Medea

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 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

The Grand Budapest Hotel

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 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

Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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 Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

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

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 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

Proust & Solaris

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

Alexander Astruc & Francois Truffaut

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 explaining 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 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 Truffaut defining a specific domain for cinema which is no longer a means of filmmaking for the contemporary era as Astruc expresses 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 regarding 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 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 the spectator.

Perhaps, the director's endeavor to achieve the required 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 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

Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver: A Postmodern Film

The socio-cultural ingredients of the postmodern theory and its hypothesis to establish the fundamental structure for creating a cinematic language draw the attention of intellectuals and critics all over the world to postmodern American directors' radical interpretations of contemporary culture.

A privileged position in American cultural history during the postmodernist era refers to a fascinating alienated individualism with the growth of urban societies. Different forms of social discourses such as gender politics, sexual orientation arguments, and racial issues of ethnicity increasingly emerge with the analysis of postmodernism. Indeed, postmodernism occurred as the radical postwar movement against modernist ideals firstly in Europe among the intellectuals, journalists, and critics. The theorization of the conventional forms in film aesthetics had often been debated to capture and grasp a new ontological approach to represent postwar consumer societies which were going to be dependent on the growth of the capitalistic corporate values in terms of financial investments and economic development in the wake of the decline of modernism. The theoretical frameworks and aesthetic concern for founding a new school of film artistic practices among European intellectuals reached America very lately almost at the end of the 1970s and had a profound influence on the new generation of American directors. These directors were desperately and bewilderingly seeking the initiative ways and the methods to demonstrate their new system of thought and to visualize and express cinematically their new enlightenment age of exploring the outcome of postmodernism in American societies. A group of these young and ambitious directors who moved to Hollywood in California rejected the cultural realities of the East coast, patriotically defended the modernist American ideals. For them, capitalistic investments in the marketing of the film industry were very important. These directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg developed the genre of science fiction and combine its thematic structure with mythological and epical vision. On the other hand, the East Coast directors explored their potential for creativity by identifying the growing importance of postmodern problematic issues in their films. They were considering the establishment of new artistic approaches for the characterized contemporary era. Some of these directors such as Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese expressed nostalgia for New York City where they were born or raised. They paid homage to European and American classical films and the older directors.

Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was narrated through the point of view of its protagonist in New York City, Travis(Robert De Niro), whose object of study is the multicultural experience of post-modernity. His obsession with reshaping the social experience suggests a perspective of his racial response to the different social identities in the contemporary era.  The violence that is found so disturbing in the film targets the American traditional working class for the replacement of old models of optimistic and innocent idealism after the Second World War with the new age of mass movements toward sexual, ethnic, ideological, and racial differences and politics. But the narrative of the film still epitomizes on the omnipresence of the detachment from the exterior realities through the protagonist's paranoia and schizophrenic impulses to the actuality of the events and the function of the multicultural vehicle. For Travis, the hyperreality of this new cultural condition within and reality beyond itself is provocative and particularly associated with his purposeful isolation. He tries to prove the superiority of his radicalism in confronting " the other form of realities". His alienation in the city is decentralized and fragmented by the complex structure of the urban landscapes. Of course, this alienation can be interpreted based On Baudrillardian vision of a media world of simulations and signs through the windows and windshields of his cab which looks like a big screen of cinema for him. His racism is most overtly there which defines his characterization and his expressionistic way of responding to the racial problematic issues in the multicultural postmodern society such as New York.

It is therefore appropriate to look at the context of the film in which some of the postmodern ideas emerge as the display of the pluralism and functionalism of the society. The sense of being an outsider and marginalized in a postmodern society which is not associated with the old definition of modern life describes Travis' strange fascination and determinism with his loneliness and solitude. His wandering through the streets of New York which is aimless and disoriented portrays the distorted figure of his psychosexual fear of breaking boundaries and characterizes the ironic and ambiguous representation of the modernistic utopian societies at the end of the 1970s. The postmodern use of parody and simulation are identified in the film by reworking and rearrangement of John Ford's racist and misogynist character of The Searcher(1956), Ethan Edwards (John Ford), whose psychological fantasies of rape and revenge can be read as Travis's paranoia and Pathological condition as Jaubin states in her writing: "The difference between Schrader's and Scorsese's vision of Travis Bickle is encapsulated in their perspectives on John Ford's The Searchers(1956), the picture that is the ur-text for Taxi Driver, as well as for many other 70's films" (Jaubin, 19). The first-person construction of the narrative describes the illusion of external reality that exists inside Travis' madness and his apocalyptic mission to change the postmodern reality in his prophetic Christian ideological vision. The idea of progress which can be considered as the modernist ideological achievement is now connected and challenged with Travis' loss of faith and confidence to new postmodern urban society.

