Les Nuits de la pleine lune(Full moon in Paris)(1984, Eric Rohmer)

It was a cold and snowy night when I went with my friends to see Eric Rohmer's film in Cinémathèque Quebecoise in Montreal. While I was seeing the film, I remembered the book that I read in french long time ago in Toronto. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol's book on Hitchcock seems to verge on a moralistic argument in a midst of a humanist discourse. Rohmer's desire to offer a moral interpretation of Hitchcock's works do not differ from what the audience can detect in his film, Full moon in Paris. One of the fascinations of the film that surfaces easily is the ambiguity of the narrative that can be interpreted as Louise (Pascale Ogier) punishment or her liberation from the ruined relationship. The point is that the film is lecturing on the moral uncertainty of the couple relationship. Regarding Rohmer's  ethical interpretation of the world, he offers a comprehensive account to how this moral corruption relates to the different characteristics of living in Paris and its suburb. Although one can realize that Rohmer's film essentially begins and ends in the suburb, the idea of the female protagonist liberation from this atmosphere of entrapment weakens the intensity of her punishment for her immoral choices. During the screening of the film, while becoming acquainted with the female protagonist, the audience tries successfully to cope with her disappointments about the consequences of her choices. Her return to Octave (Fabrice Lucini) at the end of the film makes us believe that the last choice is not different from the other ones though it seems to be the best.
Review: By Morad Sadeghi

Uzumasa Limelight (2014, Ken Ochiai)

Uzumasa Limelight appears to be regarded by critics as a work of Japanese cinema that deals with nostalgic appreciation towards an era in Japanese film history. At the same time, the parallelism that exists between the world of reality and the world on stage is clearly stated by the comparisons between the male protagonist's end of career and his faked death. His career in film industry is threatened by the presence of the new generation that finally pays respect to him at the end of the film. The joy the audience takes in analysing the film is the joy of the viewer who is discovering the cultural perspective of a homage to jidaigeki genre of film. The avoidance of sentimentalism is anticipated by preventing of using many flash back scenes that define the tragic past of the male protagonist. Finally, what characterizes the importance of the role of the female protagonist in the film is her capability of controlling the narrative that is still run by Japanese male dominated society.
Review: By Morad Sadeghi

Whiplash (2014, Damien Ghazelle)

The film typically deals with several different topics. The most important detail stands out as the sadomasochistic relationship between Andrew (Miles Teller) and Fletcher (J.K.Simmons). In this respect, the title seems ideal. The film is closer to a psychoanalytical cinematic text, and concerns artistic creativity and self-destruction. In addition to psychological traits, the distinction between professionalism and amateurism in a non-ordinary educational relationship set up a complex narrative that on its most serious level unfolds the truth of the protagonist's confusion and perplexity. With various forms of montage aesthetic, the exhilaration of film derives not so much from the narrative but the pleasure that visual format offers to the audience. Artifice and playfulness of the musical performances are the most prominent characteristic of the editing process. Undoubtedly, the film conveys an admirable summary of the protagonist's confrontation with artistic ambition that ruins the other aspects of his life. At the end of the film, Andrew earns his skill and achieves a kind of professionalism that satisfies Fletcher, but the consequence of this aggressiveness and outrage turns him into a monster(Fletcher?) that he rejects to become. Review: By Morad Sadeghi

Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)

Jonathan Glazer science fiction film of Michael Faber's novel is about Laura (Scarlett Johansson) character, an extraterrestrial in female form. She kills the men because she and her extraterrestrial community need the skins of the men probably to survive on the planet earth.  Laura's narrative is divided into two parts.In the second part of the film, an awareness of  "Other" is present. Laura finally realizes that humanity has the voices and faces. Her series of encounters with the men make her more human and finally invulnerable at the end of the film. The minimalistic structure of the film such as avoiding to use more dialogues invites the audience to analyze the cinematic text  with more precision and accuracy. The presence of the nature in the film indicates Laura's passion to explore the world of humanity. The superimposition of her lying on the ground with the trees of the forest gives the audience the clue that she is now a part of that nature that connects her to the world of humanity. The beginning of the film is visually unique and formally remarkable.
Review: Morad Sadeghi

Welles

Hollywood never offered Welles greater opportunities after Citizen Kane (1940) scandal. Though Welles paid huge price for his radicalism and genius, he attained a perfect and satisfying balance between his stylistic approaches and narratives in all of his films. Hollywood scepticism accused Welles of being untrustworthy director in terms of spending the huge budgets to make his films, but his approach to his films in a constructive spirit is undeniable. The collapse of politics of auteurism
especially in the second half of Welles life created a shadow and the darker side that its fingerprint remained on his career for the rest of his life.

Birdman (2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu)

The film is perhaps the director's most completely successful cinematic text which centres on the protagonist survival instinct as an artist and his self-destruction. The film is continuously enjoyable for the consistency of the narrative and the power of unfolding a story in visual terms. The cinematography is brilliant and inspiring.  Because of the succession of ingenious sound and visual effects, the audience is invited to participate in the protagonist subjective world. The participation allows the audience to roam through the labyrinth of off-stage and on-stage zones of Broadway theatrical universe. Numerous shots employing the theatricality of the real life emphasize the plausibility of the director's and photographer's handling. Simultaneously, the film is an attempt to produce the self-reflexive image of Michael Keaton as the actor who played the role of superhero in Tim Burton's film, Batman (1986). Then, the film succeeds in portraying the revival of an artist's career by committing the violence on-stage that draws the attention of the American Media. The excellent sequences embedded in the megalomaniac protagonist's hallucinations have associations with the subtlety of characterizations and the superiority of visual techniques. The annihilation, the humiliation, the despair, the disorientation and the confusion of the protagonist's emotional and intellectual upheavals are subtly conveyed to unite the progression and the development of the narrative with formal structure related to his subjectivity. The film is at its best when these protagonist's mind qualities provide the climactic moments of the film at the final sequences. While the ending of the film is open to interpretation, the particularly remarkable moment of ascension relieve the audience from the anxiety that bring confusion to the interpretation of the scene. Review: By Morad Sadeghi

Adieu au Langage (2014, Jean-Luc Godard)

How Godard's stylistic decisions have been changed since the beginning of French New Wave movement? The intellectual quotes, the cinematic references, Eisensteinian montage influences, Godard intertitles and the disoriented /confusing cuts are still the important parts of his style. While he tries to be innovative in using 3D film such as using the concept of superimposition not on the screen but on the lenses of the glasses, the desire to switch to video images become key element in creating his last cinematic text. In comparison with his fascinations in the earliest films,  his obsessions are not about Marxist ideology anymore.  His concerns are mostly focused on the reliability and the authenticity of  images and  sounds. The characterization, the cause and effect narrative and the resolution at the ending of the film are not the terms that Godard refers to while he makes his oeuvre. Review: Morad Sadeghi

Prometheus (2012, Ridley Scott)
Ridley Scott film, Prometheus, represents the maturity of the director's style in its narrative and formal structures. The thematic construction of the film remains allegiant to the conventional forms of storytelling recurred in the former Alien movies while the film is prequel to the Alien series. Many of these similar patterns are the references that help the audience to explore the undercurrent layers of the narrative. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is a scientist whose motivation to find about the origin and "Engineers" persuades her to control the narrative at the end of the film. In terms of having survival instinct, her character is very similar to Ripley's one in Alien (1979).  In fact, Shaw has a strong character that reminds the audience of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien movies. Not surprisingly, she can leave the planet while David (Micheal Fassbinder), the robot, helps her to pilot the spaceship. (Another reference to the end of Aliens (1986, James Cameron)). Review By: Morad Sadeghi

Gone Girl (2014, David Fincher) Review


Fincher's film is well structured and established around the voice-over narrative of the female protagonist and her inner thoughts and memories. The film is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel which is apparently devoted to the literary text. The narrative of the film is enriched of flash backs of the couple's life style and relationship. The audience  mostly self-identify with the female protagonist subjective world. The shift of the female subjectivity to the male protagonist one happens to be completed close to the final sequences of the film when  Amy finally murders and kills her ex-boyfriend in a sex scene. The ending of the film is ambiguous. Although the couple accept to live together, the potentialities of betraying, murdering and cheating are still there. We do not know if Nick knows about his wife, but the shadow of a doubt raise the question that who will be controlling the narrative and how? Nick or Amy?Review by Morad Sadeghi

The Congress (2013, Ari Folman) Review

Stylistically, The Congress demonstrates a significant departure from Waltz with Bashir(2008, Ari Folman).  The film is the combination of the animated sections and the real setting. The setting is dynamically harmonious with the animated section. This is Folman's fourth film. The narrative of the film revolves around the progressive technology for future Hollywood. Though the film hints the corruption of corporate capitalism, the world of cinema in future is subtly represented by choosing the animation art. Folman's film is very much a fantasy/ science fiction film (influenced by Stanislaw Lem's novel, The futurological Congress). The choice of animation for the world of the future allows the audience to maneuver in the realm of the imagination.  Not only does the director depict the protagonist's adventure but he emphasizes her responsibility towards her family and her concern to the future of the world of art and artist.


