Paris is Paris

I suppose I should introduce this blog in some way to give it relevance to a film course and not just to me and my life. It began way back in week three with the discussion in my tutorial group about Mekas (whose film i actually missed) and why we choose to specifically write down certain events and thoughts for later contemplation and how the meanings can change as our perspective changes as it must because time does not stand still. It made me think not of my diary but of this particular diary entry because I remember thinking I must capture this moment which is not that interesting really. All I am doing is sitting in a cafe`, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. I returned again to this memory of writing a diary entry when we talked about Varda, in part because Cleo 5 a 7 was set in Paris but also because of her approach to documentary film making in 'The Gleaners and I'. The Gleaners documents a part of social history, her interviews are not confessions, they are stories with self contained emotion and no need for dramatisation.

...The gay guys opposite me gave me a strange strange look when I came in but I think they got over the shock. I am quite shocking looking at the moment; no shower for two days, no washing of hair for 3-4. So lets recount todays activities. First stop the Louvre. Simple right. All going well. Alarm rings at 8.30 to get me up so I can go visit Jim. Two hours later I awoke to the sight of a guy in my room. This hostel must be unisex I think but he has some very strange luggage. I half freak out, half don't care. The realisation is made sometime later that there are in fact two people in my room. A man and woman, maybe I am being robbed? I still do not care and pretend rather badly to be asleep despite obvious signs such as sitting up, rolling over and opening eyes. The sleep invaders have an enormous amount of luggage which puts my poorly packed, poorly treated backpack to shame... My room mate is pregnant and french and I assume somehow associated with the man who was not sleeping in the room and that they shared the mountain of luggage which was kept in my room because the man may or may not have been sharing a room with some unsavoury types. My visit to Jim was deferred for the day as was my friend Todd-which was deferred due to my bad experiences in general with males in the past week. Honestly haven't been groped so much in my life, the bad kind of groping. Can you tell I'm drinking red wine now? So I'm on my way to the Louvre, have not lost metro ticket nor mind nor self. Arrive at Louvre train stop, follow signs, buy ticket and ask information lady if I have to check my bag. 'oui'. Arrive at cloak room and the guy has to comment on the fact that I have a woman's bag. Being conversationally deprived I of course have to comment on this and a conversation begins and I get asked out, sorry boyfriend, and people are singing James Brown and I lose my ticket somehow. So I had to be escorted past security by the guy from the luggage check who was telling me he'd never seen anything like this before. When I got inside I found my ticket saw the venus de milo, saw the mona lisa and saw people with back packs bigger than mine. Got back to luggage check, same guys, conversation included killing me for finding my ticket, smoking hash and marriage. Ok still in gay bar- on to second glass of wine (cigarette?) Worried about the metro because i don't know where i am.....

"What did Paris evoke for me? A vague fear of the big city and its dangers, of getting lost in it alone and misunderstood, or even brushed aside."
-Agnes Varda

References:
Alison Smith, 'Agnes Varda'. Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1998, 61.

The Beat Generation

Lelia- "David's writing a new novel about you Ben"

Benny- "Better not be any of that beat generation jazz like the last one"

(Shadows)

'And Carlo began his monkey dance in the streets of life as I'd seen him do so many times everywhere in New York.'
(Jack Kerouac: On the Road, 1957)

I am therefore I think

Shadows (John Cassavetes 1959/60)

The technicalities of existentialism. In opposition to the classical notion of I think therefore I am, existentialism believes in our existence before our thoughts. Our existence or identity can not be defined by thoughts alone but influenced by our environment and hence is fluctuating and not static. Rather than simply being a measure of who you are, there is a temporal and spatial component to identity. Identity is a vector defined by the path it takes or in other words the space through which it travels.

The influence of existentialism in the making of 'Shadows' by Cassavetes is most obvious through the actions of the main characters Hugh, Benny and Lelia. In order to emphasise existentialist ideas of a fluctuating identity Cassavetes has implemented several technical ploys involving the camera, setting and dialogue.

