Sunday, September 30, 2007
Sunday, September 2, 2007
A Narcissistic Intro to Film Theory
based on Turvey: Film theory aims to go beyond
"understanding intentions of film makers, interpreting the meanings of their films, identifying formal and stylistic conventions they are employing and innovations (if any) they are introducing."
In the context of this course: Film theory aims at
understanding world cinema beyond it's nationalistic/sociological settings which encourage cause and effect readings of film makers intentions, satisfying oneself with the "free indirect subjective" in the deliberate absence of definitive semiology, identifying the stylistic conventions they are employing not by name but by asking how and why they make us feel/think/act the way we do.
"understanding intentions of film makers, interpreting the meanings of their films, identifying formal and stylistic conventions they are employing and innovations (if any) they are introducing."
In the context of this course: Film theory aims at
understanding world cinema beyond it's nationalistic/sociological settings which encourage cause and effect readings of film makers intentions, satisfying oneself with the "free indirect subjective" in the deliberate absence of definitive semiology, identifying the stylistic conventions they are employing not by name but by asking how and why they make us feel/think/act the way we do.
free indirect subjective:
images which are simultaneously direct and indirect, subjective and objective represent a merging of film maker and character. For example in 4 the dolls when read objectively could represent for example a nation nation attempting to rebuild itself, hindered by antiquated construction practices (indirect discourse). To Marina the dolls could be subjectively considered harbingers of her sisters death (direct discourse). The dolls however are not able to be divided into their direct or indirect meaning because both meanings exist in multiple forms and on multiple planes of existence that are not mutually exclusive of each other. Meaning in the "free indirect subjective" image is thus expanding and ominous.
Here im assuming that subjective meaning is that experience by the subject of the film the character and objective meaning is the symbolic meaning placed on the image by the film maker.
Thinking about 3D grid representations super positioned over time (as opposed to bridges)...
http://www.zamandayolculuk.com/cetinbal/TheoryforGraviticPropulsion.htm
images which are simultaneously direct and indirect, subjective and objective represent a merging of film maker and character. For example in 4 the dolls when read objectively could represent for example a nation nation attempting to rebuild itself, hindered by antiquated construction practices (indirect discourse). To Marina the dolls could be subjectively considered harbingers of her sisters death (direct discourse). The dolls however are not able to be divided into their direct or indirect meaning because both meanings exist in multiple forms and on multiple planes of existence that are not mutually exclusive of each other. Meaning in the "free indirect subjective" image is thus expanding and ominous.
Here im assuming that subjective meaning is that experience by the subject of the film the character and objective meaning is the symbolic meaning placed on the image by the film maker.
Thinking about 3D grid representations super positioned over time (as opposed to bridges)...
2D cross-sectional graphic representation of the distortion of space-time surrounding an atom or a star.
Compare the shape of "cells" near the center of mass with those further away - a photon propagating past this mass
will tend to move toward it simply because energy is transmitted through filaments at a constant rate,
therefore its speed, direction and size with respect to our measurement of 3D space will appear to change.
http://www.zamandayolculuk.com/cetinbal/TheoryforGraviticPropulsion.htm
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Film, Poetry, Media and The end of civilisation
Bridgessublime
-adjective
1. elevated or lofty in thought, language
2. impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inpsiring awe, veneration
3. supreme or outstanding
4. complete; absolute; utter
5. Archaic.
a. of lofty bearing b. haughty
6. Archaic. raised high; high up
sublime
-verb
1. vaporize and then condense right back again
thought as a violent confrontation with reality
The cinematic sublime occurs when the imagination suffers a shock forcing you to go beyond imagination towards thought again.
For this to occur thought/logic/intelligence/the pathetic must share common ground with the senses/passion/emotion/the organic. (previously thought to belong to separate spheres)
Essentially when you are watching a film you put together all the sensory inputs in a certain way to create a logical interpretation. once this has been achieved it is not necessary to fully analyse future images, you just need your imagination to oscillate around the central themes. thought is no longer necessary. When the shock-image occurs, the previously logical interpretation is destroyed and it is necessary to reconsider all these fragments and attempt to construct a new logic for them. All through this reconstructive process is an internal monologue (a drunken monologue) searching to reassign meaning to the various parts and combinations of parts.
Rather than asking what is this "Shock" perhaps it is more informative to ask "What does it do?" which is answered above and "How does it work?"
