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gavinhalm · 12 years ago

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Glittering Beasts: Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Video Portraits and the Archive

Jeremy Blake achieved initial art world success in the late 1990's with a series of works that blended his background training in painting with digital technologies in which he combined digitally scanned, abstractly painted shapes with more realistic imagery to create large audio-visual, screen-based video projections. His achievement in this realm has been hailed as something of a major turning point for painting because of this unique hybridization (JBW, 9), but the more interesting aspect of his work may be his highly abstract, poetic approach to narrative and story telling.

Though there is little question that Blake created a new way in which to combine painting and technology, this fact probably would hold more interest for those who would wish to find art historical precedents of a traditional "painterly" nature (AMC, 4), at the expense of the narratological experimentation he produces in his pieces. Also, within these narratological explorations, there is a distinct shift from his early work, which dealt with abstract architectural spaces and fictional characters of the artist's creation, to a set of later works which take as their subject actual persons of historical and pop-cultural note.

Early Work

In a series of short tripartite video works between three and seven and a half minutes–Bungalow 8, Guccinam, and Mod Lang–Blake deals with themes of urban space and architecture, real and imagined (Teine, 144), which all obliquely engage issues of urbanization, Hollywood superficiality, and environmental concern. In these pieces, Blake utilizes the software platform After Effects (or, more precisely, worked with an animator friend at the LA-based motion graphics design shop, We Are Royale, using After Effects †) to create video panels of color and vague geometric shape, combined with colorations and "texture mapping" (to borrow a term from 3D modeling) derived from his own painted textures to render cool, almost lifeless architectural spaces (Teine, ibid).

What these early works also do is to abstractly and critically illuminate the hedonistic social structures of image-obsessed Hollywood and their materialistic movers and shakers, especially in Bungalow 8, a notorious pool-side cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Guccinam (Teine, 145), and anticipates the direction Blake was to take towards more concrete narrative issues in his work.

Mod Lang is the start of Blake's more narrative phase and "stars" a fictional character of the artist's devising that is a hybrid of a 60's rock and roll star (a slight referencing of Keith Moon of The Who) and a famous architect, with no particular connection to a historical person but which symbolizes that era's plethora of famous designers of various stripe. In Mod Lang, Blake uses his painterly skills to create a work that doesn't actively show a character per se, but instead subsumes traditional filmic characterization into a complicated set of shifting, quasi-architectural spaces, thus trading a "physical" character for a set of subjective referents which turn physical space into a kind of psychological construct.

It should be noted that this is very different from, say, "first-person perspective" films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which project the main character's gaze out of his own eyes in order to interface with the “real world”. Instead, Blake’s first-person perspectival gaze in Mod Lang is one that actively creates the world in which the character exists through the artist's use of abstract shapes of an architectural nature, as well as almost psychedelic painterly colorations.

In short, Blake achieves an unacknowledged shift in first-person, filmic characterization through his various painterly-techno-filmic techniques in Mod Lang. The closest film-historical approximation that one can conceive of is perhaps Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, but even here this particular film is closer to the works we will discuss in Blake's later phase because of its combination of filmed reality and abstract painterliness executed on the film negative's surface.

Later Work (the Winchester and Wild Choir Trilogies)

The later portion of Blake's oeuvre, consisting of the Winchester Trilogy (2002-2004) and Wild Choir (2003-2007) that he mostly finished before his untimely death by suicide in 2007, are works that engage actual historical figures of varying fame. Also, these works throughly intertwine Blake's earlier interest in architectural space with the psychological being of each of their characters through the use of historical research, in the case of Sarah Winchester, to more physical archival/material research in Wild Choir.

Winchester Trilogy

The Winchester Trilogy is Blake's move into more structured narrative concerns and in this set of films, the artist takes on the (in)famous history of Sarah Winchester and her "Mystery House", as it is currently called.

Situated on the outskirts of San Jose, California, the Winchester House exists at the complex nodal point of a number of geographic and historical convergences; being in the same general vicinity of not only the birth of cinema (near the famous “Farm” of Stanford University, where Muybridge created his proto-cinematic oeuvre), but also a mere few miles from the birth of the personal computer via Apple Computer in Cupertino--All of this adds to the subject matter of Sarah Winchester and her labyrinthian house filled with ghosts, and combines into a fascinating nexus of forces and information.

In brief, Sarah Winchester was a wealthy widow of the son, William Wirt Winchester, of the famous gun maker, Oliver Winchester, who invented the repeating rifle--the "Gun that Won the West". Sarah was thoroughly and continually haunted by what she thought were the ghosts of those that perished at the receiving end of her family's creation, became despondent with guilt over these deaths, and eventually decided to build an incredibly complex house with such things as stairs that lead to nowhere, floors without covering, thus exposing only beams, and other such “neurotically”-driven architectural fancies.

In the Winchester Trilogy, the techniques used by Blake vary from hand-held 8mm film of the house, hand-drawn tracings of the exterior, to the overlaying of a variety of scanned-in, painted shapes in order to render "physical" the ghosts and specters that haunted Sarah (JBW, 12). Within this disparate matrix of materials, Blake importantly links her visions and paranoia to issues of Western expansionism in the United States while culling fragments of pop imagery taken from Western genre films to incorporate into his work, thus borrowing heavily from filmic conventions of narrative and suspense (JBW, 14). Also, the artist devotes a whole part of the trilogy to filming the three Century Theatre movie domes built in the 1960's that are on land only a few dozen feet from the Winchester House, thus bringing the story of one woman's house and history into the larger context of violence as portrayed in the mass media (BOW, 46).

The end result is a work that skillfully intermixes, interleaves, and overlays the psycho-physical reality of Sarah Winchester/House (they are, finally, one and the same), media culture in general, and also the greater historical forces at work during this period in history in the country as a whole, thereby erasing not only the distinctions of the imaginative/personal/physical, but of the imaginative/personal/historical--There is no difference between Sarah Winchester, her house, or US history concerning the American West in Blake's work, and all of these elements are visually integrated into a singular quasi-narrative, poetic presentation that is neither literature, nor film, nor (history/portrait) painting, but instead a fascinating genre-leveling combination of all.

Wild Choir

The three parts that constitute Wild Choir ("Reading Ossie Clark", "Sodium Fox", and the unfinished "Glitterbest") are, respectively, about a 1960's-era fashion designer (Ossie Clark), a contemporary "Generation X" singer (David Bermen), and a 1970's punk-rock figure (Malcom McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols–Teine, 163).

In this trilogy, Blake utilizes a variety of archival materials including journal entries, poetry, interviews, photographs, music, and other relational materials (commercial and otherwise) in order to create what could be termed "psychological portraits" of the subjects at hand. In his work, the layering of Blake's usual painterly techniques and archival materials are used in a more literal/referential way than was done in the Winchester Trilogy and this allows for what would seem to be an even more "truthful" narrative to emerge.

What is arguable is whether this later attempt does justice, through its use of so much archival material, to Blake's earlier explorations of poetic narrative. Does the inclusion of the archive create a fuller portrait of the "sitters"? Or, to paraphrase Derrida from his Archive Fever, does the archive cover up more than it exposes or illuminates? And if so, is this in a sense a step backward for Blake in regards to creating a new kind of psychological portrait?

Even if the house of the Winchester Trilogy and the journals and other archival materials in Wild Choir are conceptually readable as similar kinds of texts, the more subjective rendering in the Winchester Trilogy (partially through an absence of archival material) creates a more enticing atmosphere in which to construct a sense of the portrait's sitter, as the sea of sign-and-signifier baggage that comes with dealing with so much archival material arguably ends up painting a mental portrait too similar to that which we could create ourselves by going to the library, or researching on the internet, the lives of the people in which the artist has an interest. ††

In Sonja Teine's PhD thesis on Blake, the only book-length publication on the full body of his work at this time, the author believes the Winchester Trilogy did not actually portray an individual (Teine, 160) and therefore is significantly different than Blake's later "psychological portraits" of fashion and music stars in Wild Choir. But, within the Winchester Trilogy, it is the intertwining of the psychological and architectural spaces of a historical person that dislocates Teine's position which would place this trilogy more on the side of Blake's earlier architectural interests rather than the later, psychological portrait phase of his work.

Indeed, this all begs the question: should there be a difference between the psychic/psychological forces at play within Mrs. Winchester and her house, and the similar forces at work in the diaries and writings of the three persons that were used in the trilogy that followed Winchester? Is writing more descriptive of what it means to be "human" than architecture? Especially in relation to the very personal, psychological architecture constructed by Sarah Winchester?

Teine's seemingly strongest argument, in which voice-over narration of the journal entries and poems of the three subjects in Wild Choir take conceptual primacy in illustrating a portrait over the music which accompanies Winchester (Teine, 161), falls apart because there is no convincing rationale for stating that a literal voice speaking from a written text makes for a portrait (in Blake’s multimedia artworks), whereas the lack of one does not.

Stepping even further out, Teine’s entire thesis (ironically) revolves around the idea that the Wild Choir trilogy of famous personages is a "crypto self-portrait" of Blake himself (Teine, 54), which is an impossibility given the categorization discussed above because there is a lack of any personal writings or texts by/about Blake in his artwork. The somewhat pop-interpretive, quasi-Freudian notion that an artist (Blake) “resides in”, “occupies”, or even “haunts”, their own artwork (either of the trilogies) through their very creation by the artist’s hand also will not hold when what constitutes an artistic (multimedia) “portrait” is set in such an dichotomous fashion.

In short, whether or not there is a "literal" bringing-into-being of the portrait's sitter through vocalization of his/her own words (via journals, or recordings, or what have you), there is still the possibility of portraiture outside of archival texts like the ones used in Wild Choir.

It is the opinion of this writer that Teine's categorization of the Winchester Trilogy as an earlier work concerned more with the architectural than with psychological portraiture does a disservice to the work because it is more valuable to think of it as a piece which is the start of Blake's growing concerns with narrating the interiority of historical personages, and thus it categorically falls on the side of the later Wild Choir.

Glittering Beast in the Archive

In the end, Blake trail-blazed new narrative pathways with his video portraits, especially with his portrait of Sarah Winchester and her house, all of which moved between traditional storytelling and poetic abstraction to the point that they have little precedent within the history of either film, literature proper, or fine art portraiture.

With the growing significance of the archive within Western artistic circles at the time of Blake's suicide in 2007, it is not surprising the artist might have felt a pressing need to engage the intellectual monster of sorts lurking within all of those journals and writings he found so alluring. It is sad that he is no longer with us so that we could have seen how he would have emerged from this labyrinth, either with another ground-breaking body of work, or injury from his fight with this most 21st century of Minotaurs.

Notes:

† Subject discussed during a business email exchange (2008, while working at Dentsu America) between myself and We Are Royale, who were also responsible for the “dream sequence” inter-title animations directed by Blake for the film Punk. Drunk. Love. (2003).

†† One of the most exemplary artists who is able to consistently transcend the potentially overwhelming weight of interacting with archives is Christian Boltanski.

Bibliography:

Teine, Sonja. Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Paintings: Sodium Fox: Fragmented Crypto Self-Portrait, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbruken, Germany, 2012.

[AMC] Jeremy Blake: All Mod Cons, Blaffer Gallery publication on occasion of exhibition of the same name. Terrie Sultan, Director, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, 2002

[BOW] Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal with texts by Mark Durant and Jane Marsching. DAP Publishers, New York, NY, 2006.

[JBW] Jeremy Blake: Winchester with texts by Jeremy Blake, Benjamin Weil, and Mitchel Schwarzer. SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2005.

#jeremyblake #aftereffects #video #videopainting #narrative #abstract #archive

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gavinhalm · 12 years ago

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A Discussion of Tom Gunning's “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations”

Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny.

