A Letter from an Unknown Woman

The Figure of Woman in Max Ophuls's A Letter from an Unknown Woman

Max Ophuls's works offer insights into women as figures for male pleasure. He has been characterized as a woman's director whose films were made for male spectators. Melodramatic depictions of women are consistently at work in Ophuls's films, and his sorrow for women's degradation, which gives rise to their spiritual strength, can not be denied.
Susan White believes that "The interest of Ophuls's films lies, therefore, not simply in their exaltation of the woman-martyr but in their analytical approach to the process of marginalization of the bad or amorous woman and other outcast members of society" (White,6). From White's point of view, Ophuls's women are mostly the victims of patriarchal capitalism. The processes of capitalistic exchange, as they relate to prostitution, undermine women's ultimate self-sacrifice for love and martyrdom.

On the other hand, Stephan Heath emphasizes the standard Hollywood production. Heath places Ophuls's film about a woman's gender identity within what he sees as the ideological realm of classical Hollywood cinema: " That "Ophuls" is the name of a certain exasperation of the standard Hollywood production of his time is no doubt the case as it is too that the exasperation is a veritable mannerism of vision, and vision of the woman-with the masquerade become the very surface of the text" (Heath, 163). For Heath, the relation between the woman and the look in Ophuls's films, such as  A Letter from an Unknown Woman(1948), has an important function. He places the film within certain ideological boundaries that separate Hollywood films from other films. The use and the representation of women in classical Hollywood cinema have been thought by Heath and others to present feminine desire as masochistic and the female body as the prey for the male gaze. Still, Ophuls's films reveal an awareness of what drives a woman to despair or suicide.

Ophuls's women are not in control of the narrative and it seems they are tormented by the plot. The movement of narrative in classical Hollywood cinema reinforces the male ego by its placement of the masculine subject in the position of visual mastery.
The woman in classical Hollywood cinema is either investigated by the narrative through the surrogate spectator, or narrator and is found guilty or she is set up as a fetish object. Does Ophuls have the director figure that seems to control the movement of the plot that torments the female character?

A Letter from an Unknown Woman is a cinematic expression of female suffering for love as white states in his writing: " If that love is masochistic, then the film is a tribute to the heroism of female masochism, through which Lena manages to have her way in the guise of submitting to another" (White, 132). In A Letter from an Unknown Woman, the polarization between the observer(Lisa) and the observed (Stefan) reveals the dualism between the woman's problematic status as a subject of the gaze and the man as the object of the gaze. As Robin Wood states in his writing: "The cinema of Max Ophuls signifies women as the subject in searching for the gaze... In the context of Letter's visual realm, the aggressive potential of the gaze ultimately rebounds upon the two protagonists while Stefan is reading the letter, and the action of the story that unfolds in the flashback is narrated by Lisa but imagined by Stefan" (Wood,  ). The Perception of the other's subjectivity-especially when the "other" is a woman who must establish her right to exist-is made difficult or impossible when the projection of image of that "other" seems to imply the oppositions between gender representations. On the other hand, in Letter Lisa's gender representation is a lonely image that is not dangerous to Stefan's right to exist and never threatens his bourgeois life. Lisa's voyeurism is not fetishistic but can be explained psychoanalytically. Throughout most of Letter, Lisa sees, hears, and narrates. Only at the end of the film does Stefan see Lisa when he hallucinates the girl behind the glass door. For Lisa, he is out of ordinary mortals.

Her fascination with the necessary distance from the desired object is caught by the nature of the photographic images. The function of Ophuls is firmly centered on Lisa's consciousness. the following description of a sequence in the film leads us to the sensation of moving with the character in the mise-en-scene that creates a kind of subjective experience for the audience; "Ophuls' camera work achieves a perfect balance in terms of spectator's involvement-between sympathy and detachment" (Wood, 126). As Robin Wood discovers, Ophuls's camera has a stronger tendency to move with the characters rather than giving a subjective shot or point of view of character which is infrequent in Ophuls's films. Whereas Ophuls's position of camera do not restrict the audience to Lisa's point of view, the spectator can still realize what Lisa experiences in her journey into the narrative. The tendency of the film to draw us into her vision is balanced and counterpointed throughout by a conflicting tendency to stop us from identifying with the character.

Tania Modleski makes the fascinating point that if the heart of Letter involves Stefan's being made into a man by finally accepting the duel at the end, then Letter, thought to be a prototypical woman's film, is really for and about a man: " We might suspect, then, that the film's movement will involve Stefan's coming to repudiate the former childishness of his ways and acknowledge the sway to the patriarchal law" (Modleski, 20). Moreover, Wood states that Ophuls's films in comparison with Howard Hawks's films are woman-centered: " Traditionally, the female principle has been regarded as passive, the male active, and, without wishing to suggest that Ophuls's films endorse any simplistic opposition of male and female roles, one cannot but feel a connection between the emphasis on fatality in his movies and his gravitation to woman-centered subjects" (Wood, 122). Not surprisingly, when she explains to the doorman that she forgot something, a reverse shot reveals Lisa standing behind the bars of the gate: the visual signs of entrapment have not been leaving Lisa from the beginning of the film. However, at one point in the film, Lisa explains her radical refusal to speak about her own; "I wanted to be the one woman you had known who never asked you for anything." From Tania Modleski's point of view, Lisa's silence is the mark of hysteria: "Lisa's is the classic dilemmas of what psychoanalysis calls the hysterical woman, caught between two equally alienating alternatives: wither identifying with the man or being an object of his desire" (Modleski, 20). Even Andrew Saris seems to believe that Ophuls's camera movements in Letter never create an aesthetic through which the man can be degraded objectively: "The main point is that Ophuls is much more than the sum of all his camera movements. What elementary aestheticians overlook in Ophuls is the preciseness of his sensibility. His women may dominate subjectively, but his men are never degraded objectively" (Sarris, 71). For Tania Modleski, Ophuls' view is never feminist, like Mizogouchi's, or feminine, like Bergman's and Antonioni's.

In contrast, Modleski, White, and Wood believe that the audience's sympathies are certainly with Lisa, and Ophuls's camera tracking shot intensifies the viewer's engagement with Lisa's experiences. While the architecture of lighting and camera movement in the staircase scenes prefigure ominous losses later in the film, Ophuls's visual metaphors in the shot enhance the structural accuracy of the details and establish the power of the look as Willeman states in his book: "It is also interesting to note that Ophuls appeared to be aware of the sexual implications of isolating a person for the look, the sexual implications of cutting to close-ups offering e.g., the body of a woman for access to the look" (Willeman, 70). Lisa's look seems not to objectify Stefan's body and simultaneously her body is not objectified by Stefan's look. Lisa's desire for Stefan can be captured and displayed not as fetishistic but repressed. But another implication at the end of the film is also that Lisa has finally become a normal girl. Perhaps in comparison with Modleski's criticism, Lisa's final devotion to a female figure, a feminized Stefan or herself, may also indicate an even more radical exclusion of patriarchy via lesbianism.

Most of the sequences in the film translate Lisa's masochism to her submissiveness, I mean to say that she acknowledges the force of patriarchal values and their all masculine qualities especially when she leaves the building at the end of the sequence and lets Stefan continue with his romance. In that sequence, Lisa is much more in control of the fantasy. However, she is certainly not the director of her story. In fact, through her story, the feminization of Stefan makes it possible for him to embody the necessary sadistic element in Lisa's masochistic fiction. This sadistic element must construct him carefully to prevent him from emerging as a potential other subject who might take control of the scenario away from the masochistic subject. She self-consciously orchestrates her development into what might appear to be passive femininity, and she actively denies Stephan the opportunity to come to know and love her by avoiding, at significant moments, acknowledgment of their past together as White states in her book: " Lisa's actions, her keeping herself at a distance from the object of her affection, may be necessary to the fulfillment of her desire, even, perhaps, to her psychological survival" (White, 161). Her strategic silence in the sequence is more than a defensive measure. The silent suffering is crucial to Lisa's happiness. Though she will manage to gain access to the aural pleasure and the visual control, she is more than willing to suffer in silence.

Ophuls's camera begins to follow Lisa in her masochistic fantasy, and its tracking shots have sympathetic accompanying with her suffering looks. His strategic camera movements reveal the most poignant moments of desire that are folded in Lisa's look. Finally, the camera movements at the end of the sequence linked to Lisa's sighting of Stefan and his place draw our attention to how Stefan lives outside of Lisa's realm of narrative as Wexman states in her book: " Stefan exists in an atmosphere of random temporality...Stefan is associated with the street, a multidirectional space, where time is governed by chance" (Wexman, 6). Perhaps Lisa realizes that the street has a meaning for Stefan. Moreover, the empty spaces of the hallways, recorded by tracking shots, are potentially entrapping for Lisa. We should not forget that the stairways suggest the inescapable consequences of Lisa's sexual assertions.

In terms of the character's class representations, the female protagonist is ultimately geared to the sphere of the middle class. There is always tension, in this type of film, between class and sexuality. In women's films, the moment of the hero's acknowledgment of his humble impulses often takes the form of a rejection of bourgeois life. Lisa is more and less a member of the middle class, and it is precisely in the collapsing of class conflicts into the bourgeois family romance that the middle class remains prevalent in the film.