By: Morad Sadeghi

38th Montreal World Film Festival (Montreal Festival des Films du Monde) 21 August-1st September 2014
http://www.ffm-montreal.org

38th World film festival in Montreal was a special event that drew the attention of the critics in Montreal and all over the world to fertile field of cinematic materials. The program of the festival was precisely organized to have the group of the films that represented "film" as the dominant medium of art.  The films provided the broad spectrum of the narratives that constituted various forms and conventions. In order to reveal the mode of discourse in the criticism hidden in these reviews,  the focus is aimed toward the films that are chosen as the particular examples for narrative and formal analysis.


Salaud, on t'aime (Bastard, we love you)(2014, Claude Lelouch)

Claude Lelouch's film does not necessarily lie in the category of the best films, but it is a good film. The film deals with the themes such as guilts, parental mistakes, professionalism, friendships  and family values. The film succeeds in creating an atmosphere in which the specificity of form and the mode of production achieve a balance. To avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to say that the comparisons between generations, or in other words generational conflicts are used as a means of establishing the end of masculine values. The end of the film is the reconciliation between an irresponsible father and his daughters. Though the new generation is right in criticizing the old one, they carry the burden of guilt as well.


Sakurasaku( Blossom Bloom) (2014, Mitsutoshi Tanaka)

The film does not succeed visually and narratively to foreground  the respect for the lost Japanese family values,  the criticism of the modern  life styles in the urban cities and the encouragement of the new generation to appreciate the past. The sentimentality of the moments, the lack of visual style and the poor narrative structure in the film help us to avoid of any unnecessary mode of criticism that involve some misunderstanding and can be interpretatively wrong.


Jack Strong (2014, William Pasikovsky)

The director succeeds in creating the Cold War atmosphere, terror and anxiety, but the narrative style is chaotic and the characterization is weak. The film narrative articulates the dichotomy of duty and choice. The ambiguous ending makes us think about how the film tries to construct the sense of impossibility of political liberation and freedom. The problematic status of the protagonist's national identity presents a coherent image of Poland as a nation and as an ideological political system.


Tokyo the City of Glass (2014, Kazuhiro Tranishi)

Transformation of body and masculine anxiety are the main themes that construct the narrative of the film. The film is filled with homosexuality and homoeroticism. Yukio Mishima's Confessions of A Mask, Gustave Mahler's adagietto from fifth symphony and Tokyo Gay district are all references that characterize the queer perspective of the film. The director succeeds in creating a detective story that deals with the problematic sexual identity and the sense of guilt.


New Territories (2014, Fabianny Deschamps)

The film is visually stunning. The voice over narrative and the stylistic analysis of the film make us believe that the audiovisual structure of the cinematic text is influenced by documentary style and horror/serial killer films. The immigration from Chinese village to Hong Kong provides a storyline in which the controlling of the body and the searching for the body become key elements in narrating the ghost story. The director succeeds in representing a dark film in which the social political structure of the Chinese village is partly criticized and evaluated.


Perro Guardian (2014, Baccha Caravedo)

It is interesting that the picture reminds us of  Le Samurai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melvile) and The Professional (1994, Luc Besson). Like the protagonists in those films, male character is a lonely person who is the professional killer. His religious belief is what is emphasized in the film symbolically and explicitly. The film remain unforgettable for, among other things, the expression a wide range of religious feelings and emotions that help to build the character though the ending is ambiguous.

Closer to the Moon (2014, Nae Caranfil)

Closer to the Moon is a good film that is well structured. The passions and thoughts in the film are synthesized as the adequate expression of the satirical ideas against the political system. The film is filled of many references and homages to the film particularly as the medium such as homage to Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock) in the scene in which the characters look through a binocular or telescope and observe the things that happen in the apartments in front of them. Doris Day's song as the diegetic score is another reference to the film medium, and the film in film structure of the script is foregrounded by the emphasis on the acting.

They are all Dead(2014, Beatriz Sanchis)

The director's strategy to make a film about agoraphobia does not succeed in creating a subtle expressive cinematic text. The film thematically follows the ideas about art, sexuality, family responsibility and guilt. Two types of maternity are compared: the real mother who feels responsible for everything and another one who has agoraphobia and feels guilty about her brother's death. According to director's interview, the Mexican point of view about the death is what the director tries to emphasize in the film. The ending of the film is positive, optimistic and full of light though the threatening presence of death is always with the characters.

Chagall-Malevich(2013, Alexander Mitta)


There are many shots in the film that remind us of Chagall and Malevich paintings. The narrative is precisely devoted to the revolutionary period when Chagall spent his life in Russia. At the same time, the joys of freedom and creativity accompanied by colors founded in Chagall's paintings are reflected in the images. The film debates on the beginning of the art of social realism in the first years of the Russian revolution. Chagall individualism is criticized by the followers of Malevich abstract political art. The ending of the film is insightful and symbolical. The idea of flying and floating into sky founded in Chagall's paintings become alive and gives to the cinematic text a sense of playful and spiritual meaning. Chagall's realm of kingdom is sky and Malevich one is earth.


Field of Dogs(2014, Lech Majewski)
Field of Dogs is a very good film. The narrative structure is dreamful and symbolical. There are many moments in the film that one can find Tarkovsky's influences. For example, there is a scene in which the wall is bleeding and has a heart beat  that reminds us of the dream scene in Mirror (1975, Trakovsky). In another scene, we see two bodies making love together while they are floating in the air that is similar to what Tarkovsky was doing in Sacrifice (1986, Tarkovsky). Finally, at the ending of the film we see that water is falling from the ceiling of a church that brings into our mind what Tarkovsky was doing with water in dream sequences in Mirror or Stalker(1979, Tarkovsky).

Cap Nostalgie (2014, Izuru Narushima)
The narrative of the film suggests that the life is always changing and what is going to be left behind is the sense of nostalgia that makes us aware of the fragility of life and ultimately of the impossibility of immortality. The film succeeds in creating a perspective of life that puts the meaning of love, death, friendship under question and investigation in such a simple way that draws the attention to the transcendental concepts. What is valued as a mark of artistic achievement is the director's choices to represents the characters' styles of life as faithfully as possible.



Review By: Morad sadeghi

Contrasting the Visual Style between Chaplin & Keaton


It is necessary to carry out the right analysis of stylistic complexities between two great comedians Chaplin and Keaton if one, as the critic, has desire enthusiastically to satisfy the curiosity of the readers which gravitates their insistence to understand more about technical and aesthetic mode of production. In fact, Chaplin's silent screen comedy is filled with the humanism and compassion of proletarian and sub-proletarian culture. His intellectual insight is almost underrated or even dismissed in critical analysis and evaluation aesthetic in film comedy. The romantic-sentimental character of Chaplin's tramp can be detected as the strong element of egocentricity which reveals his different point of view of comic characterization between his work and that of other comedians such as Keaton's. Indeed, Keaton's character is able to represent a type of realism on the screen that works with his intuition and unconscious decisions confronting the machinery infrastructures, the absurdities of daily life and the quality of creativity process. Both Chaplin's and Keaton's acrobatic skills and pantomime routines has the strong dramatic effect on their definition of mise-en scene and set design. On the contrary, Keaton's anti-sentimental approach to the narrative progress and storyline appears to flourish among the authentic locales, costumes and props which has counterbalance with
Chaplin's artificiality of the set and the stage.

Chaplin's tendency to use the static camera, medium shots and very ordinary stylistic fashion of editing in his silent films intensifies the importance of little tramp's characterization and his gags through his visual style. In contrary, Keaton's superiority and skill as the director of his films gives a profound dimension to his artistic creativity. His knowledge about editing principles of the medium, the aesthetic of camera movement with respect to manipulating the epic style of the decors and the mathematical calculation of every extraordinary scenes and gags in balance with architecture of mise-en scene provide extensively and successfully an unique and original style of comedy which invites the spectators to be a part of creative process.

To highlight and intensify Chaplin's spatial theatricality and his sense of timing to perform the gags portray a virtual and dream world atmosphere right in the middle of environmental presentation of reality. His gags help him to liberate a sense of freedom against the claustrophobic framework. The whole process of theatrical performance in front of camera forces the spectator to identify with the tramp even though the situation is pathetic. At the same time, his characteristic sentimentality within his highly aristocratic taste spontaneously create a meticulous contrast between Chaplin's real character in his life and the representation of his tramp in the images of his films. In fact,

Chaplin's tramp imposes his domination on the structure of the mise-en scene and proves his superiority by manipulating and controlling his gags on the characters, props and environment. Everything in Chaplin's mise-en scene from camera position, camera movement and rhythm of editing to characterization and gag suggests the tramp's great skill to deal with situation and to overcome effectively on tragic material and hostile moments in the context. Aesthetically, his centralization in the perspective of the frame heightens his importance as the fundamental and existential center of focus. Compared with Chaplin, Keaton's unconscious response to the chaotic universe surrounded around his character suggest his strong and intolerable struggle to survive against on and off-screen mise-en scene which impose their domination on him. The superficiality of the fragile world of context and its superiority on Keaton remain a key element regardless of its savagery to his straightforward narrative. The episodic structure of the story help him to establish the right strategic stance against the irrationality of occurrences by experimenting of the trial and the error technique like an engineer.

