie is quickly shown to be little more than a wallowing kid, lamenting his name and equating it to “Why born?”. This is the first moment in which the film expresses an interest in the reason for existence.

Shortly after their meeting, Wybie returns to the Pink Palace to give Coraline a gift – something he found at his grandmother’s place. It is the doll from the opening sequence. Coraline then explores the interior of her home; it is sprawling and angular, but with grey walls and few decorations. Put plainly, it is wholly and deliberately unremarkable. That is, until the discovery of a miniature door of knee height, which is only opened by using a black, button-shaped key. Upon opening it, Coraline is utterly disappointed to find a brick wall on the other side.

That night, with the doll carefully placed next to her bed, Coraline is awakened by mice beckoning her to follow. She jumps out of bed and heeds their call, winding up at the foot of the miniature door. Now it is open, leading to a winding, ethereal tunnel. She traverses the tunnel and emerges in the very same place she left, but here things aren’t quite the same. It is a world of similar proportion but with contradictions at every turn. There is now a welcoming warmth and cheer to the home, with the previously dull hues being replaced with warm tones of red and orange. In the kitchen her mother awaits, but this mother has fairer skin, beautiful make-up, and buttons for eyes. The yarn of contradictions is seemingly endless and only unraveled further as Coraline continues to visit this wondrous land, where everything initially appears just as she would like it to.

Returning to reality, Coraline meets another of her neighbors, Mr. Bobinsky. He is a man with straw-thin legs and a hulking chest, whose body accurately reflects his eclectic personality. Bobinsky claims to own a circus of jumping “mushka,” or mice, which has Coraline enraptured. Then, she is introduced to a pair of one-time burlesque stars, Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible, who occupy the basement. The two have an undoubtable affinity for the past, speaking of their glory days in the industry, offering Coraline bowls of old taffy, and displaying their packs of dogs – some still living while others line the walls, taxidermized.

Each of these interactions comes across with an intentional absurdity, as none of the characters address Coraline properly, instead calling her Caroline; the opposite is true on the other side of the door. Bobinsky’s physiognomy is inherently contradictory, and his tales of mice delusional, yet he treats Coraline kindly and thrills her with a display of insane acrobatics. Spink and Forcible seem to be at odds in every way; one is top heavy while the other is bottom heavy, one is blind while the other is not, and the two can never seem to agree, yet they both share an interest in Coraline. The one trait common across all of these characters is that they own a pet.

Coraline continuously returns to the other world, but with repeated visits she realizes that something is awry. Her other mother wants her to stay forever, and all it will take is the sewing of buttons into her eyes. We soon come to understand that the hands, which so carefully crafted Coraline’s replica, did so in an effort to enslave her. It was the doll which opened the portal to this odd world, and it is a menacing creature known as the Beldam which seeks to trap her here forever; to have someone to love without end, in a place which feels desirable to its captor, but is little more than an elaborate prison.

At this point, the film’s narrative begins to accelerate and the content begins to pierce further, beyond the eerie introductions and juxtapositions of its first act. The layers of domestic captivity are expertly laid in front of the viewer. First there is the plaything, or doll, then there are living creatures. From cats, dogs, and mice we can then progress to humans children. Selick encourages us to ask, what is the role of these beings and have humans consigned such creatures to live unfulfilling lives of captivity for their own selfish desires? The same can then be applied to children more generally, harkening back to Wyborne’s name and the question of why are they born? Existence is a harrowing enough process as is, which is only made more complex when we begin to understand existence as the means of pacifying the greed of others. Coraline displays that getting what you wish for is not all that it is made out to be, while asking incisive questions about the human’s role in nature, as well as the relationship between parent and child.

Confinement and Control: Being John Malkovich

Human existence is at once exhilarating, exhausting, and perplexing, and so it is common to wonder, and even believe, that life may be simpler and more clear if it were lived through the eyes of someone else. But those thoughts are merely wishful, and instead we are resigned to writing, acting, dreaming, and sharing stories in an effort to understand the perspectives of others – to obtain and experience something beyond ourselves.

Being John Malkovich takes this simple truth of existence and upends it, creating an eerie universe in which, for only a few minutes, you can embody and become one with someone else. In this world you do not become just anyone, but instead the enigmatic star John Malkovich. While it may sound like Mr. Malkovich is the primary actor and protagonist, he instead exists as a vessel through which a remarkably witty story, packed with hard-hitting questions concerning human interiority is delivered.

Set in the final decade of the 20^th century, we find ourselves in the near-vacant cellar of a New York City apartment. It is a dark, brooding scene in which we are greeted by the stiff facade of a wooden doll, masterfully contorted into a desperate and disturbed dance. However it is the puppeteer wielding the strings from above who we soon understand to be tormented. Craig Schwartz claims his sole purpose is as a performer – transcending himself and creating a new reality, one in which he is the sole master; but Craig has no audience, and what is a performer without an audience? He continues to be confined to his own mind, serving only himself.

Soon Craig is out on the city’s streets acting out a passionate puppet show in which forbidden lovers lust after one another. Here we see the development of his first audience; a young girl looks on as the puppets gyrate. Her father takes notice and pays Craig accordingly, with a fist to the face. A peculiar scene, whose absurdity leans towards comic. It is also the first of many scenes in which profound questions are posed in distinctive ways. We begin to question the roles and relationships of artist and audience; Craig’s suggestive show may have found a welcoming audience in a packed theater under the right circumstance, but instead a little girl stumbling by took a naïve interest in something unfit for her eyes. Where can such a show take place, who can see it, and what obligation does the artist have to adjust their work for a given, or even unknown, audience?

While Craig searches to escape from his own confinement via the contortion of inanimate objects, his wife Lotte searches for similar solace in her control over living beings. She tenderly cares for and supports Craig with a maternal instinct, just as she cares for the creatures that line the walls of her pet store. In their apartment, the couple are accompanied by an iguana, birds, a dog, and a chimpanzee. Through her care of these creatures, Lotte gains a sense of importance and meaning that cannot be attained internally. She treats each of these animals as well as she does Craig, if not better, clearly mapping out the differences, or lack thereof, between humans and other animals; the film too makes references to the chimpanzee’s consciousness, his lingering childhood trauma, and his visits to a shrink. It is at once lighthearted and thought-provoking.

Craig eventually takes on a temporary job as a filer, thanks to his rapid fingers. In the office he meets Maxine, a coy beauty who ceaselessly toys with him. It is here that Craig discovers the portal to Malkovich, which he then promptly shares with Maxine. Maxine, in conniving fashion, determines that the two must partner together and charge $200 per 15-minute trip into the mind of Malkovich; after all, who doesn’t want to experience the world through a different lens? We are again prompted by further questions of artist and audience: Malkovich as the unknowing artist, providing a show for all of those who pay to accompany him. Here the show provides great meaning to the audience, a miraculous glimpse into a consciousness beyond the one they have always known. Isn’t that the very essence which art attempts to capture?

In a similar sense, this expansion beyond the self is exactly what each character strives for. They each have a distinct way to achieve contentment, coming through varying methods of control over something or someone else. Simply put, a way to escape the confinement of their individual mode of perception. While Craig directs dolls and Lotte influences animals, Maxine finds meaning through the manipulation of other people and their emotions. Each character is looking for control and influence that reverberates outside of themselves.

Malkovich is no different on a surface level. He is an actor, exerting control over roles that are outside of himself, and prompting emotions and reactions from those around him. While Craig does so with no audience, no respect, and no understanding of himself beyond validation from others, Malkovich does so with total self-awareness. He is confident in who he is and has a complete understanding of his place in society. He knows himself to be John Malkovich. A man with an audience, a name, and plenty of respect.

However Malkovich’s sense of security becomes lost when Craig enters the portal, and with his own puppeteering skills is able to exercise complete control over Malkovich, eventually gaining the ability to inhabit him indefinitely. It is here that the aforementioned questions of audience and actor take on a twisted meaning. Craig, the possessor, becomes the actor, while Malkovich, the possessed, becomes the audience, bound to watch events play out on his very own stage.

Eventually Craig is forced to exit Malkovich’s shell. Upon doing so he cannot cope with his own existence and believes he must again embody Malkovich to be loved, so he rushes back to the portal at once. However a convoluted chain of events has turned Malkovich’s portal into a tunnel leading to the mind of a young girl. Here Craig finds himself imprisoned for eternity with no agency. Worse, this young girl is being raised by Lotte and Maxine, the two women that Craig once pined after. It is fantastical and maddening, as Craig finds himself the audience of his own tragedy; condemned to witness a happy existence in which he has no place.