In one of his more famous essays on photography, Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations, Tom Gunning describes the medium as being fraught with a double existence as both an icon, or bearer of resemblance, as well as an index, which points to the photograph as a literal, empirical trace of past-time. Also essential to this view is the fact that photography is inherently a kind of scientific, chemical/mechanical machine free from the "unreliability of human discourse" (i.e., an image making medium far different than drawing or painting). But, the most striking aspect of photography's early development and mass consumption were the feelings of discomfort experienced by many when viewing this new technology, along with its association with the occult.

The Uncanny and the Double

To describe the startling, “uncanny” experience felt by 19th century viewers of photography, Gunning begins with a fascinating quote from Balzac's novel Cousin Pons, where the author states, in a narrative digression shot-through with notions gleaned from Spiritualist metaphysics, that the figure or thing represented in a photograph exists as a kind of specter or ghost that is constantly producing, shedding, or radiating images of itself outward towards the camera in order to be recorded. In essence, the sensitized photographic plate, via the camera's lens, captures moments of a kind of spiritual singularity emanating from the Real World, and Real Things, and freezes them all forever, in a kind of half-religious and proto-quantum mechanical matrix of psychology, observation, recording, and iconographic image making not far removed, for Gunning, from any number of Christian panel and canvas paintings executed over the previous millennium.

Next, Gunning steers the discussion towards another famous author of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud, who locates the feeling of the uncanny through a personal story in which he found himself walking in circles through a shady part of town filled with prostitutes, thus experiencing repetitively strange and uncomfortable feelings and perceptions while in orbit around this urban space.

Without getting into the peculiar erotic connotations (for Freud himself) implicit within this story, or the refined way Gunning links Freud’s own complex theory of the “Return of the Repressed” to his walkabout, it is enough to say that the uncanny, spooky, deja-vu feeling Freud describes was the impetus for his important concept of the “Double”: Doubling refers to the representation/projection of the ego outward that can assume various forms outside the physical self of the subject (twins, mirroring, reflections, self/portraiture, etc), and has no small connection to aspects of primitive animism as well as the mythological story of Narcissus, and, of course, to photography as a medium.

What photography does, according to Gunning, is to provide a technology which could summon feelings of the uncanny through a visual-empirical doubling of reality, thus grounding Spiritualism in science/technology and helping to give it quasi-rational justification for proliferating its beliefs.

He also relates other pseudo-empirical methods of communication with the dead to his discussion, such as the example of the Fox sisters who became famous for their seances whereby they rapped out messages from the beyond (Morse Code-like, and in an empirical auditory way that could also be “directly” sensed)–Even famous public figures of the time, such as Thomas Watson of Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory, often fell into believing the efficacy of the sisters’ contacts with the otherworldly. Spiritualism now becomes, according to Gunning, intertwined with the development of early forms of mass communication and the scientific/technological in general.

Doubling of the Double Through the Photographic Mirror of American Spiritualism

A whole host of optical methods were used by spirit photographers to prove the existence of the Spirit Realm, the most successful of which was the sandwiching of different negatives in order to reveal the sought-for ghostly figures in a final photographic object–From President Lincoln's towering ghost standing behind his seated widow (complete with his hands upon her shoulders), to multiple exposures of dead children's faces next to their mothers, to strangely arranged circular galleries of ghostly heads, all were examples of the different arrangements spirit photographers executed in order to display the other-worldly beings and loved ones from the beyond.

Often appearing within these photographs were, incredibly for their early viewers, images people had seen elsewhere–Recognizable public images lurking both out in the Real World, and within in the dark recesses of the secret archives each spirit photographer possessed, were somehow (re)appearing. In order to rationalize these doubly-doubled images’ inclusion, a spirit photographer would argue that, in order for people to recognize the spirits, they themselves must use common, understandable imagery for communicative reasons. So, in short, the spirits were also producing photographs, which is a profoundly revelatory thesis that had deep metaphysical implications for both the realms of the living and the dead.

Photography also engaged in a fascinating alliance with another aspect of Spiritualism in which entranced mediums would throw up, evacuate, or generally excrete "materializations" of some uncertain gelatinous substance (in this case, not of a silver halide nature) that often included yet more images of the dead. Also, Spiritualists claimed that by merely holding a piece of photographic material, without the aid of a camera, one could produce images of ghosts, or, even more incredibly, a ghost in its entirety could be materialized via (any) photographic methods and then be touched, and even smelled.

One of Gunning’s most impressive examples during this discussion uses the instance of the ghost of one Katie King, whose supposed conjuring famously fooled one of the finest British scientists of the era, William Cookes, and would end up giving more than a little credence to the beliefs of the Spiritualists through his association–Though it was later shown that the medium who conjured Ms. King looked identical to the ghost she was purportedly summoning, thus conjuring a spirit that was, in essence as well as literally, a living double of a dead double (perhaps the most truly astonishing instance where photographic material begat the very thing it represented).

All of these meta/physical mechanizations involving photographic technology take us in one direction or another from the material, to the immaterial, and back to the material again, providing the structure for an infinite empirical/spiritual feedback loop. What could be more uncanny, or more to the point, what could provide more exemplary evidence for the existence of the Spirit Realm, then a new technology being able to not only open the doors of perception, but to actively enable communication with the Other Side?

Indeed, in Spirit Photography the mediating technology itself takes over the human medium's role, and the most profound connection between photography and Spiritualist manifestation lies in the concept of the sensitive medium (literally and figuratively, as both the sensitive medium that conjures up the ghosts, as well as the sensitive plate that captures them)–This double figuration of a sensitive, doubling medium is the ultimate medium-as-message.

What Gunning does throughout his essay is weave a very subtle, very detailed socio-historical analysis which provides an exceptional lens through which to observe one of the final sociocultural waves in the 19th century that shifted the larger focus from the religiously-subjective, to the near complete domination of the empirical/visual in our own present culture, and his analysis convincingly fuses together issues relating to period gender bias, economics, legal issues concerning fraud and quackery, the spectacles of magic shows, and showmanship itself. †

In the end, Gunning returns to the idea that Balzac found so compelling in which photography didn't simply capture the trace of something, but that this something was involved in a nearly endless series of self-referential image production. Therefore, what we end up having during this time in Western history is a situation in which the feeling of the uncanny, the idea of the Double, the fear of death, along with a new technology, engenders a metaphysics that would have the spirits on the other side creating infinitely reproducible photographs of themselves in order to communicate with the living.

We have, in short, a model of the universe where things reproduce themselves through a never ending re-production of images, but have no real, “original” existence outside of these images. Sounds uncannily familiar, doesn't it?

Notes:

† Cf. the film The Spiritualist Photographer, by the great 19th/20th century contemporary filmmaker-magician Méliès, which exposed the entire farcical display of Spiritualist photography's practice in order to produce a film that disrobes the specious, tenuous ties Spiritualism had to the scientific, and unveiled it as being all novel spectacle and showman-like trickery rather than an awe inspiring event.

#tomgunning #photography #photographichistory #spirit #ghost #phantom #spiritphotography #haunting

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gavinhalm · 13 years ago

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Traditional Versus Avant-Garde Aesthetics in Charles Burnett's "Nightjohn"

The biggest difference between Burnett's 1996 film Nightjohn and his earlier masterpiece Killer of Sheep is certainly within the camera work utilized, and though Burnett's concerns for social inequality (along with a deep-seeded desire to dismantle such inequity) had not changed over the years between these films, their formalistic differences could not be more pronounced.

In Nightjohn, what we have is a much more expected Hollywood approach to blocking the actors/figures, typical center and asymmetrical framing, camera and crane moves, and a traditional approach to sound.

Whereas in Killer of Sheep we find the use of Godard-like editorial and framing experimentation (especially in regards to how he photographs the children), Nightjohn seems to dispense with any significant formal experimentation. This new approach for Burnett opens up an aesthetic Pandora's box of sorts: is the goal of informing the viewer of social concern detracted by this new, more traditional "Hollywood" approach? Is the formalistic experimentation in his earlier movie a necessity for the telling of that story? What is the base difference, in regards to Burnett's filmmaking, between avant-garde filmmaking and traditional ways of telling a story?

Though the short discussion here is not an extended comparison between the early and later Burnett, this viewer feels that the director missed a chance to tackle the most sorrowful chapter in American history (slavery), and in a way that might have been better served through the use of his earlier, brilliant avant-gardist filming techniques--Much like Trinh T. Minh-Ha utilized an array of experimental approaches to present the "now" in/of her ethnographic films, Burnett accomplished something similar in his earlier film, and did so in a way that traditional Hollywood picture making simply can’t live up to.

#charlesburnett #larebellion #lafilm

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gavinhalm · 13 years ago

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You're Breaking Up: Audio Dislocation as Identity in Julie Dash's “Illusions”

What is so striking to the viewer in Illusions is that, right away, Dash hits us with an array of sound dislocations that make one question if they were intentional (which I will argue), or if they were all simply a set of "mistakes" in production and/or the editing room--From the very first scene, there are what seem to be miscues in dubbing, poor quality inserts, questionable mic work in general, and music that overpowers dialogue.

Most of the shots where this is happening are of the female Producer discussing with the Studio Head "bringing the reality of war" to the screen, while her dialogue is overridden by some of the previously mentioned "effects”. This approach is arguably utilized by the director in order to produce a critical/metaphorical reflection of the black female Producer’s status as a citizen and human being within the Hollywood/US cultural environment of 1942--That is to say, as the Producer character states later on, "(t)hey see me, but they can't recognize me". She is there, but her identity as a human being is fractured, shifted, dislocated across the scrim of cultural interfacing to the point that, like the unnamed character in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, she is not truly seen.

One of the most cunning usages of these auditory dislocations is that, after setting the identifying tone of the female Producer (named Minion Dupree; her first name being a clever ironic touch), they disappear when the scene moves to the sound stage where we see a black singer overdubbing the song of a white actress on screen (a common practice in the film industry of the time). Here, most of the audio dislocations are then transferred to the visual plane, where the faces of the white sound engineer and Studio Head are refracted and displaced in the window separating the mixing booth and sound stage.

Soon after this scene, we find Dash exquisitely bringing back and utilizing the audio “distortions” to signify another identity that is fractured: that of the singer. While it is obvious that the black girl is singing the part of the white actress on screen, what is so brilliant about Dash's work in this scene is that the viewer gradually realizes that even this signer is being over-dubbed (!)

By using these formal cues to bring attention to the filmic medium itself (a la Jean-Luc Godard), Dash enables the fractured, overwritten, and abused voices of black women to become fully heard and out in the open.

#juliedash #larebellion #lafilm #feminism #filmhistory #sounddesign

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gavinhalm · 13 years ago

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Architectures of Containment: Built Environment in "The Bicycle Thief" and "Killer of Sheep"

In "Manipulation of Space and Time in Cinema", Teshome H. Gabriel delineates a dichotomous history that envisions Western films as preoccupied with the aspect of time over that of space, and "Third-World" (sic) cinemas emphasizing space as being more significant than time (Gabriel, 83). Gabriel justifies his thesis by stating that Third-World film originates "from folk traditions where communication is a slow-paced phenomenon and time is not rushed" (ibid.)

What is problematic about Gabriel's approach is that, making room for certain artists in cinema's avant-garde (such as Maya Deren), along with more Hollywood filmmakers pre-1970's (such as the American Western director, Andre de Toth), his thesis doesn't hold up as one can find many Western filmmakers that deal heavily with the concept of space (Antonioni is another exemplary filmmaker concerned with the spatial), and one could also argue that certain aspects of Brazilian cinema play significantly with time (Rocha's Antonio das Mortes, comes to mind).

For our purposes here, Gabriel's basic insight into the spatial aspects that supposedly dominate Third-World film will come into play within the somewhat "outsider", avant-garde approach Charles Burnett will take in Killer of Sheep, while at the same time illuminating scenes within Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, in a manner that contradicts his general thesis, while at the same show these filmmakers creating architectures of constraint that mirror the larger social issues of oppression that they wish to address.

