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.

There was a mention of “positive racism… which is still racism” in class yesterday. One of the most complicated examples of that is Fred Astaire’s tribute to dancer Bill Robinson in the “Bojangles of Harlem” number in the film Swing Time (1936). The entire musical sequence is supposed to be a show of love for Robinson but everything about the scene is rooted in caricatures, seen most egregiously when Astaire appears onstage in blackface and wearing clothes intended to evoke Harlem. Alastair Macaulay wrote about the number in the New York Times a few years back and, in judging form versus content, described the footwork as “rhythmically imaginative.” This is certainly true in the second half of the scene, which involves shadows projected onto the wall behind Astaire. But how can anyone, even a great fan of Astaire as a performer, feel comfortable watching him perform black identity? He is black only for as long as the number lasts, and afterwards he can wash the makeup off, removing the mask – his masquerade – of blackness. Swing Time is considered one of Astaire’s finest films; as a child who grew up with a sizable collection of 1930s-60s musicals on VHS, I have been familiar with (and a fan of) Swing Time for almost my entire life and I always loved it for the inoffensive songs and dances (“Pick Yourself Up,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” the intimate two-person spectacle of “Never Gonna Dance”). It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how problematic “Bojangles of Harlem” was and still is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4UUkui545I

The “Bojangles” problem also makes me think more critically about “Shine on Your Shoes” in The Band Wagon (1953), in which Astaire shares the dance space with Leroy Daniels, who got the role because he actually was a shoe shiner in real life. Daniels’ character can only be present in the space because he is performing a service for a white character. Not only that, Daniels has to do what was so often asked of black film characters: he has to act pleased to serve Astaire. (By the end of the scene Daniels is thoroughly delighted to have the opportunity to brush the dust off Astaire’s clothes.) Daniels was not even billed onscreen for his efforts, identifiable only as “Arcade Shoeshine Man” among the film’s list of uncredited characters and bit parts on the IMDb. MGM lets him be Astaire’s onscreen partner, but at the same time those Powers That Be deny Daniels an equal amount of credit for his contribution to the number.

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-Magdalena (Sagardía)

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!

The lack of queer  theorization within the Doane and Mulvey pieces this week was disappointing. I realize they were already stepping in uncharted territory by looking closely at how women watch films, so diving into ideas of queer readings was not on their radar. But in their examinations of how women can alter the viewing practices that were so prevalent in the classic Hollywood era, for members of the queer female audience, lining up subjectivity in unexpected places is a stimulating alternative. One of my favorite films from the Hollywood studio era is Stage Door (1937). Directed by Gregory La Cava and starring an almost exclusive female cast including Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball and Eve Arden among many others, this film for me is one of those exceptions to the rule of looking when it comes to the women within the film as well as those watching. The story revolves around aspiring actresses in New York who live together in a theatrical boarding house. The blue-blooded Hepburn enters into the scene and shakes things up with her upper class aura, and has a particular effect on the brassy Ginger Rogers. For me, their narrative resembles the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back scenario that we’ve seen time and time again but this time enacted between two young women. They clash immensely in the beginning of the film but soon develop an affection for one another, largely because they are roommates in the house. And the penultimate scene which acts as a sort of climax, is the two of them embracing in a medium close-up, a very familiar sight.

There is little to no talk of men, and the only real prominent male character is a theater producer who seduces young actresses by promising them roles. In fact, when Hepburn deals with him she plays his game right along with him (masquerading one might say) in order to get the part. Her dabbling into heteronormative behavior is simply a tactic to get ahead, there is absolutely no emotional attachment involved.

The first meeting between Rogers and Hepburn is telling in the way that it is framed. La Cava uses the standard shot-reverse-shot in this scene, but instead of looks exchanged by a man and a woman, two women are given ample opportunity to look each other up and down, in the privacy of their own room to boot. Below is that clip, beginning at 1:55. Their witty banter as well as Rogers’ appearance in her bathrobe bring to mind many of the “meet-cute” moments that occur in numerous romantic comedies of the time. So, right off the bat there is a connection that the diagesis creates for these two women using techniques that usually connect a man and a woman.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/304385/Stage-Door-Movie-Clip-Miss-Randall-s-Baggage.html