The postmodern inter-textual influences in the film are pumping of Hitchcockian horror, violence, and brutality while paying homage to his films, Psycho (1960) and The Wrong Man (1956). The relationship between the film and the idealistic ideological past of Hollywood is not only radical and revolutionary to disobey the conventional rules but also pays homage to the nostalgic creative period of the collapsed studio system as Jaubin states in her writing: "Taxi Driver honors many fathers, from John Ford to Alfred Hitchcock, but it does not obey the rules" (Jaubin, 24). Scorsese's self-conscious homages to the films made in the past can be increasingly considered in the postmodern culture as a kind of spatialized temporality of the pre-existing representations and styles, a simulation and simulacrum of the real past which does not exist anymore. The self reflexive contextualized elements of the film text according to postmodern definition can be followed through Scorsese and his screenplay writer Schrader's cooperated experience of the same pressure, rage and anxiety that they feel to the entire chaotic situation of the corrupted and collapsed society. Their self-identification with Travis obviously refers to the encapsulated Christian elements of the religious education which is folded in the unconscious of the director and the screenplay writer of the film as Jaubin observes precisely:

"Scorsese and Schrader were both raised as a Calvinist in the Midwest. They agreed on the Christian allegorical aspect of the Travis' story, but Scorsese sees him as the "commando" for Christ who goes too far, he has to kill you to save your life, while Schrader focuses on the problem of the determinism and chance" (Jaubin, 19).

As it was mentioned before, for Scorsese, the film is a kind of nostalgic reactionary response to the old urban landscape of New York city which is going to disappear and vanish under the beginning of the economic boom of the corporations at the end of the 1970s. His self-identification with Travis is the essence of his self-perpetuating way of dealing with his emotions as Keyser states in his book:" Scorsese viewed Travis, he told interviewers as 'a sympathetic figure' with real affinities to himself: 'There is certainly a lot of Travis in me, some of the same emotions. There are deep, dark things in all of us and they come out in different ways" (Keyser, 74).

Travis' murderous desire which results in real depth at the final sequence of the film explains his obsession and paranoid vision with the "representation of the postmodern differences" that threatens the utopian structure of the masculine wholeness in modernism: The hallucination that Travis enacts in that scene-and which results in real death-is the hallucination of masculinity. It's search for that image of ideal masculine wholeness that subtends the entire history of the movie" (Jaubin, 21). One of the important postmodern messages of the film is Travis' masculine anxiety to the decline of the patriarchal authority. The ideological representation of the film and its contradictions in terms of defining the solidified and integrated school of formalism and storytelling regardless of artistic and cultural discourse can be interpreted as the deconstruction of the modern sense of life in the decentered cultures. Indeed, the truth bout the film's quality of representation of the images which put is outside the mainstream of Hollywood production constructs the new artistic and cultural discourses to challenge the complexity of the identity in the postmodern era. The "others" who are blacks, pimps, women as a 'wives or prostitutes' and gays who seem to be marginalized in the ironical juxtapositions of the cultural forms, the ideas and the images of the patriarchal societies become to be significant elements of hegemonic racial hybridity for Travis. From first look at Travis, it is clear that he is positioned in the dominant racial order of the narrative to criticize the other characters. His expressionistic subjective gaze which governs his paranoid consciousness is the only frame of reference to echo the problematization of representation and to interrogate his carnivalesque objects from the perspective of class, gender, sexual orientation and identity.

