The auteur theory was addressed early on in the semester – referring as it typically does to the director as an auteur. But a lot has also been said/written about the actor as an auteur. In both cases, there can be a meaningful debate as to who legitimately belongs to the club. Obviously with much less disagreement in some instances than others.
I found this very interesting article by Patrick McGilligan on what makes for great acting – which can inform any discussion on the actor as an auteur – that I wanted to share with everyone. The author is a biographer and film historian who has written about several actors himself: Clint Eastwood, James Cagney, and Jack Nicholson.
Re: the question from today’s class (“Does Nick Cave have a sense of humor?”), I present to you the music video for “Nick the Stripper,” a 1981 song recorded by the band that he led at the time, The Birthday Party. I feel pretty certain that no one who had a hand in creating this video could possibly not have a sense of humor. (Fun fact: the clip was edited by John Hillcoat, who later went on to direct the films Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, The Proposition, The Road and Lawless, all of which are connected to Nick Cave by the screenplays, the scores/soundtracks, acting roles or – in the case of the first film – all three.) “Nick the Stripper” is 100% absurd, the title indicating How to Poke Fun at Yourself and Your Purported Goth Image 101. Had I just a little more chutzpah I would find an excuse to show this in school, gleefully terrifying my fellow students with this nightmarish (and in all likelihood, heroin-soaked) vision of London set ablaze by wayward Australians, but instead I’ll settle for terrifying you as you watch from the comfort of your home or perhaps elsewhere in public, wherever you happen to be with your viewing apparatus.
Should you find yourself wondering, “What other bizarre music did this weird band make and why haven’t I heard it yet?” I can point you in the direction of “Junkyard,” which will certainly be one of the most entertainingly strange (and possibly excruciating) TV-show performances you’re likely to see (from anyone, in general), and “Fears of Gun,” from a concert filmed not long before the band imploded in 1983 and during which, to the delight of the audience members pawing at him, Nick Cave is dragged partway off the stage and he sinks backward into the crowd. This results in a) Cave rejecting the assistance of a bunch of roadies and b) the other members of the band not actually attempting to help in any way. You may notice the sound of Rowland S. Howard’s guitar fading out briefly during the incident but the playing eventually resumes, a reminder that the show must go on, even after the frontman has potentially lost control of his senses and/or judgment.
The narrative of Under the Skin unfolds a lot like the scene from Weekend that we watched last week: we see result after deadly result of the Female’s (as the IMDb refers to her) inhuman machinations before the end when we finally see what she is, the form that has forced her to inhabit her human skin and do the deadly things that she must (until she meets the deformed man, Adam, anyway). Arguably the moments of violence, like the disintegration of one victim’s body, are more disturbing than the brief glimpses Godard gives us of the corpses in the Weekend road accidents, but what’s even more shocking is the potential for nonhuman, extraterrestrial beings to have the feelings and reactions we ascribe solely to “human” people and that some human beings are predators devoid of empathy or other traditionally human emotional characteristics. Perhaps that makes the sex scene between the Female and her Scottish sort-of-savior particularly discomforting: he thinks he is having physical and/or emotional contact with a being who looks human – and almost is one – but actually is not.
My favorite shot in Under the Skin is the image of the Female, asleep in the cabin in the woods, juxtaposed against the lush greenery of the forest. The shot reminds me of Maya Deren’s short film At Land (1944), in which her body is present (usually recumbent) in unusual spaces like on a long table at a dinner party. We’re aware of the strangeness of a woman lying down or crawling through environments in a manner that is not socially acceptable or even logically possible, but what’s even more surprising is how a shot of a woman’s entire body becomes less about her physicality and more about the setting it is in and how the blurring of time/space and real/unreal creates meaning in what we are seeing. Throughout most of the film the Female’s figure is sexualized, but in the forest shot we see her becoming one with nature, perhaps dreaming of being a living, breathing human. I’m sure that some viewers can’t get more out of the experience of watching Under the Skin than the titillation of Scarlett Johansson’s physical form, but there is so much happening beneath the surface of the character (or at least so much to interpret in our projections) – going on under the skin of the film.