There are many fascinating aspects of Stage Door that feed into a queer reading of the film including Hepburn herself as a lesbian icon, the homosocial environment of the all-female boarding house, the lack of any genuine heterosexual narrative which was extremely rare at that time, as well as intimate moments between women when they share clothes or help one another get undressed after a long night out. But one of the most memorable examples involves Hepburn’s performance of heteronormativity. She comes from a very well off family and has decided to buck the trend of marrying a successful businessman in favor of moving into a very crowded house with a bunch of women. She does land a lead role in a Broadway play, though at the expense of one of the other housemates who had been vying for that same part. The housemate in question, Kay, eventually commits suicide because of the hopelessness she feels in her current situation. This role was to be her big break, and it was taken away from her. When we first see Hepburn at rehearsal attempting to feel a connection to the play, she is flat, lifeless and stiff. In the play’s scene, she is supposed to be mourning the loss of her male lover, but she is failing miserably. However, on opening night, the same night that Kay takes her own life, Hepburn performs flawlessly. Her performance is raw and heartfelt and affects everyone watching (including Rogers.) Importantly however her mind is not on this fictional male lover, but on the female friend whom she has just lost. Additionally, Rogers confronted her in her dressing room prior to the curtain going up and accused her of causing Kay’s death. So in Hepburn’s mind and emotions, she experiences the loss of her friend Kay as well as Rogers, her “special” friend. Below is the result of those feelings, a touching performance with her beloved friend Rogers looking on intently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNtz0r5pmXo

Following this scene, Rogers rushes back into the dressing room and runs into Hepburn’s arms, signifying a truce and a reunification.

With that reconnection, like similar embraces in countless romantic movies, the film is able to end.

When I watch this movie, it is a touching story of female love mixed with a lot of wonderful and intelligent humor. Most likely that was not the intention of the filmmakers or the actresses playing these roles, but in my capacity as a female, queer viewer decide to read against the grain in order to derive pleasure from the text, rather than following the strict misogynist rules of spectatorship and subjectivity that dominated at the time.

In the late 1950s, Anthony Perkins (or “Tony Perkins,” as the teen magazines called him) capitalized on his boy-next-door image by recording a few jazz-pop albums. Listening to those recordings (besides the song posted above, I’m also partial to “But Beautiful” and “I Remember You”), I find the difference in Perkins’ pre-Psycho and post-Psycho careers all the more fascinating. Even more interesting is the movie of his that came out mere months before Psycho, a comedy called Tall Story in which Perkins plays a college basketball player wooing fellow student Jane Fonda (in her film debut).

On occasion I hear my classmates talk about whether they “buy” a certain storyline or character in a film. In this instance, can we buy Perkins as a goofy, lovesick college boy since we’ve seen Psycho and perhaps some of his other unsettling performances? (See: Five Miles to Midnight, Pretty Poison, Psycho II/III/IV, etc.) As Marion Crane says in Psycho, “sometimes just one time can be enough,” and that was certainly true in Perkins’ case when you see how he was typecast. Since I spent my teenage years as a sort of aficionado of his movies and I heard some classmates ask what other roles Perkins did in his career, I can recommend a few in particular: the Civil War drama Friendly Persuasion (1956), for which Perkins got an Oscar nomination for playing Gary Cooper’s son; Fear Strikes Out (1957), the true-life story of a baseball player battling bipolar disorder; a pair of romantic dramas from the early 60s, Goodbye Again (1961) with Ingrid Bergman and Phaedra (1962) with Melina Mercouri; and, as was mentioned in class, the Orson Welles film The Trial (1962).

If I could make a case for Anthony Perkins as an auteur of acting, I would say that he should be lauded for making the most of lighthearted romantic comedy leads, various kinds of characters in period pieces of different genres, the psychological depths he had to plumb for Psycho, then all the bad retreads of the Norman Bates character that came afterward. And, to bring the post full circle, there was the Broadway musical Perkins sang in, Greenwillow, which he was rehearsing in New York in between shooting scenes for Psycho. (A stand-in played “Mrs. Bates” during the shower sequence.) The song “Never Will I Marry” might not be a classic of the American stage, but it’s to Perkins’ credit that he makes it so affecting, as you can see in this TV performance from 1985.

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!