Chaplin's fidelity to the principles of storytelling in Victorian literary tradition enforces him to be a follower and the disciple of D.W. Griffith. For that reason, Chaplin's camera is always prepared and aware to catch a glimpse in a close up or transfer and transpose the spectator's center of focus temporally and spatially to another realm of narrative.

Not surprisingly, his use of close up to highlight and intensify the romanticism and sentimentality of the moments, his parallel editing to match the coincidences between two different occurrences and finally his analytical method of editing are considered as the reincarnation of Griffith stylistic method of film editing. In contrast, Keaton's vigorous and dynamic method of acting and moving in the frame substitute his jumping in risky situation for rapid cutting of the images or using the special effects. His physical engagement with the realistic elements of mise-en scene creates the chaotic atmosphere in which Keaton has to struggle to chaos and disorder to regenerate a surrealistic balance between old form of socio-political world and new form of ambiguous utopia. The desire to use long shot in his sequences, the obsession to place the camera in multiple locations and the avoidance of creating emotion by close ups form the new rules and conventions for his aesthetic style. In fact, as McCaffrey states in his book: " The vigor of Keaton in his heyday was far removed from sentimentality. His little clown was a struggling, dead-panned dunce who looked to the horizon...But this agile, mechanical doll struggled doggedly, often swinging by his teeth and fingernails, to fight the obstacle that confronted him; and he won by weird, comic ingenuity" (McCaffrey , 84). Keaton's body with its acrobatic flexibility and a bundle of energy saves the audience a sense of continuity which produces immediately an interconnection between the spectator and Keaton's practical jokes and gags. Chaplin always restricts himself in the theatricality and artificiality of the scenes and sometimes unrealistic mise-en scene such as the dream sequence in The Kid (1921) and the hallucinated cabin sequence in Gold Rush (1925). In contrary, Keaton executes his stories in the developed and expanded space of the realistic detail as McCaffrey  continues to observe: "And while it would seem to be a personality trait of being too concerned with realistic detail that might work against the comic spirit, Keaton was able to make his type of realism work in his favor" (McCaffrey , 85).Keaton's outstanding movement inside the frame is a manifestation to define a new aesthetic style through which the paternal structure of the meaning has to entirely change the monotonous and routine way of representing the images to the visualizing the shocked and surprised moments.


Chaplin's acting style helps to the audience to develop his imagination on the stage in terms of creating a fantastic dreamful and invisible world. His self conscious pantomime is always forcing the spectator to imagine the virtual reality which does not exist in the mise-en scene. His highly inventive choreography of his movements and dynamism  in the scenes is the only principal element which provides a good substitution for his lack of interest to use the motion picture medium effectively. In contrary, Keaton creates many of his clever comic scenes with the props which exist in the mise-en scene. His avoidance to falsify the spectator with the non-realism of the set reveals his obsession with democratic and liberal way of the image representation. Keaton's self-unconscious using of camera movement, Shooting on locations and special effects never create a cliché, and his vaudevillian skills is highly gifted talent in calculating the laughter. Even in their self reflexive response to the cinema as the medium and art, the two comedians pay the homage to the whole process of film making in two different stylistic and analytical mode of representation: Chaplin by appearing as the ordinary tramp in the car race in front of the camera of reporters in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) and Keaton by appearing in the dream sequence of Sherlock Junior (1924) through which the process of editing in the film industry is mocked and ridiculed in the surrealistic structure of mise-en scene.


The function of camera in Keaton's films sometimes is the part of the gag, and it participates in the creating of mise-en scene and the progress of the linear narrative. For Chaplin, the camera is only the recorder as McCaffrey mentions in his book "He(Chaplin)was suspicious of  'Camera Tricks', as he called them, and wanted the camera only to serve as a recorder of the action" (McCaffrey,131).Chaplin's position of camera and its distance to the stage is always constant, but Keaton sometimes moves and take positions in different locations to create the climactic moments. It would seem that Keaton's tendency to move his camera lies in his inevitable need to shoot the dynamic scenes. The initiative manipulation of the editing in Keaton's films creates the graphic rhythm which concentrates on the expansion of the narrative. In contrary, for Chaplin the editing is considered as the complex process which sometimes interferes with the total mode of production and his expectation of medium as McCaffrey indicates in his book: "Robert Payne believed such an editing(In Chaplin film) was a serious weakness that marred the work because the union of little tramp and the girl was  an improbable resolution" (McCaffrey, 41). In terms of composition, the continuity of time and space and the expanding of senses of awareness to each side of the screen  and in the space behind the camera is the principal element in Keaton's aesthetic style. For Chaplin, the successful scenes have the restricted dimension inside of the frame. The  characteristic representation of the tramp is the only principle element which celebrates his considerable skill to deal with dramatic and theatrical elements of the stage.


Chaplin and Keaton were contemporary comedians who began their careers with the medium from two different schools. Chaplin started his job with Mac Sennett and Keaton collaborated with fatty Arbuckle. Chaplin's creativity in using the possibilities of new medium with Mac Sennette's group of artists is restricted to his pantomime, gestures and grimaces in the theatrical composition. he sometimes addresses the spectator with staring right to the camera and tries to share with him the claustrophobic emotional effects of the situation. As Max Linder expressed in his writings: " Chaplin works with the camera with the minutest care...but the secret is not the mechanical work..." (Manvell, 108). The mechanical work is not privileged as a prior to the acting and characterization in Chaplin's skill of pantomime. In contrary, in Keaton's addressing of camera as the spectator's look the absurdity of the situation is meant to be emphasized and underlined spectator's look. In fact, Keaton's body is destined to be characteristic in the composition to cooperate with his mind as Moews mentions in his book : " What is automated, they reveal, is a conscious being, whose mind and feelings remain his even while his body enacts a fated routine in which he is doomed to failure (Moews, 10). For Chaplin, the body is the absolute harmony with character's self consciousness and his mind.


Keaton's comedy, his gags and his hardworking pantomime as his biography demonstrated are mostly those of the performing arts of Keaton's vaudeville childhood, and then the years of collaboration with Arbuckle were the moments for him to become familiar with the medium of film and its mode of production. Chaplin's comedy, his gags and his professional theatrical acting on the stage are mostly of the performing arts of his Dickensian childhood with the parents in London and then the years of difficult phase in the pioneer period of getting acquainted with Mac Sennette and the possibilities of film as the new medium. Chaplin's admiration for Victorian literary tradition and his childhood experiences would probably have connection with his visual style and his absolute need for frequent periods of isolation during his life. Keaton's alienation with the mechanical world of 20th century and his surrealistic self-centered world of his films deteriorated the relationship between the logic of daily life and the absurdity of its chaotic situation.




Manvell, Roger. Chaplin  Little, Brown & Company, Boston 1974.


Mowes, Daniel Keaton: The Silent Features Close up University of California Press: Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1977.


W, McCaffrey, Donald Great Comedians: Chaplin, LIoyd, Keaton, Langdon A.S. Barnes & Co. New York, 1968.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)

Is Boyhood  a really good film? The focus of the film's narrative is the transformation of a naïve boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), into a college student whose sense of self and maturity are particularly received by the critics as the refusal of the parental mistakes. His observations as an observant aggravate the sense of humor, playfulness, irritation, futility, and entrapment. In the beginning, his mother(Patricia Arquette) is a devoted and responsible character who fails in finding the right mate. Because of her failures in choosing right husband, Mason and his sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), have to pass through the difficulties. His father(Ethan Hawk), seems to be lovely and the radical critic of contemporary politics, but  his chaotic life style and sense of irresponsibility prohibits him from being a true father figure. Finally, he marries with the woman whose father and mother are probably religious. They even give Bible and Gun to Mason as the gifts of his birthday. In contrast to the earlier sequences, it seems that Mason's mother and father are going to grow up and become matured. His father becomes more responsible to the end of the film and his mother accepts her loneliness and learns to live with her solitude(Without husband).

However, the film is not a masterpiece. Linklater's lack of style and visible manifestation reassure us that the film is hardly capable of offering us a stylistic insight. The simplicity of narrative, style, and characterization sometimes produce opposite effect. It looks as if the whole sense of complicated confrontation between boyhood and adulthood is lost among the philosophical dialogues or educational remarks. The poor acting and lack of strong mise-en-scene not only cast doubt on the characterizations and the visual style but also have negative impact on the film textual surface. Moreover, the dialogues sometimes have flaws and Samantha's character is going to lose its importance in the middle of the narrative. 

 Of course, in contrast with the director's earlier films, Boyhood is still a better film. The coherent structure of the narrative which emphasizes the relativity of truth in everyday life and the director's success to work with children which makes the first part of the film unique are substantial. Also, the majority of critics believe that  Linklater succeeds in creating a narrative which is simple but profoundly complicated. They even consider his lack of style and simplicity of narrative the specific techniques used  to bring up the complex subjects in the simplest way to the screen. Though the film succeeds to satisfy the audience in many ways, the acting style and the formalistic structure of the film's narrative foreshadow the flaws and the failures that prohibit us from calling it a masterpiece.