Urban Streets as Sites of Constraint

In the most important early scene of The Bicycle Thief, the main character has his bike stolen and pursues the thief in a manner that cuts linearly, and straight ahead, through the city. After loosing the pursuit, he walks back retracing the same path while looking from right to left, and though he hesitates moving in either direction, he never waivers in returning to the original site of defeat via a direct path back.

What is so telling is that he resolutely keeps this path, instead of searching in one or the other direction. All of this is in metaphorical keeping with the name of his bicycle, “Fides”, which, in essence, describes a sense of trust in Italian, and now is completely ruined and cannot be found again, even through the spacio-temporal act of retracing. It is in this act of back-and-forth movement through the urban space that negates the possibility of him finding his lost bicycle as well as ever recovering the past and possibility of a "good life".

Likewise, in the final scene, when the main character is stealing a bicycle out of desperation, we find him surrounded by the leftover fascistic architecture of the Mussolini era, and watch as he circulates through the streets in trying to escape. It is this kind of movement through this particular culturally charged space that entraps the character both physically and metaphorically.

In Burnett's Killer of Sheep, urban space is also defined through bodily movement, but with a slightly different twist in the sense that it is circumscribed by both the main character's paths (to and from work, and to another friend's house, for instance), as well as the abstract shots of children at play amongst the ruins of decay within the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles (which, it should be noted, mirrors the urban decay and run-down post war "social" housing which the main character of The Bicycle Thief resides in with his family).

This split-personality of urban space expresses both the "enforced inaction" of the adults in Burnett's film, as well as the "vitality of the children" with their "exuberant and agile vigor" (James, 331), and symbolizes the plight both groups face: the ultimate slaughtering of personal dreams and upward mobility that both the adults and (eventually) the children wish to obtain.

Houses as Mirroring-Microcosms of Urban Space

The domestic spaces in both The Bicycle Thief and Killer of Sheep can be thought of as constituting similar ones that mirror the latent social issues of the respective cities, as well as the lives of their occupants. Yet, the two filmmakers approach their camera work in quite a different way, and this respectively gives a sense of lessening constraint in Thief, and greater constraint within Sheep.

In De Sica's film, a downtrodden, low (or, no) income family lives in very tight quarters. Yet, he seemingly liberates the feeling of constraint by allowing the camera to roam freely through the constrained domestic space with many follow and tracking shots. What seems be at work here is a method of bringing the larger movements that the husband and son trace throughout the city into the apartment, thus, De Sica is successfully allowing the hectic, exterior wanderings to metaphorically transpose themselves into the interior rooms in order to render them as spaces of conflict.

Burnett's film renders the domestic space quite differently by utilizing only a set of Ozu-like "still shots", whereby the camera hardly moves at all, whether this is in scenes where the main character is arguing with his wife in the kitchen, trying to buy an old automobile engine from an acquaintance, or fending off the drug dealers that try and lure the main male character back out into the street. It is this method of using an immobile camera that keeps the main character's house (along with that of his friends) rigidly formalized and “in line”, metaphorically as well as literally, with the circular and sealed-off space that is the depressed socioeconomic world of Watts.

Third World Space and Western Time

What one wonders most in regards to these two filmmaker's renderings of urban and domestic spaces is how much did Burnett learn from De Sica? It is well known that Burnett, along with many others within the LA Rebellion scene, were very interested in utilizing the various tropes and techniques of Italian Neo-Realism (James, 332), and De Sica was one of that movement's primary creatives.

Also, what such a comparison of the filmed spaces of the street and home by these two directors does is to dismantle a facile reading of film history that would see the West as producing films mainly concerned with time (due to its conformity within the pincers of capitalistic commodity functions - Gabriel, 83), and the "Third World" filmmakers being more interested in space.

The fact of the matter is, all film, regardless of where it is produced or who produces it, is concerned with both space and time--the two (meta)physical aspects of it are ultimately inseparable, and universal.

Bibliography:

Gabriel, Teshome H.; Michael T. Martin, ed., “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films”, Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, Wayne State University Press, 1995.

James, David E., The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005.

#charlesburnett #larebellion #lafilm #neorealism #italianfilm

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gavinhalm · 13 years ago

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Hermetically, Lovingly Sealed: A Meditation on the Watts of Charles Burnett’s "Killer of Sheep"

Los Angeles film, or, more precisely, films in and about Los Angeles, often contain a subtextual reflection that communicates an architecture or larger urban space which is constrained, or even circular, by design, and is thus very different than, if not diametrically opposed to, what we superficially perceive to be the reality of LA’s sun drenched architecture or “wide open” urban sprawl.

From early Noir such as Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly, to more recent renderings in such racially charged (purposefully or otherwise) works as Chinatown, Falling Down, or Menace II Society, or the current LA Pulp/Noir, Drive, urban and even domestic spaces are often presented as performatively encased: circulating their characters into dead-end, labyrinthine cul-de-sacs; dark foreboding rooms from which there is no escape (physically or psychologically); streets that flow to nowhere or turn back upon themselves, or, in the cases of Kiss Me Deadly, Falling Down, and perhaps Refn’s aforementioned Drive, they are terminated by that ultimate (meta)physical "wall", the Pacific Ocean.†

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is solidly within this historical, filmic architecture of constraint, restraint, and enclosed space, as he also formally and metaphorically “entraps” his characters. But, unlike the other films mentioned, there is a singular difference in that Burnett shows his quasi-fictional spaces to be ones of psychological openness reflecting aspects of love and comfort.

The area of Watts in Los Angeles, especially circa 1972-73 when this film was shot, is presented as a highly downtrodden, economic "wasteland" akin to contemporary Detroit today. It has been completely abandoned by industry, and become an area riddled with the empty shells of industrial architecture.

This general exterior environment is shown by Burnett to be not simply a space of "destruction", but one that allows for continuous play (even possible regeneration), especially through the use of vignettes of the children using the bricolage and detritus laying around them in a creative way--This is especially evident when Burnett frames his shots in formally beautifully ways, such as when he shows the children also play-fighting, and building "pointless" architectural creations out of railroad ties, interacting with the freight trains themselves, and jumping and playing over the rooftops of a variety of structures.

Also, while the main male characters circulate in and out of such oppressive spaces as the slaughterhouse (both a possible metaphor for the city itself, as well as the lives they must lead within it), they always come back to the hearth of their own home. And, while this hearth also contains friction due to the obvious economic plight experienced by the characters, it is one that provides strong and continued support.

Perhaps most pointedly, in the last scene of significant action (one in which nearly the whole cast is trapped inside their broken-down automobile on the side of an unknown road at the edge of town, trying to "escape" to the “outside” for a bit of fun), Burnett could have easily ended his film on a note of resignation, and the whole thing could have taken on a similar bleak vision of life in Los Angeles as displayed in all of those aforementioned LA films. But, he instead shows the family back at the rejuvenating site of their home, one that has been circulated back to numerous times throughout the entire film.

Indeed, it is within Burnett’s larger vision of all the micro-spaces that constitute Watts that one finds love--It is, within its streets, alleyways, destroyed industrial blocks, and dusty train tracks, a place in which one can always find some semblance of support (after all, it is a "neighborhood"). In this way, the film situates itself as a kind of diametric opposite to a work like Menace II Society, as Burnett shines a light of hope in an otherwise “bleak” and "lost" urban landscape.

Notes:

† Also, not just Los Angeles, but some of the most famous of “California films”, such as Vertigo and Bullitt, have spaces and streets which fold back upon and into themselves, as if they were the metaphorical figurations of a Westward Expansion that had slammed into the continental terminus of the Pacific, thus forcing the pioneering energies of an entire nation into whirlpools and eddies that go nowhere all along the coast.

#charlesburnett #watts #neighborhood #larebellion #lafilm

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gavinhalm · 13 years ago

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Almost Out of Time – Destabilizing Western Narrative Temporality in Two Films by Zeinabu irene Davis, and Pierre H. L. Desir

"Immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity and ubiquity are all so many attributes of divinity that each allow us to escape the historic conditions of humanity"- Paul Virlio, "The Futurism of the Instant"

In Paul Virilio's most recent book-essay, from which the above quote is taken, the author sketches out a theory of temporality that envisions a contemporary world where time has been fragmented and compressed via technology to such a degree that there is nothing left but an ever-present "instant".

While acknowledging his concern for the loss of "temporal diversity", due to a world encased within a singular sense of instantaneity, in which "all distinction(s) between past, present, and future" are obliterated (though this is, perhaps ultimately, a very Euro-centric, eschatological vision of teleological "progress"), I would like to briefly trace here the possibility, within two films by Zeinabu irene Davis and Pierre H. L. Desir, of a filmic sense of time that not only destabilizes Western narrative temporality, through the use of pixelation and time-lapse photography, but also allows for the idea of time compression and/or destabilization to be one of creative positivity.

In Zeinabu Davis's film, Cycles, the director visually introduces a female character within the space of her own home and nearby locale working the daily "duties" of homemaking (cleaning, scrubbing, etc.) through a complex visual technique involving pixelation, in which the camera records short snippets of the world which confront the viewer in a manner that cuts into the traditional expectancies of continuity within Western narrative action.

These scenes where the main character scrubs floors, walls, and bathroom tubs still retain a progressive (traditional) narrative action, but in their fragmented presentation they create a heightened sense of gender-specific oppression as well as allow for moments of sensuality that would otherwise seem completely out of place if presented as a continuous set of scenes.

Indeed, it is the fragmentation of presentation of the main character's existence in these moments that creates an atemporal lacuna within the film's action, and allows for the main character's non-verbal, sub-conscious world to also infuse the story. It is the very in-betweenness which exists between what is left out in the action, during the use of techniques such as image pixelation, that enables the viewer to experience not only the level of oppression of the duties imposed upon the female character, but also her psychological state in which she rewrites oppression as personal salvation through sensuality.

Likewise, Pierre Desir's film, The Gods and the Thief, also takes the viewer out of a traditional Western experience of narrative temporality, but does so in a very different manner while at the same time opening up the space of the film to it's own form of "spiritual time".

After the male protagonist (in the form of a kind of earth-bound, Vodun spirit) cuts a wandering, discursive path through a forest, while following an equally mysterious woman, we see him eventually dragging a box (shown in a series of non-linear quick cuts) that inexplicably grows larger to the point that it becomes an almost Sisyphean burden whose actual purpose is left for the viewer to conjure.

The conclusion of this set of scenes now finds the viewer in a new space consisting of a farm and accompanying buildings, and this is where the film's temporality becomes highly abstract through the use of exceptional time-lapse photography–Shadows ominously growing over the land, multiple shots of clouds quickly forming in the sky, and the sun cutting along the very edge of a wide rectangular matte placed in front of the lens.

These renderings also allow for a kind of atemporal, spiritual transcendence to "infuse" the film's narrative. It is here, in the space of the farm, that the director has us experiencing the world in the same way as the male protagonist/spirit: by completely speeding up the physics of earth-bound temporality, all the while never letting the sun slip into darkness. In the end, all of human-experienced nature becomes an object in the hands of a spiritual psychodynamics that fragments, burdens, repeats, stalls, and frustrates a Western experience of a teleologically lived or progressive time.

After viewing these two films, what one can begin to see is that, even after all the attempts at transcending Western metaphysical concepts of time from Nietzsche through Derrida, contemporary thinkers such as Virilio are perhaps still conceptually trapped within a worldview that would have the compression of time (via technological apparatus from film to computer hardware and software) given only as an absolute moment of “(i)mmediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity, and ubiquity"–An inverse take on a Judeo-Christian, atemporal, and beatific Absolute Moment a la Dante in the "Paradiso". The problem for Virilio is that this Moment is one that, due to the stretching, cutting, destroying, rearranging, and compressing of time via modern technologies, becomes violently a-historical and a threat to humanity on a whole.

