actor profiles
animation
book reviews
director profiles
documentaries
experimental &
avant garde
exploitation
film festivals
film noir
film reviews
gay & lesbian
hong kong films
horror
interviews
japanese cinema
music & musicals
silent film
tranny cinema
- - - - - -
To be automatically notified when the next issue is posted, join our mailing list.
Dawn of the Dead
Bleeding Realism Dry,
or How to Turn One's Back on a Tyrant
page 1 of 2
Are Human Beings Real, or Do They Only Act That Way?
When we contemplate all the sinister, spirit-truncheoning effects of American commercialism, the one we most likely overlook is its subordination of all artistic impulses to a commodifiable denominator of realism — the "believable" — that can be marketed to a demos socially conditioned to accept realist aesthetics as Truth. What is realistic is what is "true," and what rings true is only what is familiar — all the better to keep the generic generic, the strange strange, the foreign foreign, and the national nationalistic. Corporate filmmaking ensnares the masses in a ritualized, Durkheimian trance — they believe they worship the insightful reality of film, but in fact their senses are pointed inward, praising only their ability to perceive received ideas and reach a social consensus about the realities they receive.
Twister
Just as religion censors whatever challenges doctrinal teaching, "realism" becomes little more than a series of censorship guidelines disallowing unconventionality or divergence from the cinematic rituals that currently define the perception of the real. As institutionalized censorship defines real experience by what it disallows, we assume the unseeable must be more real that our own perceptions, holding secret truths known only to higher powers. In this case, the higher powers are film censors, whether philistine Senators or the timorous, arbitrary ethicists of the MPAA, valiantly guarding us from ourselves. While once only seeking to censor the biological realities of blood and anatomy, the MPAA now defines reality — the seeable — by stamping with an iron fist anything that might offend a populace whose constituents are so alienated from one another that they cannot predict what catalysts will instigate violence among themselves, or, in a sense, spell society's own destruction. First, understand that Twister (1996) officially earned a PG-13 for "intense depiction of very bad weather."1 The weather, the very embodiment of Nature, is what our eyes must not see! One wonders what censorial certificate the act of gobbling a lamb chop — or stepping on a twig — would garner in real life.2 Of course, defining seeable reality in terms of censorship was not the invention of Protestant capitalism: the "socialist realism" of the Stalinists was "realistic" only insofar as it reflected the simplicity and uncluttered tonality emblematic of earthy peasantry, and the Maoist melodiousness of Yin Cheng-zong's laborious Yellow River Concerto is simply a cobbling of folk romanticisms the transparency of whose tunes defines the quality of their unabstract "reality." As in capitalism, familiarity is equated with populism, which in turn is folded into realism — if realism must be populist, then the inverse must also be true.
It is hard to chat up a colloquial citizen about films without the discussion eventually reverting to realism. Even horror films about intergalactic oysters must be credibly performed and fertilized with characterological psychology lest they risk derision, and science fiction will mouth its technobabble to impress upon us that it is a theoretical "science" explicable in objective, if generic, language. The seasoned critic is guiltier, demanding from a pedestal of jaundiced newsprint that filmic characters must prove their connectedness with reality through "moving performances," while we so futilely attempt to move each other in reality, unabetted by lurid dollies, stiflingly pathetic close-ups, and the major chord pathos of a factory-sealed soundtrack (the only tools American directors have for generating emotion). Such are the hypocrisies of the film critic's puppy-dog humanism! Critics think audiences, comfortably reclining in the corruption of the cinema seat, need actors to safely mourn and rationalize for them, as if their catharses accumulated mathematically instead of diminishing upon each return. But I am exhausted by these bawling close-ups (abolish them!), sickened by small-minded craftsmanship, and repelled by a hollow professionalism reveling in its capacity to express only the known, never the abstract — only by renouncing this professionalism, the capital engine that immoderately rewards semitalented actors for mimicking our own underprivileged lives, can the grim regime of realism-for-realism's-sake be shattered.
