From the editor and writers of Bright Lights Film Journal
Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
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How to Turn One's Back on a Tyrant
Part Two
The opposite of realism is not fantasy, but disappointment
PART ONE: THE LIMITATIONS OF REALISM AS DEMONSTRATED BY ANTIREALISM
The Cinema Is Defined as an Event, and Events Are Defined as Cinematic
When the Lumieres publicly screened their first films in 1895, it
was surely a very big event, though more in its form (the social space
of the screening room) than its content (the actions of the films). Still,
when we characterize this beginning as an event, we should not —
as Brownlow advises in The Parade's Gone By — smugly reiterate
legends of spectators momentarily convinced that pouncing filmic tigers
were about to plunge through the screen and maul their god-fearing husbands,
even if new technologies are often christened with floundering faith.
The fantasies of the earliest magic lanterns, invented around 1640, and
the innumerable 'scopes of the late 19th century — if not Plato's
Republic — had surely given audiences centuries worth of preparation
for interpreting projected illusions. Yet the masses needed an opiate
to deliver them from the starched, arch theatricalism of the Victorian
stage, and quickly accepted the paradoxical opiate of "two-dimensional
realism" the cinema would sell. This opiate was quite literally present
in Edison's Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894), whose title character stuffs
some snuff into his flickering beak, causing it to twitch momentarily,
and then sneezes it out in one involuntary yet definitive spasm, returning
the hallucinogen to the ether as the film concludes. This, one of cinema's
very first events, recognized the medium itself as a drug, probably the
first time the cinema's narcotic form and its content were used, if unintentionally,
to mutually admire one another, long before the narcoses of the cinema
became the Hollywood imperialism Europeans have so much difficulty resisting.
In the cinema's infancy, the eventfulness of film was doubled by its
novelty. Not only was the new technology an event in itself, as Benjamin
recognized, but the act of spectatorship also became a self-conscious
event, especially because the transparent contents of early films could
not provide a substantial enough drama in which to lose oneself —
the unconstructed cinematic motion of Workers Leaving the Factory
(1895) could not entrance forever. Almost instantly, actors became aware
of this eventfulness, too. In his analysis of the early Lumiere films,
Bertrand Tavernier distinguishes between the original version of Workers
Leaving the Factory, in which the workers are unaware of the camera,
and a second version filmed the following season of the same year, and
only discovered in 1985, wherein the workers look self-consciously into
the camera filming them, thus becoming actors1
But it was Melies, of course, who raised the event from the medium itself
to the powers within the medium, specifically the self-evident cut which
made the magician coyly disappear behind an interposed smokepuff. By 1914,
when the narrative structure to which we are still enslaved had firmly
established itself, poor Melies had desisted his dreams altogether,2
for his ephemeral lunar pavilions and smiling cardboard whales still smacked
of the dying stage, and his once-innovative manipulations of form now
seemed quaint compared to the lifelike "Cabiria movements" of Pastrone
and Griffith.3
But
before narrative became fully institutionalized, some films, curiously,
could not decide on the difference between narrative realism and the
spectacular fantasies of primitive silents. Griffith's The Avenging
Conscience (1914) is actually more "primitive" than his first full-length
feature, the Biblical epic Judith of Bethulia (1913), insofar
as its pre-institutionally decorative qualities overshadow any semblance
of linear narrative. Conscience, one of cinema's earliest examples
of psychological "realism," is incongruously capped by a ten-minute
fantasy sequence of nymphs prancing about a sylvan prairie — precisely
the sort of self-enclosed spectacle that would have served as a stand-alone
one-reeler circa 1905 or so. If this silliness ruins the film, it is
because the expectations of realism manufactured earlier in the film
have been disappointed; here, we realize our first axiom: the antonym
of realism is not fantasy, but disappointment.
Cinematic Musical Expressionism Defined Not as
Distortion but as Moral Tension
Distortion but as Moral Tension
We will being our discussion of antirealism in the cinema by talking
about musical expressionism, but I'll need to explain my terms, since
everyone has their own ideas of what expressionism should be. First,
I stubbornly define music as innately unrealistic. The closest approximations
to nature music can create are, as Carl Dahlhaus notes in Realism
in Nineteenth Century Music, found in attempts to imitate rising
space with a crescendo, or speeding time with an accelerando,
or (vocalized) human emotions with mimicking tonalities and inflections.