Everyone seeks freedom from the infinite confinement of their own consciousness, and Being John Malkovich makes the case that art, as well as the relationship between art and artist, allows us this escape even if only for a moment. To do so, there must be an acceptance of the self and of our own consciousness as the one true mode of perception. Transcendence beyond the individual can be feigned for a moment to provide joy and relief, just as a 90-minute film serves as a valuable distraction from the pains of life, but dragging that brief moment into an indefinite reality can be destructive, as it is for Craig.  

The Good Place and Redefining the Sitcom (Cristina)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Mandy Dreams of LSD (Eric)

Nic Cage is my favorite actor of all time, and thanks to his questionable financial responsibility, he seems to take any movie offer thrown his way. In 2018, Cage lent his voice to two animated movies, appeared in one documentary, and acted in six feature films, one of which was Mandy. Directed by Panos Cosmatos, Mandy is a nightmarish revenge thriller, imbued with as much unhinged emotion as it is with psychedelic color. In other words, it is the perfect vehicle for Cage’s often over-the-top acting style. Playing the role of a reclusive, recovering alcoholic whose wife is kidnapped and burned alive by a Manson-esque cult, Nic Cage operates at maximum Cage-ness for the duration of his bloody rampage, and it’s a whole lot of fun.

While Nic Cage was perfectly cast for Mandy, the movie would not be what it is without Cosmatos’ vision and the skill with which he laces psychedelic drugs into the film itself. Drugs appear in most movies as plot devices, sold and bought and used by characters in order to move the narrative along. Replacing the cocaine in Scarface (1983) with cheeseburgers would not make any practical sense, but the plot would remain essentially the same. In addition, countless other movies attempt to depict or replicate mind-altering drug experiences through visual effects and camera techniques. For example, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) uses close ups with wide angle lenses to create a disorienting effect, and special effects are used to make patterns in the carpet move as they might appear to during a real acid trip. Many science fiction movies take inspiration from psychedelic experiences to convey a sense of otherworldliness, as evidenced by the “Star Gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the countless other versions of the endless light tunnel. Most similar to Mandy in its attempt to craft a world dependent on psychedelics is Enter the Void (2009), yet the intimate camera of Enter the Void provides the film with a sense of realism that is noticeably lacking in Mandy. Mandy is the first example of a movie I’ve seen in which the mise-en-scene is wholly inspired by psychedelic drugs and in which both character actions and the movie universe are dependent on the presence of such drugs.

In this way, it could be hypothesized that the world of Mandy is actually the collective internal experience of its characters. The very beginning of the movie features no drugs, but the mise-en-scene in these opening scenes acts as a prologue to the full blown hallucinogenic heart of the rest of the film. The saturated lighting and double-exposures, though muted in presentation, are still apparent in the opening. In the scene in which Nic Cage’s character first takes the fantasy acid, the film presents what appears to be a montage of images within the character’s mind. These images strongly resemble the actual setting of the film, and in the final scene, Nic Cage drives away under a colorful, fantasy horizon. Once the drugs are introduced in the plot, many sequences take on a rhythmic, dreamlike quality reminiscent of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961-1964). This is despite the very literal violence that occurs in the plot, which includes a chainsaw duel and a skull crushing. The plot is presented in a very linear fashion, yet the film works to meld scenes together, which limits the role of time and emphasizes the movie’s hallucinogenic nature. The saturated lighting, fade-ins and fade-outs, double-exposures, and dream sequences cooperate with the fantastical special effects to produce a film that both explores and inhabits hallucination.

Beyond the Image: The Surrealistic Works of Luis Buñuel (Mireille)

Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel laments that the relationship between an audience and a text changes constantly, leading to individual interpretation of the artwork that often strays from the artist’s original intent. Buñuel argues that the audience should instead just accept the images in films without imposition of meaning or the passing of judgement. In other words, the real “duty” of the audience should be to simply “allow” what is being portrayed. Despite his assertions, Buñuel’s own surrealistic films are difficult to approach in this manner due to his stylistic choices, which are often shocking and unsettling. Woven throughout Buñuel’s work, which varies from abstract, almost nonsensical to more concrete, plot driven dramas, there are recurring themes such as the fragmentation and sexualization of body parts and the opinioned portrayal of certain sectors of society; precisely intended to jar the audience. Two films by Buñuel, L’Âge D’Or (1930) and The Exterminating Angel (1967), are emblematic of Buñuel’s style and as such his agenda of providing the audience with provocative fodder that defies interpretation and begs the audience to allow the purely visual experience.  

L’Âge D’Or is a surrealistic film in which Buñuel depicts the human primitive desperation to fulfill sexual desire even as social norms attempt to repress them. As such, the film is also a criticism, if not an outright attack on Bourgeois society. In this film, despite Buñuel’s argument for the “acceptance” of the image at hand, there are several sequences in which the use of shocking imagery taunts the audience to pass judgement and take sides. Buñuel chooses to highlight the sexual nature of humanity and puts sexual activity front and center from the introduction of the film. For example, a “couple” in the film is depicted as intertwined and wrestling in the mud while attending a religious ceremony. Buñuel shows them engaging in almost animalistic behaviors and completely oblivious that others are privy to their activity. In another instance, the same “couple” has been separated from the others attending the religious ceremony, and Buñuel cuts to a medium shot of the woman in a bathroom followed by a jump cut to what is seemingly volcanic rock, but strongly resembles feces. This filmic moment is quite possibly a nod to the Freudian influences of the time that argued that human beings are born with instinctual libido. However, this sequence also takes place in the fragment of the film that is introduced as “The Founding of Imperial Rome”, a not too subtle suggestion of what Buñuel thinks of society’s attempts to squelch the irrepressible desires of man and woman. Clearly, L’Âge D’Or does not provide the viewer with material that can be absorbed with impassivity. Rather, the film asserts the psychological and philosophical ideologies of the time while blatantly unveiling torrid human tendencies.

The Exterminating Angel also uses filmic juxtapositions to examine visual “obsessions” and repeated themes, but this time through a more linear narrative. In this film, Buñuel confounds the temporality of the film; blurring the lines between current reality and the dream state. Buñuel, constantly yet subtly, juxtaposes the images being viewed with the reaction of the characters as they observe the image of the reality at hand. He accomplishes this feat by alternating between high and low key lighting, switching between highly illuminated scenes and moments in which the characters are cloaked in shadow, rendering visible only certain features of their persona. The shots with high key lighting typically depict the periods in the film that are more “grounded” in reality. For example, Buñuel uses high key lighting when showing the group of protagonists imprisoned in a household for no rational reason going about their business and activities in a manner that an audience would accept as “normal”. However, Buñuel switches to low key lighting to underscore the dream-like almost psychotic state of some of the characters that are unable to leave the mansion. By using low key lighting, Buñuel is able to create more contrast and additional shadows to conceal portions of the frame, thus confounding and “un-grounding” the characters from their body and the setting, while also creating a feeling of dissociation for the audience. Buñuel’s use of cinematic lighting in this film is vastly different from L’Âge D’Or, which almost exclusively utilizes natural lighting; but both films are successful in their ability to separate and blend the current reality with a subconscious or dream state.

Finally, towards the culmination of The Exterminating Angel, the characters begin to laugh even when one of the couples has slit their wrists and died in a closet while engaging in a sexual act. This use of contrasting sound, namely a sound typically associated with joy, is combined with death and creates a lingering feeling of dissociation that displaces the viewer from a “normal” reality, not unlike the intimate scenes in L’Âge D’Or. This feeling of disquietude is no less strong even if one argues that rather than simply to create juxtaposition, Buñuel chose laughter in this scene to underscore that the characters are reaching a breaking point in their sanity as a result of the physical and psychological constraint within the household. In either case, Buñuel creates the very juxtaposition that he tries to avoid. In other words, he presents to the viewer too many possible venues to explore, which actually interfere with the ability to just let the images flood over the audience and work their magic.

LOVE DEATH & ROBOTS: What is Female Agency When the Female Body is Gone? Part 2 (Katie)

Two weeks ago I discussed the autonomy and survivability of women in the world of “SONNIE’S EDGE.” I’ve returned to discuss another episode in the action-packed anthology, one which puts a similar but new spin on the way women survive: “GOOD HUNTING.” As a story about a Chinese demon hunter, the colonization of Hong Kong, and the disappearance of old, natural magic in the world, there’s a lot to unpack. Spoilers ahead for the whole episode!

The first quarter of the episode opens with young son Liang, accompanying his father on a hunt to kill a húlijīng—a nine-tailed fox. Allegedly, the húlijīng has enchanted a merchant’s son, and the family hired Liang’s father, the demon hunter, to kill the húlijīng and get rid of the enchantment.