Letter redefines the history of cinema in its distillation of the Hollywood vision of female suffering and pleasure. The concepts such as voyeurism, masochism, class, suffering, and pleasure are reiterated in the particular moments of the film. Problems such as nationalism, sexual and religious identity, historical change, and artistic desire can never be solved entirely in Ophuls's cinema. The interchange between stage and auditorium or public and private life became increasingly a stylistic device and a theme in Ophuls's cinema. The public and private lives of Lisa and Stefan create tension that reflects the difference between what is hidden behind the curtain and what is revealed on the stage. For Ophuls, the film is a spectacle. With his increasingly sophisticated use of a moving camera, he attempts to overcome his fears of confusion between work of art and reality.

Ophuls is not a Hollywood director. The Works of Max Ophuls today are more than academic, the province of film studies and criticism. His cinema focuses not in any immediate sense on men and women but on those positions and relations of the meaning of man and woman in its representation and its production of those representations as Willeman states in his book: " In Ophuls, cinema becomes a machine for the entrapment of the look" (Willeman,71). Therefore, does Ophuls have the director figure that seems to control the movement of the plot that torments the woman? My answer is no because the dialectic of order and the excess turns on the pivot of a woman's look in a patriarchal society that is controlled by the male gaze and Ophuls does seem to identify with his women. characters. Ophuls's films focus on women, not as the other sex, but as the human phenomenon who seeks the power of the gaze to control her narrative and destiny.



Heath, Stephan. Questions of Cinema Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Modleski, Tania. Time and Desire in the Woman's Film Cinema Journal 23, No.3, Spring, 1984.

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Max Ophuls New York: Dutton, 1968.

White, Susan. The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision of the Figure of Woman New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.

Willeman, Paul. Ophuls London: British Film Institute, 1978.

Wexman, Virginia Wright. The Transfiguration of History: Ophuls, Vienna, and Letter from an Unknown Woman New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986.

Wood, Robin. Ewig Hin der Liebe Gluck Personal Views, London: Gordon Fraser, 1976.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Death in Venice

Visconti: Death in Venice, Adaptation Report

Writer: Thomas Mann, Published:1912, Charcters:1.Gustav von Aschenbach (writer), 2. Tadzio (boy), 3.Tadzio's Family. The name of the novel in the German Language: is Der Tod in Venedig.


Literary Synopsis and Description:

The story involves a cultivated bourgeois artist with the noble qualities of a writer, Aschenbach, who is helplessly alienated from his social background in Germany. Therefore, he retreated to Venice, Italy, to find personal happiness and achieve his formidable artistic creativity. As the novella proceeds, he sees a young boy, Tadzio, on the beach with the divine figure of a Greek mythological statute, and he becomes obsessed with every essence of perfection imposed by the boy's image in his mind. His adoration for beauty as an artist which is metaphorically embodied in terms of homophobia anxiety and erotic impulse leads his intellectual life toward the chaotic delirium which makes him follow the boy and his family through the city contaminated by death. He, as the protagonist, whose self-conscious wanders and moves from the present to the past ended up inevitably to his death which is the outcome of his pursuit of fulfillment.

Socio-Cultural Analysis:

From the earliest story, Thomas Mann was emotionally obsessed with his anxiety about the threatening repressed forces of human nature, specifically in terms of erotic passion and artistic sensuality, which inevitably brought civilization to the climax of its inner corruption. In particular, Mann belonged to the intellectuals and modernist artists whose critical vision of society and history at the beginning of the 20th century characterized their artistic self-reflexivity, the historical complex evolution of industrialization in the societies, and the decadence of European aristocracy emphatically in blooming of Freudian ideas. The aspects of Freudian theories such as the repression of libidinal drives and the individual subconscious condition to express the inner complexes in terms of creating mythological taboos in cultural contexts are considered the pioneering elements to analyze and criticize the artistic perception and political crisis of European cultures in the pre-war period.

Credit:

Director; Luchino Visconti

Source: Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice

Director of Photography: Pasquale De Santis

Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni

Costume: Piero Tosi

Scenery: Ferdinando Scarfioti

Music: Gustave Mahler's III Symphony, 4th Movement, and V Symphony, 4th Movement

Producer: Mario Gallo

Actors: Dirk Bogard (Gustave von Aschenbach), Bjorn Anderson (Tadzio), Silvana Mangano (Tadzio's mother), Norra Ricci (Tadzio's governess), Marisa Berenson (Aschenbach's wife)

First Performance: London, U.K., March 1, 1971

Length: 3,688 m

Duration:135 min



Film Synopsis and Description:

The narrative of the film is about the story of Gustav von Ascenbach, a German composer, whose sense of beauty and his artistic perfectionism reinforce him to arrive desperately in Venice to regain his cosmological balance with the chaotic plentitude of surroundings. Immediately after his arrival, he encounters Tadzio, the Polish young boy with an aristocratic backgrounds whose beauty and youth tremendously occupy his mind and lead him to radicalize his aesthetic formalism to alternative representations of beauty and its purity of form. His distorted memories of the past blended with the relevant aspects of the present time invite him as the spectator to enter the hallucinated world of passion and admiration for youth, beauty, and the realm of fantasies. He, who appears to react pathetically toward his attachment to the complexity of this obsession, follows the boy and his family through the Venetian. The spiritual and physical exhaustion of this chase consumes him and leaves him dead at the end of the film on the beach.

Visconti's aesthetic to visualize Aschenbach's state of mind and stream of consciousness provokes him to represent the images through the protagonist's point of view by using of pan, zoom, and sometimes the combination of both as the camera movement. Furthermore, the flashbacks occur through the jump-cutting rather than the dissolve. Of course, the costume, color, and set design offer us as the audience Visconti's obsession to represent the details, and ultimately Mahler's 4th movement as the soundtrack explores and unfolds the protagonist's melancholic passion for beauty and perfection.

Socio-Cultural Analysis:

Visconti's artistic achievement in adapting Mann's novella emerges to some extent as the response to his autobiographical work which constitutes his sexual orientation, social background, and ideological worldview as the Marxist. As the founder of Neo-Realism in Italy after the Second World War was directing Death in Venice (1971) in the historical moments from the 1960s and 1970s during which the post-war generation of European Intellectuals ideologically and culturally were oriented to Marxist theories, Sartre and Heidegerian existential philosophies and Sexual Liberation (Gay Movement). Visconti's self-identification process with Gustave von Aschenbach as an artist can be also considered as the director's attempt toward visualizing the difficult reconciliation between an artist's perfectionism to approach the beauty of reality and his strong confusion with the social oppositions as the environmental forces.


The analogy between the Adaptation and the Literary Work:

Visconti's Death in Venice is in general faithful and loyal cinematographic adaptation of the literary text in terms of comprehending the social atmosphere, environmental structure of the narrative, and behavioral psychology of the characters. But like any other adaptation of literary work to the film in which the transformation of elements brings particular discourses in a cinematic attempt to visualize the reality of context, Visconti's film suggests and implies his splendid audiovisual realization of his themes in that richly reconstructed work of art such as the representation of historical aristocratic society and the manipulation of mise-en-scene based upon Aschenbach's stream of consciousness. Perhaps more than any other crucial difference related to Mann's protagonist, the characteristic shift in adaptation occurred principally between Mann's artist as the writer and Visconti's alter ego as the composer which raises the ambiguous issues and discussions about Gustav Mahler's personal life. In addition, the opening sequence of the film is the prototype of Visconti's protagonist's presentation whose mind is preoccupied with his existential alienation with dubious moral issues and characteristic function of dominated social class. Therefore, the audience is supposedly considered to view the beginning of the first chapter in Mann's novella including Ascenbach's life in Munich not in the opening sequence of the film but through his flashbacks that help to intensify the character's internal journey to struggle with his moral dilemma about the purity of art and the artist's lifestyle.
Ultimately, by adding some dialectical conversations filled with ambiguity between the protagonist and his best friend in Germany, Visconti seems to manifest briefly his anxieties about artistic creativity and perfectionism.

Film Analysis & Evaluation:

Visconti's Death in Venice has a hypertextual structure in which the provocative leitmotiv of erotic conceptualization is used as the aesthetic metaphor to create an exquisitely ironic image of his homage and critic evaluation of devastated nobility and romanticism of the last decade of 19th-century art in Europe. The inter-textual complexities in Death in Venice, simultaneously; generate Viscontian's self-reflexivity to Ascenbach as an artist to accentuate the aristocratic social circumstances and the repressed homosexuality desire which undoubtedly was an urgent subjective need around 1970. The inter-textuality among cinematic recreation of Mann's novella by Visconti, Mahler's enigmatic paradoxical music, and Marcel Proust's stream of consciousness brings a great deal of attention which has been focused on Visconti's rationality and obsession to tame and control his artistic creativity and personal autonomy as the author.

Death in Venice is an outstanding masterpiece in terms of setting the intellectual metamorphosis over the fragility of the old world, politicizing a symmetrical transformation of the anesthetized world of aristocratic values from Mann's novella to Visconti's adaptation and categorizing the controversial theories of ethical mobilization for pure art and demonic forces of repressed desires and haunting death through the creativity process. According to Carolo Testa:

"If there is one generalization that can be made about philological comments on Luchino Visconti's approach to Thomas Mann, it is that more than a few scholars have viewed Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) under the puzzling methodological presuppositions that cinematic re-creation is but a crippled younger sister of philology. Yet it seems obvious that the main goal of great artists re-creating other great artists ought to be loyalty not to someone else, but to themselves first and foremost" (Testa, 197).