Realism in music might be seen as synonymous with narrativization, but
little more: in a formalized sense, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin
or Gliere's programmatic symphony Ilya Murometz might conflate
narrativity in music with the "real" and innate human propensity for
understanding everything in terms of temporal narrative and life cycles,
but hardly can their two-dimensional emotionalisms evince recognizably
human psychologies. Otherwise, as nature's timbres do not strictly abide
by those of the piano, accordion, bassoon, or kazoo,4 music may at best strive to produce imagistic, anthropomorphic,
or onomatopoeic realities, as in Peter and the Wolf, or re-produce
nature with technological assistance, as with the tape-recorded whale
songs looped into Hovannhes's And God Created Great Whales (1970).
The "realism" underlying even a quasi-programmatic piece such as Honneger's
rhythmique yet bourgeois Pacific 231 (1924) or Mosolov's
ballet Zavod, which respectively imitate a locomotive and a factory,
is linguistic realism. Were these pieces divorced from their language-based
programs — the very title of Pacific 231 constitutes a de
facto program5
— they might be delivered from linguistic realism to the free play
of impressionism, where their musics might conjure a greater variety of
associations. Musical impressionism, divorced from image or language,
should evince not a single essence but a full palette of mental associations
— if one is unaware of Mallarmé's source poem, Debussy's Prelude
to the Afternoon of a Faun will conjure not necessary a lounging faun,
or even the natural erotic longing it represents, but a free-floating
sphere of shapes, colors, and self-reflective sensations that broadens
and makes multifaceted one's perceptions of truth — unlike expressionism,
which seeks to penetrate to a singular, greater truth.
In contrast to musical realism and impressionism, expressionism, seeking
its singular truth, focuses on the immediate, unmediated self-expression
of the artist's interiority, and uses antirealist distortions, distancing
devices, and other techniques that make the audience critically self-conscious
of artifice and skeptical of "scientific" reality. But there are practical
problems in applying these expressionist criteria, as originated in
painting, to music: how well is the interiority of Berg's "expressionistic"
Violin Concerto (or the interiority of Berg himself) being expressed
if it must be mediated through the various wills and desires of numerous
members of an orchestra? Secondly, Bergian atonality is intrinsically
no less "real" than a Haydn symphony — atonality is neither antirealist
nor more expressive than conventional tonality. We are more inclined
to say a programmatic work such as Berg's Lulu is expressionistic,
however, because the music rubs so violently against the libretto that
we are distracted from any pretense of realist performance and quickly
understand that otherwise hidden or subtextual elements of the libretto
are being outwardly expressed through the score (whereas in Tchaikovsky's
Onegin there is no subtext for the music to decrypt).
But we cannot really understand what it means for the interiority of
Berg himself to be "expressed" in a non-programmatic work like the Concerto
when someone other than Berg himself is performing. Unlike an expressionist
painting, which forever retains its originality, the endless and varied
performability of music negates the idea of the singular artist conveying
unmediated truths, and when music is recorded as background to a film,
it is a second degree removed from originality. Therefore, I define
musical expressionism (in film) as neither unmediated original expression
nor as antirealist qualities in the music itself — because all
music is unrealistic, whether intentionally or not — but as the
meaningful tension that exists between the music and a second
element, such as a film image or dramatic action.
Music in the talking film, effectively, reshuffles the temporal realism
of stage melodrama — if opera presents live music outwardly expressing
actors' thoughts concurrently in time and space, film does the opposite,
alienating the actor's performance from the often unknown, yet-to-be-composed
music that will undergird his performance in post-production. (Godard
satirized this temporal incongruity in Contempt (1963), where
extradiegetic music conspicuously begins each time a character stops
talking.) But if we define expressionism as meaningful tension, the
standard, meaningless film score cannot be true expressionism: when
phallically swollen Korngoldian horns and swooning strings provide an
overcompensatory exterior monolog for characters whose interiors are
inaccessible, the music simply explains the interiority of the
characters without drawing them out expressively through tense intellectual
dissonance. The effect is usually a mere redundancy, which is why Satyajit
Ray likened extradiegetic music to crude punctuation marks to be used
as sparingly as possible. A film with music every five minutes is like
a novel with ten exclamation points on every page — yet we, who
would be embarrassed by a surfeit of exclamations, accept such musical
slop unblinkingly. But literal sound-image incongruity is not necessarily
expressionistic, either, for the incongruity of an ordinary, journalistic
voice-over does not exist in intellectual tension with the action it
narrates.