The father and son camp underneath the enchanted son’s bedroom window. His moans for the húlijīng ring out over the courtyard. Finally, the húlijīng comes. While Liang’s father and the húlijīng skirmish, Liang is momentarily entranced by the beauty of the húlijīng, and narrowly manages to throw dog’s piss over her body in time. The piss prevents the húlijīng from transforming completely into her fox form, leaving her in a half-fox, half-human state.

Liang’s father tracks the húlijīng to her den at a nearby temple. While they split up to scout for their quarry, Liang discovers one of the fox spirit’s hiding daughters: Yan. She is young, beautiful, and talks to him in her naked, snow-white fox form, emphatically inhuman. Liang is all eyes, even as he cowers, even as she leaps from rock to rock. And in a single argument, she changes Liang’s worldview.

YAN

Why are you hunting us? We did nothing to you.

LIANG

Your mother bewitched the merchant’s son. We were hired to save him.

YAN

Bewitched? He’s the one who wouldn’t leave her alone.

LIANG

That’s not true.

YAN

Once a man has set his heart on a huli jing, she can hear him, no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying, she has to go to him every night just to keep him quiet.

LIANG

No, she lures men and feeds on them for her evil magic.

YAN

A man can fall in love with a huli jing just like he can with a human woman.

LIANG

It’s not the same!

YAN

Not the same? I saw how you looked at me. [4:26 - 5:12]

Immediately after this talk, Yan witnesses the graphic death of her own mother at the hands of Liang’s father.

The opening of “GOOD HUNTING” tells us immediately that this will be a subversive story. Here, the female húlijīng are not the evil, demonic witch-figures that men would paint them as; Yan is as sympathetic as she is inhuman. This is the first argument that “GOOD HUNTING” will make about the agency and power of women: the beauty of a húlijīng is a not a weapon used against men, but men will oppress her for it all the same. They will resent the way they feel about a beautiful húlijīng, and they will blame the feminine fox spirits to absolve themselves.

As the episode reaches its halfway point, Liang’s father passes away. Now a grown young man, Liang lives in a modernizing village: the first trains travel through the countryside, and the colonizing presence of the British Empire looms large over natives’ shoulders. For their last meeting in a long time, Liang and Yan commiserate about the state of the dying earth around them. Yan speculates that the magic is disappearing from the earth due to “iron roads” and “machines that breathe smoke” (6:46). As the magic leaves, so does her ability to change into her “true form” (6:52). Soon, she may lose the ability altogether.

The steampunk twist that “GOOD HUNTING” takes, a sharp veer from its fantastical origins, is another message about female oppression. It is, after all, mother nature that begins to be exploited and mutilated for arrogant white men. All the (literally) magical beauty of the earth, including that of the húlijīng, is slowly suffocated once ambitious men enter the picture.

Years pass. The episode continues to tell the story of Liang. He finds himself extremely skilled at engineering, specifically that of automata; even as a much-hated minority in Hong Kong, he makes himself useful to the British and has a decent living. On a chance encounter, he bumps into Yan. He rescues her from a group of overly eager British men who seek to have their way with her.

As they catch up, Yan tells Liang she has been permanently stuck in her human form: “no claws, no sharp teeth. I can’t even run very fast. All I have is my beauty. Now, I live by the very thing you accused my mother of: I bewitch men for money” (9:05). She laments the lack of power and control she has over her life in Hong Kong: “I dream of hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt. I imagine my true form leaping from beam to ledge to terrace roof until I am at the top of this island. Until I can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me” (9:40).

The story that Yan presents is that of a loss of agency. When Yan grew up, she had both her human and fox form. Now, she is chained to her human form, and she is forced to use her beauty to survive. This is in direct contrast with how Yan and her mother were treated in China, where they were wrongly hunted for being too beautiful. The world of men has declawed the húlijīng. Not only did men take away her ability to transform into a being with sharp teeth and claws, they made safe the one thing they feared most about a húlijīng: her beauty. Yan’s beauty is now merely a tool for getting by, a plaything for rich, white, colonial masters.

So far, in every aspect of storytelling, “GOOD HUNTING” has depicted a universe in which women are hardy and survivable, but terribly oppressed. Unfortunately, things only get worse for Yan from here.

Yan’s long-time client, the Governor, was only sexually attracted to machines. Naturally, the Governor decided to drug Yan and strap her to an operating table. By the time they were finished, Yan was entirely a machine. The ultimate fantasy for men who lived and profited off automata.

Yan’s non-consensual body swap, and the complete and total murder of her autonomy, needs no explaining. But “GOOD HUNTING” is not without hope. Far from it.

When Yan comes to Liang and tells her his story, she reveals that she escaped the Governor by killing him. One night, she told him no, and it enraged him. He struck her. She struck back and realized how much strength she had gained with her metal limbs: “A terrible thing had been done to me. But I could also be terrible” (12:38).

Yan reassures Liang that she does not want to reverse what has been done to her body. She wants to make the best of it. How? By using what automata parts existed in her, and changing them to become something else entirely.

At the end of the episode, Liang has successfully changed Yan’s machine body—originally made for man’s sexual pleasure and subjugation—into one that, with the right amount of coal and fuel, transforms into a lithe, agile, and beautiful nine-tailed fox. Shimmering under moonlight and padding gracefully on the balcony of Liang’s house, the automata-fox-form of Yan is graceful, dangerous, and dazzlingly powerful. From then on, Yan does what she promised she would do: growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own her.

While the storyline of “GOOD HUNTING” is filled with hardship and oppression for both Liang and Yan, Yan’s story is ultimately optimistic—boldly, emphatically, and rebelliously optimistic. When Yan lost control and ownership of her entire body, she managed to make the best of it and, with the help of another oppressed party, become something closer to her original self. Even though she has been through hell, she persevered, and she was rewarded for it in the end.

But it’s true: Yan suffered terribly for being a beautiful woman, both as a child and an adult, and both in a rural village filled with magic, and a modernized world filled with steam-run automata. Yan had to lose all of her organic body in order to gain the ability to transform into her fox-form—to gain power—again.

Like “SONNIE’S EDGE,” “GOOD HUNTING” also seems to think that the only way for a woman to achieve anything close to true power is to not be a (biological) woman at all. And even then, there is something bleak and grim about that power. For Sonnie, it is having to fight for her life every time she enters that ring. For Yan, it is the complete loss of her actual body and true form before she could return to her fox form again. While women in these sci-fi worlds can survive through oppressive hells, it is entirely unclear whether what lays on the other side was better than what spawned those hells.

There’s still more I want to talk about. Why do Yan’s story and Sonnie’s story feel so similar? What does it mean that all the women in these sci-fi settings seem to get treated with ultra-violence? Why do increasing amounts of modern stories tell us that, when high-tech finds a throne in the world, oppressed groups get jailed into the low life? But these questions must be saved for another time.

Works cited in this text:

“GOOD HUNTING.” LOVE DEATH & ROBOTS. Netflix. March 15, 2019. Netflix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Props from "Street of Crocodiles"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

When Films Put Words in Animals' Mouths (Mireille)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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?

Use Your Imagination: Violations in Amélie (Tori)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Line Between Fiction and Reality Was Overrated Anyway (Treva)

I have discovered a new favorite niche genre: paranormal mockumentary. Or whatever Mermaids: The Body Found can be defined as. Because this film, aired on Animal Planet in May 2012 and The Discovery Channel three weeks later, isn’t funny per se. There is no joke, no “mock” in sight. All 90 minutes are presented as an entirely straightforward, scientifically factual documentary on how mermaids exist—having branched off from human evolution some seven million years ago—and the US Navy is engaged in a vast conspiracy to conceal this from the public so they can continue testing SONAR weapons in the ocean.

I could make this up if I tried, which is why Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel should really hire me to write and direct a similar film on dragons—which they’ve made before, in Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, but that took the coward’s way out and admitted that dragons do not, in fact, exist today. Mermaids: The Body Found does not for a moment admit to being fiction. In fact, it over and over includes just enough factual data to leave the viewer wondering, just briefly, “could this be real?”

Because there really has been debate about the Navy testing SONAR weapons and how those may or may not have a harmful affect on marine mammals. The “aquatic ape” hypothesis has been proposed twice, independently, in 1942 and 1960. Christopher Columbus really did claim to have seen mermaids on his way to the “New World”, there really are people in Brazil who partner with dolphins to fish, and there really is a cave in Egypt, in the desert by what used to be a shore, with primitive paintings of what anthropologists think are humans swimming.