Review By Morad Sadeghi

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Medea, Adaptation Report

Play: Medea. Writer: Euripides. Date of Production:431 B.C. Location: Athens

Characters:

Nurse

Tutor of Medea's sons

Medea

Chorus of Corinthian Women

Creon, king of Corinth

Jason

Aegeus, king of Athens

Messenger

Medea's Two Children


Literary Synopsis & Description:

The most characteristic of all Euripides' plays, Medea, reveals the tragic story in ancient Greece in which the female character, Medea, who is the princess in the barbarian territory and has been brought to land of Greece, takes revenge from his husband, Jason, for his betrayal to her and his family. Jason is successfully helped by Medea to earn Golden Fleece in order to overcome the powerful and political domination on Creon's court and Athenian Empire. He has to comfort his ambitions with establishing the new family through the marriage with the king of Corinth's daughter. Medea, who has banished from Creon's court and territory, designs a vengeful and ruthless plan to demolish Jason's fortunes. She murders  Corinth and his daughter and slaughters her own sons at the end of the play.

Socio-Cultural Analysis:

Hellenistic culture in Athenian Empire  was established and founded on the civilized values and the rational interpretation of the universe against the menace of the barbarian invasion from outside. This culture ignored the threatening elements of violent cruelty, disorder and chaotic irrational world of instinct and emotion from within. Fifty years after beating out the Persian invaders through the land and sea of Greece, Athens still celebrated his glory as an empire at peace and its dominion over the Greek world in the spring of 431 B.C. during which the production of Medea has been over by Euripides.

In that era, unlike Sophocles who sympathizes with the element of fatalism and the metaphysical forces of destiny in his tragedies, Euripides profoundly foreshadows the inevitable process of the decline of Athenian civilization through his plays specifically Medea. He insights the whole process of tragic consequences which are formed by the deliberately mankind choices. Although Euripides' devastated landscape of mythological representations in his tragedies eventually portrays the masculine/feminine dichotomy for Athenian audiences, his text remains open to divine genealogy of myth and the moral complexity of the chaotic universe.

Credit:

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini based on the play by Europides

Producers: Marina Cicogna and Franco Rosellini

Cinematographer: Ennio Guarnieri

Editor: Nino Baragli

Art Directors: Dante Ferreti and Nicola Tamburo

Sound: Carlo Tarchi

Cast: Maria Callas (Medea), Giuseppe Gentile (Jason), Massimo Girotti (Creonte), Laurent Terzief (Centaur), Margaret Clementi (Glauce), Annamaria Chio (Wet Nurse)

Runtime:118 min

Country: France/Italy/West Germany

Language: Italian

Color: Color (Eastmancolor)

Release Date: 1969


Cinematic Synopsis & Description:

In cinematic adaptation of Medea by Pasolini, the narrative potentially centers on the sexually attractive character of the story, Jason the leader of the army of Argonaut. He has been obliged to fetch and grasp the Golden Fleece to objectify his uncle as the target for his Oedipus complex as the weapon in order to overthrow him out of his throne and launch his own kingdom. Medea whose admiration and adoration for Jason signifies and epitomizes her desperate love as the disturbing motif and complex resonance through the film  helps him significantly in his intention by sacrificing everything even her own brother to steal the Fleece and construct her life with him into unity and integration. Years later, Jason whose functionality of the plot is totally unsuccessful is driven to compose an authentic vehicle to achieve his ambition. He organizes a marriage with the young and beautiful Glauce, King's daughter. Medea's melancholic and psychopathic condition enforces her to objectify Jason and everybody else as the target for her envious vengeful desire at the end.

Pasolini's documentary style of filmmaking such as hand-held camera in exterior scenes and spatial theatricality imposed by different camera angles in interior scenes are in interconnection with the historical and mythological order of narrative and storytelling of Medea's tragedy. Costume design, set design, lighting and manipulation of the exotic oriental sounds on the sound track establish the balances atmosphere with the sense of ritual and traditional ceremonies. In order to stress the structure on which the film is based, Pasolini approaches the metaphysical construction of the scenes by utilizing the long shots and extreme long shots. He creates myth's and gods' point of views. He gives the audience the strategic position for interpreting the ideological context of his artistic work. He cancels the effect of identification process, and focuses on the Brechtian terminology of the scenes.


Socio-Cultural Analysis:

Pasolini lived and created his films in the specific period of Western History in which the Marxist theory and the sexual liberation were considered as the proper weapons to reject the dominant principles of capitalism and bourgeois class of society. The intellectual practices of his period expressed proletarian and sub-proletarian culture and were capable to participate in any ideological debates. These practices rationalize and historicize the mythological events through irrationality and chaotic situations of reality. Pasolini as an intellectual standardized his stance in Italian culture as a poet, critic, novelist and film director. Pasolini and his restless generation described and analyzed the symptomatic signs of the cold war period threatened by atomic destruction  and the problematic experimentation of the young generation with ideological representations of utopia in postwar era.

Analogy between Adaptation and literary Work:

Pasolini's approach to demonstrate his poetical existentialism concentrates essentially on his visual communication with literary work. His methodological organization of his scenarios exteriorizes the overtones of sexual and mythological discourses. For instance, the ending of the play recurs twice in the final sequence of Pasolini's films. This iterative order of image should be seen as the different text in terms of its ideological and stylistic reflection. In fact, Pasolini established the new visual code to visualize the verbal signification of mythology. It is worth pointing out that his barbaric mise-en scene and visual style of the beginning of the film were particularly formulated for the opening sequence which only existed in adaptation and did not include in Europides' play. The sacrificial ceremony of male human body, Jason's childhood and adolescence and Medea's slaughtering her brother appear to be added to the play in order to convey the director's worldview.

Film Analysis & Evaluation:

Medea is perhaps Pasolini's the most uncommon artistic work with complexity of elements of cinematic language. In terms of utilizing the natural landscapes, representing the mythological iconic images and creating the stylistic visual codes, the film offers us the abstractive and the dialectic characterization of crude and raw realism. As Antonio Costa asserts Pasolini's point of view in his article:

"Even in the most ostentatiously narrative cinema, Pasolini claims, the basic elements are always irrational, dreamlike, elementary and barbaric (meaning, in Pasolini's terms; potentially poetic, although they may have been 'held below the level of consciousness' and 'exploited as a means for unconscious manipulation and persuasion'" (Costa, 36).

Indeed, in order to understand the characters' perception in Pasolini works, it is required to use a mechanism to discern the poetic elements of cinematic language as Costa continues to observe the model:

"Such a model, according to Pasolini, consists of 'free indirect speech' which, extensively studied in relation to literature, would find its cinematic equivalent in what he calls the 'free indirect subject' mode of narration and which would have the advantage of being a linguistic as well as a stylistic fact" (Costa, 36).

In other words, Pasolini as the cinematic author uses the pre-textual use of that mechanism or model to express his own formalist and aesthetic world view. In terms of editing and expressing the cruelty of her revenge in Medea, the juxtaposition of images occurs through the same model of free indirect subject mode of narration. In that model, an apparently third-person narrator speaks from the point of view of one of the characters as evidence to his state of mind while it helps to create the metaphorical hypothesis for representing the cruel reality.

Medea's cultural alienation in Jason's territory and her psychoanalytical response to male dominated world overshadows the repressed political concept of being exploited (Medea's territory) by a militaristic source of power (Jason's army and his uncle's kingdom).

Intertextually, Pasolini fascinated with Renaissance paintings, Baroque music, Eastern-African songs and middle age architecture brings the sense of barbarian element to the mise-en scene with imposing the minimalism and simplicity to the presentation of landscapes, costumes and songs. Pasolini as modern storyteller was passionate to transcript the literary texts to the fully appropriate cinematic language. He was writer and poet in the world of literature and as a director could capture the poetic and abstractive visual elements. Finally, he detach himself as the artist from his social class to obtain the maxim capability of approaching to the reality. In Medea, he reduces the artificiality of the scenes in King's palace and sympathizes with the lower class of society by visualizing the traditional ceremonies and the claustrophobic architecture of higher class of society. At the end, he succeeds to response to the abstractive concepts of his adaptation  by using his poetic documentary style.

Costa, Antonio. The Semiological Heresy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Paul Willeman, ed. Pier Paolo Pasolini, London: British Film Institute, 1977.


Euripides. Medea, Translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien. Indianapolis: Hacket, 2008.


By: Morad Sadeghi

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson's Style (Review)

Wes Anderson's style in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is influenced by German expressionism. Anderson uses the color, the composition, the acting  and the camera movement to express the emotions and the ideas. The color sometimes signifies the historical background and the cultural atmosphere of the scenes. The composition put the characters and the objects in the frames that express their relations to the characters' subjectivity and the world's objectivity. Anderson's dialogues are funny, narrative oriented and well structured. His popular thematic elements such as family problems and father-son/daughter relationships can be also found in the film.