What films like Desir and Davis' do is to show that these techniques (and technologies) can engender the exact opposite: they open up the spaces between, and the forces that drive, such fragmentation into the spiritual and psychological planes of our lived experience.

#larebellion #lafilm

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gavinhalm · 13 years ago

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Strange Times: Mario Falsetto’s Conception of Temporality in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”

In Mario Falsetto's book, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, the author makes the case that Kubrick established a "direct correspondence between fictional and real time" (37) through a reading that utilizes an “empirical”, proto-Cultural Analytics approach à la Lev Manovich, measuring such things as the histograms of Average Shot Length (ASL) per scene. Along with other, quasi-scientific occlusions into the filmic space, he interestingly and mysteriously states that filmic techniques such as long shots of three or more minutes "(add) to the sense of temporal compression" in Kubrick’s oeuvre (35). It’s not entirely clear how such a conclusion could be inferred from the work of any filmmaker. †

Also, like a weirdly farcical Kubrickian creation, Falsetto perceives in the director’s techniques a temporal/spatial equivocality between the real and filmed worlds (36-7). In contrast, even through the most superficial viewing of this film, one cannot help but believe that the various approaches utilized by Kubrick, such as long shots of “tense” scenes filled with absurd dialogue, do the exact opposite.

Indeed, the need for urgency that is expected in some of Kubrick’s scenes are cunningly undermined by the very length of time taken in each of them with their rambling and silly dialogue, along with the intentional and ironic veracity of taking shooting cues from documentary film.

Also, it is this writer's feeling that, through such techniques as the attention paid to exacting decor in the film’s art direction, along with the high level of overall "realism" (37), all such means are put to extremely ironic use by Kubrick in rendering the decisive moment of crisis whereby panic, sense of agency, and quick delivery of (rational) dialogue should instead be immediately given, but are not.

The scenes involving General Ripper, and his British subordinate, Mandrake, are one of the primary sites of ironic/farcical display within the film. That is to say, the rambling, insane, cowboy talk of the General, shot in long takes, seemingly creates tension within the plot, but is instead subverted by Mandrake's very existence. This is no more apparent than in the very name given to the General's Executive Officer.

Through a cursory look at definitions found in a few common dictionaries, a mandrake is descriptive of three primary items that are of interest to us here:

1) It was the NATO code-designation for a Stalin-era interceptor used in the north and eastern outlays to protect the former USSR.

2) The word is derived from the name of a 16th century demon of Spanish origin that was conceived for the purpose of consultation by occult sorcerers in a time of need and is immune to fire.

3) The mandrake was a symbol for birth in William Blake's early graphical/poetic work, "The Gates of Paradise: For Children".

In relation to these definitions, Mandrake, the character, becomes a multi-pronged foil to Ripper's lunatic excess (and the very idea of "realistic" tension existing within the plot). A polysemic character, Mandrake is, as the paranoid Ripper at one point imagines, a potential Ruskie; a "demon" of sorts that Ripper has "created" and locked inside his room to help him continue casting his paranoid spell upon the world (though Mandrake does exactly the opposite). And also an ironic symbol of birth in a situation that promises to promote nothing more than total, nuclear megadeath.

Thus, such a Bakhtinian, "dialogical" reading deconstructs the very notion that Ripper and Mandrake are renderings of anything sufficiently "realistic". Instead, they are, in the hands of Kubrick, farcical characters that both prolong the narrative through wild dialogue referencing American cowboy culture and comedic British silliness, when it should instead be racing forward towards some sort of rational outcome. Not least when Mandrake tries to extract the mission stop-code from Ripper (44)--In an inverse "consultation", the demon now tries to get help from the sorcerer!

The other major scenes produce much of the same kind of black-comedy goofball "Slaughter!” to a theory that wishes to show Kubrick directly correlating fictional time with real time, or some scene being perceived as more "realistic" because of its realistic set design.

The pilot and crew's demeanor in the B-52, while certainly presented with more editorial speed and within tighter spatial quarters than the other scenes (37), also displays a languid, happy-go-lucky approach to dialogue which should not be happening in a nuclear war.

From the pilot Kong’s (Slim Pickens) goofy cowboy hat and darkly slap-stick ride upon the tip of a bomb, to the inordinate amount of time-consuming preparations for launching the weaponry and finding the target, all of these sub-scenes ironically contradict any sense of "real" time. Likewise, the War Room scenes with their hilarious time-sucking dialogue, cavernous space, and cocktail hour amenities (such as the delicious spread of catered food), do the opposite from what one would expect in a time of crisis.

Though Falsetto rightfully understands that Kubrick utilizes temporal/editorial techniques and space to create narrative momentum, the director’s entire point seems to rocket right over Falsetto’s head, with his thesis applied to Dr. Strangelove coming across as strangely humorous as the lines spoken by any of the film’s bizarre characters. As it stands, Falsetto’s general thesis is a fair warning siren for all who wish to force reductionistic, quasi-empirical interpretive methodologies upon artistic objects.

Notes:

† As an example, Elephant, by Alan Clarke (1989), especially because the film contains a lot of action in its long takes and acts as a foil to the argument one might expect in defense of Falsetto’s claim: that long shots with a lot of action compress time.

In particular, Elephant utilizes long takes fused to tracking shots in order to build up tension towards the individual murders at the end of each scene; it is the extreme production and presentation of space that takes over our perception in order to define the urban geography of Northern Ireland and its Troubles as an entirely violent place (space), and that its violent history (time) ultimately no longer has any meaning or use beyond the fog of hatred as distant psychodramatic impetus.

Bibliography:

Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Praeger Publishers, 1994.

#kubrick #film #coldwar #culturalanalytics

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gavinhalm · 14 years ago

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Liquid Machine: “Metropolis”, Huyssen, and the Narcissistic Mirror

In Andreas Huyssen's brilliant and influential text, "The Vamp and the Machine", the author weaves together a fascinating article that explores a novel and contemporary feminist reading of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and produces a corrective of past readings of the film by showing that the movie itself is a reification of male gender stereotyping of women which was so deeply ingrained within the Weimar culture that produced this artistic masterpiece.

Huyssen’s Concept of the “Vamp-Machine”

The main critical thrust in Huyssen's paper is buttressed by a skillful Freudian-critical approach (utilizing the Austrian neurologist's ideas of the Oedipal Complex as well as that of the Return of the Repressed) which is melded with(in) the (misogynistic) historical trope of the female as being both "of nature", and "without nature", which is to say that she is both human and machine at the same time. Huyssen terms this the "vamp-machine", a figure used to describe the marginal positioning of woman within the urban and psychological space of Metropolis.

The vamp-machine can be seen to be an amalgam of projections and displacements (70) by the male gaze that turns woman (in this case, both the character Maria and the Robot created by Rotwang) into a kind of Pygmalion creation (71) with bodily/spiritual control ceded to men. Also, this robo-Pygmalian-fembot is a symbolic mediation between both nature and culture on a whole, an ideal creation without a "mother" (ibid), and a coupled (and coupling?) virgin/prostitute (73).

Overall, Huyssen develops a complex reading that canvases not only early socio-economic concerns in relation to the film (especially the plight of workers in capitalist society - 65), but brings in contemporary philosophers such as Foucault (76), who had fairly recently, in regards to the date of Huyssen's writing, formulated a critique of the male gaze within the purview of Western culture. This array of critical issues are, via the concept of the vamp-machine, then brought to bear upon scenes which show the conflict between the idea(l) of the virgin-female and the vampish-technological.

The Vamp-Machine Storming Metropolis

Perhaps the most significant scenes where the conflict and fear of the vamp- machine/Robot take place are the scenes of the Robot's creation, her (sic) riling up of the male workers in the depths of the catacombs, as well as the hyper-sexual "Whore of Babylon" belly dance in front of a throng of upper class men in a dance hall, and finally that of her own destruction tied to a stake on top of a flaming heap of technological bricolage--Each of these scenes takes a different approach to constructing the male gaze as it relates to the idea(l) of the female.

Within the scene of the Robot's creation at the hands of Rotwang, we see Maria's spirit transmigrated to the Robot through a variety of electronic pseudo-technologies that were common tropes during the period: Tesla Coil-like light rings that moved vertically up and down over the Robot (a symbol for the Robot's awakening) and horizontally over Maria as she lay down (an obvious signification for her "death"), as well as a variety of electrode hook-ups that communicated the transmigration of Maria into the Robot. This particular scene is the progenitor for a reading that links the male gaze to modern technological becoming at the expense of the idea (and the body) of female humanness.

In the scenes where the Robot sends the male workers (as a “false prophet” in the catacombs) and rich male party-goers (as a belly dancing "Whore of Babylon") into frenzy, the male fear of technology (and woman) gone awry is given its fullest expression. Here, we find the female as creation and cult object of the male imagination appearing as both neutral and obedient (for Rotwang and Jon Fredersen) as well as threatening and out of control (for all of "Mankind" - 73).

Lastly, the redemption by fire of the Robot, in the final stake burning scene, is a kind of guilty exorcism of all that has taken place in the film; from Freder's initial desiring gaze at Maria in front of the garden fountain, to the creation of the Robot, and on down to the destruction/flooding of Metropolis. It is the phantasmal resolution of the "castration fear" that haunts all of the male characters throughout the film (78-81).

Watery Mirrors

Though his reading of Metropolis is an exemplary piece of criticism concerning this film at the time, it is interesting to note that Huyssen neglects a very important element within the film, which, I believe to the best of my knowledge, no critic has significantly touched upon: the image of water.

Though water can be seen, traditionally, as a symbol that signifies ideals such as innocence and redemption, as well as biblical flooding, in the context of Huyssen's Freudian reading of Metropolis it can take on an entirely different meaning: that of Narcissistic mirror.

From the earliest scene in the garden, with Freder playing and seducing (and being seduced) in front of a circular fountain, and on through the later scenes whereby the destruction of Metropolis takes place through the release of vast amounts of water (which not only seep through cracks in the ground of the underworld, but later cascade over the massive buildings that house the workers of the city), we can read this as a narcissistic mirroring of Freder's imagination.

Instead of viewing water as symbolizing the facile idea that it represents innocence or biblical flooding, we can relate it to the pool that entrapped Narcissus (Freder) in a (Lacanian) "mirror phase" (Lacan, 4), whereby Freder's image of Maria/Woman (who, again, is also the Robot/Vamp) is not, or cannot, be fully resovled. The impossibility of obtaining (the) Maria-Robot therefore becomes an obsessive and never-ending goal that Freder dreams for himself, which predictably includes the happy ending whereby he fulfills his desire.

Also, as Huyssen states, all of the “subsequent events in the machine room” (which house the giant, water-vapor releasing apparatus, which in turn prevent the flooding of Metropolis) that Freder experiences “actually mirror Freder’s internal situation” of conflict, desire, and hallucination (79).

Indeed, if the entire movie is now viewed as Freder's narcissistic "dreamscape", it both radically changes Huyssen's reading of the film, as well as completely agrees with it, in the sense that the critical narrative of castration/repression still remains, but is now submerged into the Narcissitic pool/mirror of Freder's imagination.

That is to say, the meta narrative of Huyssen’s reading is critical not only of Weimar culture and the various technological forces at play – as rendered in the figurations of the vamp-machine/Robot, the city itself, Jon Fredersen, Rotwang, and Maria – but ends up becoming completely figured (with)in the figure of Freder himself.

Metropolis thus reads as a gargantuan, solipsistic dreamscape narrative of Freder staring at himself in the watery machinery of a narcissistic pool; the emanating ray of the male gaze now folded back upon itself, objectifying itself, in an infinite feedback loop.

Even though the "male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification" and "is reluctant to gaze at his (own) exhibitionist like(ness)" (Mulvey, 62), Freder has no choice. That is because in the end, as in the beginning, he was only in love with himself.

Bibliography:

Huyssen, Andreas. "The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis", New German Critique No. 24/25, Autumn, 1981-Winter, 1982, pp. 221-237

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.), New York: Norton, 2002 (original work published 1949).