The neon strip of Broadway between Time Square and Columbus Circle in New York City with pluralist display of multicultural identity through Travis' cab windows in the world dominated with image and sign creates the simulation or hyperreality of diversity which is not ideologically uniform such as the scenes in which he follows Iris (Jodie Foster), young prostitutes, through New York streets as his obsessional object. The tendency towards performance and the lack of grand narrative are the others postmodern features of the film. The acting for Scorsese is everything. Deniro's Choreographed performance displays his skills and familiarity with the acting styles in Actor's Studio, and his inspiration of Marlon Brando and James Dean testifies to the intrinsic and authentic performative values of his self-identification with the role. Deniro's reveals on numerous occasions Travis' incapacity to adapt to the external reality and his psychotic breakdown which is the effect of the narcissistic character disorder. Deniro's methodological style of film acting brings Travis's paranoid schizophrenic trauma to the surface, and it simultaneously helps the spectator to be concerned about Travis' wandering to search for his own identity through different costumes, make-ups, and performances. Travis' voice which is reading his underground diary is a kind of homage to Dostaevsky's underground notes creating a postmodern multiple narrative in which the four different almost episodic narratives are eventually interwoven together floating in his stream of consciousness.: Travis's wandering and loneliness through the streets of New York City, his fascination with the blondes and specifically his girlfriend Betsy(Cybill Shepherd), his obsession to protect Iris, and his final revenge against the other identities that existed in the multicultural diversity. The lack of closure at the end of the film he abandons Travis in the middle of the street driving to nowhere with the close-up of his paranoid eyes and his gaze on the night lights of New York City defines the critical and satirical analogy for the determining code of postmodern in the evaluation of contemporary cultural contextualization. The spectator's mind is now prepared to receive the hermeneutic interpretation of the film which is one of the most important ingredients of the postmodern structure in the analyzing of the text. The end of the film which keeps the narrative open is the appropriate visual motif of Baudrillard' simulacra: the copy without the original. The neon and the lights of the streets in New York City through Travis' point of view is the simulation of the external reality that can be reflected to his eyes from the windows of his cab, and those windows are the perfect metaphor for the screen of the cinema.

Travis's death-obsession towards the minority subcultures such as punks, lesbians, gays and drug addicts can be immediately recognized and understood as the motivated psychological response to the other social and sexual identities. His sado-masochistic relationship with Betsy, Iris and society through the grotesque inflation of abusers and victims drives him to the tyrannical brutality that penetrates through the image of reality, and his murderous desire to demolish that image can not be efficient to destroy the essence of that reality. At the end of the film that reality still lingers on every corner of the streets of New York city. Indeed, his rage is against the virtual image which is constructed inside of his mind through the labyrinth of his paranoid exploration of the postmodern urban landscape, his cinematic voyeurism and sadism inverts the social type and the role of the men in the ultimate definition of gender politics.

The lack of phallic power and the obsession with masculinity force Travis to destroy the image of reality by using violence. The ostensibly private world of the darkness and night scenes inspired by the film noir constructs the horrific atmosphere for Travis' castration anxiety. His desire to own a gun to alleviate his threat of castration anxiety is explained by feminist critics in psychoanalytical terms as the ultimate result of his voyeurism and fetishistic desire as Keyser states in his book: " The nexus in Taxi Driver between Travis' repressed sexuality and cathartic violence provides the dramatic energy; each failed romance loads another cartridge into Travis' weapons" (Keyser, 73). The hypnotic effect of his windshield on his eyes provides a met-cinematic distanciation for him. His claustrophobic isolation in the car creates an entrapment and prison for his masculinity and desire to have a physical relationship with the female body. The postmodern concept of gender policy serves to destroy the authenticity of the male gaze and power on the objectified representation of the female body and identity as the fetishized object. The actual and satirical analysis of sado-masochism and voyeurism in the film raises consciousness about the working of patriarchal representation of the images in the process of questioning the fear of sexuality as somehow compromising feminine virtue. Travis's fear of touching Betsy as the object of desire prepares a context for the film in which her appearance as an angel pushes him to find the obsession with the archetypal symbolic male power, in this case, the physical relationship. The avoidance of possessing her drives him to violence as Keyser indicates in his book: "Travis cannot understand Betsy, cannot enter her world. So like Frankenstein's monster, he tries to destroy what he can not embrace" (Keyser, 75). The solidarity of the masculine virtue in the dominant film genres such as western and gangster film is principally the problematic discourse of Scorsese's films and his homage to classic Hollywood films. In fact, the male character's powerlessness in terms of femme fatal of film noir draws the attention to the mystery and instability of sexual identity in Scorsese's films. In both films, Taxi Driver and The Searchers, the central theme is the irritated masculinity which is insulted and disrespected by the representation of femme fatale as Stern states in his book: "Central to both films is an impulse to rescue-to "return home'-a woman who does not want to be saved" (Stern, 33). In fact Travis tries to save his last image of femininity folded in the patriarchal structure of American societies.