But
as our example of meaningful musical expressionism in film, I will not
use the avant-garde films of the 1960s you might expect. Rather, I will
use Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours (1948, right), whose use of Rossini's
overtures provides a background of unbroken extradiegetic music lengthier
than that of any other non-musical in memory. What makes Unfaithfully
remarkable here is that its musical expressionism is not unimaginative,
sledgehammer irony in the manner of Kubrick's use of familiar Rossini
selections in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Going beyond irony,
Sturges uses music to pierce the interiors of characters to demonstrate
moral truths. In Unfaithfully, the maddening music provides a
frantic background to a scenario that is rather calm to all of the characters
save Rex Harrison's, whose wife's infidelity resides only in his artistic
mind, like the music he conducts. Yet when his conventionally suspicious
mind, that is, the conventional music that runs through it, is laid
across the screen, our minds, too, become clouded. In perhaps Sturges'
best speech, Harrison chastises a despicable private eye for liking
the music he conducts, and is devastated that music — his music
— does not possess certain "antiseptic" qualities that morally
cleanse despicability from the listener. But he, of course, is the most
despicable and immoral, because he can no longer distinguish between
reality and fiction; the conventional and false morality of bourgeois
art represented by the romantically confused Rossini fantasies which
obsess his thoughts, which we are forced to hear repeatedly, and which
expressionistically banana-slip as his madness mounts, eventually overcome
his rationality.6
In the end, the deluded musical soundtrack opposes the real, but calls
attention to the moral importance of rational behavior in ways that realistic
or mimetic representations cannot, for realism, accepting its rationalism
on faith, does not even bother to demonstrate why rationalism is
important as a mode of representation.7 We can compare Sturges' "contrapuntal" use of extradiegetic music to
Oliviera's The Convent (1995), which uses an atonal orchestral
score to express the devilish impetus lurking beneath a calm, natural
exterior. The atonal music may seem incongruous with the seemingly benign,
"tonal" visuals, but this incongruity lacks the moral instruction of
the musical counterpoint in Unfaithfully. It is merely a sensational
device, expressing only what we already lies beneath the surface, and
is thus very conservative, even redundant, within the possibilities
of expressionism, even though the atonality begs to be perceived as
avant-garde.
Can Direct Sound Recording Prevent the Rise of Dictators?
Because Edison's early 1900's sound recording experiments were rejected
semi-consciously by a public opting for a pure image accompanied by
music and not one realistically accompanied by dialog, the silent film
was less lifelike than the unreproduced stage. (In fact, in the early
days of film, even projection speed was not standardized, so the allegedly
"pure" visuals of the film represented no single referential reality
to begin with.) Silent actors would be given voice through a musically
mimicking vessel beyond their control, and which varied as the pianist,
organist, or bensho varied from theater to theater. In the silent
film, allied to the onomatopoeic imitation of sound was the expectation
of sound where there was none. The piano glissando of a slapstick pratfall
or barking ostinato of a hen-pecking wife became the clear if unfortunate
acknowledgements of a limitation unsure of whether its function is to
guide or presume. In Robert Israel's piano score for the 1995 Kino Video
reissue of Buster Keaton's short The Haunted House (1921), the
descending scales of the piano actually precede Keaton's slips
and falls, thus cuing not the jokes per se but the split-second anticipation
of the jokes, reducing the acrobatics from unique events to a generic
sense of expectation, and displacing the humor from the integral image
to clockwork patterns of recognition. The content and specific import
of the joke become negligible, and one winds up merely responding to
the cued perpetuation of conventional formal gestures. This is another
example of when sound-image incongruity is actually conformist, not
subversive or surrealist.
We should, then, also question the use of any music performed during
the projection of a silent surrealist film. Buñuel says he cranked
out a recording of an ordinary tango to accompany the first screening
of Un Chien Andalou (1928), but does not seem to think that a
generic tango's presumptions on the viewer's imagination will limit
surrealism's free play. This was long before such musical incongruities
self-consciously became their own mode of irony, as in the bridge dance
in Carax's Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1993), or the closing credits
to Malle's Atlantic City (1981), where the genre of background
music changes with each crash of a wrecking ball coolly clearing away
the debris of architectural history.