Visconti protested in his interview with Lino Micciche about his preference to make an artistic work with more personal overtones such as Death in Venice:

"We have got a past behind us, and, in a sense, we have already made the point we wanted to make. I made mine from Ossessione (1943) to The Damned(1969), and when I allowed myself a break, as I did in the case of White Night, it was by no means a demanding one. Now we may well be grappling with more particular and personal themes, but behind us, we have a record of political struggle that can justify his belated and temporary return to a 'privacy' we rejected for years. Will you argue that ours, too, is a crisis, a state of laziness? Let's assume. Still, it took us forty years to get there" (Micciche, 125).

For that reason, Death in Venice is probably Visconti's most personal work in terms of representing the artist's anxieties and obsessions to create an artistic work.

In conclusion, the mythological obsession to depict the purity of beauty can result in the decaying of intellectual self-control on the order of the authoritative and hierarchical structure of the ecstatic dimension of artistic creativity. therefore; Pasquale de Santis' cinematography has the allegiance to conflict between beauty and aging as the dualistic element and Visconti's editing reciprocates between loyalty to Mann's novella and the protagonist's state of mind.


Micciche, Lino. Luchino Visconti: Un Profiol Critico Venice: Marsilio, 1996.

Testa, Carlo. Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2002.


By: Morad Sadeghi

The Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni

The Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni: To Express the Existential Identity

Michelangelo Anotonioni's style in his films is founded and established on his interest to represent the existential emotions and the repressed nostalgic reflection of his characters through the landscape, architecture of mise-en-scene, the long takes, and the visual cues. The boredom, depression, nostalgia, emptiness, perplexity, confusion, anxiety, alienation, and loneliness always raise the questions for audience to engage philosophically with the cinematic text. The artistic self-expression and desire to offer a modernistic representation of the primary structure of human existence in terms of confronting the internal contradictions and a journey through our interior landscapes become subject to investigate in his films. Of Course, for Antonioni, an expression of existential angst or alienation is a typical response to the art-film milieu of the period as Brunette states in his book: "This focus can be also explained historically by the fact that in the late 1950s European existential philosophy, as popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre and others after World War II, began to filter down to more popular artistic forms such as the movies" (Brunette, 1).

The hermeneutic interpretation of Antonioni's films can be seen as the work of the audience to discover his unattainable meaning as Brunette states:

"The vast majority of Antonioni's films thus can be seen as collections of signifiers that turn out to have ambiguous signified(which is not a bad description of the world, either), and this impetus, this need to interpret, to make sense of experience, occurs even on the level of the shot. Important narrative or even cognitive information is often withheld, and the constant visual mysteries that result also contribute to a certain "hermeneutic pressure" that is always present" (Brunette, 4).

As the German director Wim Wenders remembered Antonioni's speeches on the future of the cinema and his statement through his confession that " I am not such a pessimist. I've always been someone who tried to adapt to whatever forms of expression coped best with the contemporary world[about Antonioni's cinema]" (Wenders, x). Of course, the socio-political conditions of the world affect Antonioni's architecture of vision as Brunette states in his book:

"It is all too often forgotten that Antonioni was, like every other artist, responding to specific social, cultural, and moral problems that had risen as part of il boom, Italy's amazing fifteen years economic recovery collapse at the end of the World War II. Pier Leprohon, who, ironically, was a chief architect of the 'alienation thesis', was almost alone among earlier critics of Antonioni in also insisting that both L'aventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vitae, which appeared the same year, were first and foremost testimonies on their period" (Brunette, 6).

Through his aesthetic vision, Antonioni demands his spectators to feel the mood of the scene through the visual cues and clues rather than only following dialogues as Wood states in their writings:

"There is a similar refusal to explain emotions to the audience. Both show us evidence and make us draw conclusions. The difference is in aim. Antonioni is trying to describe the character's emotions through their behavior. He uses the camera to present the behavior so that will interpret it in a specific way, and be able to correlate our interpretations into a general conclusion" (Wood et Cameron, 6).

Indeed, Antonioni's films can be viewed and realized by the spectators as cinematic text which violates conventional rules and expectations as Chatman states in his book: " The slow editing pace, the careful, subtle, measured camera movements, and the long holds on faces and details of location violate their[audience] expectations and elicit the question that producers most dread-What's this movie about anyway?"(Chatman, 1). His desire to highlight the discussion about boredom and anxiety raises the question of existential struggle as Wood continues in their writings: Boredom in Antonioni's movies is always the main component of a life devoid of any purpose except enjoyment, and reduced to a search for ways of passing the time" (Wood & Cameron, 12). At the same time, the presence of the politics of femininity and gender issues can be detected and followed as another aspect of Antonioni's cinematic reflection specifically for his strong female characters as Antonioni tells in his interview:

"I think that woman is inclined to have a deeper perception of what happens around her than man has. Possibly this is due to the fact (but I may be completely wrong) that she is used to "receive". Just as she "receives" man into herself and because her pleasure consists precisely in this "receiving", then I would dare to say that she is even naturally prepared to "receive" reality in this absolutely feminine way. Woman has, more than man, greater possibilities of finding solutions suitable to the circumstances. I do not think that this is to man's disadvantage. On the contrary, very often he counts on it" (Antonioni, 228).

Of course, from critics' point of view on Antonioni's films the difficulty of the relation between the sexes is obvious and implied through the thematic structure of the cinematic text as Brunette indicates in his book:

"Putting in this way, however, can imply once again that Antonioni's theme is primarily an existential or metaphysical example, that the sexes are perhaps natural enemies, that they can never understand each other, and that the force of love, while irresistible, leads inevitably, in our fallen world, to a great deal of unhappiness as well" (Brunesste, 32)

In other words, the gender in Antonioni's films reacts most of the time to the existential inner void as well as the social and the environmental forces which can be found and interpreted symbolically in the structure of the landscape and mise-en-scene as Wood emphasizes in his writing: "In Antonioni's world, actions are often determined as much by the surroundings as by the people themselves-either in an immediate and physical way by the setting or by conditioning from the environment which tends to limit their choice" (Wood et Cameron, 20). For instance, in L'eclisse (1962) as Arrowsmith observes in his book:

"The reeling and tilting of the changing world, the shifting reality that makes life so provisional and difficult, are thus everywhere suggested by a violent alternation of landscapes, city, country, the planned suburban world of EUR, the African motifs of Marta's apartment-all brusquely encamped. Rooms become not so much spaces but rather object-filled cubicles of indeterminate appearance; external space is exploded into bewildering landscape variety. The discontinuity of space is confirmed by temporal dissonance, for the rhythm of the time is itself shattered. Reality, in short, is now structured discontinuity" (Arrowsmith, 73).

The terms such as unpredictability and limited choices for the characters work out to be conventional in Antonioni's stylistic narrative as Wood:

"Antonioni makes his characters retain a human unpredictability. They do not perform actions worked out to be consistent with a thesis. In fact this sort of unreasoned but not gratuitous action is of greatest importance to Antonioni. 'I wanted to show that sentiments which conventions and rhetoric have encouraged us to regard as having a kind of definite weight and absolute duration, can in fact be fragile, vulnerable, subject to change. Men devise himself when he hasn't courage enough to allow for new dimensions in emotional matters-his loves, regrets, states of mind-just as he allows for them in the field of technology" (Wood et Cameron, 22).

For instance, the opaque silence and heavy residue of tense feelings at the end of L'eclisse creates existentially a kind of anxiety that dominates the whole sequence as Brunette continues in his book:

"Obviously, these are not merely random shots and must not be thought of it in that way, Antonioni achieves formal unity of the visuals and the sound here, be once again, the precise meaning, of necessity, remains vague. Some critics find the end of the film "arid", but Tinazzi is closer to the truth when he suggests that the finale can be read as a display of the intense mystery of reality. 'It shows the loss of the sign, its critics in terms of its reference to something other. For this reason IO would be very careful about attributing symbolic meanings-which might seem very obvious-to such perceptible fragments" (Brunette, 88).

Of course, in his formalistic approach to represent the existential identity of the gender through the images, Antonioni's characters bear the formal meaning of the mise-en-scene more than the objects while he is interested in the objects to express the character's emotional feelings as Brunette points out in his book:

"The very vagueness of his statement indicates, once again, that Antonioni's home ground is uncertainty, dissonance, the secular mystery lying behind visible; as one Italian critic has put it, 'the only certainties in Antonioni are formal and stylistic'. Formal elements thus once again predominate over naturalistic dramaturgy, which strives always to make "psychologically realistic". As mentioned earlier, the characters, and by a kind of metonymy, the actors, are also the carriers the formal meanings, more textual elements than human beings with whom the audience identify" (Brunette, 53).

To convey the boredom which is called Samuel Beckett 'cancer of time' Antonioni keeps his camera rolling on the actors or the occurrences in the long takes, and he draws attention to the complex reality by putting his actors not in intellectual but in an irrational environment that sometimes can be considered as a kind of surrealistic and disturbing. Through these long takes, Antonioni put the characters pinned against the wall to represent their isolation and need for protection visually such as in the scenes at the beginning of L'ecclisse or almost the end of L'avventura (1960) in which Monica Vitti is framed standing but pinned against the wall.

