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The End

2006-11-13T01:26:00.000+11:00

The sixties are over, the revolution failed and technology consumes us as we consume technology.

Ideas belong in a world context. Unfortunately this context is constantly changing and the ideas about identity, sexuality, society, revolution begin to show their age. They are interesting to learn about but can not take on the same meaning out of context. The ways in which these ideas were expressed and the techniques these ideas inspired however can be altered to fit the current context.

Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog and Agnes Varda continue to make films using 1960s aesthetics, aesthetics of aging, story telling, beauty, politics. New film makers are also inspired by the film techniques that emerged from the sixties. Jim Jarmucsh's Stranger than Paradise borrows from Cassavete's Shadows in content and style. The young characters full of existential angst move through an urban landscape and enclose themselves in apartments. Scenes are cut around partial and seemingly meaningless conversations. Like the repetition of the Charlie Parker riffs in Shadows, the music of Screamin' Jay Hawkins frames the action and represents transition.

We have certain expectations when watching films that these aesthetics did not conform to. At times we may struggle with what we are seeing and hearing because it is prompting a different kind of cinema experience from us. It's ok to let our minds wander, we won't miss that important plot twist, our heart does not have to race as the sound track crescendos, we don't even have to like what we see. The stimulation of an unique experience is what the aesthetic is designed to do and thus is expressed in different forms by different directors.

Sound

2006-11-13T01:18:00.000+11:00

One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Jean-Luc Godard
Gimme Shelter (1970)
David Maysles, Albert Maysleys, Charlottle Zwerin

Traditionally in film sound compliments the vision. In One Plus One however Godard reverses the process using various sounds complimented by visions to construct his film. The film records the rehearsal process of the Rolling Stones song 'Sympathy for the Devil'. The sound is built up layer by layer, comparable to the development of a complex plot of characters. What is created is a space defined by sound instead of vision. The camera circles the room and at times focuses on minor visual details such as the unidentified man who looks like he has happened upon the rehearsal accidentally and has stopped to listen. For an audience used to vision guiding other senses the inclusion of the man is strange. Only when this imagined back story is applied, the music came first, the man followed, does it make sense.

Gimme Shelter was not intended to be a film about sound. The film makers were lucky enough to be following the Rolling Stones on their 1969 American tour which climaxed in the ill fated concert at Altamont, CA. A sight to be seen, the sound quality in the early concert footage is far superior to the visuals. The plot is carried on by other sounds as the brash American lawyer (apparently acting on his own hence he never speaks to Jagger) negotiates the concerts location with the sheriff who appears only via a speaker phone. At the Altamont concert the visuals blur. Away from the stage the desert and the crowds of people are matched with eager voices. Close to the stage the crowd is a moving blur and the music is mixed with the pleas of the musicians and organisers for calm. The British accents of the Stones and their manager Sam Culter are particularly cutting as their voices reveal a range of emotions. The concluding sound of the film is not the song which plays over the credits but the sound of the helicopter overloaded with the Stones entourage as it escapes the chaos of the festival.

who the hell is bertholt brecht?

2006-10-19T00:00:00.000+10:00

Bertholt Brecht is a German playwright who wrote plays from around 1920-1950. He is well known for bringing politics and revolution to the theatre, a traditionally bourgeois domain. He is credited with the modern reworking of the epic which existed in ancient Greece as the less entertaining relative to the tragedy. Unlike the tragedy in which a story is generally one of personal or moral crisis the epic portrays these same events in at a societal level. No longer is the public allowed the cathartic release felt when the protagonist suffers an injustice of society which is inflicted on him, free to return to their comfortable lives. Instead they must laugh at the ridiculous nature of society portrayed as a farce, in which the previously personal injustice is only one of many. This laughter is not produced in the context of good hearted fun, it is the awkward laughter produced when an unfunny situation is presented in a funny way. It does not provide a release but instead creates a pressure. It is designed to make people aware of the injustices in (capitalist) society, to depersonalise situations so people realise that it could happen to them. The epic is designed to foster revolutionaries not mere rebels. This reworking of the epic was designed with communism in mind answering Lenin's question 'How and what should we learn?' no longer are personal morals enough we must have a social conscience.