Apart from sound's novelty value, it still remains to be demonstrated
exactly why people embraced sound in the late 1920s when they
rejected Edison's turn-of-the-century sound experiments,8
and why at the height of the silent era's Golden Age they were prepared
to bear the static immobility early sound would bring when Karl Freund
had liberated the camera only a few years prior. These audiences were
justly punished with the least written-about period in film history, circa
1928-29, in which Hollywood foolishly led the world's experiments in combining
silence and sound in a transitional phase of half-silent, half-talkie
films such as Curtiz's legendary spectacle Noah's Ark (1928) or
Lucien Hubbard's time capsule The Mysterious Island (1929), which
abruptly juxtaposed the facility of silent cinema at its technical zenith
with talking cinema at the nadir of its toddling childhood.
The
promotional ads for Noah's Ark shouted, "See and hear the spectacle
of the ages" — the spectacle being the transhistorical, Intolerance-esque
alternation of a WWI story with typically idiotic Biblical scenes, a
morally easy juxtaposition Thomas Ince had used a dozen years earlier
in Civilization (1916), wherein Jesus actually visits a mustard
gas battlefield to short-handedly symbolize some sorely needed humanitarianism.
In the silent era, the immaculate unreality of sound seemed to equate
everything with the Bible (perhaps why they were so many Biblical adaptations),
so it is perhaps appropriate that Noah's Ark, a film of dual
historical contents, should usher in a new talking medium that historicizes
its dual technological senses: the absolute morality of the Bible is
silent and removed, and the modern, sinful era is squeakily heard. Nevertheless,
in Hollywood the negotiation of silence and sound was merely a witless
alternation, with no attempt at progressive synthesis. Although Lewis
Milestone soon learned how to whip the talkie camera through mud and
over trenches, most Hollywood filmmakers deluded on the new "reality"
of sound demonstrated none of the audial creativity of, say,
the famous scene in Rene Clair's Le Million (1931), where the
realistic audio of a chase scene suddenly becomes the unrealistically
dubbed audio of a football match. Even Hollywood's most flamboyant early
talkie, the pioneering sci-fi Just Imagine (1930), is more concerned
with decorative futuristic sets in the manner of silents such as Aelita:
Queen of Mars (1924), with sound, including the requisite horrid
songs, clearly subordinate.
The early talkie's new realism resided in the recorded natural sounds
of which the live piano and wheezing organ could only provide keyed
approximations: the creak of the door, the meow of the pussy, the falling
hollow bombshells of Pabst's Westfront 1918 (1930), which sounded
less threatening but somehow more "natural" than the maniacal wail of
Milestone's artillery in the same year's All's Quiet on the Western
Front. This audial realism is the apparently unmodified,
anti-illusory, anti-totalitarian sound recording promulgated by socialist
Europe, as distinct from the more clearly phony socialist realism advanced
by Stalinism. It is the tangible ambient sound of Eric Rohmer's Marquise
of O (1976) or Margaritte von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg (1986),
films which nevertheless ironically recreate historical realism through
the present-day reality of natural sound recording, thereby conflating
two essentially different categories of the real, and thus disclosing
the illusion behind their apparent "realism."
This direct, anti-illusory sound is obviously traceable to neorealism,
whose location photography and direct sound signified an expedient vigilantism
keeping watch over ravaged streets fallen victim to Nazi illusionism.
But the problem with the exhausted yet inaccurate phrase "neorealism"
is that the antiquated realism it supposedly replaced was not
the feature-length mock-anthropology of In the Land of the War Canoes
(1914), or even actuality films such as Grass (1925), but the
upholstered, novelistic naturalism of Stroheim's Greed (1924)
and the richly textured populism of Vidor's The Crowd (1928),
films which by today's standards would be considered late Romantic.
In fact, the dogmatic socialist realism of the Soviets was originally
intended to carry the more accurate, less cryptic label "socialist romanticism,"
which itself speaks volumes.9
Today, far from the cry of naturalism, we suffer the neo-neorealism
of the "Dogma" crowd, who suppose that by merely representing mundane
minimalism — and charging audiences money for the experience —
we can cathartically purge the grand irrationalism of Hollywood decadence.
