Describe a “strange adventure” or “image sequence” motivated by two films on the unit of study, and any other films you might care to interpose

The Visceral Language of Film and the Surrealist "Strange Adventure"

By Vanessa Gazy

The lights go down… and a curtain opens… and then, the magic of cinema starts …Into a new world, which only can be visited because of this beautiful language of cinema. In we go, in we go, in we go… So beautiful.

- David Lynch (in a press conference in Israel, 2007)

At another press conference in Cannes, the cast of Mulholland Drive is facing journalists from a long table on a platform. In the center sits David Lynch, patriarch, or king. So far he has answered questions with polite disagreeability (a contradiction that he pulls off quite benignly. Like many “difficult” artists, he is loath to discuss his work). “What is Mulholland Drive about?” hazards one newspaperman, with a winning smile that cracks. Lynch’s mouth flickers upwards and he says placidly, “It’s lovely to be here.” Everybody laughs obediently; nobody presses the issue.

Now somebody else ventures the question of whether Mr. Lynch thinks people will understand Mulholland Drive. David Lynch leans into his microphone and fixes America-Blue eyes on his questioner.

“I know people understand it.” [1]

This is far less the non-sequitur it seems. Emphasise the “know” and we have ourselves an idea.

* * *

Introduction

My interests in this extended entry lie in that which this coy little sentence implies but does not say. How does David Lynch know with such certainty that people will understand Mulholland Drive, despite the fact of its supreme illogic and its defiance of linearity, coherence, and the distinction between conscious and unconscious thought? For Jean Cocteau, director of the surrealist film Le Sang d’un Poete (1930), “a film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis.” [2] In this idea, Lynch’s emphatic I know is explainable: Mulholland Drive, in the tradition of surrealism, functions not on the logic of the conscious, but rather the logic of the dream. Both Lynch and Cocteau are most certainly alluding to a certain commonly recognisable order in the disorder of the dream – a language of dreaming. It is in this language that Mulholland Drive speaks to its gathered audience, and in this language that somehow, in a way that cannot easily be put into words, this audience does indeed understand. It is in this language that Cocteau’s “hypnosis” occurs: you are feeling very sleepy as the pendulum sways. And it is to this language, I dare say, that Lynch was referring when he made his comment to the congregation in Cannes, although every journalist there must certainly have received his answer resentfully, privately thinking that they for one certainly did not understand this film in any coherent way, and wishing that the venerable Mister Lynch would explain at least some of Mulholland Drive’s dangling threads so they could go home and write their reviews for tomorrow’s Daily Something.

To which Ludwig Wittengenstein would have told them, had he been present at the time: “… I want to say: Here is the whole. (If you complete it you falsify it)” [3].

Jean Cocteau writes that film functions as a dream - that is,

…a succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of dreams, since the spectators would not have linked them together in the same way or have imagined them for themselves, but experience them in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible. [4]

In this lies the key to the readability of surrealist flm. I shall navigate my way through an understanding of this comment in relation to the special language of film, combined with an attempt to articulate the “strange adventures*” experienced in Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poete (1930), Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). In choosing to discuss surrealist films I do not wish rule out the relevance of Cocteau’s comments to the logic of the film medium as a whole. Robert Curry quite effectively identifies those elements of film-as-a-whole which invite comparison with dreaming:

In general our dreams simply seem more cinematic than our days. A curious, discontinuous way of unfolding characterises films and dreams. Dreams are characterised by the spatio-temporal discontinuities that are very like cuts in a film. The dream, like the film, freely leaps from one place or situation, to another. [5]

However, my particular concern is with the “strange adventure” of the surreal film. For my purposes, the surrealist exaggeration of these “free leaps” and discontinuities serves to provide the most dreamlike and logically problematic sequence of events with which to highlight my theories about the language of film that echoes subconscious "ramblings" beyond the abilities of verbal communication. The surrealist film is that which most profoundly imitates the logic of the dream, and most fully hypnotises its audience, which is captive in the fantasy, or nightmare, unable to click three times on the heels of their collective red shoes until they wake up – or the rolling of credits releases them from their paralysis. To watch a surrealist film is not to gaze removedly at a screen, but rather to become submerged inside the cinematic world world on screen, surrounded by sight, sound, and feeling. This is not a familiar stroll through a logical mental progression, but an adventure whose route and destination is unknown.

Rose Hobart Speaks Louder When Mute: The Visual Language of Dreaming

But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you and you and you... and you were
there. But you couldn't have been could you? No, Aunt Em, this was a real truly live place and I remember some of it wasn't very nice, but most of it was beautiful – but just the same all I kept saying to everybody was "I want to go home," and they sent me home! Doesn't anybody believe me?

- Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I have used Dorothy to fill in for Rose Hobart, who does not do me the favour of “waking up” and attempting to put into words the intense world of the dream. But Dorothy does, bless her, showing us immediately the failure of verbal communication in expressing the vivid logic of the dream (bless her). This is a stock example of the vernacular recounting of a dream, and the stock example of the realisation that the magic of the dream world dies with the intrusion of every new phrase of the everyday that tries to do it justice. After her harrowing adventure in Oz – a strange adventure, for our purposes – these are the only words that Dorothy can find to explain her dream. Her aunt only half listens, and Dorothy at once gives up, with an “oh well, Toto.” What this speaks to is a marked disconnection between the expression of the dream, and verbal expression in the conscious world. In the dreamscape, a whole visual world is created into which we enter, like Dorothy in Oz. This is a world rich in “vividness and immediacy” [6] and – and always accompanied by some overarching mood that seems to drip tangibly into everything.

Using one of his own dreams in which a corner store from his childhood, the same even down to the Greek owners’ voices sifting out onto the street, is set next to the school at which he now teaches, Elmer S. Day Jr. analyses the logic of this dream world. He comments that this world is formed as a “visual concantation” depicted entirely without the verbal. This, he says, is “a definitive example of a dream reflecting metaphorical meaning in a non-verbal manner, using a cinematic-like mode of imagery to reflect on the past and the present simultaneously” [7].

In Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart work we truly find a “strange adventure”, perhaps all the stranger for Cornell’s – and Rose’s – maintained silence. In this film, not a word is uttered – Rose’s mouth opens and closes, reciting her East of Borneo lines, but it is as if she is suspended underwater, in a bluish haze, and we can’t hear her. What we hear, absurdly, is a strange musical score which sounds remarkably like elevator music, but which oddly compliments the Rose images, which are disjunct sections of East of Borneo pieced together by distant but, in the words of Brian Frye, “still vaguely plausible” connections. For example, Frye goes on, “Hobart’s clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame” [8].