When we discussed the image of the Woman’s eye as “meat,” that immediately reminded me of another Scarlett Johansson film that was in theaters last year, sometime between Under the Skin and Lucy: the Jon Favreau-directed comedy Chef. Johansson’s character is a one-dimensional object of lust for the main character, a cute co-worker whose amount of screen time directly relates to how needed and/or wanted she is by men. (She’s needed to run things efficiently in the restaurant; she’s wanted for a brief fling with Favreau that has no pesky emotional baggage or character development.) There’s a shot of Johansson in which she is not merely a prop; she is literally propped up on her elbow as she watches Favreau cook, waiting for the moment when she gets to taste the meal and reassure him that he’s a master of his craft. She is meat carefully arranged and served on a couch-plate, a thigh to feed the hungry eye of the audience.
While looking at that image of Johansson in Chef, I am also reminded of a shot from the Roberta Findlay film Angel on Fire (1974), which I have been reading about in conjunction with a proposal that I have been writing for another class. My research deals with representations of women’s bodies in films directed by women, a topic that I initially restricted to 1915-1955 but which eventually expanded to the 1960s and 70s because of my interest in how portrayals of the body change in the era of low-budget sexploitation and pornography. Our perceptions of film and the female bodies in them change, I think, in the case of Findlay’s career since she not only directed but also photographed her films (and she edited Angel on Fire), putting her in control of the images produced. The character in the shot above is supposed to be pregnant and the camera stands in for her fiancé as he listens to her announce the news of her condition. Findlay simultaneously exposes and covers up the pregnant woman’s body, a combination of eroticization and her new role as a mother. Do the politics of the body work according to the same rules when body parts are on display in porn? Is it “feminist” porn because the story is written, filmed and put together in post-production by a woman, or is there more that has to be involved with regard to plot and characterizations?
During our discussion on Deleuze and his evocation of the time-image, a curious example came into my mind: the 2004 thriller The Clearing starring Robert Redford and Helen Mirren and directed by Pieter Jan Brugge. At first glance this film is the epitome of the movement-image Hollywood genre film. However, there are very interesting things going on with time here that challenge that initial impression. The film is loosely based on a true story and centers on the kidnapping of a wealthy businessman (Redford) by one of his former employees (Willem Dafoe). The film documents both Redford’s abduction as well as the rescue effort headed by his wife (Mirren). Very familiar territory here. However, at the end of the film, there is a twist and devastating reveal – we discover that Redford’s character had been killed before Mirren even knew of his abduction.
I am sure there were many savvy movie watchers who spotted this right away as the shots involving Redford and Dafoe all take place in a single day while Mirren’s scenes spanned weeks. However, for my affective experience (apologies to Eugenia Brinkema) this was not the case. As a result, the ending caused a jolt or “shock” that sent me into a contemplative frame of mind. Did I really not realize that these two experiences were occurring in varying temporalities? Am I really that easily duped by clever film editing to alter my perception of time? Are those scenes involving Redford and Dafoe reliable at all? These types of shock endings also call up the virtual past/future because of the need to grapple with one’s own loss of the sense of “real” time and go back and recall moments in the film that may have offered clues to this revelation. Also all ideas of logical causality associated with the movement-image are thrown out the window because anything that occurs between Dafoe and Redford that we thought were caused by circumstances in Mirren’s rescue efforts is proven false. The idea of moments in time comparing to pearls on a string is no longer truthfully representative. Therefore, within the confines of a very traditional Hollywood narrative with many of the tropes we see time and time again in suspense thrillers, this film still manages to veer at least slightly toward that vertical axis (especially in utilizing a flashback that never appears as such until the very end of the film).
Though certainly not the type of film Deleuze had in mind, I think it still offers an interesting variation of the traditional movement-image construct of mainstream Hollywood films.