The recorded ambient sounds — echoing footsteps, creaking archaic
wood, etc. — of Herzog's Heart of Glass (1976) are interesting
here because the film's historical narrative alternates modern direct
sound recording with Popul Vuh's characteristic synthesizer score. The
film's awkward balancing of realism (direct sound) and conventionalized
antirealism (a dubbed musical score) may be analogous to the half-silent,
half-talkie films of the 1928-29 period. Despite his uncanny, unfiltered
use of natural sound recording, Herzog is hardly known as a realist;
his turn to making mainly documentaries in recent years may reflect
his attempt to reconcile his work's "double" nature. His documentaries
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1996) and My Best Fiend (1999),
notably, recreate history by having their real-life subjects re-enact
their pasts in the present day, as if Herzog is admitting that the type
of transhistorical realism represented by direct audio in his previous
costume pictures was disingenuous.
Yet this convincingly "real" ambient sound can also result from technological
accident — exactly the case of Hong Kong filmmakers beginning around
1993, who began to shoot with synchronized sound on a normative basis
in an effort to raise production standards and compete with Hollywood.
But the sound technicians' lack of experience in recording direct sound
resulted in performances that combined naturalistic facial expression
with muffled, echoing, and under-recorded vocal expressions10
— in other words, truly realistic performances, more realistic than
any intentional amateurism could willfully manufacture.
The Devilish Duality of the Soul Is Meaningless to the Atheist
As
a normative signifier of a culture's xenophobic inability to deal with
cultural invasion, or as a desire not for a friendly Esperanto but an
imperialist over-language, the dubbed film should be as despised as
it is. As a hegemony of the market place, it also informs social issues:
if Americanized Jackie Chan films are dubbed with gangster rap soundtracks,
a double racism is created that suggests first, that the films are not
"worthy" of being left intact, and, second, that martial arts violence
should automatically appeal to gangsterized African-Americans. But dubbing
is not always the economic product of bourgeois imperialism; sometimes,
it can be its victim. Such is often the case with Doris Wishman, whose
films were often shot silent because she could not afford direct sound
recording. Thus, in The Amazing Transplant (1970), Wishman utilizes
angle/reverse angle scenarios so we only see the back of the speaker's
head, or the person being spoken to while the speaker remains offscreen.11 Never have
there been more unintentionally alienating films than Wishman's: the human
voice is a disembodied phantasm roaming from unseen mouths, and you desire
to violate the screen, entering it interdimensionally with outstretched
arms to twist that turned head and reveal its true face. You want to attach
a reality to the illusion, yet you are powerless.12
A true film!
But the purposively dubbed film, like Woody Allen's What's
Up Tiger Lily? (1966), should be a supreme work of art, as it reconstructs
filmic building blocks to its own liking, as do musical compositions
based on a theme written by a dead composer. Francis Bacon questioned
the authenticity of abstract art that merely manipulates preternatural
geometries without artistically constructing something from them; likewise,
the intentionally dubbed film is, in fact, greater art than the
realistic film to the degree that it is more about ingenious, multilayered
construction than slavish reproduction or mimesis. Similarly, movie
versions of novels should be as unfaithful as possible. Film
adaptations are foolishly praised for their faithfulness (i.e., slavishness)
to the source, but if one wants faithfulness, just read the source itself
— the conservatism of cinema culture values slavishness above original
variations, whereas musical variations on another composer's theme are,
contrarily, valued for how far a-field the variations wind up from the
source. On a like note, critics excoriated Britisher Hugh Hudson's Revolution
(1984) for its historical inaccuracies and Al Pacino's anachronistic
accent, when they should have fearlessly praised the filmmakers for
their Brechtian dismissal of realist acting and flights of expressionistic
fantasy (that the inaccuracies are unintentional is irrelevant). Ironically,
faithfulness is not "faith" at all, but merely rationalist accuracy
(when faith is confused with rationalism, realism will be confused with
reality).
However, once a film is dubbed, for any reason, it can no longer retain
the same identity, and must be known as a new original work. Therefore,
as Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Paganini is not called
Paganini's Twenty-Fourth Caprice for Violin (the thematic inspiration
for Rachmaninoff's piece), the gangster-rap dubbed American release
of Daniel Lee's Black Mask (1996) should be retitled Hollywood's
Variations on a Theme of Daniel Lee, which would save everyone much
confusion. But the dubbed film also occurs within industries, not just
among them: India and China have long shot silent films to be redubbed
into the various languages internal to their countries without the intrusive
motive of Western exportation. Cartoons, obviously, have no intrinsic
voice — in fact, animation dubbed with convincingly naturalist
sound effects can have more profoundly synaesthetic results than naturally
recorded live action films. For example, the overexaggerated sounds
of the flapping flags in Tomoharu Katsumoto's elegant yet nationalist
animation Arcadia of My Youth (1982) conjure archetypal or neo-Platonic
notions of objective "flag-ness," rather than merely recording a particular
flag as would a live action camera. In this way, expressionistically
unreal dubbing approaches philosophical truths (not reality)
that are in fact more objective than realism's pretended empiricism.