Moreover, the existential maladies of the characters can be embodied in their subjective sexual desires and frustrations which can be referred to as death of the emotion or transcendental values. For example, in Il Deserto Rosso (1964) in the semi-orgy scene, the talk of aphrodisiacs represents a desire for sexual intimacy as Wood states in his writing: "The scene of abortive little would-be orgy in the hut reveals the film's true moral position unequivocally. The cheaply promiscuous pawning and sniggering talk of aphrodisiacs-pornography on the most infantile level-illustrates the trivializing of sex and of human relationship that marks the adjusted characters (Corrado, initially at least, finds it distasteful)" (Wood et Cameron, 116). The erotic passion found in Antonioni's cinema seems to be connected crucially with the text as it has something to do with the transience and anxiety of a kind of apocalyptic world. Arrowsmith finds in L'ecclisse:

"The dark, ominous side of suppressed reality-whose beauty we see enacted as Love, however transient-is the story of Vittoria and Piero. Transient and fragile; its fragility is also expressed and explained by those images of a world slipping away, its latent aggression largely but never wholly screened by the flow of mostly peaceful images. And the fragility of Love, in turn, partly explains the latent apocalypse implicit in these closing images of light and dark, which make sits epiphany in the image of Faustian Eros disclosing itself as last for what it is: the other suppressed reality of dearth, Thanatos, looming over all the arrangments and peaceful orders of a world organized for aggression-aggressive Eros almost incapable of love" (Arrosmith, 84)

If in L'avventura the static compositions, the long takes, and the landscape shape the events, in Il Desserto Rosso, zoom out and use of color profoundly and fundamentally give the scenes a sense of exploration and deciphering of underlying meanings of the cinematic text through which the continuity of the relationship between the characters undergoes the turbulence and morality. For example, in L'aventura the vulnerability and fragility of the human relationship between Sandro(Gabriele Ferzetti) and Anna(Lea Massari) can be observed through the landscape of the island which is harsh, rough, and barren while everybody tries to find a place to walk on it. In Il Desserto Rosso Giuliana's (Monica Vitti) gestures and expressions create the terrified complex contrast with the abstractive focus shots or the objectified mise-en scenes, for instance, the scene in which Giuliana drives her car to commit suicide is a perfect exemplary mise-en-scene through which her alienation with the environment is represented in terms of foggy landscape, the static and the immobile figures and the bodies of the other characters. Indeed, her negative alienation including her desire for isolation and individuality strives and struggles with her positive alienation which can be defined as her enthusiasm to be a part of the group as Moore discusses on L'eclisse:

"Negative alienation, then, does no more than name the necessity for which positive alienation supplies the want. Thus the goal of positive alienation is correspondence and community, just as the goal of negative alienation is individuality and a contemplative isolation. The dialectic between negative and positive alienations defines the normative flow of aesthetic and disengagement within healthy cultures, and so it is imperative that Antonioni emphasizes the positive if he is to offer cinema as one means by which an erotically sick culture might return to moral health" (Moore, 169).

But the fantasy is the only illusory and nonreal treatment for the sickness of Eros. In addition to alienation Nomadism and diseased Eros are the other existential maladies which can be found in Antonioni's films. This nomadism brings solitude and loneliness to Antonioni's characters. Also, for Antonioni, existential anxiety and identity are problematic issues that can not be solved easily based on the scientific approach or methodology. One has to realize that what Antonioni was persuaded to do is ultimately optimistic and a kind of attempt to bring reconciliation between the painful individuation and the desire to be a part of the group. For Antonioni as an artist, everything in the world is uncertain and seems to change all the time and people are always looking for something else to overcome their own internal emptiness which connects them with the existence of sex, money, power, and drugs.

Antonioni, Michelangelo. A talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on His Work Film Culture, No:24, 1962.

Antonioni Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996.

Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images New York: Oxford University Press, 1885.

Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 1998.

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Moore, Kevin Z. Eclipsing The Commonplace: The Logic of Alienation in Antonioni's Cinema Film Quarterly Vol. 48, Summer 1995.

Wenders, Wim. My Time with Antonioni London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

Wood, Robin & Ian Cameron. Antonioni Praeger Publisher, 1969.


By: Morad Sadeghi

The Birds

Hitchcock's The Birds: The Montage Aesthetic Influences with focus on Russian Constructivists


"In his open schoolhouse sequence, Hitchcock pays homage to Battleship Potemkin by transforming the shattered lens of the woman's fallen pince-nez on the steps, a famous image, into the shattered, fallen glasses of a besieged girl as she runs into town" (Orr, 22).

"This painted image[Laughing jester in Blackmail(1929)]has been variously interpreted usefully as Hitchcock's purest exercise in the " Kuleshov effect", whereby a single image may take on different meanings according to the context in which it is seen" (Sterritt, 13)


Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) is perhaps one of his most complicated artistic works in which his montage theoretical approaches can be established and emerged as the hallmarks of his style of editing and interest in creating and composing the formal cinematic image. As so frequently occurred with Hitchcock, he sought to go beyond the conventional rules which are dictated by the studio system. A part of his editing process is incredibly a kind of refusal to the bound of rationality and normality which is practiced using standard relative resolutions. His formalistic fidelity to the different schools of montage such as French Impressionists, German Expressionists, and Russian constructivists immediately prefigures and foreshadows his demonstrative moments of physical and emotional chaos that determine Hitchcockian's importance to the voyeuristic look and its object of desire. From the beginning of the film, it seems that Hitchcock assures the spectator of the continuity editing style that dominates Hollywood classic narrative, but, by the first bird's attack on Melanie (Tippi Hedren) in her boat (25:26), he breaks down the continuous reality of the scene by establishing a kind of attraction montage (Eisensteinian one?) which is supposed to shock the spectator's visual expectations. The narrative sections of the film are chronologically constructed on the spatial and temporal continuity which can be referred to as Pudovkin's simultaneous relationship between compositions especially when we realize that Hitchcock had read Pudovkin's book, Film Technique, and Film Acting. But the expectation of what comes next is disturbed concerning Eisenstein's strategy of editing: "The use of quick Fire montage in attack sequences recalls Eisenstein's editing in his silent classic, Battleship Potemkin (1925).In the schoolhouse attack, we could say that Hitchcock restages and transforms the Odessa Steps Massacre into a mass attack" (Orr, 22).

Of course, the switch back and forth between the objective and the subjective point of view shots which is not Eisensteinian exactly defines Hitchcock's method of filming in his style. Nevertheless, this leads to a final point. Hitchcock's formalistic desire to edit the shots in the climactic moments transforms the temporal and the spatial continuity to the analytical objectivity of the constructivist's aesthetic such as the ones of Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and Pudovkin. In 1920, Eisenstein's dialectical montage and his innovative achievements in silent film drew Hitchcock's attention to the forms of montage, ellipsis, and crosscutting which have associations with Russian theories of montage.  Hitchcock's awareness of German Expressionists' experiences in moving camera and their perspective on art designing in creating the artificial set becomes key arguments in post-war period critical writings.  His inclination to combine the outcomes of Russian and German film school's theoretical approaches with the classical continuity system in the framework dominated by studio production rules ignites his creative fuel to propel a style that illuminates his precious understanding of his contemporary artistic movements.

Hitchcock's The Birds is an achievement of his skill to induce the spectator to pay attention to the montage that characterizes the visual connection between the characters and their own surrounding spaces. Eisenstein's metric and rhythmic categories are often motivated and signified by the events that happen during the film and help to highlight the suspenseful moments of the narrative. For example, most of the scenes in which Melanie is attacked by the birds contain numerous metric and rhythmic montages that embody the expression of the theme and the focus on the formal and stylistic Hitchcockian dimensions. Not only are the point-of-view shots of the characters associated with the suspended and irrational theme of the scenes, but the characteristic constructivist's montage is consistently repeated and implied through the juxtaposition of the images. For example, when Melanie is looking through the window at the climactic moment(explosion scenes) in the gas station, there is a lot of her point-of-view shots juxtaposed graphically and rhythmically with the close-ups of her face. Also, the axial editing in the scene in which the corpse of the farmer is discovered by Lydia (Jessica Tandy) represents the montage aesthetic of the shots manifested by Russian montage theoreticians.

Hitchcock's interest in practicing the constructivists' axioms on montage in The Birds indicates his struggle to protect his theory of suspense which is obviously represented in the scene in which the people including Melanie in the restaurant try to stop the man close to the gas station of lighting his matches(1:25:23). The intuitive understanding of the suspense in that scene assigns the montage accordance with constructivists' simultaneity (Pudovkin?) relationship between the shots. Although constructivists' montage dominates the entire suspenseful dramatic situation of the scene, Eisenstein's effects at the deeper level of formalistic logic can be explored because of graphic montage which can be followed in the relationship between the shots.