The Cinema of Jean-Luc Goddard

La Chinose (1967)

The irony of bourgeois students using their summer holidays to set up a kind of break away Maoist utopia parodies the Brechtian notions of art as a representation of social conscious. Like the students the film is too stylistically pretty to be propagating the wisdom of Mao. The primary colours, the good looking actors, the Frenchness of it all clash with the philosophy. The exercises performed on the balcony and back dropped by suburbia, all be it a French one, the students learn in a contrite lecture theatre complete with blackboard and the apartment in general is too grand to be home base of a people's revolution. Their actions seem fake like they are merely acting the part of student activist from their safe haven. The cuts between the students and the chickens and the streets further emphasises this by parodying the meaning of their words and showing the audience the lack of depth the students have in their peoples revolution. The scene in which the war in Vietnam is reenacted also refers to this metatextual element. The audience seems to be challenged to judge whether this play is any more ridiculous than the greater play going on.

Further metatextual elements can be found in

Week End (1967)

The films bourgeois married couple, Roland and Corrine find themselves reduced to pedestrians after their car crashes in a consumerist apocalypse on their way to kill Corrine's father. Corrine's blood curdling screams are chilling as she mourns the destruction of her Hermes handbag. As they continue their journey on foot they meet the Alice in Wonderland like character of Emily Bronte who talks in riddles. A stand off between film and book takes place and the film characters of Roland and Corrine triumph beating up Bronte and lighting her on fire. The annihilation of the text however is only one of the casualties of the destruction of consumerist society, cars are destroyed, designer clothes left to burn on the crash victims and anarchy reigns in an increasingly absurd journey. Stylistically the ten minute dolly shot of the initial traffic jam cannot be forgotten. The bold coloured cars in red, white, green, blue, black and yellow (perhaps orange as well) contrast with the washed out country side. These colours are mirrored in the clothing of the consumers and the blood that they spill. This exaggerated violence as well as the overt sexual tones, such as in the opening scene where Corrine retells a sexual encounter, make the audience laugh uncomfortably in the tradition of the Brechtian epic. Each scene is self contained but their temporal order is important following the disintegration of society and logic to the absurd.

"I am here to inform these modern times of the grammatical era's end
and the beginning of flamboyance especially in cinema." -- Joseph Balsamo in Weekend

A side note: Bertholt brecht has also been mentioned in my Italian Theatre class when studying Dario Fo's 1970 play - accidental death of an anarchist which makes use of the epic farce genre and has obvious revolutionary undertones.

"A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance."

DARIO FO, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1997

Following the techniques employed by Brecht, Accidental death of an anarchist is the fictional recounting of the polices reaction to investigations into what was declared the accidental death of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli who in december 1969 fell from the fifth floor window of the police head quarters in milan during an interrogation as to his involvement in a terrorist bombing. The revolutionary goals make it necessary to base plays on historical situations that are relevant and current but these events must also be dramatised and fictionalised such events to create the tension and apprehension about things which are occuring in the present. (although this also provides protection against defamation)

Also note that my Italian theatre tutorial was immediately before my rebel screen tutorial and sometimes i didnt manage to fully transition between the two.

References:
Jennifer Lorch, "Introduction" in Morte Accidentale di un anarchico, Dario Fo, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 1997, 18-19.
The Godard Experience published by Carlton College Minnesota located at http://www.carleton.edu/curricular/MEDA/classes/media110/Friesema/weekend.html
Wikipedia (oh the shame)

camera obscura camera lucida

2006-10-12T21:56:00.000+10:00

Owl wearing prisms

There was a discussion on borges in class again. He had an opinion on everything. Today it was the camera lucida - instead of the notion that a photograph is an obscure/inferior representation of the world we live in Borges suggests it is a lucid link to another world, the world of photography and art in which time and space differs to the world we live in. Like looking at something through a prism. A photograph exists in the present but is showing us the past but if we believe that a photograph is not just the past captured on paper then what the photograph is really showing is a completely separate time and place that belongs neither to the past nor the present because in our space time structure how can the past exist in the present?