The influence of German expressionism is recognizable and  clear from the beginning of the film. The hotel setting is gloomy, dark and desolated. Zero Moustafa is a mysterious character, and we don't know anything about his past. His story is told in flash back. His room in the hotel is small that gives the audience a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. In the flashback, the violet color of the  uniforms of the Hotel workers may represent the vitality and the liveliness of European cultural period after First World War. Red and pink color of the building and its interior decoration have associations with the sense of life that exist into the Hotel and its environment. At the same time, the cleanliness and the order of the setting in Hotel reminds us how M. Gustave is in control of everything. Andersons' characters are not psychologically complicated creatures in the film, but his villains can be interpreted as the parody of German expressionist monsters such as Vampire and Golem in Jopling's(Daniel Defoe) appearance and behaviour.  Dimitri(Adrian Brody) is also ruthless and psychopath. His character like any other German expressionistic villains is frightening and scary, but his weakness in controlling the situation and overcoming Gustave's intelligence effeminates him and takes out of him all of the forces of his masculinity. The father-son relationship between Moustafa and Gustave is counterbalanced with the relationship between Dimitri and his mother. Review: By Morad Sadeghi

Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini: Fascism in The Damned and Salo

Fascism in Italy was formed by the various motifs such as the desire to develop the economy and to promote the national identity. The industrial growth particularly began to occur from industrial societies in the north to the rural and agricultural regions in the south. For both Visconti and Pasolini, the fascist ideological reflections throughout the social, cultural and economical crisis in Europe was immediately a necessary political reaction to the social and existential moments of the history.

Of course, Visconti's The Damned (1969) can be considered as the autobiography about his aristocratic social background from which the fascism and Nazism are emerged as the socio-cultural diseases. The ultimate outcome of these historical diseases is the declination of the aristocratic social class and the emergence of the fanatic ideologies. The representation of fascism in The Damned is complex and subtle, and its political maneuvers concentrate on everybody that is intertwined with the aristocratic social class and its maladies such as homoeroticism, individualism and pre-war German capitalism. Visconti shows us the popular S.A. squads that are with S.S. militaristic troops whose elimination of brown-shirts by their motorized units emphasizes on the military high command to seize the power and establish a new order. Obviously, Nazis' ambition to control the industries and to manufacture the weapons for the next war is the only political reason that provokes them to find their own place among the industrialists' social class and make it collapse from within. Aschenbach's plot to create the private war between Friedrich and the other members of the family is the best example that is the testimony of this ambition.

Martin ambiguous sexual desires such as pedophilia and his castration anxiety which turns into a rape of his mother implicitly express Visconti's intentions. Visconti tries to reveal the fascistic plan to sterilize and purify the pre-war German societies from modern decayed life styles. In fact, Martin such as another character, Herbert, who is intellectual and liberal becomes fully-fledged Nazi at the end of the film. The expressive presence of Aschenbach in numerous scenes with them exposes in general  the fascist's tendency to sympathize with younger generation. He tries to consume their threatening dynamism to protect Nazi's  ideology. The expressionism of the atmosphere at the final sequence forms the symbolic overtones which are  associated with the decline of aristocratic social class and rising of Nazism.

Fascists' antipathy to the intellectuals is noticeable stylistically in Herbert's conversation with Nazi fanatic member of the S.A., Konstantin, who is the inheritor of Joachim's wealth and industrial possessions. The abandoning of intellectual utopia by Konstantin's son, Gunther, and his devotion to Aschenbach and his Nazi ideology is emblematically metaphorical of Nazi's success to dominate over cultural productivity of German society.

The voice of every ideology in German pre-war period is echoed in the characters' representations of the film, but the characters begin to lose their autonomies by becoming Nazi's puppets to the end of the film. In general, from Visconti's point of view, the fascist phenomenon is not only social trauma. In fact, the fascism can be a part of individual self-destructive response to the economical and political pressure of the modern societies and industrial civilizations. For instance, Martin's brutality and ruthless domination over his mother, raping her and then forcing her and Friedrich to commit suicide, express his potential mentality to follow the fascist ideology and Nazi's ambitions. Even Friedrich and Sophie are able to express their fascistic ambitions by murdering of Joachim and Konstantin. indeed, the expressive horrified representation of the characters and archeology of mise-en scene emphasize on the repressed fascistic atmosphere which dominates on the whole scenes, sequences and dialogues. Of course, Visconti suggests the presentation of the fascism in the 20th century of European societies as the outcome of the 19th century aristocracy, capitalism, industrialization and modernization of the rural societies. At the same time, he does not overlook the possibility of the self-destructive potentials and mental traumas in the characters that can be main cause of their tendencies and loyalties to the fascism  and its ideological structure.

The conversation between Sophie and Aschenbach occurs in the labyrinth of the S.S. official building where people's biographical information are filed and maintained. Aschenbach's self-confidence of his success as the fascist agent, his power of manipulation,  his ability to influence the historical moments and his  intelligence to change the political scenarios emerge as a kind of symbol. This symbol represents the dependency of the fascistic social systems to their information agencies in order to control individuals and their destinies. In fact, Ascenbach's knowledge of every character's psychology helps him to operate and his machine of war against every member of the aristocratic family. The history of Nazism and the representation of fascism in The Damned revolve around their formal necessity as the external referent to the narrative. At the same time, the key factor here is the offering to the audience a social and political explanation for the emergence of fascism.

Visconti's Marxist analysis of the historical materialism and the materialist dialectic implies and suggests the similarities between communism and fascism in terms of their desperate needs to build an industrial machine of ideology to fight against neo-capitalism and its model of consumerism which is founded on profit. Visconti also views the fate of an aristocratic family in fascistic bourgeois society from the inside. It seems that the aristocratic social class which creates the fascism to protect itself against the communism has to sacrifice itself for the ambitions and survival of the fascist ideology. It should be said that the fascistic text in The Damned can be read significantly as the reference to the cultural and political determinants which are used as the purpose to control the overall structure of the social intellectual activity for any individual.

Ascenbach's intention is to remain forcibly in the foreground. His stylistic methods to develop his plans according to the inner necessity of the fascist regime make an interesting point from which the complexities of modern political systems have been represented. This representation is floating in Viscontian contrast between historical materialism and Hegelian dualism. In fact, fascism appears as an ideological anti-thesis which could be created in side the old aristocratic social class as its thesis. Then, Nazism or neo-Nazism appears as the synthesis of the collision between these two ideological structures.

Pasolini's last film Salo (1975) was received immediately by the critics as the strong reaction to the repressed sexuality of neo-capitalism. The sado-masochistic excesses visualized in Pasolini's film particularly appeared to be shocking in 1975. The degradation of the sexual scenes and the brutality of the acts can be considered as the director's desire to introduce the mise-en scene of Holocaust and its theorem of death. The decadent world of Salo, its fascination upon the destructive forces of human being and the horror of Nazi-fascistc regime are represented by Freudian and Brechtian terms in Pasolini's interpretation of Sade's novel. The complexity of fascistic system in Pasolini's film has be seen and analyzed in terms of historical phenomenon. But the most important aspect of the film is its universality for visualizing the symbolical and allegorical representations of sexual repressive and destructive forces.

The mise-en scenes of the most of Pasolini's controversial scenes and sequences are suggested to be resembled like middle age paintings and their compositions. One also wonders if he wanted to represent the resemblance between the new cultivated modern ages with the old barbarian period of middle age. The horrific depiction of sex and torture in Salo immediately heightens the complexities of the theatricality which is the part of the fascist scenarios to construct the erotic atmosphere. In fact, the fascist bureaucrats are the narrators of the stories that they depict and improvise on the stage. They often take the God's position to manipulate their surrounded environment and prove their supremacy of the free will on the moralistic text of the world. The marriage sequence with its satirical representation of the religious rituals and the theatrical and the erotic aristocratic mise-en scene of the scenes  epitomize the potential desire to become master of political narrative. Pasolini consciously or subconsciously revelas the spectator's delirious desire to earn the fascistic power. therefore, he forces them to watch and follow the torturing scenes voyeuristically through the bureaucrat's binocular. The spectator automatically become accomplice of the terrifying and violated scenes represented on the screen. For Visconti, fascism is the outcome of historical conflict between the faith of the aristocracy and capitalism to their socio-political structure and their phenomenological fears to the fragility of its survival. For Pasolini, fascism is a metaphor of wilderness and barbarism which is repressed to human being subconscious under the domination of supremacy of the laws morality and immorality in the civilized societies.