Upon viewing Rose Hobart for the first time, Salvador Dali became incensed, claiming that Cornell had somehow stolen the idea for this film from his subconscious. This, coupled with the fact that I too can imagine waking up from this dream, hints that in this strange, non-linear film, there is a language being spoken that both awakens notions of the subconscious, and which raises questions about the abstruse language of a dreamed, shared, “strange adventure”. Frye writes that Cornell’s films are “unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious” [9]. Yet I can imagine myself trying to describe this dream, phrasing it with the passion of she who has just woken from what was certainly a spectacular and strange world, and finding it terribly difficult. Articulated in the vernacular, the “strange adventure” of Rose Hobart would sound like this:

I had a dream (I would say) about that actress from that movie East of Borneo – just bits of her, you know – and it was weird – I don’t know – it’s so hard to explain. It was just a feeling I had like I couldn’t get out of the dream. Just this feeling… and she was beautiful, but I couldn’t stop the dream…and there was a lunar eclipse, and it sort of dropped into this lake…

It reminds me of a dream I once had about a photocopier. Floating in blackness, it was spewing paper, non-stop and frantically. It was frightening and incessant, and my mind would not move on. I semi-woke, but I still could not lurch myself out of the photocopier’s world. Ridiculous, it looks, now that I write it. But in this world, I was captive and increasingly discomfited. In this world, there were no words, only images, and a feeling which spoke to me with some profundity without a name. Dreams make anything potentially real: we believe our dreams when we are in them in ways we never believe things in the conscious world.

In a chapter in his The Remembered Film, Victor Burgin uses Barthes’ analysis of the nature of the language of his own semi-conscious mind as he rests drowsily in a public bar. “The words passed through me,” Barthes explains, “small syntagms, ends of formulae, and no sentence formed, as if that were the very law of this language.” [10] This “non-sentence” is “not a preliminary to the sentence, it is rather ‘eternally, superbly outside the sentence’” [11]. In Freudian terms, this inner speech “represents the persistence of the ‘primary processes’ that historically precede ‘secondary’ modes of thought – preferring images to words, and treating words like images… [that is, in Vygotsky’s words] ‘a single word is so saturated with sense that many words would be required to explain it in external speech’” [12]. Barthes’s and Vygotsky’s discussions of the language of the unconscious mind ring true in the light of this discussion about the indescribable nature of the dream. Barthes maintains that the mental processes of the dream exist “beyond linguistics” [13]. This is why the “strange adventure” of the dream can be adequately articulated through film. Relying only on the visceral realm of the image, the filmic cinematic representation of the dream world uses a “primitive”or prisitine visual mode of expression, which is more concrete than the linguistic mode of expression” [14]. Concrete, because it is visible. Concrete, because it is tangible.

Through the Looking Glass: Le Sang d’un Poète and the Surrealist Mirror to the Babbling Subconscious

The movie screen is the true mirror reflecting the flesh and blood of my dreams.

- Jean Cocteau [15]

If, as I have discussed, we experience the surreal film viscerally, then Cocteau’s notion of his films as the “flesh and blood” of his dreams becomes imbued with significance. This idea calls into question ideas of the cinematic reflection not just of Cocteau’s subconscious world, but of the spectator who enters the dreamscape. According to Curry, The “strange adventure” that is Le Sang d’un Poète is one in which the spectator is taken into the artist’s fantastical “descent into the self” [16] through a mirror. As spectators, we must go too: we are like sleepwalkers now. And because this is the “flesh and blood” of Cocteau’s subconscious, we can feel, see, touch, know the world behind the mirror. The inexpressible realm of the subconscious at once becomes expressible – visible.

In discussing the focus of Russian writer Dostoevsky on the dream as a narrative device, Ruth Mortimer explains that “the dream allows portrayal of the unconscious of a character. Unconscious motivation, much more significant than conscious, may be illustrated rather than stated, dramatized rather than discussed.” [17] If this is true of the novel, then it is ever more true of the surrealist film, which not only illustrates and dramatises the unconscious motivation, but makes it real through actually structuring the text around the very logic of the dream. The moving image breaths life into the dreamscape and invites a shared experience of this dream. This shared experience of the subconscious is a vital element of the commensurability of the language of film. Mortimer later explains that Dostoevsky’s characters’ “dreams express the essence of man’s nature, and his dream symbols are basic concepts distorted and particularised by the individual.” [18]. In this we see that Dostoevsky was interested in dream symbols as a kind of universal language which is “particularised by the individual” in relation to their own lives and experiences. In the same manner, I believe, the surreal film is concerned with speaking a universal language of “man’s nature” through the shared experience of one man’s dreamscape. Le Sang d’un Poete thus becomes a great mirror spanning All Of Humanity, reflecting what we do not articulate through words in the language of the everyday. (N.B. this is a markedly modern perspective; postmodernism has rendered it less effective now, although in the existence of films such as Mulholland Drive, we understand that the idea still holds some sway).

As a child – and, I admit with some relinquishing of dignity, as an adult – I have played games with myself alone with my reflection. Moving my body into certain shapes, I see a cat, a woman. Moving closer, and gazing into my own eye, a see the black circle of my pupil embedded in what looks like a great, three dimensional crater: my iris, or the surface of the moon. At other times, I have distorted my face into ghastly shapes, frightening myself quite sincerely so that I have to look away, not sure whether it is me in the mirror or some terrible reflection of evil. Let us think for a moment of the mirror as a screen, into which we look to see the flesh-and-blood embodiment of our minds and hearts, which are otherwise our only company. Employing dream logic, the logic of the imaginary and the illusion, I see a different world inside my mirror, with me in it. Through this same language of visceral immediacy and unformed sentences, we comprehend Le Sang d’un Poet, although Cocteau takes the idea a step further when he actually enters the mirror, making visible the world of the dream. While my subconscious mind is embodied, made visible only insofar as my mirror allows it to be, Cocteau demonstrates the manner in which the qualities of cinema can lay out the realm of this “parallel world” as visual and sensory, in the words of Day, “embodied in the concreteness of sensuous visual imagery which combines different but meaningful elements of time and space” [19].

As a subject involved in the “strange adventure” of Le Sang d’un Poete, we are granted access to the world behind the mirror – the locked chambers of Cocteau’s subconscious which we view through keyholes. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, this is an experience of complete immersion, which we understand because all of us have experienced a dream before. The strangeness of this film when recounted verbally is overwhelming. Imagine it:

I had a dream… That I was painting a picture – but the mouth came to life – and so I tried to rub it off, but it transferred itself to my hand – and the mouth felt nice when I held it to my skin – but I wanted it off, it was too strange – so I put it on the mouth of a statue that I had in my room – and then the room changed – and it was just me and the statue and nothing else, not even a door – only there was this mirror. And the statue told me to go into the mirror – try, try – she kept saying, and so I did – I saw myself go through as if I jumped into a pool – and then I was floating in a dark tunnel, inside the mirror…

This particular “strange adventure”, held together with this distinct logic of the dream in which places shift, bodies achieve the impossible, and nothing is a barrier, takes us into Cocteau’s subconscious, represented by locked rooms in which a random collection of things are taking place. An Indian is shot in one chamber, in another a little girl is crawling up the wall a la Pippi Longstockings (whom, I feel it appropriate to note, I had nightmares about as a small child wherein she was walked up my walls in a highly sinister manner). In another is a strange image of a painting reclining in a bed, with a large hypnotic swirl rotating in the background. These images are not coherent, and yet, when we trace the fragmentary logic of their presence in the sequence, we invariably link them to an understanding connected to our individual life experiences using “a multitude” of Michel de Certeau’s “‘tactics’ fashioned from the ‘details’ of daily life” [20]. In this manner, the strange adventure of Le Sang d’un Poete becomes uniquely our own, self-reflecting, self-induced hypnosis which will be the same cinematic experience as nobody else. Hence the reason for Cocteau’s assertion that “the audience’s role is huge and has to be relearned” [21].

No Hay Banda: Your Adventure is an Illusion and You Are Very Much Fooled

No hay banda. There is no band. It is all a recording... Il n'y a pas d'orchestre. It is all an illusion.

