Talk to me

I regularly follow the film blogs of Katrina Henderson, Steven Feister, Wynn Hunter, Sarah Goetz and Jacob Harer. Jacob chose to blog about Hero, a great movie if you have not seen it, but Katrina, Steven, Wynn and Sarah all focused on film as a language for the "politics of representation." The four of them probably do not realize it, but they traced the history of this representation when you put the individual blogs together.

Sarah started "in the beginning," or close to it. The silent film era may seem ancient to some, but the thoughts of these filmmakers are still read and are very relevant in film classes today. Sarah starts off with thoughts from the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who invented the idea of montage as we know it (you can see how I grappled with this idea here). In Eisenstein's era, the films were silent, relying purely on visuals or very minimal inter-titles that Eisenstein himself detested. Sarah tells us this in her blog:

Eisenstein was almost as obsessed with the film-as-language idea as he was about montage. It then makes sense that he would assume that montage was the answer to all the world’s communication problems: if all the world could learn the language of film, than we would have universal mutual understanding. According to him, this worked – at least in the “developed worlds.”

So for Eisenstein, the politics of representation were universal to the developed (and film watching) world. By piling images on top of one another, meaning could be derived from their collisions and edits. Anyone with two eyes could understand this mode of representation.

Sound, however, changed all of this. Now film was supposed to mirror real life, something Eisenstein never intended to do in his famous finale in Battleship Potemkin. Some film thinkers, like Walter Benjamin, worried that all film would now conform to the same norms and all creativity would be lost. Steven says it like this in his blog:

When Walter Benjamin published his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he wrote that he worried that political message would soon control works of art and force them to conform to various standards, rather than allowing for the creativity.

Steven and Benjamin both have good points. If all film is just supposed to reflect what we see every day, where is the room for creativity?

Thankfully, experimental film has risen up to fill this void. Experimental film uses experimental discourse, or in other words, it uses unconventional techniques to project the images that comprise the movie. In Reassemblage, a 1983 experimental documentary by Trinh T. Minh-Ha about the women in a village in Senegal, there is a lack of familiar filmic code, a lack of the familiar politics of representation. Is this uncomfortable? According to Wynn, it is for American audiences:

Over the last week, in watching Reassemblage (1983), Bontoc Eulogy (1995), and Xala (1975), I have felt varying degrees of discomfort that I trace directly to this awakening of my political reception with respect to the cinematic apparatus as well as the narrative content of the films themselves.

So then why shoot a film in this new experimental way? According to Minh-Ha in the article "When I project, it is Silent" this is not a new way to make film at all: "As I went along..creating consisted not so much in inventing something new as in rediscovering the links within and between images, sounds and words." So maybe this was the creativity Benjamin was talking about. Maybe for a film to be truly creative it must abandon the familiar politics of representation.

Katrina hammers this point home with her pointed questions:

would an audience really know this Senegalese culture better if they knew what each of the men were making or what the children were doing? Do descriptions of cultural artifacts make a culture?

I don't know the answer to these questions. All I know is that if Benjamin and Eisenstein were alive today, experimental films such as these would make them smile and bring a wave a relief over them-film has not lost its edge.

The many flavors of Montage

In talking with my Teaching Assistant for my introduction to film class at Duke University, Bart Keeton, it became clear to me that I do not completely understand the idea of montage. So I decided to explore the topic here and solicit feedback. Hopefully this is helpful for others too!

My primary source for my knowledge on montage is Sergei Eisenstein and his essay in the book Film Form. The quote I would like to start with and use as a working definition is "The combination of two 'representable' objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented." To me, this is a fairly broad statement that could encompass almost anything. For example, this encompasses eyeline matches that we have studied all semester. By this definition,the shot-reverse shot combination is an example of montage. In one shot, you have one person on one side of the frame. He or she is staring in an off-screen direction on the opposite side of the frame. From this shot, that is all you can gather-the character is staring in the off-screen direction. In the next shot, you see a character on the opposite side of the screen staring in the off-screen direction on the same side of the frame that the character in the previous shot occupied. This is montage: it is only through the combination of these two shots (some would argue you would need a third shot showing the character from shot one)that you can derive that dialogue is taking place. Is this not montage according to Eisenstein?