Pasolini's last text is the shocking truth about the dark side of the human being which is turned out to be his success in representing the visual aesthetics of raw reality. The violence caused by modern men in the new societies seems to have origin in the new social logic that shaped the structure of the neo-capitalism: the competition to control and dominate on the reality. The fascists in Salo are no ones except the spectators who are followers of the ideologists and have perhaps reached to the conclusion from which no human being can escape or be liberated: the totalitarian potential of any ideology can interpret the reality just based on its own concepts and definitions. Of course, in observing the reality by an ideologist, no other ideology is tolerable or acceptable. Pasolini signifies a system in Salo explaining the allegorical portrayal of the any totalitarian system that tries to analyze the complexities of the socio-political phenomena only by its own intellectual insights. Hence, Salo is not only a fascist iconography, but it is a political reading about the human being confidence to his rationality and logical theorizing of the social crisis and traumas. The film ought to be seen in the light of Pasolini's meta-language which indicates a text to blame the enemies of multi-dimensional reality. The fascists live in their own utopia which has nothing to do with the reality. Pasolini exaggerates on violence in this created autonomous system of authorial texts.The idiosyncratically mild punishment in an cruel environment is doomed to extinction by its very self-referentiality in Pasolini's text. His antimodernist fascination with symbolic truths can be seen as his obsession to represent visually Theodor Adorno's point of view on the death  of poetry after Second World War.
Post-ideological, post-national, post-cultural and post modern status of Pasolini's text is perceived as Pasolini's nostalgia to the utopianism of pre-industrial peasant world as Pasolini tells us:

"What I do feel nostalgic about is the unlimited, pre-national and pre-industrial peasant world, which survived until just a few years ago. (Not by chance, I spent as much time as possible in the countries of the Third World, where it lives on, although the Third World too is now beginning to enter the sphere of so-called Development" (Pasolini, 60).

As Bondanella emphasizes in his book:

" Salo is a film which Pasolini designed to be difficult to swallow, if I may be permitted to continue the dominant metaphor of the work. It is a desperate and highly personal attack against what Pasolini had come to view as a society dominated by manipulative and sadistic power and organized around mindless consumption and exploitation" (Bondanella, 295).

Indeed, the fascists in Salo destroy the latest remaining of the cultural and mythological values of pre-modern world. It was Pasolini's destiny to suffer and to bear witness to the end that Italians gradually lost their rural identity and their societies transferred from the innocence peasantrism to monstrous consumerism.

Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., New York. 2002.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Lettera Aperta a Italo Calvino: Paese Sera, 1974. P:60-63


By: Morad Sadeghi

Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Laura Maulvey's essay on " Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" can be considered as the feminist work of criticism on the process of self-identification. The essay explains the interconnection of the spectator's subjectivity with the cinematic text established by Freudian psychoanalytic theories.
Mulvey's intention to unfold and reveal the phallocentrism structured in the unconscious of patriarchal society manifests itself primarily and demonstrates the castration anxiety of male spectator to the lack of phallic power of female character in the visual text. Her interpretation of the castration threat raises the problematic identity of women's objectified body through its fragmentation in the voyeuristic reflection of male spectator sexual desire. In other words, woman body stands in the image as the bearer of the meaning and poses question of the unconscious structure of male fantasies and desires.

Malvey develops her discussion on seeing and pleasure throughout the concept of alternative cinema as she states in her writing: 'The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film" (Screen, 200). Obviously, the erotic representation of the images in the dominant patriarchal order to satisfy visual pleasure is attacked and criticized by Mullvey in order to establish  a new language of expectations as she continues to observe:

"The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high spirit of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plentitude fiction film. the alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire as Mulvey states in her writing: (Screen, 200).

Freudian scopophilia which is associated with voyeurism and curious gaze to see the forbidden places and things as Peeping Toms continues to exist In Mulvey's discussion on the spectator voyeuristic fantasy to offer the same narcissistic aspect of the male gaze. Simultaneously, the Lacanian emphasis of mirror image for child to recognize his ego gives rise to Mulvey's future remarks on her article: " Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence for the first articulation of the 'I' of subjectivity" (Screen, 201).

Reinforcing of ego while at the same time the forgetting the world of ego is perceived and experienced by the spectator creates a complex process of self-identification through which the objectifying the sight to satisfy the sexual stimulation and develop the narcissistic ego function as the crucial dichotomy for the spectator's fascination with his like and sexual fantasies. The tension and contradiction between eroticized form of the world imposed by mechanism of libido or instinctual drive and self-preservation of ego allows the possibility of interweaving between the instinctual and perceptual reality with the realm of imaginary.  Therefore, the point of reference returns to woman as represented image: " In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly" (Screen, 203). According to Mulvey, the combination of the narrative and the spectacle creates an erotic display window of the screen to please the male gaze and signifies the woman body as the sexual object which is similarly eroticized through the gaze of the male characters and the protagonists within the screen:

"Traditionally, the woman displayed had functioned on two levels as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as the erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen" (Screen,203).

This presence of the woman figure on the screen which is passive not active heterosexual is manipulated and controlled by the ideological domination of Hollywood classic films and studio system on controlling the narrative and aesthetic structure of the cinematic text.

The coincidence between the gaze of the male protagonist who controls the narrative and the erotic look of woman figure within the screen to satisfy him and the gaze of the male spectator characterizes the omnipotent characteristic ideal ego of the active male figure. Therefore, the male protagonist in the story can control the narrative better than spectator as Mulvey states in her writing:

"The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure(the ego ideal of identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition in which the alienated subject internalized his own representation of imaginary existence...The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action" (Screen, 204).

Mulvey suggests that the mechanism of possession of woman figure within the diegesis for the male star alone as the narrative progresses emphasizes on the spectator desire to possess her too as she tells us in her writing: " By means of identification with him[male protagonist], through the participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too" (Screen, 204).

The castration threat and anxiety which is originally signified with the woman sexual difference and her lack of phallic power evokes the male spectator to dymystify her mystery and disavows that threat by substituting her as a fetish object which transforms her into physical beauty. The final result is voyeuristic which has associations with sadistic pleasure through the process of punishment and forgiveness. At the end of her essay, Mulvey's exemplary discussion refers to Hitchcock's and Von Sternberg's cinematic representation of the images which goes into the investigative side of their psychoanalytic formalistic school for the narratives and the aesthetic styles. She insists on the absence of the gaze of the male character in the most of Sternberg's narratives as she indicates in her article:

"The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich film, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she love sin the fiction...The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see" (Screen, 206).

In Hitchcock's narrative and aesthetic style, the presence of the male gaze controls the temporal and spatial elements of the story: "In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees...Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator...the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination" (Screen, 206). In fact, Mulvey never clearly explains about the alternative forms of spectatorship such as the theorizing the female gaze among the female spectators and the validity of her discourse through the intellectual history raises many questions such as 'How the female gaze can be represented and interpreted throughout the cinematic text while the theoretical sexua; specification can be inherited from the feminist stand point?'



Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Screen Journal. Vol.16, No:3, Autumn 1975.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Western & Gangster Genres: An Analysis of Setting and Landscape

Both American Western and Gangster genres have typically associations with social and historical aspects of America. To provide the traditional and thematic structure of the genres, Hollywood had to create the formal setting for both genres including the ambiguous cluster of meanings such as wilderness versus civilization or freedom versus entrapment. Not surprisingly, both genres have similarities and differences in terms of using setting and landscape.

According to Jim Kitses' article, the representation of landscape and frontier in Western movies celebrates purity, freedom and pragmatism. The openness of the landscape considerably defines the ambivalence of at once beneficent and threatening horizons, but it is still a place for the dream of a primitive individualism.

For instance, in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Ethan Edwards(John Wayne) is not able to stay with civilization at the end, so he goes back to wilderness where he belongs. In other words, the frontier setting is a symbolic metaphor from which the fundamental moral antithesis between man and nature collides. However, the frontier is a place where civilization had to meet with savagery. Its geography is also very important in representing the social and historical aspects of American civilization in nineteenth century. In Westerns, wilderness is a demonic wasteland in which myth or hero can quest for his identity as a god-like figure, which is invulnerable and superior both to civilization and its environment. Although it is a place for the hero 's death and resurrection, it is also a place for first nations (Called Indians in films) and antiheros, who posed a threat to the community's stability. Therefore, its openness and inhospitality to human life, and paradoxically its splendor and beauty, surrounded the isolated society or community which is connected to the rest of the world by a railroad or a stagecoach. As a part of the setting , church sometimes embodies the order that civilization brings to wilderness such as the scene in My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946).

Wilderness and Frontier are the only places for myth to deal with difficult situations and gain his freedom. But for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it.
According to Robert Warshow's article, in the gangster films the space of the city is presented as a trap more than a place of freedom such as the final scenes in The Public Enemy (William Wellman,1931), in which Tom Powers and Matt Doyle leave the hideout, or the scene in the hospital where Tom comes to some form of repentance before being delivered home by the Burn's mob wrapped in bandages. Then, the gangs' freedom of movement in this setting is emphasized by their own control of space such as nightclubs and speakeasies. In the classic gangster film, the control of physical space(the city) and battles for control depend on how the gangster controls the screen. In other words, power is represented in terms of controlling the screen, such as the final scene in Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) when Toni Camonte dies because he is no longer able to control his movement(entrapped in the apartment) and territory.