Mind you, the people in the paintings don’t have tails, as Mermaids depicts. And historians are fairly sure Columbus saw manatees—he certainly didn’t describe them as having “pale, speckled bellies, dark blue backs, and paddle-shaped tails.” There was never a mass whale beaching in Washington in April 2004, and the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has been discredited and disproved every time it’s been suggested.

Yet the film stands in fascinating contrast to something like What We Do in the Shadows, a 2014 mockumentary in which, per the explanation provided in text at the start, “each crew member wore a crucifix and was granted protection by the subjects of the film.” Yes, that’s right: it followed vampires around in their nightly lives.

In Wellington, New Zealand.

What We Do in the Shadows has all the mock. It parodies the sort of documentary that explores subcultures by presenting a subculture that obviously does not exist. It makes fun of vampires (and werewolves, zombies, witches…) by continuously playing with the incongruity between the darkness, terror, and perhaps even erotic intrigue the audience is led to expect from legends like Dracula and Nosferatu and the mundane details of living in a flat in Wellington, NZ. They bicker over the chore roster. Viago (Taika Waititi) puts down towels before he kills people, so the blood doesn’t get everywhere. And, my favorite (SPOILERS AHEAD): the romantic intrigue does enter with the Dracula-like character of Vladislav (Jemaine Clement), who once tyrannically ruled a small chunk of Eastern Europe before he was defeated in epic battle by his arch-nemesis “the Beast.” In classic documentary style, manuscripts and artwork of the battle are shown while Vladislav narrates his tragic story.

…Only for it to later be revealed that “the Beast” is his name for his ex-girlfriend, Pauline, who refers to him as “Asshole.”

Mermaids, however, has none of that. Even one of the most potentially incongruous moments, the one and only time a live mermaid appears onscreen in the modern day (rather than in the openly CGI segments set millions of years in the past) is absolutely serious. In Shadows, the head-height, handheld camera removes a great deal of grandeur from the occasional fights—as does the fact that the vampires look anything but elegant when they take to the air or hiss at each other like angry cats. It’s amateurish and ridiculous. Whereas the brief attack of two boys by a SONAR-wounded merman, shot with a shaky cameraphone from 2004, is amateur in a way that evokes true terror, not to mention unofficialism. That is, this is what the government doesn’t want you to see. The merman, too, hisses, as it lunges sideways into the narrow frame (who knows what else could be beyond the viewer’s field of vision…) But where the vampires, grown men is costumes from the 1700s and before, seem absurd, the mermaid is fierce and animalistic.

And terrified, and hurt. It’s already been established at that point that the other beached beings—whales—were literally bleeding from their ears, and had been something like physically bombarded by subsonic SONAR. They had blunt force trauma. It’s easy to see the merman’s distress as human, too. When the vampires in Shadows are humanized, they are made petty and amusing, with chore charts and ex-girlfriends—normal problems. The mermaids, on the other hand, are humanized with emotion, such as in the segment set 1.6 million years ago, in which one sacrifices himself to distract a megalodon shark away from the rest of his migrating pod. Though the voiceover calls the group of mermaids a “pod”, as if they were dolphins, rather than something more human like “clan” or “tribe”, the emotion in the merman’s eyes is as real as CGI can make it, and the music swells with piping sorrow as he awaits the megalodon’s jaws.

Yet the narration is dehumanizing, and it is the only words spoken in these part of the film in which the story of the NOAA scientists investigating mermaids in the modern day is punctuated with the same sort of flashback one would expect to see in any documentary on some animal’s evolution. The mermaids don’t speak a recognizable language, but the narrator has the same sort of deep, serious voice that always narrates nature documentaries. And we have all seen tragic nature documentaries, with death-by-predator and soaring, tragic pipes in the soundtrack. The conceit here is simply that instead of CGIing ancient mammoths or crocodiles or whatever, the teams at Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel have simulated mermaids. With just as much factual data as they would the mammoths and crocodiles.

I want more. I’m an imaginative woman; I can go along, laughing, with the conceit that there are awkward vampires living in Wellington. I’m perfectly to accept that as reality, just for fun. But it’s even better that every varyingly-accurate “fact” cited in this article was something I actually paused Mermaids: The Body Found in order to google, because I wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not. The film was entirely scientific, no magic in sight, but that only made it easier for my logic-conditioned mind to accept that the world might really be more magical than I had thought. That’s a gift.

So yes, I’d like one on dragons next, and then fairies—I know there’s a blurry photo of them somewhere from late 19^th century England or so. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that on the internet. Then maybe unicorns? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monster? I’m sure those already exist, but not professionally, by people actively making things up to support the theory. Yes, it might be confusing—but what’s wrong with looking up half a dozen different scientific and historical facts in an hour and a half? I learned things! And if you can’t be bothered to hit the search bar, well, the line between fiction and reality is overrated anyway

It’s a Small (Claymation) World After All (Nicola)

“Huh?” Coraline stops short at the sight of her ‘Other House,’ looming before her. She turns to her feline companion as if to verify that they had indeed departed from that location not minutes before. “But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?” she asks.

The cat replies in a drawl that implies the obvious: “Walk around the world.”

“Small world…”

 Based on a novel by Neil Gaiman, Coraline is a dark fantasy that revolves around a young girl named Coraline (not Caroline, as she is often forced to remind her neighbors). Upon moving to Oregon with her deadbeat, overworked parents, Coraline finds herself bored, neglected, and missing her old home. In search of adventure or, at the very least, something to interrupt the unrelenting monotony of the overcast Oregon afternoons, Coraline discovers a small door leading to a parallel world. In this ‘Other World’ everything is the same, but better – better food, better neighbors, better garden, and best yet, parents that actually seem to care about their daughter.

Yes, everything is better – except, that is, for the eyes. Everyone in this ‘Other World’ has buttons for eyes.

Now, if an animated doll staring at you with glazed-over, black button eyes isn’t creepy enough to give you the heebie-jeebies, it gets worse. It soon becomes disturbingly clear that the ‘Other World’ is nothing but a construction, created for the purpose of stealing children’s souls. In a danse macabre, the child ghosts of former victims describe the methods of the ‘Other Mother’:

She spied on our lives,

through the little doll's eyes,

And saw that we weren't happy.

So she lured us away,

with treasures and treats,

and games to play!

Gave all that we asked –

yet we still wanted more –

So we let her sew the buttons.

She said that she loved us,

But she locked us here

And ate up our lives.

Indeed, Coraline Jones is in a very small world. The ‘Other Mother’ has created a realm that centers entirely around our little blue-haired protagonist. But Coraline exists in a small world in more ways than one, for as it turns out, the 'Other Mother’ has quite a lot in common with a certain director with a penchant for imbuing inanimate objects with life.

At the time of its release in 2009, Henry Selik’s film, Coraline was the longest stop action film in existence. Now, when it takes an entire week for a fully staffed crew to produce approximately 90 seconds of footage, you can be pretty sure that the selected medium was chosen for a reason (masochistic tendencies aside). Stop action - Claymation in particular – generally involves the incremental manipulation of figures to act out a story. In the case of Coraline, a 140,000 square ft. warehouse was transformed into the 150 sets that compose Coraline’s world. Extensive research was done on the real-world locations portrayed so the film would appear stylized but accurate, the set was filled with hand-crafted dolls (fun fact: a woman named Althea Croem was hired purely for the purpose of knitting miniature sweaters. Sometimes her needles were no thicker than a single human hair), and the film was shot using the dual camera technique to create a 3D look.

Hmmmmm. Intense research on outside source material, a miniature world, dolls operated by unseen hands and made three dimensional… Sound familiar?

The medium of the film reflects the story itself. Pretty neat, huh?

Now, I will say, I have mixed feelings about Coraline – there are certain aspects of the film that I adore and others that bug the heck out of me. I think I’ve already expressed how much I enjoy the self-awareness of the film, but more than that, I love the stylization. Coraline is a film that knows what it is – it has a great sense of humor, it’s exceptionally creative, and the soundtrack is so good that I’m pretty sure I bought within 24 hours of leaving the theatre. That being said, it’s pretty hard-hitting when it comes to the ‘neglected child’ thing and doesn’t do nearly enough work when it comes to humanizing Coraline’s real parents. What’s more, the ending (a neighborhood garden party on a sunny afternoon) rings with the falsity of a fairytale – a tone which seems quite out of place given the general propensities of the piece. It feels forced, tied up with a bright red bow and thrown at the reader as if to say: “Here. Have a happy ending.” It blatantly ignores the fact that basically nothing has changed in Coraline’s real life and, in a day or two, Coraline’s parents will go back to their work as usual. Not to mention the fact that Coraline’s probably going to suffer from deep psychological issues. Oh, and don’t forget the three children who were murdered and had their eyes gouged out. But sure, let’s end the film with a garden party!