In thinking further about Deleuze and time – and the notion of horizontal and vertical time – I was reminded of a film I saw recently at the Tribeca Film Festival.
This is an Italian film directed by Laura Bispuri: Sworn Virgin, or Vergine Giurata. I saw it as a conscious choice made by the director to take a very nuanced approach to time elapsing in the film. Rather than have the story unfold in a linear fashion, she chooses to go back and forth between the past and the present – the past in Albania and the present in Italy. However it is not a simple case of having the story unfold in flashbacks, which is a technique that is often used in film.
The film tells the story of a woman in a remote part of Albania who exercises a choice to live her life as a man – a custom that allows her to escape the sheer drudgery and enslavement in living out her life as a wife and mother. In return for this freedom, she has to take a vow of celibacy for the remainder of her years. She decides after some years to leave that life behind, and relocate to Italy where she seems to have some family.
We see her in her new environment, as she learns to negotiate a new country/city, new people (there are even some members of the family she does not know), new apartment, and new job – not to mention coming to terms with her awakening sexuality and desires.
I read the choice made by the director with regard to time as being driven by 2 factors. First, Bispuri is bringing to light a custom that a lot of us probably aren’t aware of; and not having a clear sense of time, of what is occurring when, sort of adds to the sense of the unknown. Further there is very little dialogue in the film; it has a ruminative quality to it as a lot of what transpires on screen portrays the inner life of the protagonist. So in this sense too, it adds to the experience of the film not to have a clear sense of time unfolding.
In essence then, it takes a while for us to understand place and time, past and present, as well as relationships. It is an instance IMO of deliberately obfuscating the audience, to let the story unravel so to speak – to almost let it wash over them.
I do have to add a footnote though – just so that I don’t mislead anyone: the film could have been a tad shorter/tighter!
A week or so ago in class, we read/talked about Times Square as a singular film location – the area as it existed in the 1960s being associated with sexploitation films. As someone who moved to New York in the late 1990s, I have only heard of what Times Square was like at the time – the seedy, grimy underbelly of the city, where peddlers of sex and drugs ruled the day. It conjures up images from Taxi Driver, and brings to mind what Travis Bickle so wanted to cleanse the city of.
Fast forward some 40+ years, the area is quite different now. It does appear to be cleaned up. We don’t see the sex shops and peep shows, though apparently they are are still around – if you know where to find them. It is also free of the drug peddlers, as the NYPD has cracked down on them over the years, and at a few different locations in the city. Then again, a lot of New York is relatively crime free in the last decade or so, because there are always cops on the street, to ward off a completely different kind of threat – the threat of terrorism.
But how really different is Times Square? I was there just 2 days ago – in the midst of the Wednesday matinee rush on Broadway. It was buzzing with tourists, and some locals for sure. There was rampant commercialism on display – with the all the big stores, and the neon signs for films and TV shows, all in bright daylight!
And then there were the topless girls wandering around, mixed in with the crowd. I think they are the female counterpart to the naked cowboy who strangely enough, was missing. I realized I haven’t been in the neighborhood for a while – and so was seeing it in its current avatar. It is seemingly a little cleaned up – at least superficially. But is it dirty, crowded – yes. Is it wholesome – no.
It is the mecca of commercialism, it still peddles sex albeit in a different fashion. But then that is what makes Times Square what it is – a vibrant, energetic space that draws so many people from other countries and other parts of the US. If anything, it probably draws more people than before because they feel safer wandering about there?
In our last class I was thinking about a lot of different films, far too many to tie them together in one coherent post. Therefore this post will be a mixed bag of assorted clips, each of them relating to our Monday discussion in some way.