The concept of "Body' and bodily obsession in the film is the reminiscent of the sickness which is everywhere in Travis' postmodern society. The body for Scorsese's characters is the religious and ritual device to organize a disciplinary regime for cleaning the consciousness of the anti-patriarchal external reality of postmodernism as Stern continues in his book: "Taxi Driver doesn't assert that the body is a machine )or conversely, that the machine is a body) but rather it unleashes the metaphor of the body as a vehicle for the acting out of prohibited impulses and explores the psychic and somatic mutations which this entails" (Stern, 53). The shift of power of domination of men over women which is a characteristic and authentic element of postwar and postmodern eras can be recognized as the horrible self-destructed desire of the male when he tries to make a weapon of his body to rape and destroy the new identity of femininity in the female body.


Jaubin, Amy. Taxi Driver, London: BFI.2000.

Keyser, Lee. Martin Scorsese New York: Twayne Publisher, 1992.

Stern, Lesley. The Scorsese Connection London: BFI, 1995.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Thomas Gutierrez Alea

Thomas Gutierrez Alea: In the Memory of the Underdevelopment

Thomas Gutierrez Alea's Memorias del Subdesarrollo (In the Memory of the Underdevelopment) (1968) on the pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary worlds of intellectual community and the individuals in Cuba portrays the subjective perception of the central character, Sergio(Sergio Corrieri), whose intellectual perceptiveness offers his non-political vocabulary of the images on the representation of the ideological and the new cultural movement in Cuba. Indeed, his perception unfolds his isolation and alienation with the establishment of the new political situations discovered through his different points of view and juxtaposed with the narrative style of the film and his look of distanciation as Martin indicates in his book: " In Alea's Memorias del Subdesarrollo, arguably the most ambivalent Cuban film produced. Alea's ambivalence is not only filtered through the past (The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961), it is embodied in the figure of Sergio, a representative of the national bourgeoisie, a class dismantled, exiled, and reviled by the time of the film's production" (Martin, 150). Obviously, Sergio's voice which is heard over the images defines and prepares a grotesque and suicidal confession of the man whose psychoanalytic look and narcissistic self-portrait construct the superficiality and the artificiality of his experience with the function of the new social reality.

The documentary footage which represents the Cuban socio-political history emphasizes Sergio's unenthusiastic desire to be involved and participate with the revolutionary occurrences, and evidently creates a kind of Brechtian distance to provoke the audience to consider the social anatomy of the atmosphere which surrounds him. Obviously, the collage structure of the juxtaposed images in the film creates a contrast between Sergio's gaze and the reality represented by newsreels as Elena states in his book :

" Alea therefore used the newsreel as historical markers which contributed to the general feeling of authenticity, 'Collage' was not in itself something new in the cinema in 1968, but Alea used it in a profoundly original way. Beyond its function as historical maker, the exported juxtaposed images introduced a different point of view, which ran parallel to Sergio's. As a consequence, this device throws into relief the subjective quality of Sergio's gaze but conversely, it also emphasizes discursive specificity of the newsreels" (Elena, 104).

His lack of power and dilemma to create a dialogue with the morality of the new ideological regime in Cuba through his subjective quality of the aesthetic images of the film appear perfectly to be the dialectical reasons for his self-paralysis, individualism, and non-political relationship with the political life of everyday reality.  His self-reflection and critical thought to the past can be observed through the flashbacks, and the impact of these memories on Sergio's self-delusion and immobility draws attention significantly to his bourgeois background and unfolds his intellectual sensitivity to his subjective vision of the historical moments which put him in the state of the antihero.