-Mulholland Drive (2001) at Club Silencio

These words come from the magician at Mulholland Drive's superbly inexplicable "Club Silencio". He shows us a man playing a trumpet; the man moves the trumpet from his mouth but the music keeps playing. "No hay banda," he says, "- but yet - we hear the band." His act ends, and on comes the next, a woman's heartfelt rendition of Llorando. We become absorbed in the sadness and beauty of the act: the truth of her performance. And then - all at once - she collapses. And the singing continues from somewhere overhead. A tape recording. You are dreaming. This is an illusion. Your eyes lie to you.

Mulholland Drive is a fitting way to end this discussion, as, in the words of one blogger named "RPC" in his "Mulholland Drive Panning From the East: A Personal View", this film is delivered "intravenously... under our cortex", bypassing the conscious and resonating directly in the realm of the "strange adventure" of the dream. "At a conscious level, there’s not much you can do," he says. "Going to see Mulholland Drive is just like going to bed at night: you never know what your dream will be, if you are going to dream at all, or dream and forget when you wake up." This film is immersed entirely in the language of the dream. Fantasy, desire and fear are echoed through the internal eye of Diane's subconscious in the form of a dream. People's names change, odd and random things happen, identities shift, things encountered in everyday life bubble up in strange and deeply significant forms. Love is more beautiful, sex more shudderingly lovely, and evil and guilt are expressed in the terrible language of the nightmare. This is a language we feel at a primal level. Though it makes little rational sense, it makes sense somewhere under the tip of the iceburg of our conscious mind.

“I had a dream about this place… It’s the second one I’ve had – but they’re both the same. They start out that I’m here – but it’s not day or night – it’s kind of half-night, you know – but it looks like this – except the light. And I’m scared like I can’t tell you. Of all people, you’re standing right over there. By that counter… You’re in both dreams - and you’re scared… Then I realise what it is. There’s a man – in back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face. I hope that I never see that face ever outside of a dream… That’s it.”

“So. You came to see if he’s out there.”

- Mulholland Drive (2001)

The sequence of events that follows this particular Mulholland Drive scene results in one of the most elementally terrifying moments I am yet to encounter in film. We do not know the identity of this strange man whose nightmare we are to witness, only that his damply red-rimmed, tortured eyes are fixed on another identified man – friend? Psychologist? We can only assume in retrospect that he is a part of Diane's dream, connected directly to the moment in reality when she hired a hitman to kill her lover. Yet even of this we can't be sure.

Following the mens' short exchange, the latter one gets up and motions to his trembling counterpart to follow. No more words are spoken; the scene reverts entirely to the realm of the nightmare – some unspeakable horror looming and terror in everything, from the sign on the diner door – “please use other door” – to the green metal of the stair railings, to the sunlight and shadow washing the drab backlot. The sound we hear is a low and deeply ominous, unremitting rumble of impending horror, right there, in the middle of the day. We dread together, me, and this tortured man. We know what we will see and we don’t want to see it – and then at once, as the roar reaches its crescendo, the man whose very idea paralyses us slides out like some terrible figure from the depths of hell. Our worst nightmare has come true: the young man’s face contorts with fear before he drops to the ground; my mouth is an O of horror each time. Like every recurring nightmare, it does not become gentler when next I view the scene.

Again we see that the young man’s verbalised description of the horror of his dream sounds childish and irrational next to the actual, cinematic playing out of the nightmare, which is an expression of pure terror. This scene repeatedly nearly brings me to tears of fright; it brings my hands involuntarily to my eyes in the second before I know he will appear, it makes me dizzy and stunts my movements. For hours after seeing this apparition I am not the same: I move fearfully through my own physical world, expecting to see him slide out from every corner I pass. That's because I was there in that alley. I experienced the moment with all the heady terror of the reality of the dream. I am reminded of the stuff of one my own childhood nightmares in particular: on a similarly sunny day, the air became inexplicably full of some unplaced terror, and as I looked at my house – which for some reason was now in its skeletal form, just a wooden frame – a clown appeared to me with all the menace of Lynch’s bogey-man.

The “strange adventure” of the fantasy dream or the nightmare is based on the illusory qualities of the dream, and how fears and desires are echoed in these illusions. Mulholland Drive is founded upon the logic of the fantasy-turned-nightmare: the film is a direct reflection of Diane’s subconscious. And yet, we do not immediately pin Mulholland Drive down as another Dorothy-in-Oz scenario, for Lynch has us hynotised; we are inhabiting his illusionary space; living it. And, as Cocteau says, “one of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.”[22]. We are willing to be taken on a journey without doubting it, at first, despite the early appearances of several strange and illogical elements – a maniacally smiling elderly couple waving “Betty” (Diane) off, mention by “Coco” of someone once keeping a kangaroo on the lawns, a hitman whose bungling of a hit and subsequent murder of a vacuum cleaner is characteristic of the strangeness of a dream. But we nod along, unaware that we are dreaming, enjoying our adventure into a new “reality”. Lost in the illusion of the dream.

This film frightens in a strange way. It is not a movie about murder or crime directly, although Diane’s subconscious creates narratives of a "gang", mafia style Hollywood underworld in an attempt to divert the dream in its fantasy stage from self-blame. There is no tangible source of evil, except for the monster, but we know that he too is the product of a dream. Rather, the terror or this film lies somewhere in the unspeakable and unknowable feeling of this world, which is represented onscreen through images and sounds that strike some dissonant and menacing chord in our subconscious minds. In other words, we feel the nightmare, we see it in three dimensions; our eyes fool us. What Lynch shows us is the power of film to represent like nothing else the workings of the subconscious - and moreover, the power of film to make the spectator dream.

Conclusion: Silencio

This entry began with an emphatic David Lynch telling us that he knew that the audience of Mulholland Drive would necessarily understand what is, essentially, an illogical dreamscape of a film. I have interpreted Lynch to mean that his film, and all surreal film, can be universally understood at a visceral, primal, immediate level, because it is speaks in the language of the dream. This entry has sought to explore three facets of this language of the surrealist film: firstly, the inherently more compatible relationship between the visual and visceral communication of the film than verbal communication in the articulation of dream logic; secondly the idea of the surreal film as a mirror, which brings an audience into a collective state of hypnosis and self-reflectivity; and finally, the illusionary qualities of the dream/film language which renders the route of our "strange adventure" unknowable and makes us participents in the dream itself. My aim in this has been to bring forth the idea that the subconscious and the surreal film speak the same language exclusively. No other mode of communication is capable of truly embracing, at a visceral and visual level, the logic of the dream. The cinema shows us the failings of verbal language, for which some things are ultimately, in the words of Barthes, ‘eternally, superbly outside the sentence’” [23].

I will therefore end with a quote from Flaubert, which in the context of the verbal versus the visual, seems quite apt: “Great art,” he says, “is silent and incomprehensible and makes us dream” [24]. Which bears a marked similarity of Mulholland Drive’s final line, uttered by a strange unrelated woman with a blue beehive, sitting in the wings of Club Silencio. Her words? “Silencio”: silence. Silence viewers. Do not mull over what you have just seen, but be still as it sinks to where it belongs inside you: the mysterious chambers of your subconscious, dreaming mind.