The film follows the everyday occurrences of African American siblings Hugh, Benny and Lelia living in a Manhattan apartment. Hugh, who is clearly African American by the colour of his skin, is a nightclub singer who travels from city to city getting gigs as third class billing and is a kind of patriarch to his younger brother and sister. Benny is a beatnik and a jazz musician. Passing for white he chooses to hang around with white friends and is a thinker not a doer like Hugh. The character of Lelia, whose skin colour is also ambiguous, is shaped by her romantic pursuits first with David an older intellectual, smooth Tony and finally African American Davey. Each of these characters display the transient nature of identity and how the people who surround us influence the way we think of ourselves.

This dilemma of identity seems to belong to the urban environment. Cassavetes shoots on the actual streets of Manhattan and in central park. The streets are busy and fluctuating parallel to the identities of the characters. The apartments are also crowded. In the intellectual party the camera follows the atmosphere of the rooms not necessarily focusing in on the main characters. Instead the camera eavesdrops on a conversation about existentialism (Only on second viewing did I realise it was Tony trying to chat up one of the existential intellectuals).
In the later party scene at the siblings apartment the camera captures snapshots of their conversations. Lelia and her friend, her brother and his manager. We also see David amongst the crowd again wanting to talk to Lelia but leaving shortly after. The reluctant Benny hovers on the periphery until he is forced to converse.

In contrast to conventional cinema, Cassavetes does not shoot entire conversations nor include only those parts most relevant to the plot. The action of picks up mid conversation and includes seemingly meaningless conversations such as Benny's friend Tom's hang over in the coffee shop or Benny's story about 'The Bird" (Charlie Parker). Dialogue adds not to the plot but embellishes both the nature of the characters and the environments in which they are found. In front of the girls Tom is talkative and persuasive, with his friends the next day he jokes and complains. With only his sister around Benny gossips about a musician he admires in crowded rooms he is withdrawn.

Lelia has the most noticeably transient identity for filling the roles of intellectual, lover, little sister, friend and maneater. Her race and gender only become part of her identity when her environment determines it. When Tony rejects her because of her african american heritage and when Davey tells her to stop being masculine and her friend tells her she needs a nice man, a home and some babies. Although at the end of the 1950s miscegenation and independent women were taboo, I think 'Shadows' is not specifically about these delicate and historical issues. Instead it is an attempt to capture history from from the perspective of people who are unaware of their role in society let alone in history.

Why am I doing this?

A chance viewing of an exhibition of New Yorker Vito Hannibal Acconci's work at Macba in Barcelona. Looking into his bio i noticed that he began as a poet but transferred to photography, video and other medias in the 1960s. Acconci changed direction in order to

"define [his] body in space, find a ground for [him]self, an alternate ground for the page ground [he] had as a poet." (Video Data Bank)

The 'page ground' he mentions could be compared to "the non place of language" as described by Foucault aided by Borges as the place in which all categories of things are linked and exist together in a way that is impossible in reality. In a sense then Acconci trying to find away to achieve the impossible and create a spatial representation of the unreal.

Claim Excerpts from 1971 involved a live stream of Acconci hiding blindfolded in a basement acting menacingly being placed outside the door. People were free to enter as they liked, to chose where the reality of this situation lied. Acconci uses this piece as well as the 'pimples on my bum' work we saw in class as part of his 'art as therapy' progression. He invites people to look inside his unconscious mind and join him in the basement only to have his conscious self viciously protecting it from being revealed.

A short clip of claim excerpts as well as other acconci video works can be found at:
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?ACCONCIV

1960s Ideas: How does newness come into the world?

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog 1997) is a very intimate and non judgemental representation of the Vietnam War. The war infact takes a back seat to the life of Deiter Dengler who end up in Vietnam because it was the only way he, an immigrant without money and a formal education, would be trained as a pilot. This approach constrasts with the war itself which was unavoidably political, with successive U.S. governments determined to take a stand on what it saw as the spread of Communism.
The photographs coming out of the trenches depicted a new type of war. Vietnam's countryside and the underground communities of the Viet Cong meant that for those on the ground it was essentially guerilla warfare. For those above it meant bombing and burning villages made of wood and straw instead of a metropolis.