Sergio's dissociation with the realm of the political structure in the metropolitan city, of Havana, is represented in the subjective hand-held camera, the jump cut and the fragmentation of the juxtaposed images, and his stylistic portrayal of the middle-class character whose unanimated contact with the people of the small communities and the lower classes brings the viewer to sympathize and identify with him in terms of farcical and comic complexity with the characteristic form and the structure of the new social reality. As Alea mentioned in his conversation with Burton:

"In one sense Sergio represents the idea of what every man with that particular kind of[bourgeois] mentality would like to have been: rich, good-looking. intelligent, with access to the upper social strata \ and to beautiful women who are very willing to go to bed with him. That is to say, people identify to a certain degree with him as a character. The film plays with this identification" (Burton, 119).

On the other hand, his look of distinction with his family and friends who left the homeland after the revolution is immediately reinforced by his detachment to his wife and the best friend in the airport through the plate glass. His desire to overcome the ambiguity of his feelings about the melodramatic past provokes him to participate mentally in the ideological struggle with his interests and personal possessions in the previous world. The contrast between his perplexed critical spirit and the claustrophobic world in which he lives exemplifies his incapability to make a decision to be involved with the revolutionary movement. Though his character is not offensively or represented aggressively in terms of respecting the principal values of the revolution forcing upon him, the audience is prohibited and rejected to self-identify with him, according to Alea in the same conversation with Burton:

"But then what happens? As the film progresses, one begins to perceive not only the vision that Sergio has of himself but also the vision that reality gives to us, the people who made the film. They correspond to our vision of reality and also to our critical view of the protagonist. Little by little, the character begins to destroy himself precisely because reality begins to overwhelm him, for he is unable to act. At the end of the film, the protagonist ends up like a cockroach squashed by his fear, by his impotence, by everything" (Burton, 119).

Indeed, Sergio's narcissistic character is completely uninterested, and his moral faithfulness to the bourgeois values which implies his apolitical personality represents him as the prisoner of his social status of the middle class. His sexual and romantic relationship with Elena (Daisy Granados) and his interest in educating her interfere with her social class and concern with his domination of the masculine power over her femaleness. His power over Elena seems to be perfectly predicted as the patriarchal enforcement of a petit-bourgeois on controlling and shaping the structure of the social role and her historical relation with the revolutionary transformation of her conscience, and when he fails to objectify Elena and to influence on her, he begins to continue his objective reflection in terms of the relationship between master and servant on his housemaid. It seems to be always difficult for Sergio to understand the impact of the revolutionary social density on the decayed values of the traditional colonialist expanded forces. His alienation from his motherland can be followed and represented by his self-identification with Hemingway who simultaneously represents the defeated colonialism. Sergio's solitude to avoid facing the new reality inevitably and symbolically reminds us of Hemingway's suicidal commitment to confront the new society.

Not surprisingly, to satisfy his intellectual quest and privilege, Sergio takes Elena to the museum and Hemingway's place to mock her inability to realize the cultural higher values of European and American colonialists and to avoid his confrontation with his inability to understand the revolutionary movement. It seems to be crucial for Alea to represent an individual who is only concerned with himself, and his thoughts and sexual quest in terms of the battle of the sexes force him to approach a kind of characteristic life that can be portrayed fundamentally as an alienated outsider. The film addressed the people who according to Fornet:

 "...have believed themselves to be the sole depository of the revolutionary legacy; those who know what the socialist morality is and who have institutionalized mediocrity and provincialism...They are those who tell us that people are not mature enough to know the truth...This film is also directed to them, and is also intended, among other things, to annoy them, to provoke them, to irritate them" (Fornet, 98).

Of course, this is always Alea's obsession to put the place of the old world in front of the new ones such as his film Los Doce Sillas (Twelve Chairs) (1962) which has a comic narrative and is enriched with complex techniques as Desones states in his writing: "An example of social realism because it presents in a very direct way a critical moment for our society, a moment of transition when one can observe very clearly the fight between the old and the new" (Desones, 6).

The connection between society and the individual in Memorias del Subdesarrollo and the director's focus on the historical moments and political atmosphere acquired distinctive dynamic ideas of revolution eventually turn the camera on the question of liberation and Sergio's intellectual fragility and vulnerability with the new social order and collective consciousness. His pretensions and contradictions with Cuban society are examined and portrayed stylistically by the director to create a kind of intellectual snobbism that prohibits Sergio from breaking the social boundaries between him and Elena. The embodiment of the revolutionary outcome can be put in question throughout Sergio's existential and philosophical stream of consciousness which is under the influence of Cuban machismo and his intellectualism can be observed as the false not authentic representation of the character that undergoes the self-absorbing transformation. As Micheal Chanan noticed in his writings:

"Of all Cuban films of 1960s it is in certain ways the closest to the ethos of the metropolitan intellectual, a film that portrays the subjective condition of its central character, a kind of intellectual antihero in a state of paralyzed perceptiveness...Sergio is neither a revolutionary nor a counterrevolutionary. He would like to be a writer, which he perceives as a vocation outside the realms of the political imperative" (Chanan, 289).

