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 watching the film, I remembered the book that I read
in French a 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 does 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's (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's relationship. Regarding Rohmer's ethical
interpretation of the world, he offers a comprehensive account of how this
moral corruption relates to the different characteristics of living in Paris
and its suburbs. Although one can realize that Rohmer's film essentially begins
and ends in the suburbs, the idea of the female protagonist's 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
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Les Nuits de la pleine lune
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Uzumasa Limelight
Uzumasa Limelight appears to be regarded by
critics as a work of Japanese cinema that deals with a nostalgic
appreciation of 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 the 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 analyzing the film is the joy of the
viewer who is discovering the cultural perspective of a homage to the jidaigeki genre
of film. The avoidance of sentimentalism is anticipated by preventing of using
many flashback 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 to control the narrative that is
still run by Japanese male-dominated society.
Review: By Morad Sadeghi
Tuesday, 9 December 2014
Whiplash
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 sets
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 aesthetics,
the exhilaration of film derives not so much from the narrative but the
pleasure that the visual format offers to the audience. Artifice and
playfulness of the musical performances are the most prominent characteristics
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
Tuesday, 2 December 2014
Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer's 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 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 of more dialogue
invites the audience to analyze the cinematic text with more precision and
accuracy. The presence of nature in the film indicates Laura's passion for
exploring 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
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Welles
Hollywood never offered Welles
greater opportunities after the Citizen Kane (1940) scandal.
Though Welles paid a 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 skepticism accused Welles of being an untrustworthy director
in terms of spending huge budgets to make his films, but his approach to
his films in a constructive spirit is undeniable. The collapse of politics
of auteur especially in the second half of Welles's life created a shadow
and the darker side that its fingerprint remained on his career for the rest of
his life.
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Birdman
Birdman (2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu)
The film is perhaps the director's
most completely successful cinematic text which centres on the protagonist's
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's subjective
world. The participation allows the audience to roam through the labyrinth of
off-stage and on-stage zones of the Broadway theatrical universe. Numerous
shots employing the theatricality of 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 a 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
Wednesday, 29 October 2014
Adieu au Langage
How Godard's stylistic decisions
have been changed since the beginning of the French New Wave movement? The
intellectual quotes, the cinematic references, Einsteinian montage influences,
Godard intertitles, and the disoriented /confusing cuts are still 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 authenticity of images
and sounds. The characterization, the cause-and-effect narrative, and the
resolution at the end of the film are not the terms that Godard refers to while
he makes his oeuvre. Review: Morad Sadeghi
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
Prometheus
Ridley Scott's 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 a 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 out 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 in Alien (1979). 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
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 devoted to the literary text.
The narrative of the film is enriched of flash backs of the
couple's lifestyle and relationship. The audience mostly self-identifies with
the female protagonist's subjective world. The shift of the female subjectivity
to the male protagonist 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 accepts 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 raises the question that who will be controlling the narrative and
how. Nick or Amy? Review by Morad Sadeghi
The Congress
Stylistically, The Congress demonstrates
a significant departure from Waltz with Bashir (2008, Ari
Folman). The film is a 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 at 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 for the future of the world of art and artist.
Wednesday, 3 September 2014
38th Montreal World Film Festival
http://www.ffm-montreal.org
The 38th World Film Festival in Montreal was a special event that drew the attention of critics in Montreal and worldwide to the fertile field of cinematic materials. The festival program was precisely organized to have a group of films that represented "film" as the dominant art medium. The films provided a broad spectrum of narratives that constituted various forms and conventions. 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 themes such as guilt, 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 lifestyles 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 any unnecessary mode of criticism that involves 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 the 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 the 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)
Interestingly, the picture reminds us of Le Samurai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melvile) and The Professional (1994, Luc Besson). Like the protagonists in those films, the male character is a lonely person who is a professional killer. His religious belief is what is emphasized in the film symbolically and explicitly. The film remains unforgettable for, among other things, the expression of 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 satirical ideas against the political system. The film is filled with 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 the director's interview, the Mexican point of view about 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)
Many shots in the film remind us of Chagall and Malevich's 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 found in Chagall's paintings are reflected in the images. The film debates 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 symbolic. The idea of flying and floating into the sky founded in Chagall's paintings becomes alive and gives the cinematic text a sense of playful and spiritual meaning. Chagall's realm of kingdom is sky and Malevich one is the earth.