* I will refer to Jean Cocteau's phrase, the "strange adventure" throughout this entry as a means of uniting the dreamscape and the cinematic experience as indistinguishable elements of the same language of the visceral and visual.

Works Cited

[1] Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001), DVD special features, Cannes Press Conference

[2] Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p.40.

[3] Quoted in Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 7

[4] Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p.40, my emphasis

[5] Robert Curry, ‘Films and Dreams’, The Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Autumn, 1974), p. 83

[6] ibid, p. 89

[7] Elmer S. Day, Jr, ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Dream Imagery and Metaphor’ in Art Education, Vol. 32, No. 7. (Nov 1979), p. 17.

[8] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart" at Sense of Cinema, Accessed: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html. Last Accessed: 27/10/07.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Roland Barthes quoted in Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 10

[11] Ibid, p. 11

[12] Vygotsky quoted in Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 11

[13] Roland Barthes quoted in Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 14

[14] Elmer S. Day, Jr, ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Dream Imagery and Metaphor’ in Art Education, Vol. 32, No. 7. (Nov 1979), p. 17.

[15] Derek Malcom, "La Belle et la Bete", Guardian Unlimited, July 1, 1999. Available: http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,,62195,00.html (Last accessed 27/10/07)

[16] The Jean Cocteau Web Page, Available: http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_boap.html (last accessed 26/10/07)

[17] Ruth Mortimer ‘Dostoevski and the Dream’, in Modern Philology, Vol. 54, No. 2. (Nov., 1956), p. 107.

[18] Ibid, p. 108, my emphasis

[19] Elmer S. Day, Jr, ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Dream Imagery and Metaphor’ in Art Education, Vol. 32, No. 7. (Nov 1979), p. 17.

[20] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 8

[21] Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p.41

[22] The Jean Cocteau Web Page, Available: http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_boap.html (last accessed 26/10/07)

[23] Roland Barthes in Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 10

[24] Neal Oxenhander, ‘On Cocteau’ in Film Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1. (Autumn, 1964), p. 12

Bibliography

Burgin, Victor The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004.

Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001.

Curry, Robert, ‘Films and Dreams’, The Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Autumn, 1974), pp. 83 -89.

Day, Elmer S. Jr, ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Dream Imagery and Metaphor’ in Art Education, Vol. 32, No. 7. (Nov 1979), pp. 15-17.

Fry, Brian, "Rose Hobart" at Sense of Cinema, Accessed: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html. Last Accessed: 6/8/07.

Malcom, Derek, "La Belle et la Bete", Guardian Unlimited, July 1, 1999. Available: http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,,62195,00.html (Last accessed 27/10/07)

Mortimer, Ruth, ‘Dostoevski and the Dream’, in Modern Philology, Vol. 54, No. 2. (Nov., 1956), pp. 106-116.

Mulholland Drive (2001) dir. David Lynch

Oxenhander, Neal, ‘On Cocteau’ in Film Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1. (Autumn, 1964), pp. 12 -14.

The Jean Cocteau Web Page, Available: http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_boap.html (last accessed 26/10/07)

To Patricia Neal, Adoringly

Dear Patricia Neal,

I heart you.

I must tell you I was afraid you would disappoint, and you did, in a way, at first.

You see, I found Howard Roark in the Courtyard Cafe - he had red hair and a complex face, and I liked the way he ducked his head to go out the door because he was too tall. I could imagine him with a pencil in his hand, shooting confident lines up into buildings. I found Gail Wynand at my work, a city bar, in a business suit drinking a beer. He was handsome regal gentleman with shiny skin. I found these people in my daily life as I read The Fountainhead - a beautiful book which inspires cinematic thought - and cast them leading roles in my in-house film adaptation. But I could not find Dominique. Nobody was good enough.

I tried to find her several times. I would pass a feline blonde in a pinstriped suit in Martin Place, and examine her face quite inappropriately, before finding her wanting. I also considered another blonde who is in my Advanced Media Writing class. But she did not have enough of Dominique's potency.

And neither did you, though I was hoping you would, as Rand's choice, and all that. But you were not the pointy-cornered woman of Rand's novel that I imagined. Icy and remote and unassailable is Rand's written Dominique, but Patricia Neal, your eyes betrayed you. They are too soft. Don't feel bad though; Dominique is not quite human. The closest actress to suit the job of Miss Francon to me would be Uma Thurman in Gattaca. Funnily enough, it is a super-human she plays in this film, a designer baby with perfect genes. That's what a good cinematic representation of Dominique might have taken.

In any case, Patricia Neal, you were stunning regardless. You were more than beautiful. Your face is enchanting. I like your imperfect eyebrows. You overshadowed everyone, even Gary Cooper's Howard Roark. You are a Movie Star. You are a movie legend. You are immortal forever.

You know, I never would have seen you had you not been a Movie Star. I never would have known there was such person as you. Don't you think that is strange? And maybe even stranger is that now I love you. I feel like I know you. After all, I've heard your voice, seen how you walk, seen how expressions work over your face, know that you are a little bit of an over actor (oh, no offence of course). Your youth and beauty would have been forgotten by the world, which now only sees in your true flesh the face of an old woman. The cinema screen has made you a celebrity and a star. Even in your old age they remember the beauty you once were. That slender and cat-eyed woman standing atop a quarry wearing riding breechers.

Neal Oxenhandler, a film writer, says that celebrities live in a special fluid or medium "like aquarium fish". It is true. The cinema has placed you, and Anna May Wong, and Rose Hobart Grace Kelly, and Greta Garbo, and Ava Gardner, and Marilyn Monroe, and Brigitte Bardot, and Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlene Dietrich, into a glass tank filled with some sort of amniotic fluid that keeps you alive, immortal. Even when you die, you will still move, smile, breathe, laugh, in your museum box, and we will lavish our collective love upon you forever.

I loved The Fountainhead in its novel form too much to make any allowances for the needs of film. In fact I do not believe that it is a translatable novel: it is too big, too ideas-based, too good at what it does. It must have a literary, not cinematic voice as its authority and backbone and charm. But I am glad they made a movie because you were in it. You turned this film not into a second-rate adaptation, but into something all of its own, staring you, about you. You in dozens of gowns, your hair coiffed kittenishly, your limbs lithe, your mouth set into an intense line, your eyes always pointed achingly off into the distance. You falling down stupidly, whimpering histrionically, whacking Gary Cooper across the face with your riding crop and careering off on your histrionic horse.

I am a university student, Patricia Neal, and I have been doing a course on cinematic modernism. We have thus been discussing how a film is experienced and remembered as much as its content. We have also watched a film by Joseph Cornell called Rose Hobart. Perhaps you know it? In it, Cornell appears to remember East of Borneo only through Rose Hobart, the actress, as the actress. In the same manner, I remember The Fountainhead in its film form only through you, as you, not as Dominique, who I don't think will ever be translatable into real human form to me. I remember your face - the beautiful film star face - the face that the camera adores, and men and women.

So Patricia Neal, you have not disappointed me at all. I am glad that I got to meet you.

I would be so chuffed if you would consider sending me back an autograph.

Respectfully,

Vanessa

Some Notes on Trains

When I was a child I had a horror of the Gap. I had to be carried over it, clawing at the neck of whoever bore me over, my small heart pounding. I had panicky dreams that trains were falling from the sky in a dark, rust-coloured mass of industrial metal and screaming men. Perhaps I saw a film I shouldn't have when I was too young? Or was my horror organic, in which case - why?