Attempting to be democratically understandable to all, the commerciality of realism instead punishes all expressions that cannot be instantly grasped. Still beholden to, on the one hand, the phallically driving narrative of D. W. Griffith and, on the other, the droopy laconicism of Hemingway, this is particularly American realism, deathlessly braying its profoundest thesis: "Life goes on." Indeed, the American "indie" film is little more than Hemingwayan, monosyllabic naturalism wedded to the pouting race-class-gender identity politics of a generation naively believing the cinema is a golden-hearted whore and not her brutish pimp. Indian cinema, we know, openly acknowledges its formulaic fantasies, not only with its musical conventions but with a ritualistic embracement of genre that makes no pretense at originality, matching the shadowy illusions of celluloid with the fantasies of its subject matter — the Durkhiemian ritual, though mercilessly and unremittingly mass-psychotic, is here celebrated, exposed, and cleansed of deceit. But the materiality of our American myths — the capitalist gangster, the Manifest Destiny cowboy, etc. — demand a concomitant aesthetic of materialistic realism to envelop them. In America, fairy tales are for children: acknowledged irrationalism is for youth. Contrarily, our reification of unacknowledged irrationalism mandates the production of "adult fairy tales" to reinforce the mating and copulation fantasies of the bourgeoisie, i.e. single women should pay to view Julia Roberts seizing a wealthy husband. Thus, the naturalistic presentation of folk myth and fantasy prevalent in African films such as Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba, the Tyrant (1995) seems so refreshing to Westerners, not because they want to recolonize the postcolonial (yawn), but because they need simple, blessed relief from the Western lies that confuse reality with realism, and make in bookstores the categories "philosophy" and "religion" curious neighbors instead of bitter rivals.
Guimba, the Tyrant
To overthrow the dictatorship of realism, we must expunge the overregulated binaries that position it against fantasy, and admit that realism is itself the fantasy par excellence. As we antiessentialists discard the specificity thesis that after the days of Lumiere and Melies argued the cinema's predestined or "natural" affinity with either the real or unreal, the naturalistic or the fractured, we too throw off the sympathetic yet obsolete argument of the Realists who, in a critical gesture of 1930s antifascism, championed democratic realism against the encroaching dangers of Munchausenian imagination. But as a lowest common denominator attempt to counter centuries of faith and metaphysical irrationalism, supposedly empiric, pseudo-positivistic realism has ironically emerged as the most institutionalized faith of all. Further, the mode that should represent egalitarian understanding in its content refutes it in its form: while attempting to portray a democratically understandable content, the medium itself antidemocratically punishes (i.e., frequent refusal to produce and/or distribute) antirealist modes and styles of representation — recall the well-documented production troubles of Brazil (1985) or Being John Malkovich (1999).3 Some may find the aesthetic of heightened realism more invigorating, erotic, frightening, and altogether more sensational than our realities, but this intense sensationalism is a quantitative measure expressed only through impossibly synaesthetic adjectives, and cavalier adjectival quantities, even if one champions subjective experience, do not evince the quality of truth.
Method acting, a paradoxical attempt at greater realism through greater imagination, is realism's symptom, not its remedy. Realistic acting, in which both actor and audience are self-consciousness of the actor's attempt to be unselfconscious, is the hallmark of television — consider the slyly deployed yet slightly overtelegraphed facial nuances, voice inflections, eyelid flickers, and temple-veinings that characterized Barry Levinson's cop drama Homicide. When performed less skillfully, these gestures are also the hallmarks of Aryan-blonde news anchors and Presidents who recite stage-directed scripts — whether Clinton or Reagan was the superior actor depends on whether one values "natural" talent (the real) over formal training (the realistic). The most egregious culprit is the soap opera actor, whose facial telegraphs are so embarrassingly, nauseatingly, and unnaturally broad that we must conclude they are a sign of acute neurosis, perhaps a reflection of the neurotic claustrophobia from which their housewife demographic suffers. There can be no more transparent a sign of the U.S. myth of capitalism pulling itself over the eyes of a hypnotized public than the tagline for a recent greed-and-torsos soap opera: "Their story is your story." Such a tagline could only be necessary when "their story" is so unlike our story that only purely irrational disbelief can associate the hyperbole of soap operas with the forever dwindling economic reality of the soap opera's lower-class demographic. We must be assured that their story is ours — that they are we — because it would never have occurred to us otherwise.