From the Zalewski article you can see the importance of nature in Herzogs approach to film making and his life in general. During the making of 'Rescue Dawn,' the Hollywood adaption of Dengler's tale starring Christian Bale, Herzog had the camera follow Bale closely through the thick jungle growth avoiding wide and overhead shots in order to capture the oppressiveness of the environment. The annecdote about Herzogs search for the perfect vista scene also demonstrates his commitment to caputuring the natural beauty of a landscape. Herzog forcing a hand held shot because setting up a tracking shot would take too long and the light which made it a 'high intensity landscape' would be lost. The landscape is also important in 'Little Deiter needs to fly' . Although 'Rescue Dawn' was to follow, Herzog originally choses to have Dengler re-enact his time in Vietnam rather than an actor playing young Dieter. In order to convey what it feels like to be trapped in the jungle or a prison camp Herzog follows old Dieter as he relives his ordeal capturing not only the impact of this foreign environment but also the physicality and emotions involved. Herzog could have chosen to have Dengler tell his tale whilst at a war memorial for example this would have created an entirely different film. It would have been about the war, about his triumphant rescue and not about what it feels like to be trapped in a jungle or in a prison camp which is what Herzog is interested in.

Links can be made between the use of graphic depictions of the Vietnam war by both the U.S. government trying to rally support and protest groups against the war and the emmergence of a questioning of the 'truth in photography' in the 1960s. In this period it was pointed out that the photographic negative was open to manipulation and that photographic images could be used to manipulate. This was also true of cinematic film as demonstrated by Brakhage's work created by etching and attaching objects directly to the film.

Barthes suggested that photography was recording both absence and presence simultaneously. "What I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator), it has been here and immediately separated;it has also been absolutely irrefutably present and yet already differred."

No longer was still photography and implicitly film capturing truth in the moment no longer were they purely aesthetic. Herzog is clearly against his films belonging purely to the relms of aethetics, promising to stop anything on his film (Rescue Dawn) the moment it became purely aesthetic.

In this line of thought the accepted truth was no longer trustworthy neither were the roles assigned to us. The photographer has the power to manipulate but once the photograph is taken it is immediately separated from their control. The observer then has the power to see what they want to see in the image. The observer no longer had to be passive. These ideas are mirrored in litterature where the author was proclaimed dead and their control over their work once it had been written was questioned. The power to manipulate words and meaning was transferred to the previously passive reader. Similarly the audience at the cinema were no longer seen as the receipients of a directers or prossibly a studios new masterpiece. Reactions of cinema goers were extended beyond liking and disliking. These new roles however did not go unchallenged. If one worked beyond the confines of the norm, of language, of photography and film, this power struggle could be reversed or redefined.

Herzog's film making technique reflects the questioning of the roles of directer and viewer. He doesn't just want his audience to watch, he wants to feel. The way in which he is compelled to be his own stand could in part be in order to understand what characters feel and also what he wants his audience to feel. This could also be interpreted as a way of making the scenes real memories which can not be erased later on in an editing suite because from the Zalewski article it is also obvious that it is not just the directer dictating what he wants his audience to see and feel but also the studios who want an action film with mass appeal.


What does this have to do with cinema?
The new cinematic techniques explored during the 1960s were not driven by technological advances but by the new way in which the world was conceived and perceived. Giorgio Agamben ... the gesture belongs to the realm of ethics and politics and not simply to that of aestheitic. Film does not only capture acting but gestures. Film can capture the truth of a gesture the way in which photography, which can only imply the movement and language which is restricted by its rules cannot.

'Little Deiter needs to fly' is an attempt to capture the truth of the past not merely retell it in the present as historical fact. Herzog has Dengler relive his experiences in Vietnam rather than get an actor to play him. We travel back in time with Dengler until we are brought into the present again. Although he avoids politics it is Herzogs ethics in not judging Dieter's experience that elevates and makes his also aesthetically pleasing documentary memorable.

A closing thought: the cinema that was created in the 1960s can not be lead directly back to one thought or one concept of the world but are the result of the possibility of a different world. Thus raising the question of the impact of these pieces today where hope for a better place is dwindling and the horrors of Vietnam are being repeated exposing the lack of change that has been achieved.

References:
Giorgio Agamben, 'Notes on Gesture' in Means without End: Notes on Politics. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Trans.) (University of Minnesota Press, [1996] 2000): 49-50.
Michel Foucault, 'Preface' in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (New York: vintage, 1970)
Laura Mulvey, 'The Index and the uncanny' in Time and the Image. Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed) (Manchester University Press, 2000)
Daniel Zalewski, 'The Ecstatic Truth: Werner Herzog's Quest', The New Yorker. (April 24, 2006)