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Chapter from Feminist Film Theory: a Reader, Thornham, Sue, ed., Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

#metropolis #andreas huyssen #freud #psychoanalysis #jacques lacan #film #filmtheory

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gavinhalm · 14 years ago

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Axes of Perception: Visualizing the Idea of the “West” in 19th Century Photography and 20th Century Film

“The hardest thing for a...photographer is a place without edges–a place without finite form or limitation...For most people, space is not something to look at, it is something to pass through” –Thomas Joshua Cooper, photographer

“It isn’t necessarily about the horizon, but how you get there and what is in the middle” – Martin Stupich, photographer

For over a century and a half, the space and horizon(s) of the American West have captivated photographers, artists, filmmakers, and writers who have struggled to corral the conceptual/physical infinitude they assumed existed, or even experienced first hand, in the Western frontier. Indeed, what can be gathered from the above quotations by two contemporary photographers of the West is the idea that, between one’s feet on the ground and the infinite horizon expanding outward, the West, in its own unique way, still contains nothing...and everything in between. That is, the quotes outline in their almost empirically empty descriptiveness the same struggle that has confronted all artists as they “made their way out West”.

Two early photographers whose work could be considered formative for the view of the American West as being both an infinite horizon of plenty and a groundless void of nothingness, are the 19th century photographers Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) and Timothy H. O’Sullivan (c.1840-1882). Both of these mens’ work will be considered as exemplary of the type of visual delineation of the West that artists continue to express.

Their work will be brought into relation with scenes from two classic Westerns of Hollywood’s early and mid-point “Golden” eras (Andre De Toth‘s Day of the Outlaw, and The Big Trail by Raoul Walsh) in order to show a consistent photographic vision of the American West over a century between these artists’ lives--These scenes are nearly exact transcriptions of the West as shot by the photographers Watkins and O’Sullivan, and therefore hint at the idea that the conceptual and spatial visions of this part of the United States have remained quite constant over one hundred and sixty years.

Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins is a well-known photographer who worked with many other photographers in the San Francisco area and into the Yosemite Valley in the 19th century. He staked out a large market for his photographs, showcasing his work in county and national fairs and exhibitions and even overseas at the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris (1). His photographs were also the first non-literary inspiration for conservation efforts by Americans through his enthusiastic reception by Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others (2).

Watkins’ photographs are often thought of as suggesting “planarity and depth” as well as being somewhat two-dimensional and “designed” in a way that reflected a kind of empiricism (3). Also, the clarity of focus and tight grain-structure of his works impressed everyone and were even used to settle land disputes since one could execute precise measurements based on their superiority (4).

But, the particular technique that best serves our purposes here is his frequent use of the panoramic format while in the field (most other photographers used this format only for mere promotional activities) (5). Watkins used the panorama for interesting conceptual purposes in order to establish a particular experience of the West that showed the land, people, and their growing towns (Fig’s. 1 & 2) as “spreading out in conformity to the emphatic pull of the horizon” (ibid.).

Timothy H. O’Sullivan

The photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan made his career working with the 19th century geographer/surveyor Clarence King and, later, George M. Wheeler. Both O’Sullivan and King were attached to a U.S. Government survey (U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, March 2, 1867) into the Western interior that was somewhat hyperbolically described as “unmapped, unstudied...(a) terra incognita” (6) and covered the area from the California-Nevada border to Cheyenne, Wyoming. This expedition had as its goal not only to map the area in general, but also to serve as a military excursion to define territorial boundaries for expansion and settlement (7).

What we find in O’Sullivan’s photographs are methods of spatial delineation that include shifting his camera, in an uncannily “Modernist” way, to increase tension in an image (8), combined with making multiple views of a scene that reflected the methods of surveying itself (9), and finally, the backing up and/or pushing forward of the camera to describe the same scene in a precise, linear way (Fig. 3) that is directly reflective of certain cinematic camera movements, such as the “dolly” shot.

The work of both of these photographers was a major factor in how the rest of the nation east of the 100th Meridian came to understand the American West’s landscape through the sale of their photographs to newspapers and pamphleteers (10), stereoscopic view-cards, as well as single-item prints and copies of their work.

It is through Watkins’ and O’Sullivan’s photography that we find a proto-cinematic methodology that uses, respectively, approximate “pan” and “dolly/follow” movements to try and give form to the infinite expanse of Western lands. What is being formulated through these two men’s body of work is an idea of the American West that is both infinite and intractable in its offering. Their work is the archetypal first pen upon the palimpsest of the West that was to set the expressive and artistic grooves nearly all “lens-men” (whether still or motion) were to follow, consciously or not, up to the present day.

Andre De Toth and Raoul Walsh

David Bordwell, in his essay “Camera Movement and Cinematic Space” (11), discusses the fundamental difference between still and filmed imagery as being one of “ambiguity” (12), where the still contains ambiguity because the static “image does not specify the (entire) physical layout of a depicted space” and the filmed image, by allowing subject movement, “gives us a sufficient amount of information to define a particular spatial layout”, and this “virtually eliminate(s) any ambiguity” (ibid,).

As we shall see, through their camera work and framing choices in two particular scenes, both the directors Andre De Toth and Raoul Walsh actually do provide significant ambiguity in the motion picture image, thus destabilizing the dichotomy between the photographic and cinematic presentations of space as theorized by Bordwell, and also do so in a similar way to the photographers Watkins and O’Sullivan.

Day of the Outlaw

About sixteen minutes into Day of the Outlaw, De Toth fades a tense interior scene between Robert Ryan and Tina Louise’s characters into the next where the camera looks out across the town’s main “street” and along the path that leads into the local mountains (a foreshadowing of the final scene where Ryan leads the terrorizing outlaws to their doom out past these foothills and into the mountainous horizon beyond).

Here, De Toth pans the camera from left to right (Fig’s 4 & 5), which is a predominant camera move for the director throughout his film, and it defines the space as one of extreme horizontality (even the smoke rising from one of the chimneys seemingly can’t escape the force of this movement).

After the camera stops on one edge of the mountain range (Fig. 5), De Toth uses a clever, quick transitional fade to bring the viewer back into the room where we were before, and we now realize that the earlier pan was the (impossible) floating, daydream-like vision of Ryan’s character (Fig’s. 6 & 7). Or, was it simply a director’s editorial trick executed for the audience in order to (re)emphasize the vastness and loneliness of the West and has no direct perceptual connection to the character in the room? Either way, it’s not as easy to suss out as it might seem at first sight.

This expansive (but ultimately empty) pan transmigrates the viewer into Ryan’s character while tying the bodies of the viewer/actor to the experience of the landscape, and is an excellent example of the West being written into our national consciousness as as an infinite, horizon-space full of objects and movement.

In the rest of the scene, De Toth follows Ryan’s head movements from the window and timed exactly to the pan into the interior of the room, but this time the camera is moving from right to left, thus allowing for the ambiguous possibility we have moved into a new psycho-perceptual space. Then, the camera stops as Ryan (we) look into the wall mirror (Fig. 8) in a moment of self-contemplation/realization.

De Toth’s lateral, panoramic pans here are not so different than Watkins’ own photographic depictions of early Western cities, mining towns, and the local landscape, and their effect is also similar in that both sets of imagery present a strong sense of spatial continuity that breaks down the idea that stills cannot fully show the surrounding space. Likewise, the cinematic and still cameras of De Toth and Watkins show more than just an idle, contained space (13). Both of these men’s work act as cultural encoders which reify a conceptual loop we all have grown accustomed to experiencing, either consciously or not, when looking at the American West.

The Big Trail

Though not as technically or artistically polished as De Toth’s film, which postdates it by 29 years, Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail also sets the stage for a conception of American Western space that both promises endless bounty and swallows all into the event-horizon that is the Western desert. But, the film does so in a less “psychological” manner than Day of the Outlaw.

About an hour and twenty minutes into the film, we have followed the massive armada of rag-tag homesteaders, along with John Wayne’s character and his nemesis, from their initial departure and into the endless reaches of the West; at several points, but especially here, Walsh lets his camera linger for an impressive amount of time on the masses of covered wagons and nameless persons that constitute the body of the homesteaders.

In a manner that could be thought of as being in the style of an O’Sullivan-like surveyor’s eye, Walsh both pulls the camera back from a scene, and also pushes it forward (Fig’s. 9, 10), in order frame the particular elements of the homesteader’s movements, as well as to show their universal struggle within the landscape (Fig’s. 11, 12).

Walsh’s camera work here is, again, hardly as psycho-dramatic as De Toth’s, as he sticks to simply letting the landscape speak for itself with all of its endlessness, foreboding, and granular detail, only pushing in, or pulling back, to reveal/constrain when needed for an obvious reason.

This way of framing and shooting is especially useful in a directly narrative fashion when the scene shows a menagerie of death and emptiness (people being buried, horse’s carcasses being left behind, sandy burial grounds and human skeletons laying in the foreground of the frame) right before the “Indians” come over the hill to descend upon the homesteaders...like the Good Lord Himself, the Western Lands both giveth and taketh away in equal measure.

What is so interesting about the De Toth/Watkins and Walsh/O’Sullivan pairings is a two fold proposition:

1) That they all circumscribe and define for us the space of the American West as both a lateral optics intertwined with the infinite horizontality of the sky, and a never-ending, linear push forward into an “unknown” space that is defined by either the camera moving forward, or by moving backward, in order to reveal the larger possibilities of the landscape, or make apparent the larger movement of characters/people within this landscape.

2) That these pairings essentially destabilize Bordwell’s idea that the still image doesn’t allow for the inclusion of surrounding site specificity--Regardless of the fact that Watkins and O’Sullivan worked with more than a single image in a “shot” (with stitched panoramas, and in paired shots, respectively), their position within the history of photochemical imaging (i.e., pre-cinematic) shows that the still image could indeed be used to delineate subject matter from beyond the bounds of the single frame.

Though, ultimately, De Toth is the more easily readable filmmaker to our modern eyes (due, of course, to his historical placement within Hollywood and motion picture technology’s timeline), both he and Walsh use long-standing imaging techniques for both literally describing and metaphorically showing us how we have conceived of, and continue to conceive of, the American West.

Notes:

1. Nickel, pg. 24.

2. Nickel, pg. 216.

3. Nickel, pg. 24.

4. Nickel, pg. 25.

5. Nickel, pg. 26.

6. Jurovics, pg. 15. This area had previously been explored but not documented to the degree that these men would end up executing.

7. Jurovics, pg. 17. 8. Jurovics, pg. 19. 9. Jurovics, pg. 20.

10. G. Malcolm Lewis’ essay “Rhetoric of the Western Interior: Modes of Environmental Description in American Promotional Literature of the Nineteenth Century” in The Iconography of Landscape is an excellent introduction to an obscure form of commercial literature, the publishers of which were often the primary buyers of work by photographers such as Watkins and O’Sullivan, who would have provided them with various imagery of the Western interior.

11. Bordwell, “Camera Movement and Cinematic Space” in Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from Cine-Tracts.

12. Bordwell, pg. 232.

13. Even in De Toth’s confined spaces, such as in the bar room dance scene where the director has the gunmen and the women dancing in circles while the camera does complete 360-degree tracking/pans, not a whole lot is actually shown, but a lot of movement exists in massive circularity.

Bibliography:

Bordwell, David. “Camera Movement and Cinematic Space”, Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from Cine-Tracts. Ron Burnett, ed. Indiana University Press, 1991.

Jurovics, Toby. Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Yale University Press, 2010.

Lewis, G. Malcolm. “Rhetoric of the Western Interior: Modes of Environmental Description in American Promotional Literature of the Nineteenth Century”, The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography #9. Eds., Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Nickel, Douglas R. Carleton Watkins, The Art of Perception. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 1999.

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gavinhalm · 15 years ago

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“WARNING: Click_Here”-- Classic Horror Film as Interactive Screen.