My father has a face that tells a story of some different time. The world is in his eyes and in the set of his jaw. He used to take the Parisian Metro to and from uni, when he was poor and struggling. I can remember him there, my little internal movie screen ticking over with the dusty crackle of old film. He is small in the shot, centered, and his bell-bottoms and longish chestnut curls give him a Simon and Garfunkel sort of wistful seventies cool. Parisians in long coats with pointy collars sit around him on the train, reading Le Monde to the rhythmic clickety-clack, eyes down, but my father's eyes are up, and sad, and swirling. I wouldn't be born for another ten or so years, but in the same way as Burgin describes a memory of his mother as he was in her womb, this "memory" I have of my father "of course is a fantasy with a decor almost certainly derived from a film" [1].

This course has prompted me to realise notions I have about trains that that I may never have been prompted to articulate otherwise. They inhabit a symbolic, dreamy sort of place for me - associated with the "internal movie screen" that I have found myself continually referencing in this blog. This seems strange, for trains are such staunchly utilitarian things, the farthest things from dreaminess imaginable. Yet I suppose they're a bit like Howard Roark's skyscrapers. It is their supreme and single-minded trajectory towards one practical aim that gives them a kind of beauty. Moreover, they are visually and aurally larger-than-life. In the texts we have studied, nearly all of which have a modernist preoccupation with industry and the machine, trains are represented with a distinct tendency toward the poetic.

Trains overcome, supercede nature, supercede humanity. They cut lines through cities, plow through mountains, underwater, over water. They can be both romantic in aesthetic, or deeply ugly. They will kill us without noticing if we are silly, or sad, enough to meddle in their paths. They are monstrous and lovely at the same time. Their atrocious hugeness is both moving and frightening, and calls into question the idea of scale: little person and big train.

In Berlin: Symphony of a City, the train, dark and not without menace, hurtles into the city. There is not a human in sight, just this train that seems to drive itself. The train is represented as its own agent - a notion that is by no means unreasonable. Standing on King's Cross platform every morning, I strain to see the train approach through the tunnel: first just two pricks of light, then a great looming shape, and the air pressure changes as it plugs the entrance, and there is a great whoosh and chaos of metal wheels on metal tracks. There is a small drama in every arrival, replete with an imminent, muffled roar, then orgasmic cacophony, then gentler, post-coital hiss as it stops as if spent. I have taken to peering into the front cabin as it passes, trying to glimpse the human at the front. Always vaguely surprised that he is, indeed, there, and that his face is placidly human.

In Man With The Movie Camera, trains are again a central motif. The man and the camera go beneath a train to record the uncompromising, visually hypnotic rhythm of its movements - and to admit to a kind of defeat. The train is the biggest thing in this film. Bigger than the city, which the man can overcome with his camera. Bigger, in fact, than the camera. The man with his movie camera cannot supercede the train; he lies beneath it as a testament to its power. I suppose these days, the jumbo jet represents what the train did to modernity: the machine that still causes my breath to catch as I watch it miraculously take of and - fly. So big, and somehow airborne: I am struck each time by this strangeness. However, in Vertov's film, the aeroplane is still a flimsy, Icarus-esque looking thing. The train is the real triumph of industry.

Rutmann and Vertov focus on the exteriority of the train, and its symbolic power. As such, we see the great metal outside of trains; we see the tracks and hard metal slicing the outside air.

And yet, it is within the train that humanity is present, and a new kind of drama takes place. Worn seats, graffiti, chewing gum, discarded newspapers, people, fractured snippets of conversation, vomit, crazy people, business people, bad smells, ipods, red hair, no hair...

The drama of the interior train is the drama of so many people in one roaring, speeding, deeply impersonal, deeply personal space. This dramatic interior space has always drawn the attention of cinema and literature. It is such a strange and sensory experience. For Michel de Certeau, the train passenger is in a state of "travelling incarceration" [2], and there is great cinematic potential in this notion of captivity. Short of engaging in the wild western drama of jumping in and out and over trains, there really is nothing much one can do between stations on a speeding train, but stay, seated and submissive, at the whim of the machine. The camera senses this mood, pounces on the potential.

This in-carriage drama is played out by in Wise Blood - a novel which is markedly cinematic in its highly visually-based and non-psychological delivery, especially so in the initial train scenes. Hazel Motes sat forward on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. [3] It is not that we know he wants to jump out - he just looks like he does, which is all the cinema can offer us. O'Conner lingers over Hazel's experience in the train: the woman sitting opposite who annoyingly makes conversation, the experience of the dining car, the experience of the berths, the experience of missing the train. It is effectively a sequence of relative non-events, ordinary train events, that are nonetheless charged with an air of confinement and dull discomfiture. Hazel is a little freakish, people look at him oddly, and he becomes increasingly agitated. But the train bundles them all tight in a parcel of metal, not delivering him any remorse. The train ploughs on forward on its voyage to who-knows.

And what about that wonderful idea, expressed in class by Melissa and giving me a little jab of "ooooh I hadn't thought of that", that to look through the window of a train is a very similar experience to the viewing of a movie, "a series of moving images at a fast and predictable pace"? Outside, as inaccessible as fiction, the world slides by, we passengers passive and voyeuristic, our eyes fixed on the one spot as moving pictures take us on Cocteau's "strange adventure". Either it is a film we know well - the trip from Redfern to King's Cross: black-Central-black-Town Hall-black Martin Place-black- one moment of open air and views across Woolloomooloo wharf- then back into black-Kings Cross-roll-credits.

Or a film we don't know. Sometimes, standing at King's Cross station about to go to uni, I am overcome by the urge to get on the train and just stay on and end up in Waterfall, or Wolli Creek, places I haven't been. Like seeing a movie for the first time. After all, all I'd do is sit there and watch. It would not be an adventure driven by me actually doing anything, but by the train/film taking me there.

Some notable cinematic train moments:

In the wonderful Australian film, Look Both Ways, a death on the train tracks acts as the catalyst for all that comes next, particularly the two main characters' musings over the nature of life, and the nature of death. Viewable here.

Another Australian film, One Perfect Day, where a DJ lies under a train with a tape recorder to satiate some great longing brought about by the aural qualities of trains. Linked here.

Harry Potter on the Hogwart's Express, a big friendly benevolent train. The Polar Express, which takes you, presumably, to Santa. Trains as kind old men who will envelope their precious cargo and deliver it safely to its destination. Steam trains waiting regally on platforms as symbols of the excitement of a great journey or quest.

The Day of the Roses, where the horrors of the train crash are laid out in full cinematic detail: twisted metal, dark tunnels, people so little and fragile compressed between layers of splintered steel and bloody seat stuffing. The sickening contrast of man and machine as an old man in the rubble sings Amazing Grace.

Sliding Doors, where a woman misses her train - the doors slide closed, stand clear, doors closing - and the entire course of her life is dramatically changed. The train is god; a philosopher; a fatalist.

And let us not forget toy trains: Charles and Ray Eames' Toccata for Toy Trains short film, and Thomas the Tank Engine. The filming of the miniature train. In the Eames' case, to marvel rather nostalgically at the aesthetic quality of toy trains - not, the emphatically inform us, miniature trains, but old-fashioned toy trains. In Thomas' case, to humanise trains, endowing certain ones with young, lively personalities, and others with a jaded slowness from too many years of - well, training. Thomas "runs off", and cries "my wheels hurt!". Do have a look at this link - if nothing else it will make you laugh fondly and remember childhood.