If we dive further into his work, we get other good quotes explaining montage, such as "The shot is by no means a montage element. The shot is a montage cell...What then characterizes montage and, consequently, its embryo, the shot? Collision. Conflict between to neighboring fragments." So I suppose that your definition of collision could be debatable-maybe the shot-reverse shot is not enough collision. But in my opinion, this collision of consecutive shots with two different characters on opposite sides of the frames staring straight ahead at the off-screen space is the montage that Eisenstein is referring to.

So instead of beating a dead horse, I decided to move on to Vsevolod Pudovkin's essay from the same book that also discusses editing. In the introduction to his piece, it says "Kuleshov and his cohort [D.W. Griffith] later theorized that emotional connection and narrative could be propelled through juxtaposition, believing that the real character development in a film took place in the cutting room rather than before the camera." This, too, is exactly what I'm arguing for my shot-reverse shot example. Pudovkin argues for the use of the close-up to give further meaning: "The close-up directs the attention of the spectator to that detail which is, at the moment, important to the course of the action." Most shot-reverse shot combinations employ close-ups to display emotion, so all signs are still pointing up. And then, finally, Pudovkin delivers the final piece to my puzzle: "In this sequence must be expressed a special logic that will be apparent only if each shot contain an impulse towards transference for the attention to the next. For example: (1) A man turns his head and looks; (2) What he looks at is shown." This is the essence of my shot-reverse shot example and how it gets its meaning, so at least I have identified the source behind my theory. Now I just need to find why what Eisenstein is arguing is different.

So I returned back to Eisenstein, and I started at the introduction since that is where I found Pudovkin's thesis. And there I found this: "Unlike Pudovkin's stress on the narrative and the emotional flow possible with montage, Eisenstein emphasizes its disjunctive and colliding effect." Now I'm really getting somewhere. Pudovkin is definitely focused on the narrative when he talks about a man looking in the off-screen direction and then the camera cutting to follow his gaze. I, too, am talking about the same kind of situation. Apparently, Eisenstein is not. The type of "collision" he is referring too must, then, be one independent of any type of narrative thread. I still think that the two individual shots of a shot-reverse shot should qualify as a collision, but I guess to be an Eisenstein collision (I just made a new film term), the sequence must be independent of the narrative.

With this as my new hypothesis, I reread Eisenstein and stumbled upon this quote: "But in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another." Alright, so maybe the shot-reverse shot qualifies as two shots stuck together. And then Eisenstein says this: "The vulgar notion of what happens-as a blending-has also led to the vulgar notion of montage mentioned above...Is that correct? In pictorial-phraseological terms, yes, But not in mechanical terms. For in fact each sequential element is arrayed, not next to the one it follows, but on top of it." This type of montage, the one Eisenstein is NOT describing, is, in fact, exactly what I am talking about. There IS a difference between the montages of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and I line up on the side of Pudovkin...I think :).

[Post scirpt: Writing all of this out helped me tremendously. I originally intended to focus exclusively on what Pudovkin and Bela Balasz had to say it about the close-up and apply it to the highly controversial Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, but I instead to decide to explore what I did NOT know. I'm glad I took the latter path and used this blog as an opportunity to learn, and I cannot wait to see what kind of feedback I receive.]

Film "grey" or Film "off-white": Film Noir

As a new student of film, I have a confession to make: I had not heard of film noir until last week. Embarrassing? Yes. But there is no time to learn like the present.