Field of Dogs(2014, Lech Majewski)
Field of Dogs is a very good film. The narrative structure is dreamful and symbolic. There are many moments in the film where one can find Tarkovsky's influences. For example, there is a scene in which the wall is bleeding and has a heartbeat 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 which is similar to what Tarkovsky was doing in Sacrifice (1986, Tarkovsky). Finally, at the end of the film, we see that water is falling from the ceiling of a church which 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 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, and friendship under question and investigation in such a simple way that draws attention to the transcendental concepts. What is valued as a mark of artistic achievement is the director's choices to represent the characters' styles of life as faithfully as possible.
Review By: Morad sadeghi
Thursday, 21 August 2014
Chaplin & Keaton
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 a desire enthusiastically to satisfy the
curiosity of the readers which gravitates their insistence to understand more
about technical and aesthetic mode of production. 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 can 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 the 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 creates 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 helps 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 must 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. 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 principal 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 before
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
Wednesday, 13 August 2014
Boyhood
Is Boyhood a 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 she fails in choosing the
right husband, Mason and his sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), must pass
through the difficulties. His father (Ethan Hawk) seems to be lovely
and the radical critic of contemporary politics, but his chaotic lifestyle and
sense of irresponsibility prohibit him from being a true father figure.
Finally, he marries a woman whose father and mother are probably
religious. They even give a Bible and Gun to Mason as 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 at 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 the 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 in working 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 in satisfying the
audience in many ways, the acting style and the formalistic structure of
the film's narrative foreshadow the flaws and failures that prohibit us from
calling it a masterpiece.
Review by Morad Sadeghi
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Medea
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 the land of Greece,
takes revenge on his husband, the Jason, for his betrayal to her and his
family. Jason is successfully helped by Medea to earn Golden Fleece to overcome
the powerful and political domination on Creon's court and Athenian Empire. He must
satisfy his ambitions with establishing a new family through the marriage with
the king of Corinth's daughter. Medea, who has been 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 sons at the
end of the play.
Socio-Cultural Analysis:
Hellenistic culture in the Athenian Empire was established and founded on 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 a 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 its 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 was 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 deliberate 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 the 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 Euripides
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 the 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 to overthrow him out of his throne and launch his 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 forces her to objectify Jason
and everybody else as the target of her envious vengeful desire in 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 soundtrack
establish the balances atmosphere with the sense of ritual and traditional
ceremonies. 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' points 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 a specific period of Western History in
which the Marxist theory and sexual liberation were considered the proper
weapons to reject the dominant principles of capitalism and the bourgeois class
of society. The intellectual practices of his period expressed proletarian and
sub-proletarian culture and were capable of participating 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 the 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 images should
be seen as a different text in terms of its ideological and stylistic
reflection. Pasolini established a new visual code to visualize the verbal
signification of mythology. It is worth pointing out that his barbaric mise-en
scene and visual style at the beginning of the film were particularly
formulated for the opening sequence which only existed in adaptation and did
not include in Euripides' play. The sacrificial ceremony of the male human
body, Jason's childhood and adolescence, and Medea's slaughtering of her
brother appear to be added to the play to convey the director's worldview.
Film Analysis & Evaluation:
Medea is perhaps Pasolini's most uncommon artistic work with the complexity
of elements of cinematic language. In terms of utilizing the natural
landscapes, representing the mythological iconic images, and creating stylistic
visual codes, the film offers us the abstractive and 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, to understand the
characters' perception in Pasolini's 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, a third-person narrator speaks
from the point of view of one of the characters as evidence of 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 the 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's fascinating with Renaissance paintings, Baroque
music, Eastern-African songs, and middle age architecture bring a sense of
barbarian element to the mise-en-scene with imposing minimalism and simplicity
to the presentation of landscapes, costumes, and songs. Pasolini as a modern
storyteller was passionate to transcribe 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 detaches himself as the artist from his social class to
obtain the maximum capability of approaching reality. In Medea, he
reduces the artificiality of the scenes in the King's palace and sympathizes
with the lower class of society by visualizing the traditional
ceremonies and the claustrophobic architecture of the higher class of
society. At the end, he succeeds to responding to the abstract 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
Thursday, 24 July 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson's style in The
Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is influenced by German expressionism.