On the other hand, the representations of the society and civilization in terms of the setting in both genres are metaphorically threatening and ambiguous, because both heroes are unable to remain restricted indoors, and then wilderness or street is the paradigmatic place of movement, change and liberation from the claustrophobia imposed by community and social order. For both heroes, saloon, bars and nightclubs are the only places to represent their image in order to create a place for the self in society. Ultimately, the final scenes in both genres are almost the same, because the heroes, who are unable to adjust with the laws and rules imposed by community, have to be punished by leaving he civilization and going back to wilderness or being killed at the end in a trap.

However, the evolution of genres in film history is itself an important aspect helping us to understand how the elements like setting can be changed to visualize the abstract metaphors dominating the text. IN fact, in new gangster films , such as Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990), the city or modern society, instead of being a trap is a nest, and control of space becomes less important rather than gang's code of survival against economic and political changes.

Kitses, Jim. The Western: Ideology and Archetype, Focus on the Western, Page:64-72.

Warshow, Robert. The Gangster Tragic Hero, The Immediate Experience. Page: 127-133.

Warshaw, Robert The Public Enemy: Modernity, Space, and Masculinity, Modernity and the Classic Gangster Film Page: 17-24.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Proust & Solaris

The aesthetic phenomenon of memory is elaborated by Tarkovsky into a much more consistent version of Proust's categories. The central conceit of Solaris(1972) dreams a kind of utopian reconciliation between two protagonists, Kris and Harry, crucial to the nobility of the film is the fact that the film provides a manifestation on memory. The film's metaphysical speculations which are immortality or metaphor of mortality are demonstrated only by the significance of the memory and its function on each character's conscience. The revelation of Kris' inmost wishes through the memory is the essence of the film. Trakovsky provides a striking example of his fondness for Harry's merging identities when the implications of the story are reaching to the embodiment of the character's guilt-ridden memories. Kris' confrontations with unresolved conflicts of the conscience can be revealed only through the materializations of Harry extracted from Kris' memory that shed light on the complexity of his remembrances of the past. Proust's categories of memories and their function can explain how they work in Solaris and why their categorization is reproduced and captured in the classical form of film within film. It occurs when Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) shows an old documentary of Solaris and when Kris shows Harry the filmed record of Earth that he has taken with him to the Solaris station. In each case the recollection of time past in the present is vividly illustrated. In fact, some physical and metaphysical of the meaning in the film can be elucidated by Proust's voluntary and involuntary memories. These types of memory are connected to the number of linked images in which Tarkovsky's interest and desire to show the spectator the metaphorical aspects of the past are palpable and impressive.

So much of the film is simply involved in looking, thinking, and contemplating in silence on nature, the past, and the Solaris. It seems that the sympathetic dramatization of religious hope talks about immortality in human terms while linking it to memory and desire. The opening shot of the film shows us the lake in the neighborhood of Kris' dacha where underneath the water gentle fronds of algae weave to and fro. The image is picked in the film on numerous occasions, for example, when the camera focuses on the hair of the sleeping Harry, spread out in baroque curlicue on the pillow of Kris' bed. perhaps most extraordinary of all is the dolly into the pond in the final sequence when there is a point of view from the copy of Kris(or Kris?) to the reconstruction of Kelvin's dacha. In Tarkovsky's film, the objects that become living organisms, or living organisms that turn into the objects, work as the link between Kris and his memories. Trakovsky's interest in filming Proust's voluntary and involuntary memories is hardly surprising as Green states in his book: "Although past time my be irrevocable, it can not be destroyed or vanish without trace. Time and memory merge, are two aspects of a single phenomenon" (Green, 59). Kris' filmed record of home represents the technique of reproducing time, through film within film, in which Tarkovsky explores complex relationship between memory and time and creates new images for the ideas of resurrection and eternity at the end of the film.  It is important to remember that a copy of Harry who is reconstituted out of neutrinos is learning how to communicate with the characters, how to sleep in bed with Kris, how to stand against solitude, and finally how to memorize and remember the images and the sounds. In fact what the copy of Harry earns through a kind of utopian reconciliation process with Kris is not only the image of love itself, but is the package of habits that she has to learn in order to become matured and human.

The abstraction and concreteness of dream sequences in the film and their relations with memory signify here not really a dreamlike quality obtained by making reality strange, but they suggest that we are dreaming and remembering not in order to enter non-reality but in order to find reality more real than before. The structure of the world without the participation of memories in Solaris is diagnosed with the symptom of scientific interpretation and logical understanding of the universe because the process of remembering the past attains the highest degree of mysticism that can be connected to the moral principle. The aesthetic world of memories linked to the subjectivity of the perception remains anti-materialist and loyal to mystical union of subject and object. Tarkovsky's aim is to see things and the entire world without adapting them to any definite perspective, neither to that of subjectivism nor to that of objectivism. The language of objective science creates distance between man as a subject or an authentic existence and his memories as the object. Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris  does not share with Lem's novel the central tenet of its narrative. The film can be analyzed based upon the director's emotional, moral, and religious preoccupations while the skeptical and rational side of science is also represented in the two important figures of the film, Snaut and Sartorius. On the other hand, things are just what they are and they present themselves to our eyes in an absolutely simple manner. In Solaris, Tarkovsky as an intuitive metaphysician attempts to deny the credibility of scientific resolution and to approach all mechanisms that can be complicate our rational perception.

Though Tarkovsky refused to become the disciple of Eisenstein's cinematic constructivism, it is fascinating that his concept of memory in formalistic structure is produced exclusively through the process of montage. This means that even for him the cinematic representation the memory through character's subjectivity can not be constructed unless by the juxtaposition of the shots that creates the concept of collision between the past and the present.  For Tarkovsky a single shot has time, and the process of formalistic reconstruction of time is solved by letting the actions be non actions that no longer follow the logic of experience of everyday life. The lack of Logic and coherence that we sometimes observe in reconstructing the past through the involuntary memory should not be dismissed as the failure of intellectual achievements, but that it contains its own form of intelligence which needs to be analyzed and understood. Tarkovsky's use of memory as an artist device which helps transform the past into the reality of the present appears also in accordance with the dream's concept of time. The merging of dream and memory in Tarkovsky's works is not done because of symbolic reasons as Bornstein states in his books:" Tarkovsky's expressions neither represent the 'real' nor do they symbolize the 'unreal'. They remain in the domain of the 'improbable" between symbolization, representation, and verfremdete [alienated] expression and this is what gives them their 'strange' character" (Bornstein, 8).To analyze Trakovsky's artistic strategy of expressing the past and memory through the film, one has to focus on the concept of Proustain Madeleine that has been reiterated in the conscious of the protagonists as Bornstein continues in his book:

"'Spaces' functions here rather...like a 'Proustain Madeleine' which one can perceive best when 'lying in bed'., meaning when suffering from a reduced mobility. In Tarkovsky such a space is produced by letting it be perceived not by a proud, conceptual, subjective man convinced in his mathematical capacity or in his 'stylizing power; but by a man whose being is reduced to nature" (Bornstein, 25).

For Proust, involuntary memory is able to capture the singular moments of the past that produce exactly the existential anxieties as Gross states in his writing: " In every instance in Remembrance of things Past when an involuntary memory sweeps over a character, it disorients him, makes him uncertain of who he is, even creates a feeling of 'dizziness' or' oscillation' between an earlier moment re-experienced and the existing one" (Gross, 378). For Proust, the truth is somewhere in the depth of the memory as Gross observes precisely:" All that is really important about life comes as a result of these eruptions from within. The most essential truths are those contained in the depths of memory and obtainable only by reflectively possessing the material that emerges involuntarily" (Gross, 378). For Tarkovsky, Proust is the person that he has to refer to when he needs to reconstruct the past through the memories in cinema as Tarkovsky states in his book: " Proust also spoke of raising 'a vast edifice of memories', and that seems to me to be what cinema is called to do" (Tarkovsky,59).
In fact, the individual should not be overwhelmed with a flood of disconnected images. His insights that arise from reading his memories are not enough to prove its reason d'etre. For Proust as Gross indicates in his writing: " One must find a way to turn them into art, which Proust was the spiritual correlate of the raw material thrown up by the reminiscences (Gross, 378). Though converting the involuntary memories to the art is not exactly what Kris does in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky continues to do that from Mirror (1975) to his last film in self-reflexive approach to create art.

For Tarkovsky and Proust, involuntary memory can create an impression that has associations with existential and spiritual experiences. Tarkovsky's landscapes and objects in Solaris consists of the fact that, on the one hand, the notion of the landscape as a major aesthetic principle is necessarily to the structure of the film, on the second hand, "If there are landscapes in his films these landscapes are not geometrical but 'mental landscapes'" (Bornstein, 23). These mental landscapes that are connected to inner time represent a realistic and naked reproduction of the reality which comes sometimes very close to the kind of aesthetic that can be perceived in formalistic structure of dream sequences.