This is also reminiscent of the platonic view of the inferior world of nature and th superior world of the imagination. Photographs capture the imagination in ways in which words fail. Ideas can be captured on film whilst they must be translated and transposed and limited by grammar when put into words. Ideas on film are limited perhaps by technology. One reel of film can contain one idea. Two projected simultaneous can contain two which when considered together produce other permutations of these ideas when combined in different ways. Now even more ideas, images and conversation can be displayed at once and have become interactive such that the viewers input effects what is seen. The limitations of film as a portal to the world of the imagination are lessening and the real time input of viewers allows us access to this alternate time and space. We have input but we cannot control it because to control it would be to bring it back down to our world and reduce it to an imitation.
I wish i had of remembered this in class.

what does this have to do with me?
I dont know. i think in a way i like my written words perhaps over movies although i have never created one with prior intentions of greatness or even mediocrity as opposed to writing things. Words in their solidity are easier to analyse but do they exist if no one reads them? In recording history are pictures better than words? In psychology the theory is that we can recognise faces using three different methods. We have a visual store of the feature unique to the persons, we have the name of the person and then we have a store of information, personal history of the person. The visual and semantic stores have shown to be dissociable in some ways meaning we can remember names but not faces, faces but not names but both can trigger the biographical information. This suggests that for people a face and a name triggers the same information or at least activates similar parts of the brain. Perhaps then the space and time of the imagination is not interfered with too much by having to write or film them because ultimately they are processed in similar parts of the human mind from which they came and belong to the same realm in which time and space is altered.

'the owls are not what they seem'

"Twin Peaks is about entering a world, falling in love with it, working within it, and letting it talk to you. To me, if it doesn't have honesty, and you don't obey those rules, then it won't work, it won't feel good, and the audience won't stay with it. That's also true of painting, or any movie."

David Lynch

taken from the city of absurdity

The modern woman

2006-09-04T23:40:00.000+10:00

It seems that woman have picked up a few extra skills since the 80s.
I found this musing on a friends blog:

I am tired of this course I've been in for 4 years. I need to get out or I will die. Please give me suggestions, anyone who actually reads this rubbish is welcome to give suggestions. I think I am good with my hands, bad with my back, good with customer service, no good with liking people, or trusting people, I can cook and sew and grow and massage and read and type, my handwriting is awful and I am clumsy with knives and heat. I know a bunch of useless health stuff and am happy to tell people bad news. If you think you have the perfect occupation for me please comment.

Chantal Ackerman

Je tu il elle (1974)

What do peoples bodies do?
What do womens bodies do?

The most interesting aspect about Ackerman's films for me were the way in which she filmed activities for such a long time that they took on different meanings and caused different reactions. Eating suger compulsively from a bag so that it spilt every where went from being a contrite amusement to making me wanting to shake her. The writing and rewriting of a love letter at first made me wonder about her before my mind wandered to all the letters I have been compelled to write but not send. When the truck driver began his story I was relieved to have something to follow and guide me but by the end I kind of wished he had not opened his mouth. The sandwich making made me relieved she was eating something decent until she appeared to stuff herself again which made me worry about her. The love scene surprised me. After time the bodies became moving marble statues with hips and breasts, white and perfect. Their form was more intriguing to me than the acts they were performing.

Paris is Paris

2006-08-31T23:16:00.000+10:00

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

2006-08-18T16:56:00.000+10:00

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

2006-08-13T23:52:00.000+10:00

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?

2006-08-09T12:33:00.000+10:00

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?

2006-08-02T11:16:00.000+10:00

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)

The First

2006-07-28T23:56:00.000+10:00

Herzog-'Little Dieter needs to fly'