While it is hard to be certain how editorial such formalistic surmises are for thinking about Hitchcock's influence on Russian constructivists, it might be ventured in this vein that the inventing of an ideal editing strategy illuminates his relation to continuity editing and its restrictions and constraints which are imposed by the studio system. According to historical documents, Hitchcock thus tried to gain control over the studio's rules by eliminating editorial choice throughout filmmaking. He could shoot it once because the strategy of editing had been envisioned in the storyboard. For example, the scene in which Melanie is waiting outside the schoolhouse and smoking a cigarette (1:09:57) was meticulously drawn on the storyboard. Hitchcock's method of editing which is precisely calculated by his method of control is based on playing with the audience's expectation and Melanie's point of view shots. One recalls in this regard Hitchcock's aesthetic and directorial style which are both evident onscreen and as the spectator understands it to be off-screen. The birds gathering which is being grouped on screen creates a sense of terror for the spectator's suspenseful anxiety and Melanie's moment of understanding. The category of editing in this scene can be still compared with Pudovkin's simultaneous relationship between the shots. The presence of Eisensteinian rhythmic and graphic in the scene suggests that Hitchcock tried to choose the most important shots to be edited together in the final cut.

Hitchcock's profound intellectual involvement with the post-revolution Soviet constructivist montage theories is one of the most challenging aspects of his work in making The Birds. As his calculated cuts illustrate, the cultivated and the marginality of his characters in the film help the spectator to feel the suppressed impulses in the "look" that transfers between the subjective shots while it seems that the characters are looking at the objects or each other. His entire oeuvre is an effort to explore the possibilities of a combination of the Russian montage aesthetic and the stereotypical continuity editing that is practiced in mainstream American cinema. There is no filmmaker more willing to make cinematic time and space in such a way that the use of a visual metaphor becomes the crucial element in choosing the right shot to be juxtaposed with another one.

In other words, if The Birds stands out as the astonishing use of montage of attraction, it is also significant for its experimentation with simultaneity and continuity editing in which the opposite kind of technique and editing revolves the suspense through a truly brilliant piece of mise-en-scene. In that kind of editing, the obvious contrast of the graphic relationship between the shots and the off-screen occurrences provides the required artificiality of the entire fictional environment, and Hitchcock' use of constructivist montage elaborates his strikingly obvious desire to play with the spectator's expectation and understanding of time reference in the climactic and the dramatic moments of the plot and the narrative. For example, when Melanie goes upstairs to the attic to search for the source of the noise (1:46:35) and the bird's attack takes place (1:47:42), Hitchcock expands the temporality of the event by the technique of montage because his rigorously rapid graphic constructed editing creates the perplexity and the confusion for the spectator (and perhaps Melanie too) to realize how the real-time has been passed.

The combination of point-of-view shots and the camera movements sometimes in Hitchcock's films create labyrinthine passages to reflect his avant-garde tendency to represent the alteration between German expressionist and Russian constructivist aesthetics. For example, in The Birds in the scene in which Melanie delivers the love birds to Mitch's (Rod Taylor) place (21:56) the combination of point of view shot and the camera movement not only intensifies the suspenseful experience of the scene but also it emphasizes on the rhythmic montage which is categorized by Eisenstein in his essays on editing. On the other hand, Hitchcock's emphasis on drawing the spectator's attention from trivial to important shots can be reminiscent of Eisenstein's theoretical writings in his book, Film Form, about the analytical editing which was practiced by D. W. Griffith in his films in the beginning of the silent era. According to Eisenstein, the director such as Griffith can direct the viewer's visual experience from the long shots of the objects, the landscapes, and the human bodies to the closer shots such as medium shots and close-ups of the same ones in the establishment shots and sequences. It seems that Hitchcock who was perhaps familiar with Eisenstein's theoretical writings attempted to practice the technique in most of his films such as the beginning of Psycho (1960) and Shadows of a Doubt (1943). From the beginning of The Birds. Hitchcock's analytical editing to get closer to the subject can be detected through the microscopic sensitivity of his camera to discover and explore profoundly the elaborated and enriched visual narrative. By Melanie's approaching Mitch's town and family, it seems that Hitchcock's camera style of editing getting closer and closer to the important tones, scenes, and expressions. His closer shots make the spectator aware of the important visual cues, and his desire to stage the scenes by using the analytical editing punctuates the flow of visual expression and a specific affinity with the montage which is considered as part of Hitchcock's style to narrate the story.

It is impossible to tell exactly in this essay how Hitchcock's style has changed through the period of his filmmaking in terms of his ongoing unpredictable manner of responding to the demand of the film industry and the expectations of the spectators. As we watch The Birds, what is suggested are the theorization and the analysis of his formalistic and modernist approach to create an artificial architecture of mechanism of "look". No wonder it is so difficult to define the nature and the direction of the montage in Hitchcock's films. Of course, it will be easy to assume that he was influenced by his contemporary European and American styles of filmmaking, but Hitchcock's style, the montage zenith, is often marked by his desire to disturb the spectator's expectations rather than offering a bunch of lectures in film arts in his films. For him, more than anything else, the intellectual and emotional intensity of the moments determine the logic behind any cut, camera movement, and long take. Dark Romanticism, surrealism, and the artistic and technical achievements of German and Russian schools of cinema can be all traced and detected through the reviewing of his films, but it is important to remember that Hitchcock never considered himself an artist who created subconsciously. Hitchcock, as one of the greatest inventors of form in the history of cinema, believed that cinema had affinities with the visual arts, and he taught young apprentices such as Truffaut and Godard how to plan a film shot by shot concerning the editorial and formalistic approaches.

"Do you think of yourself as an artist?"

"No, Not particularly" (Bogdanovich, 554).





Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made it: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors New York: Ballantine Books, 1998.

Orr, John. Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema London: Wallflower Press, 2005.

Sterritt David. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.









By: Morad Sadeghi

John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes: The Camera-Related Strategies

Cassavetes' cinema is often stylistically structured on his desire and intention to use the interrupted conversations, the hesitated dialogues, unresolved narrative structure, and unpredictability and spontaneity of the character's body movement and gestures in the dramatic situations. To understand his aesthetic vision, one has to critically observe the moments that are randomly constructed and established on the irrational movements linked with the physical actions. Moreover, Cassavetes' characters and events are continuously choreographed to represent the infinite variations in the pattern of behavior. Nevertheless, it seems that his camera-related strategies are discussed and observed explicitly by the critics' appropriate and adequate responses to the visual patterns of the choreographic variations in his characters' anthology of failures of communication. Not surprisingly, the photographic properties of his visual moments are implicitly measured and judged by the patented and patterned critical commentaries. In fact, most of the critical writings on Cassavetes' camera strategies are basically associated with his interviews about his style of camera and montage aesthetic:

"I feel I have to move beyond the current obsession with technique or camera angles. It's waste of time. How you shoot a film is a diversion. I think anybody can shoot a film...What are we wasting our time doing that for? It has nothing to do with life. Now we are making that a value. Pretty Photography is part of our culture" (Gelmis,82).

Like many revelations in Cassavetes' style, the hand-held cameras, the shooting faces in the close-ups, the long takes in the dialogue scenes, the desire for improvisation, and the avoidance of pre-planned shooting with the storyboards are evidence of his stylistic aesthetics to visualize the playful or deadly serious impressionistic moments of life forces reflected on his characters' faces. To document the truth of human relationships and their dynamic of engaging with reality, the progress of his films strives to shed light on the pointlessness or the absurdity of using conventional point-of-view shots according to Carney:

"His films simply reject essentializing, metaphorizing, subjectivizing abstracting and a contemplative form of knowledge and relationship...Cassavetes simply rejects that understanding of experience. Viewers are denied access to intentional depth, and asked to navigate shifting (and potentially bewildering) expressive surfaces" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 10).

Moreover, Carney states that one can essentially notice how Cassavetes subtly and perhaps consciously uses the shots and counter-shots to offer his representational skepticism to the relation between his characters' psychoanalytical deep responses and the objective stimulations of the external world: " The way of profundity in Cassavetes' work is not in moving from surfaces to depth, but in breaking down the opposition between them rather than attempting to plump depths, Cassavetes' viewers must learn to skate on shifting surfaces" (Carney, 52). Beyond that, Cassavetes' avoidance of deciphering the states of indeterminate and imaginative scenarios concerning the non-linear editing non-star-centered scene-making is worthy of further serious consideration. Not surprisingly, the framing of the shots in Cassavetes' films disturbs the stability of our relationship with the cinematic text and finally collapses our habitual strategy for understanding the function of the composition in each scene. Indeed, Cassavetes' use of the technique of improvisation creates an accidental product in which the characteristic and dramatic function of the framing and composition have to be matched and determined concerning the character's social maneuverings and persona. Obviously, the framing is manipulated in such a way in which the camera that is usually close to the character's face can represent his entrapment in the confined social environment: "Characters exist within a force-field of pressures and influences, which continuously threaten them and which they can never escape" (Carney, Persistence of Vision, 42).

Of course, the time that is needed for an emotional or human relationship to be developed is what necessarily subdues Cassavetes' compositional designs. His strategy to frame his characters and put them in the composition can be mostly considered and observed in the relationship between his individuals with the social group around them:

"Cassavetes technique of photography and editing work to reestablish the democratic contexts around any individual, to resist the individual's effort to isolate himself frame, or to elevate himself above, the social group of which he is a part...The individual character is no longer able to control or dominate the visual space of the frame or the social space of a scene as in the traditional fictional film" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 97).