Which leads me back to my initial comments about my childhood dreams about trains, and my sense that trains are lodged immovably in the realm of the dream and imagination. The cinematic representation of the toy train is an indulgence of this idea. These little trains are finally stripped of their utilitarian aims, and become purely the stuff of nightmares and fantasy, as the child imagines them.

I am reminded finally of Bloc Party's music video for I Still Remember. Here, the camera moves evenly up a moving train, recording in each carriage a self-contained bubble containing different worlds. This is a perfectly articulated example of the cinematic potentials of the interior of the train, with each carriage a container of some form of human life, no two the same, each a mini-drama somehow heightened by the roar of the train and its frantic movement. In one carriage the people act distant; in another they are all mates; in another someone spots something out the window and everyone gets up to look; in another the carriage is the domain of the band and a mini-rock show. The lead singer is present in each carriage, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes a true example of de Certeau's train captive, with his palms against the glass and his mouth moving inaudibly, begging to get out. One carriage is full of just hims, emphasising the notion of the dream and the memory in relation to the railway - that this is not realism, but rather the tangent of a yearning imagination, gathered up in the idea of the moving train.

I think that I very much love trains.


Works cited:

[1] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004: p. 15.

[2] Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steve Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 111.

[3] Flannery O'Conner, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

We are ugly but we have the music...

... croons Leonard Cohen in The Chelsea Hotel No. 2.

You told me yourself you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception...

Which reminds me of when I fell in love with a big, big person with pale, freckle-speckled skin, who had carrot hair and limpid blue eyes and a face stuck halfway between grubby primary school kid and weathered man. A bit like an ogre, I suppose. Or a sort of orange King Kong. He was one of the most beautiful people I have ever encountered. Something about his ugliness was wildly fascinating and desperately beautiful. I obsessively wrote about the look of him.

Wise Blood is not without a similar appeal. Really, this is often a hideous novel about hideous people in a hideous town. Hazel Motes is the possessor of "a nose like a shrike's bill" (p.4) and his scull appears to protrude from his skin through hair that "looked as if it had been permanently flattened under the heavy hat" (p.4). When Hazel visits the seediest prostitute in town, he finds "a big woman with very yellow hair and white skin that glistened with a greasy perspiration". Her teeth are "small and pointed and speckled with green and there was a wide space between each one." Haze finds his senses "stirred to the limit" (p. 21), and they have sex in the dirty room when she is done clipping her toenails. Ugly, perverse, grotesque, and utterly compulsive reading.

My interest in this entry is primarily the cinematic ugly in relation to the aesthetic of Wise Blood as well as the presiding aesthetic of Australian film. I am use the word "ugly" in direct contrast to the supreme gloss of the classic Hollywood film, which cannot bear to cast someone less than conventionally beautiful in its leading roles. For example, the Howard Roark of Rand's novel was supposed to have a face that was somehow repellant, if not ugly to the average person. Gary Cooper, how ever, is far from ugly - in fact he is quite gorgeous.

Wise Blood is a cinematic novel for its unabashed and singular interest in surface. O'Conner does not delve beneath the epidermal veneer of anything, even though the novel form itself encourages this kind of deeper analysis. She prefers to depict people and settings as if through a camera lens, as events without explanation, people who are impenetrable and are only knowable through what is visible about them. As such, this book is necessarily read cinematically: shots, lighting, soundtrack, film quality and image texture are the ways in which we see the story develop.

My internal movie screen (which has reappeared again and I wish I had named it something better to start with, but it seems the name has stuck) plays Wise Blood: The Movie in the aesthetic style that it unconsciously decided suited the text, probably from the novel's very first line. It installs a lens, decides on contrast levels, picks a musical score. Our minds really are installed with a little cinematographer. I imagine mine looks rather like Vertov. He stand with his eye to my retina, analyses the data for me, and decides on which cinematic elements are appropriate for screening. O'Conner has done well in recognising this and capitalising on this in Wise Blood.

The resulting film?

Well - in terms of style, lighting, filter, exposure, acting - like the stock-standard, Dendy-endorsed, quirky-sad-ugly-beautiful Australian film. It won't sell, but it will certainly inspire a small group of cult followers.

Everyone will have noticed the marked aesthetic difference between the American Hollywood drama and the Australian Film Institute drama. Having little technical knowledge of film, I have always struggled expressing this interesting difference, save from saying rather crudely that American films are glossy as opposed to a the certain very raw drabness of Australian films. I asked a friend if he knew what I meant by this different aesthetic. He said yes, of course. I pressed him to describe it. "A sort of washed-out quality," he said. "The colours in Australian films aren't as saturated." He suggested that an Australian film is matte to the American glossy. Not technical, but in its way, accurate.

I don't know whether it is an agreed-upon style, or whether it has to do with a kind of mood in our landscape and cities, or the fact that the budget is low, or that our cameras used are not as good (surely not), or that our tastes are different. What I do know is that for its modesty, its honesty, its muted colours that are closer to the real colours of things, I like this aesthetic better. It is more soulful. It makes for a different, darker, arguably more meaningful cinematic experience. And it was this kind of dark but thought-provoking cinematic experience I had reading O'Conner.

I was taught by the highly entertaining Marc Brennan last semester, and we had a class discussion about why the Australian film industry is failing to win box office profits. Brennan launched into one of his articulate assaults at backward-looking, non-proponents of pop culture, which usually I quite enjoy. However this time, his assault was aimed at the kind of film, that traditional Dendy-style Australian film, which happen to be my favourite. Most loathsome at all in his eyes was Somersault - which I loved. I said as much, and he looked at me incredulously. Why? he said. They're all so deathly depressing. And dreary. And ugly. Bring on the blockbuster any day. Those guys at Dendy are so bloody narrow-minded and set in their ways. If Australia did more genre films, and less of all that moody, so-called culturally important stuff, our film industry would boom, said he.

Oh, but Marc, what would Howard Roark say to that! What about integrity?

I like the gritty visuals. They aid the telling in the story without the need for a single word. They suit the stories being told: Australian stories just as much as Wise Blood is a story specific to the Deep South. Flannery O'Conner shrouds her whole novel in this kind of cinematic texture: dark interior spaces, pale, white-washed exterior spaces. She doesn't write it explicitly, but you know that's how it looks where Hazel Motes is.

I think we live in a country whose natural and urban features are conducive to this kind of filmic representation also. There is nothing glossy about Australia outside of Sydney. Instead there are muted blues, greens and purples, dusty earth, pale blue skies with strong, white light. To me, it is formidably beautiful. I love it in Somersault the way everything in the freezing Snowy Mountains air seems to have a blueish hue - and am reminded of Rose Hobart. I love the drama and tension between what is beautiful and what is coarse, or ugly.

Similar examples of this aesthetic can be found in Australian films such as Two Hands, Look Both Ways, Little Fish, Wolf Creek. Brilliant, each one. I'm a citizen in favour of the Australian film, dark and moody and quirky and honest.

And so I say: long live the domain of the ugly, disfigured, damaged, perverse, gritty, drab, Mrs. Watts, bad teeth, a weird hat, an ugly child with two plaits, a scarred non-preacher, a mummified shrunken "jesus", a rat-coloured car and a strange dark boy in a car yard who says nothing but swear words.