I mentioned Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven (1981) in relation to the Tsai Ming-liang film that we watched part of, The Hole (1998). (You might want to watch the first minute of this clip first, since it’s not included in the video I embedded above and there’s dialogue that sets up the “Pennies from Heaven” number.) I realize that all musicals incorporate some level of fantasy in musical-number scenes – it is considered totally normal for characters to stop what they are doing and break into song – but what makes both Pennies from Heaven and The Hole different is that the drama in the non-musical portions of the narrative is so stark and sometimes tragic, while the musical parts are incredibly and almost overwhelmingly stylized, using vivid colors in the costumes, makeup and set design to heighten the contrast between the two types of storytelling within each film. The act of lipsynching, utilized in both films, also puts the focus on the characters’ dreams of finding some kind of paradise thanks to big-budget fantasies that temporarily ease the pain of daily life.
In thinking about uses of time in film, I find myself remembering Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001), which tells the story of a watch salesman who meets a woman for a brief moment, selling a watch to her and in the process finding out that she is moving to Paris, and this tiny slip of an encounter obsesses him so that he makes it his mission to change every timepiece so that he will always know what time it is where the woman is, in Paris. The film also makes constant reference to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), which you’ll notice in the trailer because Jean Constantin’s score for the Truffaut film plays throughout it, in addition to showing a scene from What Time Is It There? in which Lee Kang-sheng’s character watches The 400 Blows on TV. There is also a scene – perhaps a couple of scenes, I can’t quite remember – in which Jean-Pierre Léaud, the star of Truffaut’s film all those decades ago, pops up in a cameo. Besides paying tribute to that specific moment in time in cinematic history, What Time Is It There? has its own unusual sense of timing for shots, sometimes letting the camera linger, most notably in a shot of a prostitute stealing Lee Kang-sheng’s watches from his car after they have had sex (and he has fallen asleep), the shot staying fixed on the woman as she lugs the heavy case full of merchandise down the street until she is out of sight. (You can see the scene here from the 1:36:52 mark until 1:38:05.) There are also two narratives occurring simultaneously since the film tells the stories of both the watch salesman and the woman with whom he is infatuated, weaving back and forth between their individual lives in Taipei and Paris.
Ideas about time become even more complicated when dealing with documentaries. 20,000 Days on Earth (2014, dirs. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard) is a partly fictionalized day-in-the-life portrait of musician Nick Cave, a totally unreal setup because Cave visits so many different locations across England, France and Australia, always by car, that it makes no sense how it all could have transpired in the time frame of one sunrise to its resultant sunset. I only wish that I could find a clip online from the beginning of the film (I have the DVD – if anyone’s interested!), which organizes the chosen “important” events and memories in Nick Cave’s life into a countdown collage of moments from birth to his current day on Earth, compressed into about a minute and a half. A series of scenes throughout the film show a Nick Cave archive (designed for the film; it’s not a real place) where Cave can sift through photographs and other objects that trigger his memories à la Deleuze (moving along the y-axis, you might say…) and catalog his personal and professional histories. At the film’s climax, a Sydney Opera House concert set on that twenty-thousandth day is intercut with shots from concerts that happened throughout Cave’s career, tying memory, experience and the passage of time together as continuous influences on the world of right now. (The y-axis affects the linear progression of x-axis actions.) Every moment in the film’s one-day period is marked by the ghosts of the past.
Finally, as far as road movies are concerned, Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976) is foremost in my mind. (The original German title, Im Lauf der Zeit, translates to “In the Course of Time.”) This short clip gives you a pretty good sense of what most of the film is like: the landscape is as much a character as the humans themselves, and music fills in the space left empty by the lack of language. These two men (played by Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler), who have been thrown together by chance, often communicate through silence. They allow the environment and the soundtrack of records and radio music to speak for them. Time becomes drawn out as these characters make their way across Germany, Vogler’s projectionist character stopping his van at each town’s near-deserted and falling-apart movie theater. And given Kings’ running time of two hours and fifty-six minutes, the experience of seeing the film in a theater (as I did at MoMA last month) creates what feels like a bond between all the moviegoers, as though we had all been on a journey even though we never left our chairs. The passage of time is a constant concern in Wenders’ films, as in the thirteen-minute phone scene between Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984), which recounts the entire history of their marriage, and in the angels and humans considering the meaning of mortal existence in Wings of Desire (1987) and Faraway, So Close! (1993). Perhaps time doesn’t heal enough, as Wings’ female protagonist, Marion, wonders; maybe time is the disease. (And while we’re thinking about Wings of Desire, I also like this bit of analysis from a Criterion Collection essay on the film, which connects to readings from past classes regarding objectification, voyeurism and visual pleasure.)