"You were tricked by your own imagination, Mrs. Rand" - Dr. Maxwell in I Walked with a Zombie

"The brain is the screen. I don't believe that linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On the contrary, the biology of the brain–molecular biology–does." - Gilles Deleuze, "From Philosophy to Cinema" in Cahiers du cinema 320

"If a film, which is already both the dream of its maker and the dream of its audience, can present itself as the dream of one of its characters, can it, finally, appear to dream itself?" - Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Goddard, and First-Person Film.

"Something bizarre about the cinema struck me: its unexpected ability to show not only behavior, but spiritual life...Spiritual life isn't dream or fantasy–which were always the cinema's dead ends...Spiritual life is the movement of the mind." - Gilles Deleuze, "From Philosophy to Cinema" in Cahiers du cinema 320

In Bruce Kawin's influential 1978 book, Mindscreen: Bergman, Goddard, and First- Person Film, the author makes the argument that first-person narrative film can be thought of as reflecting (or, standing in as a kind of synecdoche for) the mind of both the viewer and the filmmaker, something he terms the "Mindscreen".

This idea is driven precisely home in his quote above, which is clamped, if you will, between the twin pincers of another great thinker of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze. Here, we find a shocking thesis: Can a film possess that most human of qualities (thought)? Can a film, in fact, be a sleeping being of sorts?

What is so intriguing about Kawin's quote is not so much its fantastical, psychological metaphysics, but that it could reflect another possible thesis (when coupled with the material-spiritual thinking of Deleuze): that of film becoming an interactive screen. What is meant here is that, if we squeeze out the idea of the dream (and, by default, the whole clinical-psychological apparatus of the dreaming subject) between the two clamps of 1) molecular biology of the brain, and 2) the (Bergsonian) "movement" of the mind executing the procedures of “thinking”, we can start to view the screen as a site not of dreaming, or of "being", but as a space of interaction where the viewer's perception and consciousness moves in-and-out to interface with the formal systems given in a film.

Perhaps the easiest way to go about describing this "interactivity" of the cinematic screen (1) is to talk about "fantasy" in film, or the "fantastic"; that genre of film which, in the third quote above, Deleuze seems to say is a cinematic "dead end". Though the philosopher has a point in the sense that film can not actually materialize the fantastic, films can present formal constructs that hint at things of a fantastical nature, and therefore it is these "things" (the formal constructs) that become the interactive elements within a film.

And, this is precisely why most, if not all, of the "fantastical" or "fantasy" movies of the last decade (ones utilizing the technologies of 3D modeling, animation and 3D theatre projection) simply fall flat in just about every intellectual regard. They are just not interactive enough; everything is provided to the viewer with regards to his/her imagination through the wild, video game-like whirl of 3D animation. So much so, that there is nothing left to imagine. The viewer is, in effect, left in an intellectual/experiential desert akin, perhaps, to the space Robert Duvall's THX-1138 character is trapped in: a seemingly infinite "Ganz Field" of empty white light (2).

One of the best ways to go about finding these formal interactive points that allow for a true movement of the mind (and spirit), is to go back to the classics of horror and/or fantasy from the days long before the onslaught of computer generated "fantasy" took over the cineplex. For our present purposes, two excellent, WWII-era (3) films by the director Jacques Tourneur will do splendidly: Cat People of 1942, and I Walked with a Zombie, 1943.

Cat People

There are numerous liminal moments and clever points in Cat People that allow (indeed, insist upon) interaction by the audience. These points of interaction are not just "clever" in a facile sense either, but act as perfectly set positionings that allow the viewer to interact with the screen at moments where "fantasy" couples with the real.

Perhaps the most significant interactive trope Tourneur uses in Cat People is the play between light and shadow. This takes place throughout the film in moments where a plant will obscure part of the image with its darkness; where sectors of space and character are illuminated by a street lamp; where shadows are moving across walls in enclosed spaces; when reflected light off of water in an indoor pool creates a kinematic field of brightness and equal threads of darker; and, in this same scene, when we think that the female lead has transformed into a panther, there appear cat-like shadows along a wall (only to have her appear quite like a normal woman when she flicks on the light). †

All of these luminous/spatial moments are points of filmic interaction that allow the viewer to penetrate the given-real, and enter into (indeed, create) the imaginative-mythological space of fear and horror. That is, each of these moments where light and shadow jostle against themselves in the perceptual field is a moment where the viewer's mind must construct the fantasy of the film. There is no need to show obvious transformation through "clever" special effects. And this is, not so incidentally, why such interactive media as comic books seem arguably superior in artistic effect to the omnipresent, present-day “effects” films, which try to replicate the comic book’s level of authentic fantasy.

There are also more subtle points of interaction in this film as well (hidden interfaces within the interface), such as the very early scene inside the female lead's apartment when the two main characters are sitting together in the darkness, the woman humming as she looks out a window, and to the right of her outline is the dark shape of a statute. It is the figure of a rider on a horse holding up an impaled cat on his sword. This interactive point will open up for the viewer the whole mytho-fantastic architecture that this film hangs upon; everything else in the film referring back to this root_menu of light, shadow and suggestiveness.

It should also be mentioned that sound plays an enormous role in interfacing with the viewer in this movie as well. Instances such as when the main female lead is following her female nemesis down a dark and intermittently lit street, about to (we think) transform into a black cougar and attack. It is in the very moment when we expect the cat to pounce that a bus screeches before fully entering the frame, therefore allowing the sound to rewrite itself in the viewer’s mind as a cat’s scream. This invisible cougar takes auditory shape elsewhere in various other instances in the movie, such as the previously mentioned pool scene and other interstitial moments where we expect a given, visual transformation, but are left to construct the fantasy ourselves.

I Walked with a Zombie

Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie also creates, but in a radically different way and not to the same numerical degree, a set of interactive sites for the viewer to interface with the fantastic.

The director's second movie, hot on the heels of Cat People, is an instance where the horror is, instead, "given" to the viewer in the body of the (un)dead wife (a somewhat similar situation to that more well-known master of horror, Hitchcock, in his film Psycho, which was created nearly two decades later), and, not surprisingly, her body acts in a similar fashion to the statue of the horse and impaled cat in the previous film--Both these "objects", or ritual-like bodies, are conduits to the mythical worlds that lay outside the visual-given. In this case, the wife's body acts as an interactive node in which to engage the fear of the Voodoo religion.

And, though we see a vast array of quasi-empirical movements within the ritualistic displays put on by the island's locals, these movements (the use of dolls, the (un)dead Voodoo highwayman/guard) always reflect back to the (un)dead wife's body, creating a self-referential network of cause-and-effect that is negatively reflective of the "rationality" of the characters that are living.

The systemic network between the (un)dead wife's body, the Voodoo mechanisms of ritual, and the rationality of the character's existence (especially in the figure of the nurse) is an infinite feed-back loop whose elements counteract and play with one another: is this whole situation a creation of the nurse's imagination? Or, is it, indeed, a mystical, fantastical space of religious and spiritual events?

This is quite different to the situation in Cat People, where the viewer is decoding a number of interactive points of reference within light, shadow and sound, always moving towards some sort of conclusiveness. Here, we just don't know what's going to happen. And, though Tourneur gives us the towering physical body of the (un)dead wife in which to interface with the film, we never do.

That is not to say that I Walked with a Zombie is without sets of horror film tropes similarly used in his earlier film. There are a number of occasions when, for instance, light and shadow work in a like fashion to Cat People, such as the early scene when the nurse first "meets" the (un)dead wife in the stairwell. Here, the different volumes of light and shadow work to create a similar set of references between the shadowed "irrational" and the lit "rational" spheres of existence (not the least of which is the change in appearance on the (un)dead wife's face from one of hallowed decay to normalcy as perceived by the nurse). But, these effects fall away (become dead "links", if you will) when the overriding network established in the (ritual) body of the (un)dead wife comes online in the viewer's mind. And, this feedback loop, as I previously labeled it, de-centers the narrative thrust of the whole movie, makes it fall back into itself, and ends up crashing the whole system of the plot (4), the viewer never making his/her way out of the vortex and back into linearity.

Perhaps this is the most "horrific" act in the film...Take away the story from reality/life and what is left? Nothing but the nihilism that the first brother displayed on the boat, towards the nurse, early on in the film. That is, there is no "beauty". What could be more horrific or fantastic?

These two classics of fantasy/horror are, in each of their own very unique ways, a veritable interactive web (site) of symbols and tropes, both visual and auditory, geared to make the user/viewer interact with the screen's interfaciality and create, within the space of their own mind, all the fantasy a viewer could want. All without the use of a single key-fame, composited image, computational algorithm, or animatronic beast. These two films are, in the end, a testament to the imaginations of both the filmmaker and the audience itself.

NOTES:

1. By using the phrase, "cinematic screen", I mean to keep it particular from the interactive screen of the computer, which is a more literal kind of interactive space. But, some of the descriptive figures of speech utilized to describe computer interaction will be useful in elucidating my general thesis.

2. In all fairness, it should be noted that I am being playfully ironic with the reader here, for what happens in a Ganz Field (a space of complete visual isolation, uniformity, or emptiness) is that the mind tries to construct that which it cannot see. In short, the mind starts to hallucinate. A kind of empty grey Ganz Field is also the "home" screen a user first sees when s/he boots up or initializes a 3D-modeling computer program.

3. What is so interesting to ponder is the extent to which this kind of horror that was so popular in the U.S. at this time in world history (if not the origins, then, at the very least, the paradigmatic example of which would be Hitchcock's 1940 classic, Rebecca). That is, the success of this film (and it was very successful) was certainly due to the unseen, un-seeable nature of the horror. Which is not at all that different from the "invisible" horror that was infecting Europe and existing as a distant, "non-material" abstraction to U.S. citizens.

4. A meta-mise-en-scène, descriptive of this whole situation, and more evidence for the utter collapse of narrative structure in this film, is the point near the end of the movie when the "drunk" brother grabs an arrow out of the body of the St. Sebastian figurehead/fountain and hunts down his brother's (un)dead wife and "kills" her. Aside from the obvious logical twist of whether there was anybody/anything to kill, what complicates, extends, collapses and ironically twists this scene (and the whole narrative) is that, according to legend, the arrows shot at the Saint did not kill him (he was, instead, found alive)...and, if one wants to proceed in the opposite direction, one could admit that the figurehead is not the body of St. Sebastian and therefore could not be killed anyway. Which brings us back to the materiality of the (un)dead wife's body; is it "alive" or is it "dead", and will (or did) that arrow in his hand actually kill her?...ad infinitum, back and forth, round and round we go...

† Or, at a much later point in the film, where the main male character is working with a female co-worker/friend late at night, and she gets up to answer the office phone on an architectural light-table. The light from this table flushes her face and upper body, while much of the rest of the office is enclosed in darkness, enveloping her, a foreshadowing of the horror to come...

#film #horror #horrorfilm #filmhistory

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gavinhalm · 15 years ago

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The Ambiguous Labyrinth: “Night and the City” and Film Noir

When one thinks of Film Noir as a genre, the first thing that comes to mind is a plot driven by a detective's desire to solve a crime committed by sub-characters trapped in situations they have little control over but have exacerbated to a large extent, thus creating a moral ambiguity for the viewer to ponder.

Another trope within Film Noir is the lighting and camera work; much of it inherited from a vast array of German Expressionist movie-makers, which mostly consists of low and abstract angles utilizing wide-angle lenses, and is often set up to be reflective of the psychological mood and dualistic moral situation of the main character. This is, in part, graphically signified by stark light and dark contrasts on the character's face via such things as Venetian blinds, etc.

At first glance, Night and the City fits squarely within these formalistic constructs, yet the figure of Harry constitutes a bit of an anomaly within the genre. Not only is he far from the usual detective characterization, he seems to have more in common with the sub-characters rendered in other examples of Noir.