Gee, thanks.

I would tend to say, if you’re going to go the route of a dark fantasy, you should commit. The film does such an amazing job of constructing this incredibly unsettling aura, but all that work goes right out the window in the last five minutes. The 'Other Mother' is possessed by a desire to have things 'just so.' Consequently, even though her world is supposedly perfect, it has a wrongness to it – it feels too contrived. The movie itself (intentionally or not) possesses the same wrongness and a lack of natural progression that is positively infuriating. That is not to say the film is not enjoyable (in fact, I highly recommend it) but it does leave certain things to be desired. 

BONUS: I also highly recommend perusing the CoralineTheMovie YouTube channel. They have some wonderful stuff in there about the making of the film. It’s fascinating!
Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FfFaj2eRcQ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

 

Darkness and Allusion in "Over the Garden Wall" (Elizabeth)

It is rare that one can recommend an animated television show without needing to throw in a caveat. There are plenty of gems out there, but all too often cartoons are either insultingly childish, full of shock value humor, or just simply keep going long after they should have ended. “Over the Garden Wall” does not suffer from any of those problems. It is a new kind of endeavor for Cartoon Network, a short miniseries that is deceptively deep and dark in tone, telling the story of two brothers who are lost in a mysterious woods trying to find their way home. One of its main themes is that nothing is as it first appears, and this holds true for the miniseries itself. It is child friendly, as anything on at primetime Cartoon Network will be, but its tight, twisting plot and mature themes ensure that most children wouldn’t be able to scratch the surface of its depth.

One of the strongest ways that this manifests is in the constant allusions and stylistic and tonal references that the series has. The man alone in a manor who thinks he loves a ghost and fears he may be mad hearkens back to Poe, the two witch sisters have designs that call to mind the work of Hayao Miyazaki, and Greg’s dream of going to heaven is a clear homage to the oldest theatrical cartoons. It draws many of its locations and episodic plots from older American culture and folklore from a purposefully indefinable era. Even the obligatory out-of-place modern jokes and references Wirt and Greg make turn out to be foreshadowing the eventual twist, that they’re working their way through the limbo of the dead who haven’t let go.

One of the strongest and most thematically resonant parallels is to Dante’s Inferno. From the name of their treacherous but good-hearted guide, Beatrice, to the fact that Wirt is a poet whose official role in the Unknown is “pilgrim,” the foreshadowing about the true nature of the woods is much clearer to those who’ve read the classics. This lets the writers add a creepy layer of symbolism that children watching wouldn’t be able to grasp—the Beast, a clear Satan analogue, attempts to get travelers to give in to despair, which will cause them to turn into trees. In The Inferno, becoming a tree in hell is the punishment for suicide. It gives the viewer the same sense that it gives the boys in the story—wandering through a mysterious past and trying to make sense of the memories and legacies of those who are gone.

Even the darkest of implications can hardly measure up to some of the explicit action of the plot, especially the woodsman who unknowingly burns lost souls to ashes. This can be quite powerful—but it can also work against itself. Some of the trappings of child-friendliness don’t quite work out for a story as dark as this—the, dark, detailed backgrounds and monsters of the Unknown clash against the cartoony stylization of the humans, the songs not sung by the bullfrog tend to be rather jarring, and there are a few times where it feels the need to explain things that it could have more elegantly left to implication. However, this is exactly the sort of deep, mature, unique project that animation needs to get taken more seriously as a medium.

Dystopian Love Stories: Heartbreak in the Digital Age (Helen)

I usually find romantic film to be a subject that’s all too sugary-sweet, but the sub genre that has been building steam in recent years provides a refreshing, albeit somewhat terrifying, discussion on human intimacy with the ever-evolving technology of convenience. In the same way, generations adapted to telephones, Internet access, and smart phones, these fictional characters must tackle the paradox between having complete access to world from their fingertips and the strange sense of alienation from never having to leave their home to do so. These films ask the question, is such a thing as too much access? Too much information? Is contentment possible when there seem to be infinite options? Is the technology that is made to assist us, perhaps stunting us?

 

Spike Jonze’s most recent film, Her (2013), looks into these questions with a slightly different spin in what I would consider to be a fairly convincing realistic look at artificial intelligence and the moral ambiguity of developing a personal assistance technology that is capable of independent thoughts and feelings.  The story follows a recently divorced introvert named Theodore Twombly in the year 2025. The ethical questions raised in this film revolve mostly around his developing romantic relationship with his OS “Samantha”. Although, it is worth noting that there are a lot of interesting moral quandaries for the viewer to consider within the background of the main storyline. For example, Theodore works at a company that ghostwrites romantic letters to the customer’s significant other under the assumption that it was written by their spouse and of course, not contracted out to a stranger. Although this deceit seems to be with the best intentions, that ethical grey area is the crux of the film. Both his career and the OS provide parallel examples of modern services meant to make life simpler that seem to instead desensitize an over stimulated population. Although this film shows the delight and feverish highs of Theodore’s relationship with “Samantha” through beautiful cinematography, it is clear from the start that his love will end in tragedy.

 

One of the most striking scenes in the film is when Theodore goes on a blind date set up by his coworker Amy. The woman he meets, who is never given a name, is played by the stunning actress Olivia Wilde. Although she is awkward at first, the close camerawork is intimate rather than suffocating. Their interaction is slow to spark, but develops into a romantic chemistry. However, when she asks him about permanence and commitment he hesitates and recedes. After his failed date he speaks at lengths to “Samantha” about it. It is a subtle reminder than Theordore is retreating from life itself, comforted by the convenience of technology. As time passes, it becomes clear that more people have begun dating their OS, including his only close friend, Amy who is also struggling with her “human” relationship. Towards the end of the film, Theodore descends down the stairs to the subway, with his blue tooth in ear speaking to “Samantha”. As the camera follows him, the same blue tooth can be seen on the various strangers passing him by. This film is less of a cautionary tale, and more of a discourse on the complexity of human intimacy and desire being swept away in the changing tides of modern advancements.

 

Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) offers another perspective on the romantic drama with a science fiction twist. This film however, begins with the end of a relationship and shows the lengths to which someone will go to forget and suppress their former flame. While the technology in this film is entirely familiar with the exception of the memory-erasing machine from the fictional company, Lacuna Inc. Gondry mixes aspects of life that are entirely relatable into this science fiction story. The film opens completely unremarkably with Joel Barish waking up and commuting to the Long Island Railroad on a Valentines Day like any other, so he thinks. In reality, most of the film is presumed to be Joel’s memories running through his head as he is having them erased. Much of the film is shot in montage with Joel’s narration over top, similarly to how memory is perceived. The non-linear timeline forces to viewer to recall and reorder the scenes to piece together the story just as Joel does.

 

Although the story mostly works backwards through a relationship retroactively, the flashbacks recall moments of genuine tenderness and pain for Joel and the object of his affections, Clementine. However, just as in Her (2013), the technology meant to soothe proves to be harmful for Joel. The oversimplified solution to a breakup is too permanent for fickle human desire. The film raises other ethical dilemmas through the various relationships in addition to Joel and Clementine’s. For example, Patrick, the Lacuna employee that erases Clementine’s memories falls in love with her and begins dating her. He uses Joel’s journal to relive his experiences with Clementine in order to manipulate her affections, knowing she won’t remember them with Joel. Lacuna’s receptionist Mary, also learns that she had an affair with the married doctor that runs the company, but had all of this memory erased. Even though she had her memories erased, the attraction she had for her boss developed again. Proving, that the system is not only traumatic but also ineffective. Learning of their own pasts, Joel and Clementine decided to try their relationship again, with a somewhat optimistic ending. Although, the greater implication is that their relationship is likely doomed to fail again.

 

Both of these films and the subgenre of science fiction romantic dramas address an anxiety between technology simultaneously simplifying our lives, but also making things much more complicated, especially in how we interact with one another. I'm not sure how things will be in ten or twenty years, or if these fever dream ideas will ever be realized, but it's something to keep you up at night. To put it simply in the immortal words of 1986 one hit wonder, Timbuk3, "the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades".

 

 

"Stephane?" (Ingrid)

    The Science of Sleep (2006), directed by Michel Gondry, is a depiction of life as an indiscernible mix of dreams and reality. From the very start, we are launched into the mind of protagonist Stephane Miroux, who is in the middle of the dream. Stephane’s dreams are a production, literally. We see him working in his “dream studio,” a one-man television show by the name of “Television Educative.” He plays the show’s theme song on the drums and the piano, sets up all the cameras, and serves as the show’s host. By the opening credits, it is obvious The Science of Sleep will not be a conventional film.