Deleuze talks about the harmonics which accompany the perceived dominant image. Each image activates in the brain not only the dominant interpretation of the image- for example soldiers fighting with bayonets in a field -but other harmonic images which are resonant of the dominant image- for example cowboys and indians, tanks, planes dropping bombs, dead bodies being dug into mass graves. Resonance occurs between the dominant image (frequency) and its harmonics. With film there is not only images but sound as well which bring there own harmonics to the overall physiological and psychological sensations. This overall sensation is a multiplicative combination of energy rather than the sum of its parts. A shock occurs when these parts contradict each other or what you expect of them because seeing and hearing them at the same time creates new links between previously unlinked harmonics and more energy than usual is being poured into the resonant force.
"When the violence is no longer that of the image and its vibrations but that of the represented, we move into a blood-red arbitrariness. When grandeur is no longer that of the composition, but a pure and simple inflation of the represented, there is no cerebral stimulation or birth of thought." p 164
In bad cinema (the movement image) instead of illiciting previously unthought of combinations of images and sounds the baddie jumping out of nowhere simply illicits other stored images of baddies jumping out of nowhere with the similar accompanying screech of the violin or scream.
Thus in bad cinema the shock does not illicit thought but laughter or disgust ie a release. The shock is not great enough to make us rethink our previous logic.
Godard show us the genius of composition in Notre Musique and Weekend. The violence portrayed come from opposite ends of the realistic spectrum. Notre musique shows actual images of war, representations of war (some perhaps poorly done) where as weekend shows illogically red blood, extreme and outrageous violence- both transmit similar messages.
Cinema as a subtractive rather than additive force
The force of cinema relies in the ability to reinterpret on many levels.
Deleuze talks of the Whole - reality in its infinite number of interpretations- something which the cinema can not recreate on screen just because it has sound and movement. Sound plus movement does not equal reality. Cinema is there for great in what it subtracts from the Whole. Cinema organises movement and time in a way that can make us think.
In good cinema this organisation cannot be arbitrary (unlike the arbitrary constraints of language - Russian ) : Hell, Purgatory, Paradise (neatly transported from religious texts or perhaps Dante)
In Notre musique Hell a collection of war footage and Paradise a strangely familiar woods (see Week-end) guarded by U.S. Marines enclose the longer drawn out Purgatory. In purgatory we encounter a mixing of media, poetry, filosophy, history and film. Journalism, journalists, interpreters, homer and the illiad, Greeks, palistinians, Jews, yugoslavians, french-russian jews, "red indians," conflict and Godard. Yes all these things exist in reality but only in film can they meet as they do. Their collective presence feels like a montage -
"As beautiful as a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."
only these meetings are carefully designed by Godard.
These combinations are designed to make us think.
What do they represent?
violence - war, suicide
displacement - "red indians" the franco/russian jew
literature - great poets --- palestinians more interesting than jews but only interesting because they are victims. poetry is for victors. The trojan side of the story not told? -the aeneid by virgil.
identity-identity through philosophy, identity through race, religion, language, shared past, victimisation
language-books in an old church.
culture
Once you start thinking about the links between these things it consumes you.
Composition and transcendence
Pier Paolo Pasolini
RoGoPaGA film by Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti
"Quattro racconti di quattro autori che si limitano a raccontare gli allergri principi della fine del mondo."
Four stories by four authors about the jolly onset of the world's end.
The Ricotta
pasolini's montage of poetry, politics, film, media and religion.
The free indirect subjective
Automaton: mechanism with concealed motive-power; living being whose actions are purely mechanical
metonymic: substutution of an attribute for the name of the thing meant eg turf for horse-racing
Monday, August 13, 2007
Tibet
Language, Thought and Reality: Thinking about World Cinema
According to Wiki: World cinema is a term used primarily in English language speaking countries to refer to the films and film industries of non-English speaking countries (those outside of the Anglosphere)
Although a problematic definition at best, the Wiki definition encapsulates the apparent domination language has over thought and therefore thoughts about culture.
“ Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69) ”
This extremist position (thoughts and sensations are generally considered as being interactive) can be interpreted as an extension of classical thought, rediscovered during the Renaissance, where language an logic, representing the political, was polarised from it's defective counterpart the aesthetic, representing passion. The aesthetic was concerned not only with appearance but with all forms of sensation and thus was seen as an irrational subject of Passion. The political however stemming form logical thought was seen as a product of Reason. The role of the body in the aesthetic was seen as passive, in the political, active. An active life by definition was one which concerned itself with politics.[1] Through the body the border between the aesthetic and the political becomes blurred.