Anderson uses color, composition, acting, and camera movement to express emotions
and ideas. The color sometimes signifies the historical background and the
cultural atmosphere of the scenes. The composition puts 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 desolate.
Zero Moustafa is a mysterious character, and we don't know anything about
his past. His story is told in flashbacks. 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 the European cultural
period after the First World War. The red and pink color of the
building and its interior decoration have associations with the sense of life
that exists into the Hotel and its environment. At the same time, the
cleanliness and the order of the setting in the 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 behavior. Dimitri (Adrian
Brody) is also ruthless and a psychopath. His character like any other
German expressionistic villain is frightening and scary, but his weakness in
controlling the situation and overcoming Gustave's intelligence effeminates him
and takes out of him all the forces of his masculinity. The
father-son relationship between Moustafa and Gustave is counterbalanced by the
relationship between Dimitri and his mother. Review: By Morad Sadeghi
Friday, 18 July 2014
Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini
Fascism in Italy was formed by various
motifs such as the desire to develop the economy and to promote the national
identity. 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 were immediately a necessary
political reaction to the social and existential moments of 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 emerged as the socio-cultural diseases. The outcome of these
historical diseases is the decline 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 outcomes
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 the
military high command to seize power and establish a new order. The 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 place among
the industrialists' social class and make it collapse from within.
Aschenbach's plot to create a private war between Friedrich and the other
members of the family is the best example that is the testimony of this
ambition.
Martin's 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 lifestyles.
Martin as another character, Herbert, who is intellectual and liberal becomes a
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 the younger generation. He tries to consume their
threatening dynamism to protect the Nazi's ideology. The expressionism of the
atmosphere in the final sequence forms the symbolic overtones which are associated
with the decline of the 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 the Nazi's
success to dominate over cultural productivity of German society.
The voice of every ideology in the German pre-war period is echoed in the
characters' representations of the film, but the characters begin to lose their
autonomy by becoming Nazi puppets by the end of the film. In general, from
Visconti's point of view, the fascist phenomenon is not only social trauma. Fascism
can be a part of the individual self-destructive response to the economic and
political pressure of 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 ambitions. Even Friedrich and
Sophie can express their fascistic ambitions by murdering Joachim and
Konstantin. indeed, the expressive horrified representation of the characters
and archeology of mise-en-scene emphasizes the repressed fascistic atmosphere that
dominates the whole scenes, sequences, and dialogues. Of course, Visconti
suggests the presentation of fascism in 20th-century European societies as the
outcome of the 19th-century aristocracy, capitalism, industrialization, and
modernization of 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 the main cause of their tendencies and loyalties to 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 is filed and
maintained. Aschenbach's self-confidence in his success as the fascist
agent, his power of manipulation, his ability to influence historical
moments, and his intelligence to change political scenarios emerge as a kind of
symbol. This symbol represents the dependency of the fascistic social systems on
their information agencies 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 a fascistic
bourgeois society from the inside. It seems that the aristocratic social class that
creates fascism to protect itself against communism must 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 a
reference to the cultural and political determinants which are used as the
purpose to control the overall structure of the social and intellectual
activity of any individual.
Ascenbach intends 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 the Viscontian
contrast between historical materialism and Hegelian dualism. Fascism appears
as an ideological anti-thesis that could be created inside 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 a
strong reaction to the repressed sexuality of neo-capitalism. The sadomasochistic
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-fascistic
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 been 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 reveals 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 law’s 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 a 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 the 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 innocent peasantries
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
Laura Maulvey's essay on "
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" can be considered a 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 spectators to the lack of phallic power of
female characters in the visual text. Her interpretation of the castration
threat raises the problematic identity of women's objectified bodies through
its fragmentation in the voyeuristic reflection of male spectator sexual
desire. In other words, a woman's body stands in the image as the bearer of the
meaning and poses the 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). The erotic representation of the images in the
dominant patriarchal order to satisfy visual pleasure is attacked and
criticized by Mullvey to establish a new language of expectations as she
continues to observe:
"The satisfaction and
reinforcement of the ego that represents 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 plenitude 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 to conceive a new language of desire as Mulvey
states in her writing: (Screen, 200).