    We soon learn that Stephane is moving back into his mother’s home, also his childhood home, in France. His mother has secured a new job for him at a calendar printing company, a place he hopes to expand his artistic visions. It quickly becomes apparent however, that there is no room at the company for his offbeat creativity; his ideas are rejected and he is stuck performing menial tasks like cutting and pasting logos. Stephane’s frustration manifests itself in his dreams, where he fabricates elaborate schemes to seize the company and publish his drawings. Dreaming is his coping mechanism; a way he can make up for his insecurity and thwarted masculinity.

    Stephane is deeply ensconced in the shelter of his self-imposed innocence and infancy, which results in shortcomings in all his relationships. We see his immaturity most obviously in his room, which I think is fair to say, is a direct extension and reflection of himself. Stephane’s room is frozen in time, still bearing all the remnants of his boyhood. The furniture is painted in primary colors, the tiny twin-size bed is covered with racecar-patterned sheets, the walls are decorated with scribbles, and the bookshelves display homemade toy models.

    Stephane eventually develops an interest in his neighbor, Stephanie, after he discovers their mutual interest in art, designing, and building. The first time they spend time alone together, Stephane quickly gets absorbed in Stephanie’s personal art project—a small felt boat. Like a toddler with ADHD, he is easily excitable and easily inspired. His imagination runs wild, and soon, he is sputtering ideas building a forest inside the boat, creating a sea of cellophane, and making a short, animated film out of the production.

    Stephanie and Stephane seem to be on the track towards a picture-perfect, adult relationship—neighbors that fall in love over shared creative visions and projects. In fact they’re so similar, they practically share the same name. And yet, they fail to move forward. The movie is completely devoid of actual sex; it only happens for Stephane’s omnipotent dream-self. Stephane and Stephanie never come close to consummating their partnership; they never even share a bed. Their stunted relationship can almost be entirely attributed to Stephane’s immaturity. Overall, their romance is frustratingly unsatisfying.

(Spin Art. Licensed under Creative Commons at Flickr.)     

    The last line of the movie is perfectly simple. Stephanie approaches a sleeping Stephane and quietly says, "Stephane?" It's the exact question I was asking throughout the film. Because the film is so immersed in Stephane's mind, it was impossible to determine if something is actually happening or if it is yet another fiction concocted by Stephane's imagination. There were scenes where it seemed like real space and time, but then the rules of gravity would suddenly be suspended or blips in time would occur. I could never be sure. As the whimsical, fantastical film continually traverses dreams, reality, and the muddled region where the two intersect, all concrete delineations are blurred. We follow Stephane as he navigates these worlds seamlessly, opening a door in his dream space and entering a room in real space. In many cases, his dreams often invade his real life because he is a hyperactive sleepwalker. The most prominent example of this is when he slides a letter under Stephanie’s door, asking for the phone number of another girl, while sleepwalking—a rude but unintentional gesture that causes a rift in their relationship. Stephane’s inability to distinguish between dreams and reality translates into our inability, as viewers, to follow his true life events. 

    It is in this complex way, that the film progresses cumbersomely. To make things more convoluted, the characters speak in three different languages, English, French, and Spanish. The characters interchange languages when they speak so subtitles flit on and off the screen inconsistently. These are all constant reminders of the warped, fantasy world Gondry has beautifully constructed. 

A Different Take on Dreams and Nightmare in 1988's Alice (Steven)

Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 film Alice, one of many adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s well-known work, mixes stop-motion and live action footage to depict an unsettling, dream-like Alice in Wonderland. Jan’s Wonderland is an old house. Both timeless and inconstant, it’s a place where cracked walls repair themselves and threadbare creatures sew holes back up. Each shot is cramped and detailed. Jan focuses on objects and poses rather than vistas or facial expressions. The Wonderland house resembles a twisted I Spy book with its piles of wooden toys, bones, tattered cloth, sawdust, and leaves.

Unlike many dream-inspired films, the sensations in Alice are rooted and immediate. There are no psychedelic washes of color or vague mists here: it’s a world of sharp sounds and sharp corners. Jan achieves strangeness not through otherworldly imagery but by placing and attaching familiar things in unfamiliar ways. This collage-like method reflects the laziness of our subconscious. Rarely are dreams original creations of our minds; instead, they steal ideas and images from our waking lives and put them together in often nonsensical ways.

Jan is eerily in tune with the tones of our childhood dreams, and he’s not afraid to present an honest portrait of them. There’s no shortage of nightmare in the film. The sounds, which, of course, can’t be traditionally produced due to the stop animation, always feel a little louder and more staccato than they need to be. Even in the cases where a normal recording of the sounds of the scene could have been used, Jan often uses a similar sound from a completely different origin, as when Alice claps her hands and produces a noise much harsher and shriller than a normal clap. This sharp soundtrack heightens the unease of creepy moments, but the unfamiliarity also makes the watcher listen more consciously to sounds which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. There’s no score outside of the title credits, but sometimes these noises approach musique concrète in their rhythmic insistency.

While there are no jump scares or gore, the film does not have a dearth of visual creepiness, either. Death, decay, and violence reoccur as motifs. Skulls hatch from chicken eggs and scuttle into the shadows, skeletal chimeras march along dirty floors, and a flank of steak flops to a new hiding spot when disturbed. The “Drink Me” bottle not only makes Alice small, it also turns her into an uncanny doll. In one scene, the minified Alice is forced by dead animals to walk the plank into a pot of milk, which turns out to be another transformative liquid with an unsettling effect: Alice grows again, but instead of a girl or a doll she becomes a girl entombed alive in a doll-shaped sarcophagus.

Taste, or more accurately hunger, is also a consistent theme both in Jan’s adaptation and in the original book. In Alice, the white rabbit is introduced as a taxidermied specimen in Alice’s room. It creaks itself free of the supports and chatters incessantly through big yellow teeth. It greedily licks sawdust from the timepiece it keeps lodged inside its own body cavity. Once in Wonderland, Alice tries to eat anything that looks edible, but jelly jars are filled with tacks and nails sprout from loaves of bread, and most of the things she does manage to consume coincide with the size-changing substances from the book. Her narration is frequently paired with extreme close-up shots of her mouth pronouncing the words. Hunger is an astute choice from Lewis Carroll, as young children think about it quite often, both inside and outside of sleep. Jan Švankmajer makes sure to point out that they also think of death and violence more than most adults would like to admit.

Alice manages to marry creepiness with wonder in its surrealist exploration. As with most of Jan’s work, the film carries with it a dose of absurdist humor. He breaks the fourth wall early in the film with an odd bit of narration from Alice’s lips: “Now you will see a film… made for children. Perhaps.” A film for brave children, perhaps, or a film for adults to think and dream and have nightmares as kids for an hour.

Life is Cinema (Mina)

    Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012) is a film about a film. But what exactly is "film?" How can we define cinema? Carax tries to answer these questions by blurring the boundary line between real life and film, between the real and the imaginary through Holy Motors. When the two intersect we are able to realize that our life, our reality is essentially a performance.

    Carax believes the essence of film is acting and performing by using one's physical body. From 19th century Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographic gun to today's ditigal technology, the cinema has been developing for over 130 years. The improvement of machinery enabled mass production in the film industry, makeing more films accessible to the society. The epilogue of Holy Motors starts with brief clips of a running man. Next we see a mysterious man waking up and discovering a secret door hidden in the wall in his apartment room. He enters a crowded, yet silent movie house. The eyes of the audience are closed, their bodies stiff; they almost look dead. The opening clips in the beginning of the epilogue belong to Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist who conducted numerous studies on human body and motion. His clips thus convey a tone of nostalgia of earlier days of the film industry. Unlike the passive, mechanical movements of the audience, the man in the clips carries out active physical performancs. The mystery man (played by Carax, the director himself) looks feeble, so small in front of the huge movie screen. In all, I believe the epilogue celebrates the development of the cinema, but simultaneously points out the lack of physical movement in today's digitalized films and the passiveness of the audience.

    Carax's affection for pure physical performance continues to be shown in the character named Oscar in the next nine episodes (divided into Act I and Act II). Act I of the episodes focuses on portraying the beauty of performing. Oscar comes out of his luxurious house, posing himself as a wealthy businessman. His assistant Céline is waiting for him in a limousine. She tells Oscar that he has nine "appointments" in that day. For his first appointment, Oscar dresses up as an old beggar in the streets. We directly see Oscar combing a wig and putting makeup on his face before he act. In the next sequence, he is a motion capture actor who vividly performs a simulated sex with an actress (which once again underlines the digitalized technology in film). The importance of the use of body constantly reappears in the sequences.