You cannot talk about film noir without first talking about the idea of genre. Thomas Schatz defines genre in his article "Film Genres" as a type of tacit contract between filmmaker and audience that promises a certain type of plot, character, setting, style and so on. A genre film honors this contract and delivers to the audience the type of film they wanted and expected. Schatz delves deeper into the idea of genre and offers this keen observation: "The determining, identifying feature of a film genre is its cultural context, its community of interrelated character types whose attitudes, values, and action flesh out dramatic conflicts inherent within that community." The community is not a physical location on a map, but rather a "network of characters, actions, values, and attitudes." To sum this all up nicely, "A genre represents a range of expression for filmmakers and a range of experience for viewers." Genre provides a framework for both filmmakers and audiences to operate within.

With all that being said, Paul Schrader says in his article "Notes on Film Noir" that film noir is not a genre. "It is not defined...by conventions of setting and conflict but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood...Film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the forties and early fifties that portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption." I'm going to disagree with Schrader and his idea of film noir not being its own genre. Film noir is very much a product of its time; right after World War II and year of Allied propaganda, everyone was eager to take a less optimistic view of the American way of life. Throw in the red scare, impending Cold War and McCarthyism, and it is not hard to see why Hollywood took a turn for the darker side. This is the cultural context and "community" that film noir works within. It is the framework for the ranges of expression and experience for film noir filmmakers and audiences to work within.

Out of the Past (1947, directed by Jacques Tourneur) is a perfect embodiment of film noir. Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has settled into a small town out west as a gas station owner trying to avoid his past. One day, though, his old partner-in-crime Joe (Paul Valentine) tracks him down and orders him to go see the powerful gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Jeff had been on an assignment for Whit go so south and retrieve his mistress Kathie (Jane Greer), but Jeff ran off with Kathie, and Kathie ended up leaving Jeff. Jeff has been hiding ever since and retells the story of his past to his new love interest Ann (Virginia Huston) as he drives to meet Whit. Once he arrives, Whit gives him a new assignment that Jeff quickly realizes will catch him in a frame for murder. Crossing Whit again will not be so easy.

Out of the Past uses several conventions typical to its film noir genre throughout the movie. The main and most obvious one is its use of lighting. Expressionist lighting burst onto the scene in the film noir genre - gone is the brilliant glow around the protagonist from the 1930s and in its place are shadows. Schrader notes that the protagonist, instead of casting a shadow, is now in the shadows. The light affects more than just the characters in the scene-the lighting of the entire set is important as well. "Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes-jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits-that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pocketknife," Schrader says, This use of lighting helps to create the fatalistic, hopeless mood that film noir thrives on. For example, after the murder Whit desired had been completed, Kathie and Jeff appear to form an alliance and rekindle their love while trying to find out how to get themselves out of this tangled web. There is a close up of them kissing against the wall, but their faces are obscured by shadows. Kathie's face is completely cloaked in the shadows-the light shines past her but does not touch her face or lips. This could be foreshadowing for the remaining plot twists in this roller-coaster of deception.

As said before, film noir focuses more on expressionism of tone and mood, so it uses conventions such as interior monologues to properly set the scene. When Ann and Jeff are driving in the car, Jeff triggers a flashback to his first encounter and love affair with Kathie and narrates the whole series of events for us. We see action happening on screen-for instance, we see Jeff sitting in a bar in Mexico or walking around the hotel-but the real action is in the words he is saying. Another mood setting convention is the genre's use of music. The music crescendos in times of suspense and guides the way viewers should feel. For instance, when Kathie unexpectedly shoots one of Jeff's former partners, the music starts up instantly. And when Jeff later arrives at the building where the murder will take place, the camera zooms in on the man's name on the directory on the wall and the music simultaneously goes "da-da-da." (As a side note, this film’s use of music differs greatly from Caché and Cinema Paradiso’s use of music, two films I discussed in previous blog posts). Both the interior monologues and the music serve the same purpose-to convey the all-important expression of the mood of the film.

To close, I am going to quote Paul Schrader once again: "Perhaps the overriding theme noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future. Noir heroes dread to look ahead, but instead try to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that , they retreat to the past. Film noir's techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, and insecurity, then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style." I look forward to more thoroughly exploring this genre in the week to come.