In fact, he is the epitome of an anti-hero wrestling with his inner nature (something akin to a struggling artist recklessly searching for his "voice", as his romantic rival posits in the film) and who creates havoc not only for himself, but for his "friends" and loved ones to the point where we as viewers hardly have any sympathy for him in the murderous end.

Indeed, this type of characterization and outcome has more in common with later "Neo-Noirs", such as Woody Allen's Match Point, where a morally ambiguous character plays with the audience's affection and trust to an uncomfortable breaking point, thus leaving the viewer’s feelings toward the protagonist suspended between relief and outright loathing.

The lighting in Night and the City is also something of a different order altogether. Whereas a "typical" Noir will use stark nocturnal effects of light and dark signifying the "good and bad" morality of a character, here there is hardly such optical reflectivity of psychological states. Instead, we have a situation where the protagonist moves in-and-out of light and dark, night and day without too much metaphorical regard to his situation (for instance, when rummaging around in his girlfriend's apartment looking to steal some cash from her, the girl’s apartment is well lit with hardly a shadow cast).

Perhaps the only solid connection this film has to "typical" descriptions of Noir is in the rendering of the city as a constricted space of moral and physical trauma; its snaking paths through alleyways and nocturnal scenery render it very capable of being a paragon of the genre.

Yet, upon further reflection, one must take issue with such critics as Paul Arthur who see Night and the City as reflective of an urban labyrinth with "(n)early every setting...crammed with architectural grids, frames, cul-de-sacs, narrow stairways, (and) perspectives (which) choke off the mobility and freedom of (the) human subjects". Though it is true there is a constrictive circularity reflected in the various paths Harry takes though the city (and towards his fate), the geographic spatiality hardly constricts him (and the viewer) in the same way the near-contemporaneous Kiss Me Deadly does, in which the camera rarely looks up from either the ground or immediate architectural space, thus hermetically sealing the main character and audience within the box of the plot.

Indeed, there are several moments in Night and the City that show a far-off London, and by implication, a way out and into the countryside (this is especially true in the final scene by the Thames River). Though this could be seen as alluding to the futility of Henry ever thinking he can escape, it hardly proposes the strict labyrinthian bondage Arthur finds within the film.

In closing, one can certainly see why Night and the City is often considered a classic of the genre (though, early on it was not given the critical due it deserved), with its amoral characters, use of the city, and cinematographic style. But, upon further reflection it seems to sit uncomfortably within the typical descriptions reserved for Noir, and as such illuminates the continuing battle that exists in trying to empirically define this unique and popular genre.

Sources:

Ballinger, Alexander, and Danny Graydon (2007). The Rough Guide to Film Noir. London: Rough Guides.

Night and the City: In the Labyrinth. Essay from the insert for The Criterion Collection DVD

#film #filmhistory #filmnoir #noir

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gavinhalm · 15 years ago

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Out of Time: Atemporal Machines in the Garden-- Contemplating the “West” in two films by Andre de Toth and Robert Aldrich

“…(T)he essential impurity of cinema…this thesis has signified above all that the passage of an idea in a film presupposes a complex summoning forth and displacement of the other arts (theatre, the novel, music, painting…), and that as such ‘pure cinema’ does not exist…” - Alain Badiou, Philosophy and Cinema in Infinite Thought; Truth and the Return to Philosophy

“The pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not lost its hold upon the native imagination…here was a virgin continent! Inevitably the European mind was dazzled by the prospect…(i)t was embodied in various utopian schemes for making America the site of a new beginning for Western Society” - Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

Those who led the ‘march of civilization’ from the 18th century on were inclined to be contemptuous of the countryside, the home of the backward farmers, shaggy yokels, or pleasure-seeking aristocrats living on their feudal rents, not on profits wrung from trade and manufacture…” - Lewis Mumford, “Suburbia-and Beyond” in The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

We have here, on the one side, as if in the form of brackets (let us say), a vision of America stretching as far back as the 15th century, and a bit later during the age when Shakespeare wrote his New World play, The Tempest, where rugged, New Europeans tested their mettle against God and Nature starting in the Florida, Massachusetts and Virginia forests and then, some two centuries later after the Louisiana Purchase, forced their way past the Mississippi River and into the plains and foothills; the avant-garde of these settlers pushing deep into the land and space of the imagination, further westward, but also northward, into the Wyoming mountains. These people constitute the eastern, right-hand side of these conceptual brackets that make up the idea of the West.

On the other side, far away from the mountainous peaks of Wyoming, lay the land of California (along with that almost eschatologically-absolute body of water, the Pacific Ocean), which was to become, if not the formative space and land of the imagination, describing what America is as a whole, then at least its most rugged and constitutive metonymic representative; California as the United States.

Between the right-hand bracket of the Wyoming mountains and the left-hand bracket of California and the Pacific is where much of our nation’s imagination has oscillated back and forth, throughout half of our history, between an individualistic view of nature and land as something to be tamed and controlled, and a view in which the land is envisioned as a cornucopia of plenty, given to all those who live in it, free of charge. A “laissez-faire” Elysium Field where we write our most holy myths of life, youth and infinitude…“God’s country”, as perhaps that most paradigmatic of Western individualists, the actor Ronald Regan, might say.

Both the movies by Andre de Toth, Day of the Outlaw, and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, can be seen as engaging with these conflicting yet intertwined views of the American West. De Toth’s movie renders the Wyoming landscape as brutal and difficult, yet it can be seen as an idyllic representation of the Pastoral Ideal (1), where individuals race against Nature to carve out their own identities and senses of belonging, ultimately finding success after harsh trials and tribulations. On the other hand, Aldrich’s movie sets upon the stage, in a future over a century later and within the now overrun idyllic landscape, the machine of the city (2), which has rooted itself as an a-historical being that feeds upon older ideas of individuality along with contemporary “newness”, only to spit back a similar kind of loneliness and emptiness that the rugged West shot back at the original Pioneers.

Also, this is the case not just in the way the stories unfold (they are, in their narrative construction, typical Hollywood cinematic storytelling vehicles), but perhaps more significantly in the way each director, with his cinematographer, situated the camera and then chose the precise shot in the editing room. Both filmmakers would end up using very talented lensmen and editors (3) to execute their respective visions of the West--It is here, in the “Range of Light” (4), that the great conflict in conceptualizing the West is set in these films, a situation which one could argue continues to this day.

Day of the Outlaw

If we look at de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw as a conflicted arena of forces pitting the idyllic concept against the realities of nature (whether physical, or even psychological), we can see it reflected most effectively in both the composition of the shots and some of the editorial decisions.

Right from the start, in the transition from the first scene to the second, evidence of this conflict is alluded to, as the main male protagonist Blaze finishes his conversation with a local townswoman (with whom he has a love interest), the editor performs an L-cut transition, letting the sound and dialogue from within the saloon’s interior carry over into a shot that shows the great expanse of mountains behind a portion of the town’s buildings. This strategy creates an excellent mood for mixing the interior world of humanity and the exterior world of nature, which can be viewed as being separate and antagonistic, yet combined, forming an unstable whole.

Likewise, the latter part of the second scene shows Blaze exiting the saloon by allowing his upper body to come into the right of the fame in close up, while the rest of the frame shows the mountains beyond, along with small figures of other townsmen walking on the dirt road that constitutes the main avenue in the town.

In these two examples, the mixing of far-off nature and in-close humanity is exactly the kind of visual trope that illuminates this film as a space of atemporal conflict of no resolution between nature itself and the local residents. Cerntainly, this is by no means unique to this particular film, but the manner in which de Toth and his cinematographer render it gives it an artistic weight that creates a dialog with other photographic renderings of the West (c.f., 4).

Another cinematographic technique in line with this idea, used a bit later on, is one in which the filmmakers panned the camera in an almost 180-degree arc, starting at the opening of the town’s road, pointing out to the peaks of the nearby range, and turning across the town’s few buildings nearly stopping at the other end of the road. The whole time, the gigantic range of mountains behind loom over the ramshackle buildings, de-scaling them into insignificance even though they take up most of the frame. This flattening of the picture plane meshes figure and ground relationships, yet, at the same time, puts into conflict the idyllic landscape and the humans trying to live in it.

A point in this film which is not only pivotal, but also an integration of outer and inner worlds, is a moment when the male protagonist is in his hotel room staring out his window at the mountain range that is to be his and so many other men’s fateful space of reckoning. After a moment, the camera tracks him from behind as he moves towards a mirror in his room and then stares into this alternate looking glass. Indeed, mirrors will prove pivotal at several moments in this movie serving as symbolic surrogate for either the interiority of the character or the outside world itself (5).

As the story continues, de Toth has the camera play these tricks of in-and-out compression of space (6) more voraciously. For instance, as the dance scene whirls the camera round and round, figured in the earlier, near 180-degree pan that showed us the town’s main street and looming mountain range, the director then, in an excellent effort to transition from one scene-space into the next, pulls the camera outside the bar to look in through the window as we view the whirling dancers. Then, a direct cut is performed that reveals the “docs” place, which leads to a cut to the exterior shot of the town and its main road finishing with a fade back into the bar.

Such complex maneuverings of camera and editorial decision-making are well thought out artistic choices that completely enclose the space of the town and its residents with their (unfriendly) visitors, yet at the same time open all of them into the surrounding environment. This is part and parcel the kind of technique that is often used in cinema of this genre to rewrite, time after time, the story of idyllic nature and “man’s” place in it as a completely conflicted being wrestling with both internal conflicts of various sorts and the mighty untamed bear of Nature (7).

The penultimate scene of this film is one that has Blaze surviving most of the antagonists on a desolate peak above his town. Here, he (predictably) defeats his remaining enemies by outlasting them in the cold. The most interesting feature of this scene is the space in which de Toth decided to shoot the “showdown”. In this space, there are several rock outcroppings in a fairly flat spot of ground that eerily mimic the mountain peaks as seen from down below in the town. It’s as if Blaze and his final two enemies have been transformed into allegorical giants hovering above the Lilliputian town, thrashing and outwitting each other in a final clash of titans, as this space can be viewed as the very edge of existence itself (8). Indeed, it is the eastern edge of the idyllic West, a space that had to be won and conquered from not only unwanted “Indians”, but by the very struggle of “White Man’s” battles within himself to define who he is and how this land may be conceptualized; either as magnificent place of plenty, or (no)place of resistance and fury.

So, we see that no matter where any of the characters turn, gaze, place themselves, consecrate as their home, love, or die, they are always battling between an individualistic view of nature as something to be tamed and controlled, and a view in which the land is envisioned as a nourishing blessing--De Toth’s camera is both a magnificent witness and constructor of this tangle of myth and Being.

Kiss Me Deadly

Though the vision of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is of a different order both spatially and historically (the West has long been “won” and we are thrown into a metaphysical no-place that eats history up in the name of progress and finds the protagonist awash in an atemporal space much akin to Day of the Outlaw), the resulting experience of the West is (not so) strangely the same. That is, even in mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, the West has not changed much as a conflicted conceptual entity of combined myth equipped with an antagonistic view of nature.

In the beginning of Aldrich’s movie, a rhythmic repetition is established between the dividing-lines on a road, the running footsteps of our soon-to-die heroine and two different close-ups of her running towards the camera. This cinematic progression is repeated three times as cars pass on the road, ignoring her until the main male protagonist, Mike Hammer, stops and picks her up.

This action of repetition, though seemingly different from the ins-and-outs of de Toth’s camera, performs the same recombination of spatial features between character and “Nature” but in a tighter circle: less expansive outside of the character’s body (9), yet still rotating around them in a similar fashion. As we shall also see, this kind of spatially tight, enclosing repetition will find its way into the various decaying architectures that constitute the city of L.A. in the 1950’s. An L.A. that was quickly disappearing, from Bunker Hill to the Chavez Ravine; a victim of progress and various urban issues emanating from this era which would come to a head in the 1970’s (10).