In Act II, acting starts to pervade the real life. Act II, the boundary line that differentiates the real world and the cinema fades away. In the fifth and sixth sequence, for example, Oscar "kills" people who look identical to him and Oscar himself also gets "murdered" by others. At the end, however, Oscar returns to the limousine, alive, and gets ready for his next appointment as if nothing happened. When we saw the sequences in Act I, where he assumes the role of a beggar or a motion capture actor, we were fairly certain that what Oscar is doing is “acting”; in other word, it is not real. Now, we are no longer certain if this is real or not. We now recall the first time Oscar we met in Holy Motors. We believed that when he walked out of his house, he was the true version of Oscar. Every role Oscar has appears looks real and unreal at the same time. The act of making distinction between reality and film becomes useless. The prologue of Holy Motors further completes the identification of the real world and the unreal world. Céline drives the limousine to the Holy Motors garage then she places a mask as if she readying herself for a performance. As soon as we believe this eventually might be the end of the fantasy, another fantasy appears. The reality is then inseparable from the cinema, the fantasy.

    Oscar transforms into a different person each time he gets out of his limousine; the limousine is the movie theater, and also the place where film is made. Moreover, at the end of the prologue, the limousines talks to one another, expressing their fears that they may be considered outdated and unwanted. As we hear the discription, "outdated", we might be able to think about the Lumière Brothers’ train. In the 19th century, the screening of a train itsef was an exciting spectacle for the audience. But now, trains are "outdated". They are old, bulky, just as the limousines. Ultimately the limousines represent the one of the earliest cameras, the earliest period of the cinema history. Taking Oscar from one place to another, the whole travel and distance indicates the passage of time in the film industry.

    Through the prologue and epilogue which starts and ends Holy Motors, we realize we are the lifeless audience from the prologue. We also realize life is a mask, a mask is an act, an act is a movement, and movement is the "motor" of cinema, the causation which makes film appear beautiful. Within this interconnection, we find deep awe and beauty. Life is cinema.

Dream in Cinema: Blue Velvet & Inception (Yeirim)

 

Dreaming and watching a film share some common qualities. In a dream, we are staying still, asleep, likely surrounded by darkness, and are engaged with sensory images which, regardless of its probability in real life, appear emphatically real at the moment. Similarly in a movie theater, we are seated still, surrounded by darkness in which we are soon absorbed into a few hours of vivid sensory experience that is realistically alive to us even if we acknowledge that they are not happening in real life. Thus, both in a movie theater or a dream, the necessity of logic often fades away and we often develop a unique personal relationship between the images and our minds. Some films make use of this unique quality shared between dreaming and cinematic experience to engage the audience more to their ideas or themes. These two films which I will talk about from now, Blue Velvet and Inception, are excellent examples of such films.

 

In Blue Velvet, we follow a young man named Jeffrey through his discovery and engagement with the existence of abnormality such as violence, unhealthy obsession and distorted sexual desire not only in the other part of the world but also and more strikingly, inside himself. An object that leads Jeffrey and the audience into this journey is a severed human ear he finds in the field. This image is uncanny itself, but a zoom into this ear and out of another one even drags us to a completely surreal realm.

 

The realm is often, if not always, separated from the normal one. While the normal is set in the brightness of the day, this abnormal realm is set in the darkness. The chronological or logical link between the two is broken. For example, both of the most eerie scenes, Jeffrey’s first encounter with Frank and Dorothy and the mad car ride, are cut immediately to Jeffrey’s waking up in the next morning without any wrapped-up conclusion in between.  Such abruptness is very similar to dreams, which often lack of logic and which we often unexpectedly wake up from. With this fragmented link, the film then employs surrealistic images to further enhance its dream-like quality.  A severed ear in the field, a dancing woman on the top of the car regardless of an intense violence right next to her, and the dead body of the yellow man in an erect position, all illustrate the surreal. The images certainly have an absurdity, but when they are visually embodied on the screen, it fades away, just like the logic disappears in dreams.

 

Through these choices, David Lynch describes the abnormal world as a nightmare. However, that does not mean that he disregards it as unreal. In fact, by making it dream-like and surrealistic, he reminds us that in the very bottom of our unconscious minds, there always exist these repressed and distorted desires, and that they can never be completely apart from us, just as we live our real lives when we are awake but also live our dreams when we are asleep. Therefore, like an insect in the beak of a robin in Jeffrey’s restored peace, the presence of dark side of human nature that Blue Velvet has demonstrated, is still there in the awareness of the audience even after they wake up from this film.

 

Since dream is an actual subject matter in Inception, it has more prominent presence than it does in Blue Velvet. Nonetheless, the way Inception exploits the notion of dream to convey its theme is just as unique and creative. In Inception, the lack of logic in dream is also introduced, and is solved again with the ability of cinema to create vivid sensory images. The explosion of the streets in Ariadne’s first training, the world that bends and folds into half in her second training, and the abstract world if limbo, are all most effectively realized with cinema as their medium. Christopher Nolan has genuinely made use of these purely cinematic factors to create his world of dreams and present it as a new reality to the audience.

 

However, Nolan’s technical use of dreams shows its real worth at the end of the film. When the entire journey seems to have ended and when the audience is waiting for a final resolution, the film ends abruptly without any conclusion. The lights in the theater are turned back on and the audience wakes up from the film unexpectedly just like they are waking up from their dreams. The ending is almost a ‘kick’ that Nolan gives to his audience, with which the audience realizes that by watching this film, they have also gone through the process of inception. Just as the inception plants a new idea in Fisher’s mind, the film plants its whole new world in the audience’s mind, and in doing so, Christopher Nolan has smartly incorporated the shared qualities of dreams and cinema.

 

 

 

 

 

The Fall, a Masterpiece you Might have Missed (Sophie)

When I call The Fall, by Tarsem Singh, a fairy tale or a fantasy, I mean that it is this aesthetic, and this story telling mode that propels this masterpiece of a film, not that it should in any way be taken as a lightweight tale for children. In fact, with it's R rating, The Fall, deals with themes and shows vivid imagery that can be troubling or graphic even for some adults. It is a fantasy because it is driven by fantasy and imagination on every level. The story is of one narrative, that of of how a stunt actor, Roy, (Lee Pace), in the face of shattered legs, and dreams of stardom and love, turns his imagination towards creating a second narrative, fueled by his new fantasy of suicide. He tells a tale of an epic journey to a young patient of the same hospital, and in her imagination, the story becomes sprawling landscapes and rich costumes that the film shows the viewer in stunning color. Even the creation of the movie is driven by fantasy. The project, called a "vanity project" on the part of Tarsem Singh by Variety, was filled over four years and across seven countries, always on location rather than adding the surreal and ornate landscape in during editing.

The film is carried in part by these visuals. If there was ever a movie that will suffer on a small cell or tablet screen with poor contrast it is this one. In place of the quick cutting and digitally rendered backgrounds of so many modern films, The Fall opts primarily for long takes of locations the reader recognizes from photographs out of national geographic archives and lists of exotic architecture. All of these locations are put to use, in their rich palettes, complex geometrical patterns, and mind blowing spaces, to create a dreamlike air to the inner narrative. While some viewers might be looking for a film with tighter action and setting, once you buy into Tarsem Singh's different mode of visual story telling, he has a truly mesmerizing world to show you.

Despite these surreal landscapes, this is a fantasy movie that still remains entirely within the genre of realism. Keeping the realm of the majestic inside the imagination rich mind of a five year old girl gives both the inner and outer story an added air of credibility and emotional impact. In fact, the entire movie is told from the point of view of Alexandria, a five year old child of a migrant worker family in the hospital for a badly broken arm. She speaks poor English, and rarely gets visitors, but she is well enough to wander around the grounds. The viewer learns Roy's story (barring a brief introduction scene) only as she sneaks peeks of it around corners, or as she is hurried in or out of rooms. The outside plot, set in a color drained, confined space, could not be more different from the epic tale Roy tells her, but as Alexandria slowly unravels both, they both become tales of intrigue.

As the movie progresses, parts of the two worlds start to combine. Imagery from the hospital finds it's way into Roy's epic story of revenge, and fantasy characters gain the identities of people around the hospital. The reverse is true as well. Roy's story finds it's way into Alexandria's life in the hospital, informing her actions and reactions. Roy, having intended this from the beginning, uses the girl's interest and dedication to the story to have her help in his suicide plot. As both stories near their climax, Alexandria refuses to be a passive observer, and both stories become as much her own as they are anyone else's.