 Joe Dallesandro and Jane Forth in Trash  |
The actor's conscious attempt at unselfconsciousness stands for "realism": the more apparently "natural" the facial twitters, the more realistic they are. Aesthetically, unselfconsciousness has often apotheosized eros — the effortless pubescent grace of the Athenian youth ignited the pederastic swoon of seemingly all Greek thought. In American popular art, however, nearly all unselfconsciousness is coded as realism: everything can be justified or criticized on the grounds of the actors' believability alone. "For film ... what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else," says Walter Benjamin.4 Robbed of the stage actor's living "aura," the film actor's body, removed from the interactivity of a live audience, "... loses its corporeality... [and] is deprived of reality"5 — thus, realist aesthetics madly compensate for the mutual alienation between actor and audience. This is the double nature of performance — aware of the actor's craft, we nevertheless desire nothing more than the actor to overcome mundane craftsmanship and become lost in his own spirit, transcending character and achieving the apex of human art, of humanity, and of himself. But ever conscious of the actor's attempt to be real, and never really capable of a cathartic or Aristotelian loss of self, we find only the spare meaning contained in the actor's telegraphs — the pauses and covert brackets that assist the audience in following collocations of words. After years of inculcation, we not only recognize these formal cues of realism but tacitly admit they invest the content with realism as well. In real life, the stutters in our speech are usually uncontrollable — unless we're actively rehearsing our words — and we care more about content than the pauses that help others understand it, unless we are practiced actors. And even if we, children of behaviorism, are all actors in life, organic yet artistic media in and of ourselves, we are mostly poorly trained and in great need of improvement — we fool each other efficiently, but are unpracticed at sincerity. A play or film acted with "true realism" would be partially indecipherable and unreadable, since we do not always make conscious attempts to be heard or understood. The indecipherability of the overlapping dialogue in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) is an exemplary attempt at "genuine mimesis," arguably more so than the improvisations of Cassavettes, whose realism is a spontaneity that shares with Antonin Artaud an attempt to substitute a mode of performance for genre. Though the attempt to overcome genre is laudable, the effect of self-satisfied improvisation on the viewer is too often a bored appreciation, an acknowledgement that uneventful cum antinarrativistic chatter is noble in intent but dull in content — thus, Paul Morrissey must desperately ballast the frames of Trash (1970) with the ample diversions of Joe Dallesandro's pendulous dong when the trivial amusements of the improvised dialogue are not weighty enough to anchor the film.
The Inability to Mimic Death Is the Inability to Live Life
For all the worship of realism — that is, of artifice — there stands one thing beyond the actor's ability, one motion that can never convince us of its realism regardless of its sincerity: the gesture of death, which even film technology cannot perfect. Because the death gesture does not involve language, save for the Shakespearean "I am slain," we can only cue death's outward appearances; even if we could experience death and then be resurrected to perform it, we could not technically improve upon the surfaces of the Method. On the live stage, the death gesture had capitalized on the theater's very inability to create realism, and thus the gesture, and the medium itself, confesses its deficiency through necessary stylization and expressionism. From hair-rending Victorian heart-clutching, to outlandishly contrived Jacobean bloodthirst, to the ritualized postures of Kabuki, stage death gestures are grandiose, archetypal, and generically standardized events whose very unrealism defines their dramatic effect. Art inhabits its playful place — removed from life — by being unable to realize dying and thus living, two words signifying the same process of decay. The difference between life and art may hinge on life's death gesture usually being convincing and art's always unconvincing — if your friend is crushed by a freight train and expires right before you, you are unlikely to say that his death was unconvincing, though you might silently imagine how film might have fruitlessly tried to perfect it.