A few nights ago I saw a film, Silence of the Palace, and the only way for me to see such a film is because of my one tract visor has been removed not too long ago; being accustom to the mainstream commercial cinema all my life- One that has been pounded in my brains in all my western upbringing. It excluded the ‘other’ narrative. So why is it mostly that these ‘other’ narratives are not spoken of in a larger circle and only in a close venues housing just a few people, mostly in academic circles. This subject has a wide speculation, and in my opinion it is mostly political. On a personal note, this film, and another that I have seen a few weeks back “The Murder of Fred Hampton,” is the ones that I watch and not the recycled narratives that commercial cinema provides. These two films have such a great impact on me like many other films that has themes of oppression and stifled movement of the human being.
Having said the above it brings me to my point. Why are these scenes haunting me still? It is not until I read an article that deals with this onscreen/off-screen suture. And it was in an article that this writer talks about this phenomenon in the ‘Piano,’ that there is a connection that holds on to the spectator in one way or the other, it is like the event on the screen has taken hold of my being. In the Palace of Silence, The Bey Family has a household of servants, mostly women, whom they suppress in one form or the other; the male members of this family would have their nightly tryst with a woman of their choice, which has become such a habit that the oppressed women are immune to such a trauma. The filmmaker lingered camera holds the spectator (me) to these scenes penetratively, bringing an onscreen/off-screen synchronization. It is as though what is happening on screen is being realized by me. I had always wondered why this feeling is so often felt by me, and it was not until I read this article that it has really unveils my uniqueness as a shared feeling.
The Murder of Fred Hampton really set the stage for my presentation today. I have never seen this footage before; just like many films that concerns African American suffering of that period. And only years later, when the Panther movement has been eradicated it is then shown; I wonder why? And here we are in this small room with a small audience bringing to light this injustice one little crowd at a time. And it is forum as these that the L.A. Rebellion is born out of- bringing issues such as these into the public sphere. Because commercial cinema finds these themes to be politically incorrect, thus a large scale exhibition is very rare. And most times these films can be viewed, in small spaces. This is not to say that the works of this group of filmmakers cannot be at the forefront of popular cinema; it could, but the price is not worth it, their works would not have its true mission statement that’s truly intended, because oftentimes commercial cinema is manipulative. These artist seeks no fortune or fame but rather the truth.
This African American cinema, is briefly explained in Zeinabu Irene Davis’s article, Keeping the Black in the Media Production.”
Fig. 1. This child looks away from a poster of black activist, Angela Davis.
In the late 1960s, in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising and against the backdrop of the continuing Civil Rights Movement and the escalating Vietnam War, a group of African and African American students entered the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, as part of an Ethno-Communications initiative designed to be responsive to communities of color (also including Asian, Chicano and Native American communities). Now referred to as the “L.A. Rebellion,” these mostly unheralded artists created a unique cinematic landscape, as—over the course of two decades—students arrived, mentored one another and passed the torch to the next group.
This set of filmmakers plays a pivotal role in carrying the torch to eradicate oppression, and bringing public awareness through their films. Davis quotes, “Our Goal was and is to represent ,reflect on and enrich the day-to- day lives of people in our communities. “And she further went on to say that “Although we are of very diverse origins and conflicting ideas, we share a common desire to create an alternative to the dominant American mode of cinema. Her style of film-making is that of keeping abreast with the socio-economic and political premise; helping to preserve Black lives and to create and engage in oppositional media practice that disenfranchises her people, and resisting the conventions of Hollywood and Blaxploitation films.
This following clips below, further explains briefly the L.A. Rebellion Movement.
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