While the stunning visuals are what set this film apart, it is Catinca Untaru's portrayal of Alexandria that allows it survive. Herself a 6 year old Romanian actress, her character is about as genuine and natural as I have ever seen a child in a movie. Her scenes throughout the hospital were film in order on purpose, so that as Untaru's English improved, so did Alexandria's, and as the actress's front teeth grew back in, that, too was incorporated into the script. Alexandria, unlike many children characters, feels real, active, and motivated. Her actions, because they were partly improvised by Untaru, belong genuinely to a girl, struggling to learn English, in a world of adults.

The film ends, with an old film reel of stunts from early silent films, though I will let you find out the emotional impact yourself, to avoid giving away the resolution. Its impact, artistically, is to reinforce that this is a movie about how films have been made, and continue to be made, the choices directors, producers and actors make. It is Tarsem Singh acknowledging that he is fully aware this is not the kind of movie his viewer might be used to, but that each movie is about what can be done weighed against what the crew makes efforts to do, and ultimately, how the audience receives it. It is, at its core, a movie about movie making, and a story about storytelling.

The Circus and Imagined Realms: MirrorMask and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Sophie)

Who doesn't occasional dream of running away to join a circus? The lead females of two whimsical films of the last ten years, want exactly the opposite – feeling trapped by the lives they are forced to lead in small traveling family circuses, Helena Campbell, in MirrorMask (2005) and Valentina in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) want nothing more than to run off and join the normal world.

Taking the circus and its themes of possibility, magic, and mystery as a base, both films choose to extrapolate on dreams, identities, and imagination, but visually, take very different directions. Both films are strikingly beautiful and marvelously successful in creating stunning imaginary realms – but you would expect nothing less from the creative brains behind them. MirrorMask is the brain child of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, (a team that has worked together several times in crafting wacky and inventive children's books,) and made possible by the Jim Henson workshop, while The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeownproduction.

MirrorMask choses a steampunk fantasy, with sepia tones and gear-based monsters. The film, like much of McKean's work, looks like a collage, which lends itself wonderfully to the notions of how a subconscious breaks apart the world and rearranges it in dreams or fantasy. Likewise, through the cut and paste landscape that Helena travels, the familiar becomes strange – objects we thought we knew get repurposed. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus uses are broader pallet, choosing extremes of color and pattern, as well as fantastical architecture. Though both films draw heavily on themes of light versus darkness, the worlds inside the imaginarium explode (sometimes literally) with the contrast. The pleasant dreams play out in near neons and rainbows of pastels, while dark temptations are saturated with deep reds and blacks. Even the tinny props of Parnassus's real world stage are rich with visual detail.

Despite their common themes and settings, the two movies tell different archetypal stories. MirrorMask, using Helena as the protagonist, becomes a liminal fantasy journey to adulthood – an Alice in Wonderland tale. The movie was influenced by Jim Henson's Labyrinth, the splitting and doubling found in many fairy tales, and some story elements that will sound familiar to anyone who knows Gaiman's Coraline, published in 2002. Helena, wandering in a dream-like state, finds herself in a world of two kingdoms, one of light and one of shadow, where the balance has been thrown off – and only she, a girl who looks just like the missing Princess of Shadow, can fix it. She travels with a native companion and overcomes trials, as per the Campbellian pattern, leading to confrontation and reconciliation with her dream-mother figure, solving of the riddle, and a return as a more complete person.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus by contrast is a story about dealing with the devil. By focuses on Doctor Parnassus rather than his daughter, Gilliam tells a story of morality and temptations, about struggling with consequence rather than circumstance. Gilliam describes the character of Parnassus (played by Christopher Plummer) as almost autobiographical – an old man who long ago worked as a monk dedicated to sustaining the world by telling stories. Tempted away by the devil (a Mr. Nick, played by Tom Waits), he earns his immortality by proving that people cared more about imagination and stories than petty fancies by winning over souls in his imaginarium, a mirror land that turns imagination into landscape. Years later, he makes another deal – his youth returned for his first born – a debt that is coming due as the movie opens. He, his daughter, and his small traveling band take the imaginarium around the cruder parts of London, trying to win over souls for imagination. When Parnassus makes another deal to try to save his daughter, the film becomes a desperate race to see who can win 5 the fastest. Ultimately Doctor Parnassus is only freed from the cycle of suffering when he resists the temptation to make another deal with Mr. Nick. By contrast with MirrorMask this choice mask a resignation of the end of his lifetime, rather than it's beginning.

A final interesting note: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was Heath Ledger's final film. He died 1/3 through the filming of it. As a result, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law were cast to replace him in the scenes inside the imaginarium, and the script was altered slightly to reflect the characters awareness that his appearance altered in response to his own or other people's imagination.

The Works of Satoshi Kon, and the Impossible Pursuit of Perfection (Katie)

Fans of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan would find watching Satoshi Kon's 1998 animated film, Perfect Blue, something like a case of retro déja vu. The similarities between the films are not a coincidence – Aronofsky was not only aware of Perfect Blue, he had even purchased the rights to it when making Requiem for a Dream, in order to exactly re-create the bathtub scene for his film. While Black Swan is not a remake of Perfect Blue, it draws heavily from the same themes – duality, madness, and the desire to reach a stage of impossible perfection.

 Perfect Blue is the story of Mima, a pop idol who wishes to leave her idol profession and branch into acting. This seems to please no one – her ex-pop idol manager is extremely protective of her, and disapproves of the roles she is offered and how she is treated by the directors of the television show Mima is cast in. The one most upset is Mima's number one fan, who stalks her every move and runs a website dedicated to Mima. In order to succeed and distance herself from her idol past, Mima agrees to appear in a violent rape scene, and then to pose for nude pictures – which brings her both success and misery.

 As she questions whether she is following the right path, she begins to hallucinate a double of herself – the Idol Mima, still fresh-faced and innocent, who taunts her for her mistakes and insecurities. Mima begins to sink into delusions and madness – she begins to read the blog on her website (which are not even written by her) in order to remember what she did that day. The scenes from her television show begin to merge with her real life. The Idol Mima pops up everywhere she goes. When the photographer from her nude photo shoot is stabbed to death, Mima can't remember whether or not she is the murderer.

Mima struggles with the duality of her image and her self, unable to reconcile her past as a pop idol, and her future as an adult woman in charge of her acting career. But unlike Nina in Black Swan, who destroys herself in order to achieve perfection, Mima finds that she is the victim of her manager, Rumi, who has been living vicariously through Mima. The climactic ending sequence is a grotesque and physical battle of the Mima's – and while it is revealed that Rumi was heavily manipulating Mima's life, it does not explain away how Mima continues to see Rumi as a ghostly specter of herself. In the end, it is implied that they are both disillusioned – but Mima has been able to reconcile her personality split, while Rumi could not.

 In the search for her identity, reality for Mima becomes mutable and fluid, a jungle of mirrors and images, a cobbled-together world of illusion, constructed experiences, false narratives, and deception.

 Satoshi Kon continues to play with the theme of distorted reality and narrative in his 2001 film, Millennium Actress. The film follows the life story of Chiyoko Fujiwara, an actress whose career spanned for decades in Japanese cinema, as she is interviewed by her biggest fan, Genya Tachibana. A scene towards the opening of the story is an early hint of the merging of reality and film that is to come – the audience watches as a young Chiyoko climbs into a spaceship which begins to liftoff. The camera then cuts out to reveal the scene is actually a video that Genya is watching, and as the spaceship rumbles into space, the room around Genya begins to shake. For a brief moment the film world and the real world are one – until it is revealed that it isn't the spaceship shaking the room, but an actual earthquake.

 The merging of reality and narrative continues as Chiyoko tells her story to Genya and his cameraman, and the flashbacks become not only her interior reflections, but an interactive experience. Genya and the cameraman become part of the flashbacks, watching and commenting on Chiyoko's actions and experiences. Yet there are even more layers to this constructed reality, as her recounting of her life becomes the recounting of her film roles, with no distinction between the two. The narrative becomes an epic of not only her story, but the story of Japanese cinema, of Japanese history, and Japanese history as told through cinema. She journeys through time and space in order to achieve her goal – to reunite with a painter, in order to return a key he lent to her with a promise to meet again.

It proves impossible for her to meet her painter again. Yet the story of Chiyoko's chase is more thrilling and fulfilling than any outcome where she and her beloved painter could be reunited. The narrative of her life story is what gives it meaning, even as it seems to be foolish to chase an impossible goal. On some level, Millenium Actress and Perfect Blue are both about the same thing – the impossible pursuit of perfection, and the toll it takes on an individual. Perfect Blue presents a pessimistic outcome – the complete fragmentation of Mima and Rumi's identities. Millenium Actress is more optimistic, presenting the impossible pursuit as more personally enriching than the goal itself. Both films present challenging and complex narratives, and are excellent examples of animated films that are not just for children.