Many of the shots in Kiss Me Deadly are tilted and/or at an angle, starting with the hospital exterior where the camera starts out below Hammer and then shows a shot above from the rooftop, looking down to the figures on sidewalk. This kind of back-and-forth is similar to the shots in Day of the Outlaw where the characters were combined with the idyllic landscape and mountains, but the main difference with Aldrich’s movie is that we see very little of what is beyond, and only view pieces of street intermixed with buildings.

The most significant scene where this kind of hermetically sealed camera work is in play, is the “shadowing” scene where Hammer is stalked at night by a crook armed with a switchblade. Here, the camera sets itself at various 30 to 45-degree angles to follow the characters as they play a short game of detective cat-and-mouse. The camera sets itself up to capture light, shadow, store fronts, close-ups of faces, back to angles of shops, close-ups of shoes, back to the faces now in profile, cigarette machines with mirrors…this whole cinematic, German Expressionistic menagerie ending with Hammer beating up the crook and sending him down a monstrous flight of stairs.

The back-and-forth, in-and-out action that the camera executes in Aldrich’s film is, again, similar to de Toth’s choice of movement. By keeping the camera’s cuts between the figure and its immediate surroundings locked together in a dance (11), Aldrich ends up stripping the idea of the landscape down to its bare minimum--Here in L.A., at the outer limits of the West, there is no landscape to speak of. Here, there is no grounding outside of a person’s immediate surroundings. It is indeed, a “silent land”. Ironically, this situation locks the characters into the very atemporal sense of time that the others experience in Day of the Outlaw. The West may now be a barren wasteland filled with decaying buildings, but it is still the purveyor of space qua space and only space.

The spaces within the architectures in Hammer’s city are just as self-referential in layout as they are in occupying the city grid. Each clue or potential source he finds (12) leads him to a stunning array of labyrinthian houses and hotels from the Victorian era. And, each of these architectures contain within themselves an almost Danielewski-like (13) set of staircases:

The first lead takes Hammer to a very old Victorian mansion possessing a large flight of stairs (the building is subdivided or turned into an apartment complex, like many large old houses in the area; an early hint that the domestic spaces of L.A. are voraciously fragmented).

Hammer then helps an old mover lug a trunk into the building. Camera shoots from above, looking down, then looking up as they ascend. Old guy tells Hammer where Christina’s roommate moved. Hammer goes to where she supposedly lives and finds it also has a huge flight of stairs going up to her room. He climbs these stairs and we watch him from above, looking down through the maze of a rectilinear spiral staircase that goes upward to some unseen floors.

Later on, after a few other scenes, Hammer drives to another lead at a certain Hillcrest Hotel. Here we see him arriving in his car, driving underneath a pair of cable-car looking trolleys that pass overhead in opposite directions (This is the old Bunker Hill part of LA that has long since faded). Hammer gets out of his car and climbs the longest set of stairs so far, in order to get to the hotel only to have to climb another flight of stairs to access the room to meet his lead.

All of these stairs lead to dead ends (or to themselves); none of them are truly passages to any place whatsoever, and the camera locks us, along with the characters, into the labyrinth that is L.A., and the West--Whether we are trapped in the great range of the Rocky Mountains, or some dank set of stairs that spiral into the darkness of reality itself, there is no (meta)physical escape “way out here”, and we are doomed to circle our own wagons in fear of a place without any sense of time or history.

But, this space of repeating stairs and soon-to-vanish Victorian architecture is not the most sublime “no-places” Aldrich builds for us. That discovery is reserved for the end of the film where we encounter the Malibu beach house in the final scene, placed as it is on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the very outer limit of the West.

It is in this house that Christina’s (supposed) roommate takes control of an object that is the primary source of mystery in the story, now given as an anti-matter, anti-MacGuffin Pandora’s Box (and she as Lot’s daughter who is to open the box, which results in her–all of our?–death via nuclear detonation).

What the viewer ultimately finds in this box is the limit of the Western conception of Nature and “man’s” place in it--The absolute expression of which is the atomic bomb. This is the eschatological warning and “clue” for humanity in Aldrich’s film, as we cower like the two figures in this closing scene, stuck in the no-place between the beach’s shore and the Pacific Ocean, our backs to the infinite darkness, with the fiery winds of history, and the future, howling all around us.

NOTES:

(1) The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Leo Marx, Oxford University Press, 1964 and 2000.

In this magnificent and very influential book, Marx writes about the long-standing contradictory views we as Americans have built up concerning technology and progress and its effect upon the landscape. It may seem an obvious observation that there are those that would see the land as mainly a source of profit and those that would see it as a paradise to protect, but Marx delves deep into the American cultural psyche, as well as older European origins, to thoroughly illuminate the deep rift in our cultural vision concerning this vast body of land that we call home. I am deeply indebted to his book for the general thrust of my thesis.

(2) The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Lewis Mumford, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961, 1989.

Los Angeles is, of course, one of America’s largest cities. However, due to the automobile (especially through the influence of the Firestone company and family in the 1930’s), L.A. as a whole is more of a mass form of suburban sprawl. Therefore, I am tending to conceptually treat the whole city as such in this essay. For an excellent historical survey of how suburbia became such a powerful American urban form, Mumford’s book is an excellent point in which to start any research on the matter. The section I have in mind is “Suburbia–and Beyond”, pgs. 482-524. Please note that his research covers historical developments through 1960.

(3) Both of these movies have some of the best Hollywood cinematographers and editors available as crew. Day of the Outlaw boasts cinematographer Russell Harlan, a six-time Oscar nominee who also lensed To Kill a Mockingbird, and editor Robert Lawrence, also an Oscar nominee, who cut films such as Spartacus. Also, it should be mentioned that for sound, the great Alexander Courage, (nominated for two Oscars and winner of an Emmy) of Star Trek theme song fame (as well as all of the Trek movies up until his death last year), composed the music. He was also responsible for the theme song from Lost in Space and was lead composer/sound designer for Audrey Hepburn’s classic, My Fair Lady.

Though the film is chock-full of formal and post-production errors (bad V.O. over-dubs, inconsistent match-on-action cuts, etc.), Kiss Me Deadly has an equal class of lensmen and editors. Cinematographer Ernest Laszlo is an Oscar winning cameraman who also shot Stalag 17. Editor Michael Luciano (nominated four times for an Oscar) was also responsible for cutting The Dirty Dozen, The Grissom Gang and The Longest Yard.

(4) What I am referencing here is Ansel Adams’ great photographic “essay” Yosemite and the Range of Light which engages not only the Yosemite, but much of the surrounding and nearby lands that compose the Rocky Mountain range (‘Range of Light’ was Adams’ term for this particular geographical region). But, aside from Adams, Edward Weston, Carleton Watkins, and a number of other West Coast photographers (some, not 20 years earlier) had gone on to photographically capture (or project) something of this concept of nature in the West, whether they were consciously after it or not. All of these master artists’ work photographing the West is something that has embedded itself into our national psyche, and one can fairly postulate that the cinematographer for the film had seen at least some of these men’s work, and perhaps absorbed their influence.

(5) There is the mirror in Blaze’s hotel room that he consults, and then there is also the mirror in the saloon. This mirror eventually gets broken by the outlaws when one of them throws a fit because they can’t drink or rape the townswomen as they are wont to do. It is certainly the pivotal axis point in the movie when this mirror gets smashed. Afterwards, the plot starts rolling towards its inevitable conclusion and is situated exactly mid-point in the film, almost as if it were a textbook example of Aristotelian poetics that has a story build up into a high, mountainous and climatic point, and then roll back down to its eventual conclusion.

(6) There is always compression or reconstitution of space in both of these films, but there is little temporal configuration. As a matter of fact, there is little sense of time outside of the one we physically experience while watching these movies (i.e. we sense the passage of time because we are watching a movie, not because of the movie and its narrative). These films are almost entirely spatial entities. There is no History associated with the lands shown in either of these films, whether it’s the vast open mountain ranges of Wyoming, or the urban wasteland of Los Angeles. We are trapped, scene-by-scene, in an atemporal machine that only re-circulates the space around itself.

(7) It is interesting to note that this particular Western (and many others in the genre) shows no other animals aside from the horses. The wilderness is replete with frightening giants like the Grizzly and lesser-sized, but no less fierce, beasts such as the wolf. Perhaps it is just a matter of money available for the use of trained animals in a production, but one would think that if a Western truly wanted to show what it is like for “man” to wrestle with the great outdoors, they could throw in a wolf or a bear, for good measure, into the plot.

(8) The only dialogue between Blaze and the Cheyenne Indian:

C.I., “You see anything?”

Blaze, “Not much.”

C.I., “There’s nothing to see…”

This is perhaps the most lucid and significant dialogue in the movie. At the very top of the mountain, one reaches a limiting edge (of the concept) of the West; there is nowhere else to go. Later on, we will experience another, similar physical limit upon both the concept and the space that constitutes the West in Kiss Me Deadly.

(9) A very interesting discussion for unifying the body and the earth in both a cultural and physical manner can be found in Wendell Berry’s book The Unsettling of America; Culture & Agriculture. This is an excellent small volume that concerns itself with farming and sustaining the land for use in an agricultural sense.

(10) For an excellent glance into the issues of environmental, economic, and population studies that were to overwhelm the American city by the 1970’s, please reference The Prospective City, edited by Arthur P. Solomon. The issues brought up in this book were just starting to be sensed in the 1950’s when Kiss Me Deadly was filmed: intra-metro population distribution of African-Americans (not to mention Hispanics); the changing roles of city centers; industrial locations in relation to populated urban areas; transportation issues. All of these matters are an integral part of the perception we now have of our cities, but we can sense their presence within the fragmented urban space of the Los Angeles as portrayed in this movie.

(11) An interesting parallel between cinematic movement and urban planning can be found in Wayne Attoe and Donn Logan’s book, American Urban Architecture; Catalysts in the Design of Cities. In their book, Attoe and Logan propose the concept of “catalysts” to both describe what goes on in downtown redevelopments, as well as use it to help model potential sites of change that could be targeted for efficient redevelopment.

The tie with cinematography is in the way singular urban spaces (such as a particular business, or park, etc.) link to others by becoming economic/social moving agent/forces (catalysts) which direct their own growth, as well as the (now) connected spaces. It’s almost like looking at a combined map and shot list for moving though a scene/city during a film.

(12) Hammer’s “need to know” takes on epic and mythical proportions well beyond a typical detective’s drive to find clues in a story. For instance, there is a scene when he is in his girlfriend/secretary’s apartment and she whispers in his ear, “Va Va Voom says your Greek name would be “Mikela Sulfuris’…” What is so interesting about this is that in the Christian Bible, burning sulfur is referred to as “brimstone”, or, more to the point, fire and brimstone (this word will appear in the dialogue, again, at the apocalyptic end of the movie). Subjects for such sermons were “eternal damnation”, and the like. Hammer must find out all there is to know, even at the risk of experiencing eternal damnation himself…

Taking the director’s cue in attaching mythical significance to a character, one could conceivably view Va Va Voom as a figuration of tekne; the Greek word for artisanship, craftsmanship, or even (like the philosopher Martin Heidegger interprets it) technology itself. He is, after all, a mechanic with craftsman-like skills.

(13) The House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, Pantheon, 2000.

This book has perhaps one of the most frightening staircases ever conceived in the history of literature. It resides behind some walls in a sweet, 1930’s Palmer-like suburban house on some street in Anytown, U.S.A. (thoughmuch of the novel is focused within Los Angeles). This staircase not only lives, breathes and growls, it grows and shrinks to epic proportions, all underground... Growing from being only a couple stories deep, it becomes several thousands of miles deep (at one point I believe it is theorized that it goes further in depth than the circumference of the earth). Basically, it is a spatial demon one can walk through, and, some of the staircases in Kiss Me Deadly must be the early relatives of this later monster.

#west #westerns #westernfilm

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