You make the cinema beautiful.

Works cited:

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

Skin Was Once Just Skin, Metal Only Metal

Such a proud little man he is, in his breeches and tucked in checkered shirt, stomping about efficiently with his camera over his shoulder, swapping it to the other every so often with practiced ease. Such a proud man with such a jaunty stride. His eyes are open, hyper-open and fixed to his camera lens, and he thinks everything is marvellous. Ah, look at the prettiness and strength of those girls, those men, with their cars and their machines. Ah, and look what I can do with this camera of mine - I can show it all to you: all the glory of modern man I give to you with my movie camera!

I watch this little man with his movie camera, touring his city with reverence and pride for industry, progress, and a Five Year Plan, with a small bite of something like nostalgia. Watching Vertov's film, I am reminded of the experience of watching home movies from childhood. The little girl who is - impossibly- me, so startlingly alive. My parents' young likenesses moving, talking, breathing on the screen. I regard the individual faces in Man With The Movie Camera with this same personal interest. What is it about this film that gives me such an overwhelming sense of the human, and moreover, such a sense of a lost and irretrievable past?

Unlike the grainy black and white still image sitting anciently on a mantle, viewing historical images through the film medium is illusionary, like seeing some apparition or ghost with all its human faculties in order. Unlike the artifact that is the still image, the frozen moment with a thousand potentials on each end -what happened before the shutter fell? - what happened after? - the human represented on film is her own agent: she moves independently of my imagination. Unlike the artifact of the still image, the cinema is alive. It is hot, for movement generates heat generates energy - and energy means heartbeats. Thus Vertov's cute Russian girls, all plump energy and bright eyes - are to me like living apparitions, rising quite miraculously to show us what was.

I see something quite lovely in The Man With a Movie Camera: optimism, hope, admiration for the achievements and potentials of human beings. It is a film about the relationship - and love affair - between humans and their machines. In his stern way, Vertov demonstrates the "poetry of machines" [1] - the "poetry of levers, wheels, and wings of steel; the iron cry of movements; the blinding grimaces of red-hot streams" [2]. In the kinok's manifesto, Vertov proposes that in film-making of this kind, which treats the human much like a most glorious machine, the "perfect electric man" is conceived. "We introduce creative joy into all manual labour," he says, "we bring people into closer kinship with machines; we foster new people." [3] Thus when watching this film, the viewer is made to reflect on the very notion of the movie camera as a most ingenious machine, which, when coupled with man, is capable of a power so great that it can see everything in the city - even the most intimate of moments when a woman's vulva is exposed at the moment of childbirth. We see hands, a flurry of busy hands engaged with machines: women in call centers, typists, paper-folders. All this is sped up to emphasise the efficiency of it all; the clean symbiosis between human and machine. Don't these workers look flushed with pleasure, and aren't they the lovelier for it.

I think this film represents Modernity at its highest point, experienced "in the processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation... and gives as its key institutions the factory, the city and the nation." [4] In Vertov's manifesto towards the "new people", we see the modernist faith in answers, rationality, and grand narratives. He endorses the idea of a "truly universal absolute language" - note the use of the word absolute. We see a fascination in the power of machines; the film is a series of triumphant moments in which the human body and the machine unite. And in fact, towards the end of the film, the audience watches in delight as the movie camera actually springs to life on its tripod legs - which do, all of a sudden, look endearingly human - even cute - unpacks itself from its box, and looks about inquisitively. The camera is a most benign cyborg at this moment; a friendly cyborg. In fact, the fusion between human and machine is endorsed entirely here, in the most positive - dare I say innocent - way.

Postmodernity has changed all this. It has changed the way we think about machines, and changed the way we make film. I would like to use Donna Haraway's idea of the cyborg in relation to Ridley Scott's markedly postmodern film Blade Runner (1982) to support this.

Haraway says in her "A Cyborg Manifesto" (note the use of manifesto) that "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs." Haraway uses the cyborgian model to confound the boundaries between things that that defined modernity, like masculine/feminine, animal/human, animal/machine - a confusion that translates onto the postmodern screen. Postmodern theory asserts that "we can never, finally, know these hidden truths [of modernity] with full confidence, better to accept that we live in a world of appearances (a world without depth) or simulacra (in Beaudrillard's terminology)" [5]. I want to use Blade Runner to illustrate - or should I say animate - [ha!] - my point.

I presume that everyone has seen this film, so will not labour over the plot. I will say only that in the dystopian future represented in this film, humans have engineered "replicants" which are completely human physically, different only in the fact that they have no temporal past: they were manufactured in labs and do not have a history to speak of. Yet they can cry, feel, yearn. They are true cyborgs, true hybrids of machines and organisms, true simulations a la Baudrillard that cannot be separated from the original. And how miserable they are.

Likewise, the city represented in Blade Runner is "not the ultramodern, but the postmodern... it creates an aesthetic of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration." [6] This film is interesting to look at beside Man With The Movie Camera because these two films - one representing a far-gone past, the year 1929, one a distant future, a hundred years later, the year 2029 - present polar opposite cinematic representations of the "cyborg" and the industrial city. Comparing the beautiful vision of the modern city in Vertov with the postmodern filmaker's opinion of the future of our cities now is really quite harrowing. Moreover these two films in conjunction show cinema's unparalleled aptness - because of the aliveness of movement that I spoke of before - for immersing us in the mood of the time.

Vertov and Scott have both made films which labour over the idea of the human and machine. Both, I would argue, have a preoccupation with the idea of the cyborg: the fusion of the human and the machine. However, one is a celebration of human ingenuity, creativity and boundless industrial possibility through the machine, while the other is a reflection of the idea that while "the industrial machine was one of production, the postindustrial machine [is] one of reproduction" [7], which has led to exhaustion and decay. In Man With The Movie Camera, there is a lovely naivity in Vertov's representation of the cyborg: arms and legs filmed in isolation in the frame to disembody and mechanise them; people using machinery in factories; a man perpetually attached to his camera so that it might as well be his eye; the camera doing its cute little imitation of a human. In Blade Runner, however, human beings are so technologically skillful that they now can replicate themselves.

It seems to me that this has great implications for cinematic representation of "visible events"[8] and the trustworthiness of the camera. Vertov represents machines harnessed by humans. The machine that is his camera commands everything in the city. In one scene in fact, a giant Vertov (plus camera) stands atop a miniaturised city, seeing all, conquering all - trains, cars, buildings. He frames the trains and trams he shoots lovingly, but with control: the bigness of the train is no obstacle - he gets right underneath and placidly shoots from there. The people in the film are represented as the most superior machines of all: they jump, fling themselves in the air, command the tools of their work. It is a very honest account of "visible events", even the personified camera scene, which pretends to be nothing other than special effects. Vertov tells us not to read into this film and he means it: the visible and invisible are the same and the camera is on our side.