Paul Schrader also considers Alea as the director whose insight into the Cuban revolution draws attention to his interest to visualize the portrayal of the Revolution with its whole outcome: " The films of Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea insight into how the Cuban revolution that had inspired so many people all over the world had come to a crisis. His films always defined the limits of expression in revolutionary Cuba" (Schroeder, xii). In a similar manner, according to Julia Levin: "Unlike any other Cuban filmmaker, Alea was able to retain a sophisticated balance between his dedication to the revolution and his critical judgment of it when its ideals had been betrayed" (Levin, Sense of Cinema).

For Alea, the film raises profound questions about the role of intellectuals concerning the revolution as Elena indicates in his writing:

"What is the intellectual's role in society? What is their role with respect to politics? what is the function of art that purports to be subversive? such questions were to elicit diverse and contradictory answers but would henceforth make it impossible, for artist and intellectuals to act and to think without first taking a stand as to those dilemmas. Memorias del Subdesarrollo echoed such preoccupations through the figure of the average intellectuals, deprived of any outstanding qualities, who underwent an intellectual crisis in individual terms" (Elens, 105).

At the same time, Alea's obsession and enthusiastic desire to involve the audience with the daily reality go beyond the spectator's expectations, and take a kind of didactic and stylistic approach to educate his mind on the representation of the reality as Chijona states in his writing: "Equipping the spectator with critical insights into reality, to the extent that he ceases to be a spectator and feels moved to actively participate in the process of daily life. In other words[what is needed are] not only works which help to interpret the world but which also help to transform it" (Chijona, 29). Alea, without referring to the Italian Neorealist movement, historicizes the narrative in his film just like any other director in that period, and tries to represent a rhetorical and ideological figure of the revolution which demonstrates the ideology of renewal and rebuilding for the whole country as King observes in his writings: "The vast majority of Latin American films I have seen are about history or memory or both, using flashbacks, multiple time layers, historical reconstruction, historical documentary inserts, and many other devices to historicize the narrative" (King, 115).

Finally, Alea in the closing section of the film shows Sergio's defenseless and anxious situation in preparing for the Cuban missile crisis, and his self-paralysis ambiguously can be considered as his final suicidal resolution right between speeches on television by Kennedy and Fidel. He who consumes gradually the remnants of his decayed middle class in his alienation with new social phenomena is captured accurately in the face of the threat of nuclear drama. The spectator leaves the auditorium while he still thinks about Sergio's future and destiny at the end of the film, and Alea's intention to support the idea of representing him in the claustrophobic and entrapped mise-en scene still raises the crucial question for the audience: Do the intellectuals and artists can perfectly detach themselves from their own social class and status and sacrifice their own life for sake of revolution? Alea's answer to the question is simple and easy to realize: It depends on the intellectuals and their tendency to participate in new realities.

Burton J. Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Film-makers, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Chanan, Micheal. Cuban Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Chijona,Gerardo. Gutierrez Alea: An Interview, Framework: Afilm Journal(Norwich, England) 10 (Spring 1979), 29, (Reprinted from Cine Cubano 93).

Desnoes, Edmundo. Habla un Director Revolution, La Habna, January 8, 1963.

Elena, Alberto. The Cinema of Latin America, London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

Fornet, Ambrosio. Tomas Gutierrrez Alea: Una Retrospective Critica, La Habana, Letras Cubanas,
1987.

Levin, Julia. Sense of Cinema: Tomas Gutierrez Alea, http//www.senseofcinema.com.

King, John. Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London: BFI, 1993.

Mertin, Micheal T. New Latin American Cinema, Detroit:Wane State University Press, 1997.

Schroeder, Paul A. Tomas Gutierrez Alea: Dialectics of a Filmmaker, Routledge, 2002.


By: Morad Sadeghi