In his autobiography My Life and My Films, faithful realist
Jean Renoir proclaims, "...if we were living in the 12th century...the
practitioners of dubbing would be burnt in the marketplace for heresy.
Dubbing is equivalent to a belief in the duality of the soul."13
But, as we no longer live in the 12th century, dubbing, like the blue
screen (discussed below), represents not a superstitious belief in the
soul's duality, but a healthy belief in its nonexistence. The multitudes,
deluded into thinking that the cinema is innately and soulfully realistic,
will laugh at atheistic techniques such as dubbing or the blue screen,
perceiving them as sad, incongruously unrealistic comedies. Such is their
faith in the religion of realism!
The television laugh track is currently the most popular (or omnipresent)
type of cognitively discontinuous dubbing. Laugh tracks technologically
produce unreality — the laughter bad jokes cannot realistically
provoke — in the way that musical accompaniment in films, whether
bludgeoning or plaintive, presupposes emotional responses that may or
may not be warranted. In this way, the laugh track is society's greatest
signifier of conformity not only by its form but by what it signifies.
Because, as Henri Bergson insists, laughter is a socio-moral corrective,
and because one's identity is too-easily surrendered to the collective,
conventional morality of group laughter, the laugh track is the perfect
antirealist device to reinforce ideas of what audiences should and should
not consider normative behavior, directing, and, over time, conditioning
the audience's allegiances and scorns by the placement and degree of
mechanical laughter. When there is a canned laugh scheduled every eight
seconds, what ironically becomes "meaningful" are those tender moments
when the laugh track chokes and falls dead, kindly telling us when we
shouldn't laugh (we had forgotten we had a choice in the matter). These
are the 22-minute sitcom's "serious" interludes, usually signified by
fifteen seconds unbroken by a counterfeit laugh. If more than six or
eight lines of dialog transpire without a laugh, we immediately realize
this episode is getting very ambitious. It is thus telling that the
average American sitcom's jokes involve one character mechanistically
insulting another. Formally, the arrival of the insult signifies the
presumption of a laugh-response, while the content reflects the simple
sadisms of American pop culture, the bettering of the self over the
other (here, via insult). If we accept the Bergsonian idea of laughter
as a moral critique of mechanization and dehumanization, the laugh track,
without irony, irrationally tells us the opposite, that humanity is
bettered when it revels in Pavlovian mechanization.
My ironic defense of dubbing, however, does not mean films cannot be
butchered. The experience of cinematic reality necessitates, paradoxically,
the unselfconscious experience of losing oneself — the cropping
on butchered videotapes, however, make this impossible, because one
is continually distracted by the parts of the film itself that have
become literally and quite consciously "lost." Those excruciatingly
squared Shaw Brothers videotapes, for example, do not even pan-and-scan
the original Shawscope frame but cripplingly fix the viewer dead center
as did the stagy, immobile camera of Edison. Amusingly, in the cropped
videotape of Ho Meng-hua's The Flying Guillotine (1974), most
of the film's signature head-severing is itself severed by the cropping,
and as the frame sadistically withholds the satisfaction of our bloodthirst,
we must, in reader-response fashion, imaginatively (re)construct the
arcana missing from the work's bleeding physical ruins. Perversely,
Hong Kong films became popular in the West, I believe, because the poorly
cropped tapes originally available — with often unreadable subtitles
— forced normally lazy viewers to actively work their imaginations
to fill in the missing information on screen, pushing them into the
challenging position of not only creating meaning from the text, but
being constantly and tantalizingly aware of both the fact of their creation
and its inherent limitations.14
In the depressing context of cropping, it is also interesting to note
the trend in TV commercials which parody movie trailers: the movie-trailer
parody will be presented letterboxed, to signify it is supposed to be
"cinematic." It can be nothing other than a crushing irony that one
of the most conspicuous examples of letterboxing on TV is but a sign
that cropping, i.e. the destruction of the integral, has been a normative
experience that can now only be parodied and played upon without fully
redressing the original problem.