Freudian scopophilia which is associated with voyeurism and a 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 on
mirror image for a child to recognize his ego gives rise to Mulvey's future
remarks in 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 ego while at the same time, 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 life and sexual fantasies.
The tension and contradiction between the eroticized form of the world imposed
by the 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 the 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's 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 the studio system 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 the 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 the woman as an icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification
process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror
recognition in which the alienated subject internalizes his 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 the woman figure within the
diegesis for the male star alone as the narrative progresses emphasizes the spectator's
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 by the woman's
sexual difference and her lack of phallic power evokes the male spectator to demystify
her mystery and disavow that threat by substituting her as a fetish object
which transforms her into physical beauty. The result is voyeurism 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 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 loves in 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). Mulvey never
clearly explains the alternative forms of spectatorship such as the theorizing of
the female gaze among the female spectators and the validity of her discourse
through intellectual history raises many questions such as 'How the female gaze
can be represented and interpreted throughout the cinematic text while the
theoretical sexual; specification can be inherited from the feminist standpoint?'
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Screen
Journal. Vol.16, No:3, Autumn 1975.
By: Morad Sadeghi
Western & Gangster Genres
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 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 the 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 the 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 antiheroes, who pose 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 that is connected to the rest of the world by a railroad or a
stagecoach. As a part of the setting, the church sometimes embodies the order
that civilization brings to the wilderness such as in 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 to personify it.
According to Robert Warshow's article, in gangster films, the space of the city
is presented as a trap more than a place of freedom such as in 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 control of spaces 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 in 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 the wilderness
or street is the paradigmatic place of movement, change and liberation from the
claustrophobia imposed by community and social order. For both heroes, saloons,
bars, and nightclubs are the only places to represent their image 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 to the laws and
rules imposed by the community, have to be punished by leaving the civilization
and going back to the wilderness or being killed at the end in a trap.
However, the evolution of genres in film history is itself an important aspect in
helping us to understand how the elements like settings 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 the 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
Thursday, 17 July 2014
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) is dreams of
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 of 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 reach 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 the film
within the 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. Some
physical and metaphysical meanings 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 about
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 objects, work as the link between Kris and his memories. Tarkovsky's
interest in filming Proust's voluntary and involuntary memories is hardly
surprising as Green states in his book: "Although past time may 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 the home represents the technique of reproducing time,
through film within the film, in which Tarkovsky explores the 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. 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 to become mature 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 to enter non-reality but 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 the mystical union of subject
and object. Tarkovsky aims 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 on 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 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 of the memory through the character's
subjectivity can not be constructed unless the juxtaposition of the shots 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 nonactions 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 involuntary memory should
not be dismissed as the failure of intellectual achievements, but it contains
its form of intelligence that needs to be analyzed and understood. Tarkovsky's
use of memory as an artist's device which helps transform the past into the
reality of the present appears also by 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 Tarkovsky'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 consciousness 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 can 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).
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 involuntary memories to art is not exactly what Kris
does in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky continues to do that from Mirror (1975)
to his last film in a self-reflexive approach to creating 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 consist of the fact that, on the one
hand, the notion of the landscape as a major aesthetic principle is necessary
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 reality which comes sometimes
very close to the kind of aesthetic that can be perceived in the formalistic
structure of dream sequences.
In Solaris, dream and memory are merging, and do they symbolize and represent 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 and becoming one makes us
suspicious about the credibility of the 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 in 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, and 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 the 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 the impurities of the soul. Tarkovsky's allegorical
use of cinematic images 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 the 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 allegorical 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 they
represent love, family, oedipal relationships, and death.
The involuntary memories in Solaris provoke the sense of guilt and trigger
Kris' delirium which culminates in 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 trees. Mist" (Robinson, 389). 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 the reality of Solaris. Non-formalist
definition of style is relevant 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 constant contact with the waking world within the realm of
sleep.
Tarkovsky's films deal so outspokenly with dreams and memories. In Tarkovsky's
films, the logic of the dream/memory produces a distance. 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 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 of 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 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