The importance of dreams in David Lynches films connects him to the surrealists. Surrendering to our dreams and other worldly coexistence allows us to breakdown existing boundaries whether or not they are for our own good.
Somewhat hesitantly i suggest that film which combines our sense of sight and sound and ruptures our sense of time and space can break through the boundaries of language.
According to Wiki: World cinema is a term used primarily in English language speaking countries to refer to the films and film industries of non-English speaking countries (those outside of the Anglosphere)
Although a problematic definition at best, the Wiki definition encapsulates the apparent domination language has over thought and therefore thoughts about culture.
“ Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69) ”
This extremist position (thoughts and sensations are generally considered as being interactive) can be interpreted as an extension of classical thought, rediscovered during the Renaissance, where language an logic, representing the political, was polarised from it's defective counterpart the aesthetic, representing passion. The aesthetic was concerned not only with appearance but with all forms of sensation and thus was seen as an irrational subject of Passion. The political however stemming form logical thought was seen as a product of Reason. The role of the body in the aesthetic was seen as passive, in the political, active. An active life by definition was one which concerned itself with politics.[1] Through the body the border between the aesthetic and the political becomes blurred.
At the time of the French Revolution political theorists recognized the functional role of the aesthetic in politics. Rouseau’s influential book ‘The Social Contract” pointed out that a government which disregarded and suppressed sentiments and feeling lent itself to rebellion and revolution. Underlying rebellion are isolating, antagonistic desires dictated by abstract thought. Aesthetics comprised of feelings and shared bodily experiences however act as a unifying force. Ignoring the aesthetic is thus seen as the irrational path. By incorporating feeling into law, tapping into a shared aesthetic, transgressions of that law become a violation of the self and society becomes self regulatory.
Under this system power lies in the aesthetic. This power however is incomplete. There are those who chose to follow their own aesthetic guided by their subconscious or intuition. The surrealists of the 1920's rejected the aesthetics and conventions of the bourgeois society of their parents which the saw as being responsible for the chaotic state of the world.
[1] Quentin Skinner, Visions of politics: Renaissance virtues,
Bunuel and Dali 's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) depicts the struggle to escape from these values through atemporal dreamlike sequences. Most grotesque of all images in this film is the vision of a razor cutting through an eye strongly suggestive of the need for a new vision. A the foundations of the bourgeois vision is the church, the rotting carcus of a war ravaged society and high art. Other images reflecting the rejection of high art include a book being dropped and falling open on Vanmeers "The lacemaker" and possible references to Manet's "The Luncheon on the Grass" when the man falls to his death into a forest in which a naked lady sits. Insects are also used in the piece. Ants which crawl from a stigmata like wound in a characters hand symbolise this decay, a moth the possibility of metamorphisis.
The importance of dreams in David Lynches films connects him to the surrealists. Surrendering to our dreams and other worldly coexistence allows us to breakdown existing boundaries whether or not they are for our own good.
Somewhat hesitantly i suggest that film which combines our sense of sight and sound and ruptures our sense of time and space can break through the boundaries of language.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
The fantastic: Pan's Labyrinth
Ein klein nachtmusik
Dorothea Tanning
Streamside Day Follies
Pierre Huyghe
Although set in the Spanish civil war the dynamics between the family rather than the political bodies were most striking to me. Violence and madness can occur in any family the only solace children stuck in the middle of all this can find is within their imaginations. Their salvation comes from realising the behaviours modelled by their superiors is wrong and that obedience whilst placatory in the short term, is not a for filling long term strategy.
The universality of these themes beyond a specific historical context is due to the links between Pan's labyrynth and the original fantasy of "the enigma of the origin of the self" which is "solved" by the fantasy of family romance or return to origins. As a child the most important markers of our origin are our parents and our homes. In Ofelia's case the civil war has taken both her father and her home away from her. Her mother in marrying the captain has also distanced herself from her daughter. To comfort herself Ofelia seeks out a fantasy world through which she can return to her origins as the long lost princess of a magical King and Queen.
To for fill her personal quest, Ofelia must undertake three tasks which conflict with the behaviour and obedience expected of her. In choosing to go against the dominant social contract, her body becomes politicised highlighting the link between self identity and power. Through her body and intuition not thought and reason she opposes the powerful fascist regime.
If aesthetics is a discourse of the body then the body of Ofelia represents the aesthetics of choice and freedom. It is innocent yet powerful. Tied to the body rather than time or place it occurs in the fantastical setting where the conscious and unconscious meet.
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