 Alfred Clark's Mary, Queen of Scots |
Lillian and Dorothy Gish
in Orphans of the Storm
The continued use of the replaceable, maltreatable ragdoll in scenes of violence throughout the silent era — such as the penniless child steamrollered by the heartless aristocrat's carriage in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921) — was a tacit admission that the medium was only as realistic as the current state of its technological art. Yet this ragdoll flimsiness also haunts and disturbs; like the creakingly fabricated Flash Gordon automaton, the doll's blatant evidence of inadequacy, farcical yet unnerving, reminds us of our own, all-too-human frailty at any given moment. Similarly, the tortured puppets of Jan Svankmajer disturb because we are forever unsure what are their thresholds of pain — thresholds pushed to grotesque limits in Svankmajer's Punch and Judy (1966) — and we imagine our own untested, untortured limitations displaced to the puppets' endlessly punishable dead wood. Yet the opposite extreme, a surfeit of technology, disturbs equally. The wholly computer-animated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) was hailed as a watershed in something or other, but its digitized characters, hardly Frankensteinian because they never knew life to begin with, become spectral waxworks whose technology mockingly mimics not life, but only the lively facial grimaces that conventionally, or realistically, cue it. From hell, Plato smiles — shall we smile back?
We
discover the litmus test of realism's lack in the "snuff film,"
a subgenre of realism predicated on the idea that if a real person's
death can be achieved on screen, then verite has achieved its ultimatum
and the cinema its greatest potential. The once-impossible death gesture
finally seeks uncompromised authenticity not through the teary humanism
realism covets but through a sophomoric stroke of anti-humanism in extremis,
where bodily violence and pain verify the limits of realism, just as
they also, contrarily, humanistically test the limits of a postmodern
cultural relativism trying to overcome the biological tyrannies of the
body. That the first such film, Roberta Findlay's X-rated Snuff
(1976), spliced a phony verité murder scene into an unrelated
Argentine crime film and promoted it as real only proved realism's hypocritical
machinations. In Snuff, the cinema's unsteady truth
is reproduced by cues of realism audiences had already been conditioned
to expect: the wobbly handheld camera whose dismissal of the tripod
and exaggerated bounces are absurdly equated with the realism of "natural,"
motile vision, and a seamless, mise en scene presentation of blood unaided
and unobscured by guileful montage. Because we laugh at the transparent
suture of Mary Queen of Scots's beheading, we should
be shocked when the death gesture is accomplished without the benefit
of a montage-based system which unconsciously deludes us but of which
we in our wiser moments are suspicious — the formal technology
shocks, not the violence in itself. Snuff's notorious
promotional campaign, which mobilized hired "protestors" to
draw attention to the film by picketing its immorality, turned the entire
film into a "realistically" staged event designed to outrage
a bourgeois society unprepared to admit the logical outcome of its
own doctrine of realism. Realism becomes outlawed by the realists.