In other words, Cassavetes defeats the isolating effect of the close-up and his framings. In his compositions, he mostly avoids rigidifying the space around a character such as his composition in Faces(1968) between groups of people who have a conversation together:

"So that even as we are looking closely at one actor, we are hearing the voice of another off screen...even as we focus on one character within the frame, the foot, leg, arm, hand, or part of the body of that figure or another will extend out of or intrude into the corner of the frame, reminding us of the web of connections and relations outside our view at any one moment" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 101).

 However, his next films cause the viewer to think about his style through his film career. What do they have in common with the earlier ones, and what links them together in terms of fundamental concepts and visual devices. For example in Love Streams (1984), Cassavetes moves the camera and uses shot/reverse shot editing while he still tries to avoid point-of-view shots, and he also uses improvisation on the movements and the close-ups of Sarah's character (Gena Rowlands). The professional lighting and the character's movement in the mise-en-scene distinguish the distinctive differences between Faces and Love Streams. The choreographic pattern of the framing and the camera movement in Cassavetes' films often proves that his close-ups are precisely necessary to the extent that the viewer is capable of following the emotional signals and the evasive forms of the hysterical and expressive moments on the character's faces. If, in Faces, the close-ups and the static frame create confinement and isolation, his latest films such as A Woman under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980) are attempts to break the bleak entrapments and claustrophobic narrative confinements by allowing the characters to move in the composition. In other words,
if the composition is filled with the close up of the characters' faces
 in the earlier films, Cassavetes's style is changing in terms of using camera movement, high-spirited scenes, the characters' freedom of moving, and the composition of depth. By allowing the characters more freedom of movement and bodily disposition, Cassavetes justifies his previous experiments with extreme close-ups and hand-held camera movements.


From the beginning of A Woman under Influences, Mabel's freedom to move freely in the frame and out of the house indicates Cassavetes' style that has been changed since Faces though she is in a prison-house. If his individual verbal miscommunication with the friends, the neighbors, and the strangers automatically equate drama with action and movement through spaces in his earlier films, Cassavetes' importance of emotional moments on the character's faces turn out into more social adventures and psychological events in his latest films such as his desire to work with gangster genre in Gloria and The Killing of a Chinese Bookies (1976) such as Gloria's degree of freedom to save little Phil (John Adames) from the world of Mafia. Therefore, his strategy of framing and composing a shot needs to be evolved by maximizing action and movement in the frames. From the perspective of stylistic growth, Cassavetes' technical photographic decisions to use more distant camera set-ups in his latest films indicate his affinity to medium and long shots in which the possibility of respecting the social group creates broader spaces for the actors to play their emotional and irrational responses to the chaotic moments and situations such as the scenes in which Mable(Gena Rowlands) and Nick (Peter Falk) eating lunch or spending their time with their own friends and relatives around the table. But at the same time, the struggle of the individual with the social forces in Cassavetes's films forms the very confined framing in which the stylistic necessity of using improvisation combines with the obligations of Hollywood's conventional methods of filmmaking.

But what makes Cassavetes' style of framing and composition such a complex dialectical work is his successive close-ups of each important character in each of his films as the close-ups in Faces between Richard (John Marley), Freddie (Fred Draper) and Jeannie (Gena Rowlands). It aesthetically seems that Cassavetes's characters attempt to enlarge the boundaries and the framing of their close-ups to release and liberate themselves of the social forces that dominate them such as Sara Lawson's (Gena Rowlands) attempt in Love Streams to get rid of Robert Harmon's (John Cassavetes) house and personal world. The greatness of his latest films that follow Faces is attributable to his characters' stylistic escape route from social influences and criticism.

According to Carney, there is no such thing as the subjective point of view shots in Cassavetes' films that explain the psychological and internal emotions of the characters. In fact, Cassavetes' point of view shots which are designed and expressed in shot/reverse shot format mostly echo the social pressures and influences on the character. In slightly more complicated cases, his camera seldom penetrates the character's unconscious mind to reveal his psychoanalytical desires and intentions: "There is nothing but surface. There are no clarifying essences, explanatory metaphor, or private depths of subjectivity by means of which we can get inside characters and events to simplify them" (Carney, Pragmatism, et al, 11). Because the character's interior perception of the external world is changing, the viewer is denied and rejected to experience any subjective point of view through the character's look: "The viewer is put in the position of not knowing quite who the characters are, why they are behaving in the way they are, or exactly how to interpret their specific expressions" (Carney, Pragmatism et al, 10).

Because Cassavetes is not recognized as a Hollywood director, his work is not an attempt to display psychoanalytical issues in the characters' problems. But like anything else in his style which is going to change from his earlier films to the latest ones, a sense of point of view shots are also seen more in his latest films. Of course, from Carney's view on Opening Night (1977) in the scene in which the play is done in front of the audience, point of view shots in Cassavetes' film can not be only observed from the main character's look: " Cassavetes' shifts of camera placement not the sensitively shifting and adjusted perspectives and focuses of an ideally responsive observer or a participant to a scene, but a series of irreconcilably conflicting points of view from the perspectives of many different audiences or participants" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 263). In other words, the conventional use of point-of-view shots in Cassavetes's films is rejected by his interest to remind us of the presence of the camera and shifting of psychological focus to the social field of view such as the scene in which Sara Lawson finds Robert Harmon in his dark room close to his jukebox that looks like her point of view shot, but it is not.

Just like many other artists in film history, Cassavetes's visual style evolves from utter and simple uninteresting matters of intellectual issues to more complicated and controversial ones. One feels that he would have done anything in his power to simplify the intellectual confusion in his films. But by looking at Love Streams, one can realize how Cassavetes uses fantasy, hallucination, and dream sequences in his final film from his characters' point-of-view shots to a degree in which his avoidance of offering any intellectual psychoanalytical criticism in his earliest films turns out to more contradictory and confusing interpretations concerning the complexity and density of his characters' lives. Perhaps, any criticism that would adequately describe his style must attempt to be textual rather than contextual. In this sense, Cassavetes' life and work are articulated to what idealism defines as challenging with intellectual confusion and social chaos.

Carney, Ray. Love's Dreams: Love Streams and the work of John Cassavetes Persistence of Vision, No:6, Summer 1988.

Carney, Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Carney Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Gelmis, Joseph. John Cassavetes: The Film Director as Superstar London: Seckler & Warburg, 1971.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Sansho the Bailiff

Sansho the Bailiff: The Aesthetic of the Camera Movements

Mizoguchi's cinema has one key element as its ingredient which may be separately identifiable from the rest of the significant aesthetic achievements that are attributed to his name. It is not quite difficult of course to examine this element at the beginning of his films which is motionless and attentive, but the spectator's direct line of vision dramatically changes as long as the camera is starting to move. The expanding sense of awareness to each side of the screen and in the space behind the camera forces the audiences to reconstruct their vision and version of dramaturgy beyond the frame.

Kenji Mizoguchi paid his homage to Kitagawa Utamaro (1756-1806) who is known for his portraits of women in love in Five Women Round Utamaro (1946). He displayed the sense of variety and richness of camera movement in his post-war film which standardized and portrayed Mizoguchi's stylistic elements of his Japanese religious representation in the aesthetic of his narrative: the sacrificial theme of the female characters for the male protagonists. Of course, his static composition and mobile camera reveal the dignity, integrity, and submissiveness of his female characters. Indeed, Mizoguchi's fascination with prostitutes, Geishas, and the historical figures of suffering women his extravagant and controversial stylization for bizarre experimentation with different historical periods in Japan, his cultural and traditional references to Japanese painting and calligraphy, the representation of religious elements, Kabuki and Noh theaters as the fundamental elements of cultural antiquity and the sense of guilt to his sister for her sacrificial role in his life brought into Japanese self-consciousness a sense of revival to the ignored traditional culture during the American occupation and the years after Second World War.

Mizoguchi's responsive reaction to the cinematic texts as a multilayered phenomenon which can be considered also as the single continuum is in the overall expressivity of his allegiance to his cultivated knowledge about Japanese culture and the international influence of the masters of cinema. Renoir's long take is beginning to gather focus in Mizoguchi's films such as The Life of Ohara (1952). The stylistic camera movement in Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) is reminiscent of Orson Welles' fascination with the long take. The pictorial motifs that can be brought to existence from Japanese paintings can be followed anywhere from pre-production to post-production issues. The authentic sets, props, and architecture of the mise-en-scene are truly superb and the Western audiences who are not familiar with Japanese artistic and historical authenticity are satisfied with the difficulty. His entire visual system like Yasijiro Ozu's forms the basis for representing the quality of the Japanese theatrical architecture of the houses and the design of the rooms. For the same reason, the mise-en scene on the stage which seems to be inseparable from Japanese traditional domestic life and their ceremonies emphasizes Mizoguchi's dedication to the art of acting which comes from Kabuki and Noh traditions. Similarly, the circular pattern of narrative and storytelling which can be found in Ozu's films is also maintained as the moral fingerprint of the religious doctrine of the painful cycle of life here in his stylistic visual system. The choreography of actors and actresses' movements in the static frame shifts crucially from the ultimate metaphorical and metaphysical meaning and definition of each shot to represent the visual style of compositions and automatically reduces the rhythm of temporal and spatial juxtaposition of images in which the process of editing occurs inside the camera movement to maintain religious meditation between the audiences and the film as the artistic work.

