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.)

https://instagram.com/p/1vn9EsSwLh/

MY BLOG #1

04/13/15

Corporeality, Sensation,Affect.

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.

BLOG #2

03/30/2015

FILM AS A POLITICAL WEAPON:

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.

Davis LA rebellion clip.

https://youtu.be/UcUmV-TaVGk

Burnett interview.

https://youtu.be/QmHYw-eFu3w.

Bush mama-Haile Gerima.

https://youtu.be/2YdZC0xQ1hg

A glimpse of prof, Haile Gerima, (show up to 6:30 min.)

https://youtu.be/wXVRRW1pXNE

2/23/15

Film and Reality;

Joan of Arc.

As I watch this film for the umpteenth time it never ceases always to bring out a missing piece that slipped by on one my previous viewing. This time around I delved into a reading of Dreyer’s work, and it is amazing that this film in my opinion is an abstraction that came to life slowly. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer forced us, the spectator, “in a secluded area of visually; cornered me with no avoidance but to face this face of Falconetti and her elusive trickery though honest in her intentions but subject to her and the treat pose upon her to deny her inner calling to satisfy an authoritative appeal.”

And yes I do quote the article that made me not take this film as I always ordinarily take it- on it historical impasse. This time around it is all about the physiognomy of Joan and her persecutors.  It excluded a fancy set or a historical setting but just focused on the mimetic attribution that spoke on its mere facial expression. I must extract this quote for I cannot say it better, “ Dreyer fashions his imagery after paintings of the period and indeed succeeds in keeping out crude actuality. “It is as if Old Dutch masters had come to life. “And in accordance with their appearance, their characters are like nomads, they move slowly about, and there is special distance between them which reflects their resistance to promiscuous mingling. In this film I would omit my any promiscuous tone; Joan was as rugged and disheveled, just ready to be slaughtered. Not dressed as an Anne Boleyn before being headless by the axe man.

In my opinion, this film like most film of this style could not have been so rich had it done differently. Intertitles did not matter, the actions of this slow abstraction, bodies that slowly steps out from their respective enclaves. They are tightly squeezed out from a pastel tube, and suddenly made to life is some rustic manner. They come out of low arches representing a world of oppression. And in the open they are crouched to the low ceiling that accentuates their actual decision on Joan’s life. Dreyer ironizes his mise en scene for instance, as the priest was pulling confession out of Joan, he a man of the church is shown as the evil one that has the right of way, and as the camera confronts Joan, there is a vivid cross on the wall. Dreyer is emphasizing here that although God is on Joan’s side, Dreyer could have been making a statement here that the truth in the form of God as a savior is not always the savior.

And in reading Epstein’s piece, “Magnification,” he says the close-up “addresses me personally with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized.” Dryer must have taken a piece of tutoring here in enhancing his meaning with Falconetti’s face. This article says it all; it posits as a guide in looking at Joan of Arc, it contributed to my once ordinary looking at this face to a now complex face that attributed a meaningful language- Epstein has simplified Falconetti’s physiognomy, “The close-up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never before has a face turned to mine in that way (Epstein, p239)….”

This blog has a pretty cogent analysis of Deleuze and Bergson’s notions of time and elucidates some of what this week’s reading covers.

Guide to Reading Deleuze’s Cinema II: The Time-Image, Part I: Towards a Direct Imaging of Time to Crystal-Images

Starting from Prof. Herzog’s point yesterday about the vulnerability of the peep show viewer’s body, I’d like to discuss that vulnerability in contrast to the anonymity of the viewer in a porn theater. Since both were staples of Times Square’s sex industry wonderland, I’m interested in the different viewing experiences and the relationship between the viewer and the actors on film. As Prof. Herzog pointed out, in a peep show the exposed female body would actually be fairly protected, literally placed in a box and only available for one person’s view. The peep show patron, on the other hand, would be vulnerable with his or her body on display. As I understand it, porn theaters gradually started replacing peep shows around the 1960s and 1970s. In the more traditional Metzian structure of theatrical apparatus, the viewer’s body is hidden in a dark room, while the film actors are fully on display on screen. The peep show viewer’s body (and eyes) are placed outside the entire apparatus itself, breaking with Metz’s argument for the viewer as a part of the apparatus: the spectator is the searchlight (which also duplicates the camera) as well as the screen (which also duplicates the film strip); Metz deems this the “mirror-chain” (824-5). Since the peep show removes the spectator from the apparatus and prevents the spectator from looking at himself looking at the screen (as in Metz’s formulation), perhaps the anonymity of the peep show viewer is actually less anonymous than the porn theater spectator who, though situated in a dark room, sees himself reflected on screen.

After our last class when we discussed the Linda Williams essay on “film bodies,” I went back to the section on “Structures of Fantasy.” Williams includes a chart of which categories certain films fall into depending on pornographic/horror/melodramatic content and the perceived intended/expected audience, and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) falls into the horror category with the assumed audience of teenage boys. The interesting thing about Dressed to Kill, besides the fact that it was nominated for three Razzies (including Worst Director) in the very first year that the awards were given out, is that it steals so gleefully from Alfred Hitchcock films, possibly more so than in any other De Palma film. (I’ve seen quite a few of those sex-and-violence-driven De Palma thrillers – Sisters, Body Double, Passion, etc. – so I feel able to make that statement.) Dressed to Kill is primarily influenced by Psycho, but there is a famous scene set in a museum that swipes so many elements from Vertigo that De Palma ought to have been arrested for theft. Everything from the setting to Pino Donaggio’s score to Angie Dickinson’s Kim Novak-esque outfit is meant to evoke Hitchcock’s film and the cat-and-mouse game played by Dickinson and Ken Baker is supposed to excite the viewer as much as it does Dickinson. The blend of desire and unease is part of the thrill of the chase both for her (the participant) and for us (the spectator). The quality of fantasy exists here because De Palma places the two characters in a soft-focus bubble of Hitchcockian homage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUyibRxVr1g

Talk about a “quest for an object of desire” (as Laplanche and Pontalis might say)!

Unsurprisingly for a De Palma film, a female character suffers as a result of expressing her sexuality (although the question of whether Dickinson had any choice in either consenting to or refusing the sexual encounter is up for debate). This not-so-clandestine taxicab interlude between strangers brings greater sexual satisfaction to Dickinson’s character than anything she has experienced with her husband – De Palma depicts this with a “bad sex” scene at the beginning of the film – but as we know from Linda Williams’ list, Dressed to Kill is a horror film. Draw your own conclusions.