In Solaris, dream and memory are merging together and nor do they symbolize and represents the reality. They simply are the objects and are reality. Kris' memory does not seem exactly what it is. The complexity of the mise-en scene into which the architectures of his house in dacha and Solaris are integrating together and become one makes us suspicious about the credibility of pure form of memory. Due to the utmost expressivity of the scene, everything is part of a reality within which manifestations of dream and memory can not be distinguished. To say that all memories in Solaris come as an absolute form is erroneous. Kris' reconstruction of memories when he is hallucinating is hard to recognize as Robinson states in his book: "Harry, who is crouching bedside Kris' head, is comforting him; she looks up, into the camera; another light flares the lens. Then one of Tarkovsky's continuous dream shots in which multiple versions of Harry are seen..."(Robinson,338).The question is how Kris' existential contemplations to the philosophical questions of life, the spiritual and metaphysical expression of his experiences can intermingle together and create one entity. The conception of the image that should, according to Tarkovsky, manifest an organic link between idea and form present the transcendent without appeal to intellect. However, Proustian involuntary form of memory requires an intellectual receiver able to unite himself with the Western metaphysical conception of subjectivity that creates distance between the observer as the subject and the observed as the object. Therefore, Kris is not able to intellectually analyze the extraordinary phenomena that happen on the Solaris. It is only possible for him to mediate through the fabricated memories and to get rid of impurities of the soul. Tarkovsky's allegorical use of cinematic image accords with Proust's reflection on memory and artistic creativity. For Proust, categories of memory can only be revealed and rediscovered by the medium of literature that can work like a link as a media between pre-modern and modern world. Tarkovsky, whose metonymical cinematic art moves toward the aim that Proust is searching for in literature, creates anti symbolism that does not lead to a semiotic art of signs because we know how hard Tarkovsky tries to overcome symbolism. It leads to memory/dream images in Solaris which although utterly unreal, come to express reality itself. In other words, by referring to memory, Tarkovsky refuses to reproduce or stylize the past as Bornstein states in his book: " All there is dream and allegory, through which history is 'expressed'. Through the perception of flashing images able to twist the regular rhythm out of its routinized spin, the allegorician fractures the regular, naively progressive rhythm of modernity" (Bornstein, 102).If, for Proust, a sensation activates forgotten memories and reveals our discontinuous selves, the memories, for Tarkovsky, are important only because of their representation of love, family, oedipal relationship and death.

The involuntary memories in Solaris provoke the sense of guilt and trigger Kris' delirium that culminates to his nostalgic image of dacha that embodies Kris' existential suffering as Robinson tells us in his book: "Then Kris is seen beside the lake, as at the beginning of the film. It is now wintry, though...Dead bare tress. Mist" (Robinson, 389). In fact, the memories in Solaris appear to create moral paradoxes for the characters in the space lab. Moreover, Tarkovsky's stylization is here understood not as a simple abstraction from a concrete reality, but as being backed by a sophisticated relationship between the stylized memory of the past and reality of Solaris. Non formalist definition of style is relevant in regard to Tarkovsky's cinema. He has elaborated in his films aesthetics of memories and dreams in a way which many people think that all of his films can be considered as the zone between memory and dream. The idea of dreamlike realism inside of Proustian memory suggests itself a perfect way to maintain a constant contact with the waking world within the realm of sleep.

Tarkovsky's films deals so outspokenly with dreams and memories. In Tarkovsky's films, the logic of the dream/memory produces a distance. Obviously, this distance is not a Brechtian distance as Bornstein indicates in his book: "In Tarkovsky, the observing distance of the spectator projects the spectator(in a paradoxical way) right inside the time of the film" (Bornstein, 17). Tarkovsky's strongly of anti-symbolist and anti-realist concept of shot relies on the principle that every scene can produce its own time while at the same time the temporal phenomenon of each shot creates the distance between the spectator and the cinematic text. For Tarkovsky, both dreams and memories as phenomena of cinematic time arise out the inner and temporal necessity. In his cinema, neither symbolism nor realism represents the reality in the temporal necessity of each shot of dream/memory. The transformation of dream/memory to the reality and the reality to the dream/memory provide a decisive moment for cinematic aesthetics at the end of Solaris. Completely opposed to what Hollywood classic cinema once thought, memory and dream are the elements that avant-garde artists such as Tarkovsky, need in order to create the abstractive concept of the time and their cinematic expressions.

Bornstein, Thorsten Botz. Films and dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-wai, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2007.

Green, Peter. Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press, 1993.

Gross, David. Bergson, Proust, and the Revaluation of Memory International Philosophical Quarterly 25 No.4, 1985.

Robinson, Jeremy Mark. The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky United Kingdom: Crescent Moon, 2006.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Alexander Astruc & Francois Truffaut: An Obsession for Politics of Auteur

Alexander Astruc's writings on La Camera-Stylo revolved around emerging a new future for the cinema through which the medium of the film obtained properly its particular foundation to establish a new structure for representing the film art as wholeness as Astruc states in his writing: " The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel " (Astruc, 17). From his point of view, this age is called camera-stylo as he continues in the same writing: " That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camerastyolo (Camera-pen)" (Astruc 18). According to his theoretical approach to explain his hypothesis, the term of camera-stylo is the metaphor which emphasizes on the functionality of the camera an  artistic tool to write an idea. This flexible use of 'camera as the pen' can express satisfactorily the authorial demands of an artist in his creating of the stylistic aesthetic.

The idea of expressing thought by using the cinematic language is Astruc's obsession to consider the whole historical attempt of the intellectuals, filmmakers and film theoreticians to liberate the cinematic images from the domination of the concrete and the static form of the movements. This idea gives birth to the new cinematic vehicle of thought as Astruc states in his writing:
"From today onwards, it will be possible for the cinema to produce works which are equivalent, in their profundity and meaning, to the novels of Falkner and Malraux, to the essays of Sartre and camus" (Astruc,20). This of course implies the manifestation of the Auteur Theory for the intellectuals of French Nouvelle Vague such as Trauffaut defining a specific domain for cinema which is no longer a means of filmmaking for contemporary era as Astruc expresse his idea in his writing: " Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene but a true act of writing. The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen" (Astruc,22).

Of course, the similarity between Truffaut's article about adaptation in cinema with Astruc's recognized manifest of camera-stylo refers to the originality in the concept of the authorial domination on the text. This similarity explains the overcome of the cinematic adaptation with regard to the invented mise-en scene on the faithfulness to the 'Tradition of Quality" respected and followed by the most distasted French directors in the period as Truffaut explains in his article:

"Well, for these abject characters, who deliver these abject lines-I know a handful of men in France who would be INCAPABLE of conceiving them, several cineastes whose world-view is at least valuable as that Aurench and Bost, Siguard and Jeanson. I mean Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jaques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati, Roger Leenhardt; these are, nevertheless, French cineastes and it happens -curious coincidence-that they are auteurs who often write their dialogue and some of them themselves invent the stories they direct" (Truffaut, 223).

Truffaut's essay on underestimating the artistic auteur cinema has a function of fidelity to Andre Bazin's article on adaptation: "La Stylistique de Robert Bresson". It seems that there is an absolute comparison between Astruc's 'writing of the story by the camera' and Truffaut's profound theoretical analysis on the cinematic adaptation: "Talent, to be sure, is not a function of fidelity, but I consider an adaptation of value only when written by a man of the cinema" (Truffaut, 229) or " The fundamental problem of cinema is how to express thought" (Astruc, 20). Truffaut's rejection to "Traditional of Quality" goes far away that he denies it in his radical approach to the "Politique des auteur": " Well-I do not believe in the peaceful coexistence of the 'Tradition of Quality" and an "auteur's cinema""(Truffaut, 234). For both Truffaut and Astruc the cinematic translation of a literary work is a complex phenomenon to be achieved. The distinction between the filmmakers who make the equivalent scenes for the literary text and the auteur directors matters only on the logical relationship between their fidelity to the text and their creative stylistic approach to invent a cinematic language which can be possibly considered as a radical departure from faithfulness to the spirit of the adapted work.

For the intellectuals of the French Nouvelle Vague, such as Astruc and Truffaut, the politics of auteur precisely establish director's cinematic vision through 20th century as the proper substitution for author's writing style of the 19th century. The leitmotif of their article which remains consistently as the richness of the texts is their persistence to celebrate the discovery and the exploration of the existence of one individual as the auteur. That individual dominates on the whole process of filmmaking. He creates his stylistic aesthetic to represent the text as his own raison d'etre. He creates an analytical and dialectical dialogue between his metaphoric succession of the images in relationship with the interior structure of the text with the mind of spectator.

Perhaps, the director's endeavor to achieve the requires artistic revolution in his style appears to be the only reason to reinvent a language for his own purpose.
His intention to offer a significant and unique expression of the cinematic events and consequences based upon the systematic use of techniques standardizes the duty of the cinema which is not obviously the imitation of the reality. The final result for cinema is the creating of its own reality within the dramatic time and space.

Astruc, Alexander. Naissance d'une Nouvelle Avant-garde: La Camera-Stylo L'Ecran Francaise. Mars, 30. 1948.

Truffaut, Francois. Une Vertaine Tendance du Cinema Francais Cahier du Cinema:No.31. January, 1954.


By: Morad Sadeghi