Sansho the Bailiff which belongs to Mizoguchi's latest period of filmmaking is considered one of his anti-patriarchal, anti-feudal, and anti-capitalistic works which radically challenges the contradictory potential of militaristic elements through the anti-spectacular style of its presentation in Japanese culture. The deciphering of the formal and the aesthetic stylization of the film requires intellectual analysis through which the relationship between style and content has to be prioritized according to the laws of multi-point perspective. The Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival for the film implies a little familiarity and affection with Mizoguchi whose emotional response and moral stance toward the novelist Ogai Mori and his original story is part of a serious intensive investigation of his country's historical landscape. The most striking element of Mizoguchi's adaptation is the twisting of the central character from the female to the male protagonist who carries the burden of the narrative for the first time. Such a radical alteration of tonality in characterization is fundamentally different from Mizoguchi's conservative formalism in terms of stylistic representation of his suffered female protagonist as the leitmotif. the unmasking or revealing moment is happening on detailed accuracy of set-decoration, the costume design for each character which represents his social class and personality on the screen, the dialectic architecture of his long takes, and visual concentration on deep docus traveling shots. The lack of close-up and point-of-view shots, the absence of rapid cutting in the climaxes, and the fact that the camera is placed most of the time so far back from incidents immediately offer us as the audience the moral perception of the final redemption of the characters. The awakening that results in his approaching reality through religious meditation follows the minimalism that is the essential property of Mizoguchi's stylized images.

The structural and spiritual affinity of Sansho the Bailiff with Mizoguchi's former films such as Sisters of the Gion (1939) and Osaka Elegy (1936) which depicts the life story and the destiny of prostitutes and Geishas become obvious when Zushio's mother, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), is sold to the brothel and becomes a prostitute for the rest of her life. Like all the Geishas characters in Mizoguchi's films, Tamaki is also destined to live in the cage, and water is the only symbolical natural element that connects her metaphorically to Anju (Kyôko Kagawa) and Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi). The desire for Japanese suicide in Anju's self-sacrifice for Zushio and the brutality of the ending in which Tamaki and Zushio ultimately meet each other in a melancholic and pessimistic atmosphere are also considered as the convention of rhetorical symbolism. This symbolism formulates a sense of continuity and rejection of any artificial transition between shots to represent a new humanism in the Japanese post-war period. For instance, Mizoguchi's camera movement from mother and son to the landscape of the land and sea in the final scene suggests the possibility of integration between humanity and nature as our extension of mankind's existentialism in the form of family survival. Mizoguchis' respect for the non-violence teaching of religion can be followed in the shots and camera movements in which the glorifying of violence is avoided by deviating the audience's center of focus to off screen at the harsh moments such as the invisibility of Anju's suicide, Tamaki's punishment for her unsuccessful escape and the burning of the face of the escaping slave by Zushio's brutality and ruthless obedient to Sansho and his fatherhood figure in the background.


Mizoguchi's establishment sequences at the beginning of the film revolve around Tamaki's memories in the past which are transferred to the present through her state of mind by using the dissolves and the lateral camera movements. Her attempts to maintain the united family are associated with her memories and later on with her song which can be heard and realized only by Anju, and then; Mizoguchi tries often to isolate them to emphasize their loneliness and alienation from the patriarchal society and its chaotic outcome by lateral or slight camera movements. even Anju's insistent advice to Zushio to remember the lost moral values and the past memories despite his resistance are perceived automatically as her motherhood figure Zushio. It seems again that Mozoguchi's preoccupation and enthusiasm with camera movement follow the same interest to construct an aesthetic style in which there is an existential continuity between remembering the past and experiencing the present. The astonishing anthropological fact about the mise-en scene is the nature and its symbolical representation in creating the balance between human beings, his moral values and his deliberate choices. Sansho's vertical presence to the horizontal structure of the narrative and the image embodies his ruthless masculine authority which tears the feminine elements of nature and its beauty apart. The admiration for the traditional and moral values that the metaphysical configuration of Buddhism imposes on the text of Sansho the Bailiff is noticeable and properly manipulated in the narrative, aesthetic style, sound design, camera movement, and editing. Right after Anju's suicide, there is a cut to a statue of Buddha that creates emblematically a metaphorical image of Anju's transformation from a human being to another form of nature, water.

The theoretical frames of references that can help the Western audience to receive  Mizoguchi's text are not psychoanalytic or structuralist in the final examination, and the function of his camera movement in the cinematic representation cannot be recognized based upon the conventional norm of the Western subjective and objective aesthetic theories. To understand his cinematic experience with the narrative, it is required to seek another school of analysis to achieve a higher perceptual level in capturing the essential moments of his filmic text.  Mizoguchi's camera mobility can be analyzed and understood only by minimizing the Western dualistic interpretation of the text and concentrating on the context in terms of the religious metaphorical elements in the image as well as its visual cues. Furthermore, the sense of violence that can be brought to the images by the stylistic editing is reduced and eliminated through his long takes and camera movements. The presentation of geometrical artificiality in the three-dimensional architecture of mise-en-scene has no advantage over his simplified spatial landscape and theatricality. In fact, the suggested model to explore the underlying treasures of the text is absolutely philosophical and meaningful in Mizoguchi's cinema which is always associated with Japanese rituals and mythological beliefs. Within the visual field. there is a kind of flow and continuity of space and time which have not been visualized by any mathematical formulae of any school in the history of western art designing.  Mizoguchi's complexity of his camera movements occurs in the same model in the moments of awareness and miracle. In other words, his characters achieve a kind of knowledge and perception at the end of each shot in camera movement which invites the audience to identify with them and their suffering through the journey of life and death. In terms of representing the miracle, for instance, there is a camera movement from left to right to the Sansho's mansion through which the liberated slaves celebrate their miraculous liberation from slavery, and, interestingly, this movement is presented in the reverse axial momentum of Sansho's mobility which happens from right to left in the frame. Indeed, the optical view of the camera in these precise moments is constructed on the character's physical and psychological communication with the spatial and temporal continuity from the past to the present.

Sansho the Bailiff has extraordinary exterior images whose masterly visual compositions are nearly presented in long shots.  Mozoguchi's appreciation for long shots even in his camera movements has nothing to do with Brechtian distance. It seems that his audience is expected to respect the whole story as the cycle of life in nature which appears to be a part of Buddhist teachings. The noble drawing of nature on the Japanese costumes, paintings, and potteries is in interconnection with morality and ethics which can be followed and explored in  Mizoguchi's stylistic aesthetic. Therefore, the optical distance between the mise-en-scene and the horizontal camera movement forces the audience to take a strategic position to explore the film content by striking indirectness in Mizoguchi's camera style. The center of focus in multiple perspectives of Mizoguchi's mise-en-scene is governed by a need for concealment and dissemblance so great to give his text a sense of magic and enigma.


By: Morad Sadeghi

La Regle du Jeu

Stylistic & Political Analysis of La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game): A Discussion on Theatricality, Style and Political Aspect of the Film

La Regle du Jeu (1939, Jean Renoir) shows us the impossibility of escape from social relations. Renoir's cynicism to produce a plot that is about the ruling class on the edge of the catastrophe creates the implicit critic of swapping roles between masters and servants. Three influences stand out; Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and Musset. The pattern of wife, husband, and lover adds parallel to love affairs in two different classes, and the theatricality of the plot revolves around the struggle to survive in the middle of the chaos for the class of upper bourgeoisie: "It is more faithful to examine the film in terms of an alternation between order and disorder, which accentuates the repeated failure of social cohesion" (Sesonske, 427). The impossibility of assembling several groups which have no shared project except deceit and destruction draws our attention to the rules of acting, as the theatrical motif: " Robert's final mendacious speech, delivered from a stage-like platform to an audience, consecrates the final triumph of the theater over truth"(O'Shaughnessy, 148). The presence of war and death in using guns against people as well as animals beside the theatrical roles and the game-playing of the film put emphasis on the blending of theater and reality: "Even as Schumacher fires live bullets at Marceau, card games and dancing continue, murderous intent being taken for part of the shadow by an audience that can no longer distinguish theater from reality" (O'Shaughnessy, 149). The upstairs and downstairs with tremendous irony embody an unequal society in which the potential for political change and ideological revolutionary movement are doomed to collapse. Even the capacity for anti-Semitism is evoked while the second song is sung by characters that their costumes and wigs suggest that they are orthodox Jews.