In Blade Runner, however, the camera cannot be trusted to represent visible events that correlate with invisible events. The replicants cannot be distinguished from the human. Machines have revolted against human beings; the Vertovian desire for a so-called "perfect electric man", has backfired. And the camera becomes party to this betrayal, confronting us with the cold fact of cinema's inability to discover what is a replicant human and what is real, thus showing us the limits of our own eyes, and the refusal of the camera to help. In fact, at the end of Blade Runner we are left in doubt as to whether Deckard, the protagonist played by Harrison Ford, is in fact a replicant himself. This epitomises postmodernity's deep anxiety about humanness, about the future of our cities, and its concern that we have lost our sense of reality and temporality. This applies to the future Los Angeles represented in Blade Runner: "there, the machinery of imitations, reproductions and seriality, in other words, 'replicants', affirms the fiction of the real." [9] Machines have overcome humans in this dystopian vision of the future, so that even the camera seems to be its own agent. One cannot imagine a human being behind it - rather it seems coldly impartial to the angst it causes.

Perhaps this is the reason for my nostalgia upon watching The Man With A Movie Camera. This is cinema that has a deep sense of its past: it remembers, and moves forward. It's sense of time is rooted between the two stable markers of past and future, which now can't always be trusted. It is innocently proud of its technological achievements. Somehow the people represented in this film seem all the more comprised of human flesh in their coupling with machines. The camera is warmly flooded with the humanity of Vertov, rather than vice-versa.

What we come to see is that film can represent flesh and bone and that's all - the nature of film is that it is "at once surface and symbol" to apply the words of Wilde. In Vertov, that's all we need to see, that's all the film strives for. Now, we need more - the surface is frightening and strange, and we want the comfort of definition of the real and unreal, the human and inhuman - but the movie camera does not yield.


Works cited:

[1]Annette Michelson (Ed), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,1984, p.8.

[2] Ibid, p.9.

[3] Ibid, p.d.

[4] Morley, David, 'Postmodernism: the Rough Guide', in Curran, James, Morley, David and Walkerdine, Valerie (Eds.) Cultural Studies and Communication, London, Arnold, p. 56.

[5] Ibid, 59.

[6] Bruno, Giuliana, 'Ramble City: Postmodernism and Bladerunner', in Kuhn, Annette (Ed.) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1995), 189.

[7] Ibid, 189.

[8] Introductory words, Vertov, Man With The Movie Camera (1929), available here.

[9] Bruno, Giuliana, 'Ramble City: Postmodernism and Bladerunner', in Kuhn, Annette (Ed.) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1995), 188.

The Camera is Doubtless a Boy (with a Fetish)

I watched Piccadilly while eating a banana in the library with Emma. We were hungry and anxious to get home, and watched the film in fast-forward in several parts (because we are children of postmodernity), particularly the bits involving Mabel's histrionics (tiresome), but we were compelled to hit play whenever Anna May Wong filled the screen; the camera demanded it of us. The vividness of her on-screen image - vividness, as if her edges were somehow sharper than everyone else's - caused me to pause mid-way through banana-chewery, long enough to get busted eating the illicit item by the particular AV librarian who frightens me.

I wrote an essay last year about Asian fetish pornography, and, perhaps a little perversely, recalled the material I had read for this assignment when I watched Wong's Shosho. Why? Because, somehow, the movie camera becomes the mind's eye, and as such guides thought. Therefore, in that first, memorable scene when we first see Shosho dancing in the scullery, and the camera glides up her body greedily and teasingly, I felt as if it were me regarding her, lingering desirously over her pointy and mesmerising movements as if savouring each upward-panning moment before the piece de resistance: her angular and beautiful Chinese face. Hence my jaw stopped working over my food, hence Em and I became very still and our faces edged minutely closer to the screen.

I wrote of Cornell's fixation on Rose Hobart in my last blog, and I find some similarities in the treatment of Anna May Wong's physicality and on-screen presence by Dupont. However, rather than Cornell's fixation - internal, private, dreamy - what I think we see here is a fetish, a public and masculine fetish. A shared Western fetish for the oriental woman. What I am interested in in terms of Piccadilly is the representation of the fetishised female object in film, and how the viewer experiences this object through a male lens. Let me explain.

According to Richard Fung in his "Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn”, the Western fetish for the Asian female is based on dominant representations of the Asian woman as submissive. “Because of their supposed passivity and sexual compliance,” he writes, “Asian women have been fetishised.” [1] He explains that these representations occur in two forms: “The Lotus Blossom Baby (aka China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty, et al.) and the Dragon Lady (devious madams)…" Thus, he goes on, "Asian women in film are for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men – as love interests for white men (re: Lotus Blossoms)” [2]

In terms of Wong's Shosho, we see that this idea is highly applicable. She is indeed a vixen, a "Dragon Lady" of sorts, who holds a potent sexual power over the men she deals with in the film, even Dupont himself, judging by the way he has directed her - but I would argue that these men never lose control of her - with the exception of her Chinese counterpart, Jim, whose desire for her is rejected in favour of the tall, gentlemanly Valentine. She does not upset or disturb beyond what is narratively called for, but rather obediently stays within her frame and plays her assigned stereotype: an exotic and dark beauty with come-to-bed-bad-boy-almond-shaped-eyes.

Shosho's rejection of Jim in favour of Valentine is certainly worth comment in reference to Western representations of the Asian male. Fung writes, "Asians are collectively seen as undersexed" [3] through a Western lens. He continues, Asian men… have been assigned to one of two categories: the egghead/wimp, or – in what may be analogous to the lotus-blossom-dragon-lady dichotomy – the kung fu master/ ninja/ samurai. He is… almost always characterized by a desexualized Zen asceticism… defined by a striking absence down there. [4]

Jim is certainly not sexy in Piccadilly - he is relegated to "peripheral character" status, and in fact, he doesn't even get the dignity of being identified to the audience. We just assume he's some kind of ex-lover of Shosho's. All he really does is be shunted, ordered around and sort of - lurk. And then, at the end of it all, he's the sobbing wretch who murders Shosho out of jealousy. He's dark and small in the frame to Valentine's large whiteness; the camera does not like poor Jim. But is mad for Valentine, and even madder for Shosho.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the camera is undoubtedly male in Piccadilly; a Western male with a fetish for (and fear of) Asian girls. The first implication for this is that, as viewers being taken on a "strange adventure" over which we have no control, we experience being a man regarding a woman, for the camera lens attaches itself to our retinas and connects with our brains and this is all we know and see for a little while. Therefore we see the great power of a director, and the pressing need for other cinematic voices to be available, as these days they are. Cinema, which echoes the workings of the mind more precisely than any other medium, is beautifully, terribly influential.

What we see in the dismissal of Jim and Valentine's easy possession of her is echoed in an online forum called “ASIA’ZINE”, where a participant writes,

All this [cinematic representation] serves to convince the Asian fetishist that they have a good shot in landing an Asian female. What they perceive as the meekness of the Asian male boosts their own ego, since it removes them as a threat in the dating game. It makes the fetishist feel special, as if they have something to offer outside of what an Asian male could. They become convinced that they are Casanovas to the Asian female. [5]

However, perhaps the recent popularity in the west of films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Hero (2003) represents a Western desire to experience "exoticism" outside of a fetishising and masculine cinematic lens. Do have a look at this link (the men in Hero leave Jimbo for dead without succumbing to Western representations of the guy-that-gets-the-girl, while the female characters are truly powerful).

Works cited:

[1] Fung, Richard. “Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn” in Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience (1996). London and New York, Routledge, p. 183.

[2] Ibid, p.182

[3] Ibid, p. 183

[4] Ibid, p. 183

[5] ASIA’ZINE: The Hows and Whys Behind the Fetish: Opinions of an ABC. http://www.asiazine.com/dating/dat06011.htm Accessed 5/09/07