38th Montreal World Film Festival

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

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


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

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


Sakurasaku( Blossom Bloom) (2014, Mitsutoshi Tanaka)

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


Jack Strong (2014, William Pasikovsky)

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


Tokyo the City of Glass (2014, Kazuhiro Tranishi)

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


New Territories (2014, Fabianny Deschamps)

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


Perro Guardian (2014, Baccha Caravedo)

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

Closer to the Moon (2014, Nae Caranfil)

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

They are all Dead(2014, Beatriz Sanchis)

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

Chagall-Malevich(2013, Alexander Mitta)


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


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

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



Review By: Morad sadeghi

Chaplin & Keaton

Contrasting the Visual Style between Chaplin & Keaton

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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




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


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


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


By: Morad Sadeghi

 

Boyhood

Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)

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

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

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




Review by Morad Sadeghi

Medea

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Medea, Adaptation Report

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

Characters:

Nurse

Tutor of Medea's sons

Medea

Chorus of Corinthian Women

Creon, king of Corinth

Jason

Aegeus, king of Athens

Messenger

Medea's Two Children


Literary Synopsis & Description:

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

Socio-Cultural Analysis:

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

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

Credit:

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini based on the play by Euripides

Producers: Marina Cicogna and Franco Rosellini

Cinematographer: Ennio Guarnieri

Editor: Nino Baragli

Art Directors: Dante Ferreti and Nicola Tamburo

Sound: Carlo Tarchi

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

Runtime:118 min

Country: France/Italy/West Germany

Language: Italian

Color: Color (Eastmancolor)

Release Date: 1969


Cinematic Synopsis & Description:

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

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


Socio-Cultural Analysis:

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

Analogy between Adaptation and Literary Work:

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

Film Analysis & Evaluation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


By: Morad Sadeghi

The Grand Budapest Hotel

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

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


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

Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Bondanella emphasizes in his book:

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

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

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

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


By: Morad Sadeghi

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


By: Morad Sadeghi