Despite or perhaps because of critique of a whole society, the film provides contrast between the gender relation ships and the confinement of Christine(Nora Gregor) suggests that the men try ironically to defend patriarchy, as O'Shaughnessy states, " The finale sess a closing of male ranks in any case as the errant women are brought under control..."(O'Shaughnessy, 151). The film undoubtedly signals the end of Renoir's political commitment. Renoir's Popular Front films imply the possibility of renewal by opposing theatricality with decadent social order. The confinement of mise-en scene of Chateaux echoes the close spaces of dominant class and reverses the vitality that revolutionary disorder and chaos of freedom impose on the prejudice and pretension of the ruling class. The forces that attempt to unify the disparate individuals of the house are fragile because they all try desperately to reassert the order that relies on the theatricality of reality. The pessimistic representation of the ruling class through Renoir's social concerns with the limitations of lower class society defines a social world in which people hunger for rules not values: " La Regle du Jeu embodies a social world in which there are rules but not values. If you don't know the rules, you are crushed; but if you know the rules, you are cut off from your own nature...La Regle du Jeu presents a society that has refined feelings to the utmost, in order to starve off the demands of time and history" (Brandy, 132). Chesnay's love for mechanical toys relates him to desire to control the time and history and entertain the world. Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) desperately attempts to protect a society that is not authentic anymore because of alienation of isolated individuals: "But what Le Chesnaye tries to preserve as a society of harmonious aesthetic style is in fact a congeries of isolated individuals, each in his or her own world, the masters separated from the servants, the aware from unaware, the passionate from unmoved" (Braudy, 133).

The political stuggle in popular Front period represents that the radical social transformation is possible, but Renoir, by directing La Regle du Jeu, Suggests that this change could be for the worse. French higher class's egotistical irresponsibility in the film to face with the external threat jusr before the beginning of the Second World War presents a microcosm that symbolizes a counter-revolutionary ideology against the emergence of fascism. The similarities between masters and servants in terms of representing the theatricality of social order foreshadows lower class's political death, and the destruction of hopes that Popular Front promises leaves a pessimistic and cynical mood on Renoir's feelings: "The end of his love affair with the common people and with popular culture leaves him with nowhere to turn, for his alternative audience, the wealthy bourgeoisie, is the main target of his savage assault on French society" (O'Shaughnessy, 150). Renoir's intention in playing Octave's character in the film can be considered as a kind of self-portrait in which he attempts to mock with his professionalism as the director and his political career as the defender of left wing during Popular Front period: "Octave(Jean Renoir) is a character from outside the usual social order...Octave thinks of himself as a coward. All his life he says, he has been too cowardly to dare any responsibility or difficulty, but he has been content instead to float along with the social tide" (Braudy, 134). Octave who always intervene in every dramatic moment is prosperous to hide his feelings until near the end of the film: "The character of Octave, with his substitution of scial stability for personal feelings, subtly criticizes his idea of total accessibility to all experience...If La Chesnaye is the benevolent imposer of order, Octave is the go-between, subordinating his own nature for the fancied good of others and the harmony of his little world"(Braudy, 134-135).

Renoir's taste for long takes and a mobile camera as well as depth of field is significant to follow  fragmented Hollywood style of analytical editing through the whole film, as Renoir tells in his interview with Labarthe: " It is the depth of field. For that, Bachelet[director of photography] and I ordered some special lenses, very fast lenses, but ones that still gave us considerable depth, so that we could keep our backgrounds in focus almost all the time" (Volk,192). The lack of focus on any particular character in the film is very strong idea that relates only to Renoir's obsessive concern on relationship between individuals in multistage format of mise-en scene, and Renoir's camera does not simply record the dramatic relationships, but it focuses on the abstractive layer of moral and emotional signs of situations in depth of field, as Bazin states: " Jean Renoir's pictorial sense is expressed above all in the attention he pays to the importance of individual things in relation o one another...Renoir, like his character, quickly forgets the act in favor of the fact" (Bazin, 84). Renoir's camera is invisibly wandering throughout the salons and corridors, and its mobility reveals the presence of the people and the protagonists who are in the relationship together on the screen, and the function of the framing is to unfold the reality: "Renoir, on the other hand, understands that the screen is a mask whose function is no less to hide reality that it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves behind" (Bazin, 87). Of course for Bazin, the reality of the scene can be only emerged and signified by technical explanation of composition of depth and camera movement: "But the function of depth of field is not only to allow more liberty to the director and the actors. It confirms the unity of actor and décor, the total interdependence of everything real, from the human to the mineral" (Bazin, 90). Not surprisingly, Renoir explains his desire for deep focus in the famous Le Point Article: "The farther I advance in my profession, the more I am inclined to shoot in deep focus. the more I work, the more I abandon confrontations between actors neatly set up before the camera, as in a photographer's studio. I prefer to place my characters more freely, at different distances from the camera, and to make them move. For that I need great depth of field..." (Renoir, le Point Article). If Bazin's word alludes to the possibility of Renoir's influences on Welles's visual style in Citizen Kane, later on, Bazin inaugurates a new critical awareness of Renoir's editing: : His editing does not proceed from the usual dissection of the space and duration of the scene according to preestablished dramatic formulae. rather, it follows the dictates of his roving eye, discerning, even if occasionally distracted or willfully lazy" (Bazin, 87).

From the stylistic point of view, the rapidity of the actions needs to be recorded by the camera movements rather than straight cuts, Renoir's style of camera movement and depth of field intensifies audience's sense of relations within groups. It is true that certain rhythms and relationships are best served by the straight cuts or successive separate shots, but a track or pan can enhance audience's awareness of the environment surrounding the characters. The integrity and continuity of certain actions in the film put the slowness of editing in converse to the rapidity of the actions. On the other hand, the great number of shots in this film reminds us that straight cut, for Renoir, is still an appropriate device to create a film, and his choices to create artistic situations from mement to moment are variably shifting from using of camera movements to editing, as Durgnat reminds us, " A track or pan from A to B, rather than a cut from the first frame of A to the last frame of B, may be slower, less bold, and involve more background distraction, but it may also enhance our awareness not only of the relationship between A and B, but of the possibility of gradually shifting relationships
between two within an external environment" (Durgnat,193).

Renoir looks on the film as a comedy whose hidden meanings can hardly be praised by the extreme left. Presumably, Renoir has offered French Public a film in which he seems to be attacking the superiority of French high society and to foreshadow Hitler's war against France. The press reviews about the film are even friendly, but the film is commercial disaster: " Either way, the film's receipts were everywhere to dismal and the alarmed overseas distributors were able to renounce their contracts, and La nouvelle Edition Francaise was bankrupt even before the film had had a chance to reach its " court of appeal", the international arthouse market" (Dugnat 190-191). In 1946, however, a French exhibitor discovered a print of 85-minute version. From 1946 on, La Regle du Jeu went the rounds in three different versions, of 90, 85 and 80 minutes. The foreign critics immediately assigned the film to a genre established by Stroheim: "Moralistic realism about highlife decadence appropriate to the demoralization of France. Renoir's subtitle described it as une fantasie dramatique, which surely implies something lighter-hearted than Storheim, but no one took any notice of so unfamiliar a category" (Durgnat, 192).

Before La Regle du Jeu Renoir's films convey a sense of hope and fragility, but after La Regle du Jeu the hope for progressive change is lost. Renoir's critique of whole society suggests that the Chateau's closed spaces a s a cage for the characters opposes to the vitality of nature and the freedom that Andre Jurieux's character(Roland Toutain) represents. Perhaps the ruthless and the ironic massacres of the rabbits in the nature are again another evidence to prove that the Chateau's microcosom embodies a self-assured and destructively frivolous society without having political future and understanding external forces. The contrast between Christine and Lisette (Paulette Dubost), Marquis and Andre  in which the differences between their social status were supposed to draw Renoir's film into focus on social disintegration of two different classes suggests that Christine, Lisette, Marquis and Andre all can be places into the same pessimistic and devastated landscape of human efforts that likes enthusiastically to change the social and political rules, but without having enough strength to do that. Christine has lack of self-awareness, and Lisette is frivolous. The Marquis is perhaps obsessed with his aristocratic mannerism and self-assurance, and Andre denies the crowd the image of public heroism they had sought and, finally, his anarchistic and self destructive behavior bring his accidental death into the plot, as Durgnat mentions in his book: One might argue that although the shooting is accidental it represents an unconscious collective resolution by a society which fears Jurieu's vitality" (Durgnat, 199).

Not surprisingly, Renoir states that there is not one character in La Regle du Jeu who's worth the bother of saving. The logic of the plot seems to suggest that in La Regle du Jeu no one and everyone are to blame, as Durgnat states, " In general, the hypocrisy require of an individual by society is less dangerous than self deception...Effective response to social situations depends on a certain balance between spontaneity, calculation and hypocrisy" (Durgnat, 200). In fact, all theatricality that is in balance with depth of field and camera's look to the events in the film emphasizes in people's struggle to survive in the society in which one needs to wear masks on order to be accepted and respected by the numbers of the community. The architecture of the mise-en scene in The Marquis' house and Chateau in which each room represents a platform and a stage for a new theatrical play are designed to offer the audience the rule of the social game which is hypocrisy. Only through depth of field, slow editing and mobility of camera movements, Renoir has enough strength to manifest his political declaration in defending of pacifist Communist left against ruling class of society. Beyond all the questions, it is by the destruction of love that society are found wanting. Renoir's final humanistic stance against the rules of the decadent society is truly expressed by the film.

Bazin, Andre. Jean Renoir New York; Simon & Schuster, 1973.

Braudy, Leo. Jean Renoir: The World of His Films New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Durgnat, Raymond. Jean Renoir Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

O'Shaughnessy, Martin. Jean Renoir U.K. Manchester university Press, 2000.

Renoir, Jean. Le Point Journal, 1938.

Sesonske, Alexander. Jean Renoir: the French Films, 1924-1939 Massachuset: Harvard university Press, 1980.




By: Morad Sadeghi