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.

McGilligan

Enjoy!

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?

Mulvey talks of the active/male and the passive/female – with the former looking at the female in a couple of different ways. He either fetishes the female and elevates her to the status of an icon or a pin-up. Or he is a voyeur who takes on the role of judging/punishing/rescuing her. In all of this, the female is passive; and her chief quality is the being looked at-ness.

We as female members of the audience are said to exercise a choice – between identifying with the male gaze, or with the female being looked at-ness. In fact drawing from psychoanalytic theory, it is suggested that we oscillate between these 2 points of view.

I like the idea that we move from 1 POV to the other, but not as it is described by Mulvey. Personally, I am not sure that I identify with the male POV – the male gaze – when the masculine in me is ascendant. For me, it is an uncomfortable POV, even abhorrent on occasion: the voyeurism, the aggression, all of it.

Even more objectionable is the POV of the female being looked at. My response to the idea of a man rescuing/completing me can extend anywhere on the continuum from amusement to annoyance. Then again I can have a visceral reaction to popular notions of romance. Think of Michelle Pfeiffer’s glowing face in Up Close and Personal, with the Celine Dion track in the background: “I am everything I am because you loved me!”

What makes sense to me is that we all have masculine and feminine tendencies that we move between. 1 of which maybe the overriding tendency for some of us. For others, it maybe that we are the stuff of movement, without a value judgment associated with either POV? The goal is to integrate the 2, and be more in touch with the masculine and the feminine in us. Rather than view the world in dichotomies.

I am all for an “androgynist” film theory!

I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea “it is so bad it is good” – a comment that was made in connection with the film Showgirls and/or the director Paul Verhoeven.I certainly get the idea of not looking at the usual suspects when it comes to the auteur theory – where’s the challenge in that – and so looking at a Verhoeven. But I had a lot of difficulty stomaching the film. It was quite unbelievable that this film would have been made – and even more so that it made the amount of money on home viewing, in its afterlife.

Maybe I am at a disadvantage because I have not seem enough of the director’s films to have a good sense of his filmography, and so be able to appreciate his POV, his presentation, and his style. I can only say that I dislike the 2 American films of his I have seen fully – Basic Instinct and for sure Showgirls. I did catch his Dutch film – Black Book – that he made when he returned to filmmaking in this native Holland,. It was not a bad film, but it was not a particularly good one either. One among many, many WWII films is how I remember it.

I found though that Colleen’s post gave me pause – when she talked of the dichotomy in his portrayal of women. It is possible as she suggests that we cannot make sense of how he sees them, or what he thinks they are/should be about. But this still does not take away from my issue: the exploitativeness in his portrayal. And more importantly, just how bad his films are. Or to be specific, how bad Showgirls is – the story, the script, the acting, all of it!

Balasz certainly writes eloquently about the close-up in the excerpt from Theory of Film. And I found Maria’s post spoke further to the power of the close-up. But what made it all come alive for me was the excerpt from Joan of Arc that we saw in class this past week.

Almost fairly early on from when we recognize other beings around us, we humans strive to communicate with them, and with the world around us. We further learn to speak, as the primary means of interacting with other human beings. So it was with me.

By the time I started watching films, the talkie was a fixture. I grew to love film, but the only kind I knew and watched was films with dialogue. I have loved many films for their script, and certainly many actors for their dialogue delivery. I have also been guilty of dismissing silent cinema as more comedic, even goofy in a sense.

It is in this context that the comment about unlearning and relearning ((that Professor Herzog discussed), resonated for me. I saw the power of silent cinema – and the close-up – when we watched the sequences from Joan of Arc. I saw the volumes that Falconetti’s face conveyed about the conflict Joan faced, and the poignancy of her situation. I realized I need to unlearn my ideas of film as always being tied to the spoken word, and relearn the language and nuance of silent cinema. I really need to discover this new world!