At the opposite end, realism becomes prestigious in the minimalist garb of the generic film-festival art film (yes, a genre!). The traditional montage-versus mise-en-scene argument is turned on its head: it is no longer the psychological suture of cuts that constructs realism but their minimalist absence, for we now pride ourselves on our suspiciousness of technological excess, even as rampant MTV-ism fetishizes the very notion of editing's control over time and, by extension, the psychotic cult of timeless youth upon which MTV is constructed. When "artfulness" is designated by the absence of cuts — the overcrafted, self-impressed ponderousness of a Hou Hsiao-hsien — it is as if minimalism's negation of liveliness equals the negation of life and, through some mistaken logic of binary oppositions, the creation of art. Film, a composite medium suffering still from an inferiority complex, needed to inherit the historically exalted place of painted, static art by mimicking it under the pretext of realism. Warhol exposed this foolishness before it was even invented in Sleep (1963), whose lack of content never pretends to be a high-art substitution for content. Warhol regresses technology to a point of reproduction so primal that it blurs the line between production and reproduction, as if the reproduction of the film were just as original and authentic as the action being filmed. We can think, too, of the bridge since constructed between William Heise's archaic silent The Kiss (1896) and Warhol's Kiss (1963), which hardly advances technologically upon the static reproductions of Heise's bolted camera. In Warhol, the event is not the work itself, but how the audience interacts with the work's boredom or uneventfulness in a society so predisposed to rationalizing its own decadence in terms of "art" that meaning is no longer textual or even interpretive but is constructed among elements6 that include self-important uneventfulness as a false category of bourgeois value.7
Warhol's 1963 Kiss with
Heise's 1896 version (inset)
We only need to see that Film Comment critics declared the preposterously, self-importantly static Beau Travail (1999) one of the best films of its year to see that uneventful stasis — in the guise of the Buddhistic serenity that we seek only in pretentious films, and are incapable of achieving in reality8 — has been falsely equated with artfulness, as if the stony symmetry of the film's images were suitable for framing in that pinnacle of bourgeois values, the museum, where the sterile and sublime become indistinguishable, twinned values. This fallacy further assumes stasis — the timeless deified moment — is the highest expression of art, overlooking the vitally imagined, internal movement inherent in painting, be it the Chinese scroll that presumes the movement of the spectator's journeying eye from end to end, or the dramatic, and thus temporal (not timeless) apocalypse of Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836). Beau Travail's pretense effectively negates Benjamin's formulation of the actor: rather than a self-conscious attempt at unself-consciousness, the direction of the film's actors self-consciously strives for self-conscious artiness, which then begs the audience to applaud its own self-consciousness of the film's self-consciousness, as if they were effete museum patrons approving commissioned products. But I — robbed of my gaiety by these contests of tedium — refuse to applaud. In fact, my hands are doing something else entirely.
Technology's Blood Enlivens the Gesture of Death
Some might say the death gesture took decades to mature, others would say it still has yet to mature, but I would say it can never mature, forever a prisoner caged between the naïve verite cues of snuff and the expressionism of the living stage. To my mind, the cinema's greatest death scene is Dirk Bogarde's chaise lounge funeral in Visconti's Death in Venice (1971), and not simply because it is attractively upholstered with the borrowed longing of the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth. As he dies, an ecstatic deathly fever sweats the dye and makeup from Bogarde's freshly primped brow and temples, which then trickle down his face like tragic blood turned bilious. The scene is truthful because its visual expressionism, undercutting the languorous influence of the music, reminds us of artistic illusions instead of hiding them. He bleeds the made-up falsity of the screen, the literally painted persona of the actor, and in doing so acknowledges the illusions of art, the deception of all appearances, as opposed to plastering them over with the second illusion of fake stage blood pretending to fleshly catharsis. As he fades away next to an antique camera positioned under the dying sunset, we realize the film is signifying the frame of its own photographed artifice and not "realistic" life, the first confession all works of art must make.
 William S. Hart's Hell's Hinges |
NEXT PAGE: Blood technology goes to war
Notes
1. See "Reasons for Movie Ratings" at www.filmratings.com.
2. To take another example of the denial of nature, Western Puritanism demands that the female breast be sexualized (and privatized) while the male breast can be desexualized (and publicized), not because the female's is more conspicuous but because its lactational function remains ugly evidence of humanity's Darwinian animalism.
3. I do not, however, endorse Being John Malkovich — the fantasy of its narrative is too enslaved to the psychological realism the actors strive for.
4. From The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
5. Ibid. Benjamin is quoting Pirandello.
6. A full discussion of these "elements" is the subject for a book. Suffice it to say I mean both audience receptivity and the manipulation of that receptivity by both critics and marketers (as if there were anymore a difference between them!).
7. True, uneventfulness can be also effective as a satirical allegory of alienation, as in Fassbinder's Why Has Herr R Run Amok? (1969) or Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975). Yet it is a fairly one-dimensional allegory, and the point can only be made once or twice in film before becoming gratuitous.
8. Therefore, devout Buddhists do not generally make films. Khyentse Norbu's The Cup (2000), a notable exception, is organically boring, and not self-importantly boring (for indeed a Buddhist has no self).
page 1, 2