Realist Devices Attempt, and Fail, to Penetrate Inner Truths
Integral
to cinematic realism is the mobile camera — we believe the free
will of the camera could, like the swiveling politic of the human eye,
pan in any direction and reveal any part of the world if placed on wheels,
if allowed the same flight enjoyed by a "real" human. This is what Olivier
demonstrated in Henry V (1945), when the doors of the theatrical
first act literally open themselves up to a boundless panorama, the
diegesis of the whole earth and not the altar of the stage. Yet this
realism was rendered unreal again by the camera's multiple subjectivities
and that romantic Technicolor of the 1940's. Black and white films,
from the primeval grains of Edwin S. Porter to the solid brush strokes
of film noir, are, it is said, "expressionistically" unreal. Yet all
the world's color processes until the 1960's were a candied carnival
of iconic colors, hardly an improvement in terms of realism on the pasty
two-strip faces of DeMille's original The Ten Commandments (1923).
The classical theorists of realism, writing in the 1940's or earlier,
sneakily avoid talking about how the phoniness of early Technicolor
utterly failed to improve upon, in terms of realism, the abstractions
of black-and-white. Thus, we can conveniently overlook the unrealistically
pretty, Madame Butterflyish orientalism of the Toll of the Sea
(1923), the first two-strip color feature, the ghoulish purples of Curtiz's
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and the crypto-Bavarian rainbow
spectrum of The Wizard of Oz (1939), which pulled the illusions
of German authoritarianism from behind their velvet curtain, and argued
that we must reject expressionistically colorful fantasy and return
"home" to the uncomplicated "reality" represented by black-and-white
film stock.
Certain cinema techniques are innately unrealistic, such as the blue
screen and zoom lens. No one dares use the blue screen today for the
purpose it once served, to project a street scene behind a stationary,
studio-bound car whose driver's hair miraculously stays glued in position
despite a rear-projected world whizzing by, all in risible violation
of Newtonian principles. Hitchcock, whose use of the blue screen in
Lifeboat (1944) is perhaps the most extensive use of the device
ever, defended this frugal technique, which was ridiculed even in his
era; yet it may be that ninety full minutes of exposure to the illusion,
combined with an overintense acting style that distracts from it, are
required for the technique to take hold. (If you recenter the characters
in the phony lifeboat in the midst of the studio and not the sea, the
effect is heartbreaking.) If in Hitchcock's eyes films were intrinsically
fantastic anyway, why not extend that suspension to the most unrealistic
type of representation, one that pretends a two-dimensional world is
three-dimensional? In this sense, the two-dimensional blue screen is
like the theater screen itself, so if we are willing to believe the
two-dimensionality of the theatrical screen is three-dimensional, we
should also extend that courtesy to the blue screen. Today, this inherently
expressionistic rear projection is used only for Brechtian irony and
mise en abyme avant-gardism (in Syberberg, for example), as it
only calls attention to the cinema's failure to accurately represent
multidimensional reality. But we, fools, cannot even define our own
parameters: when a wigwearing television newscaster pontificates in
front of an oversized photograph of the capitol building — as if
he were live on the spot — we rarely pause to ponder the geographical
expressionism of this living three-dimensional creature artistically
positioned before a two-dimensional representation, and dumbly accept
the image as a convention of "news reality."15
The zoom lens is an exclamation whose function is similar to the music
score. If not merely cinematic punctuation, the zoom symbolizes contemplation
(Robert Altman always does this), an introspection paradoxically made
from without. As the camera calls attention to itself through its zooming,
it is though the camera itself, with self-satisfaction or revelation,
is thinking about the object of its zoom. When the frame zooms in on
someone's face, the intensification of the frame conventionally signifies
the character's intensification of thought, discernable only to the
camera's special insight.16
But because film cannot represent an interior monologue without recourse
to language (the intimately whispered voice-over is a French specialty),
the zoom lens, which strives to puncture interiorities, signifies only
the existence of thought processes without divulging their contents (let
alone providing a moral, expressionistic commentary). In this way, film
can be pretend to signify more than it does, as form conveniently stands
in for content.
PART TWO: ANTIREALISM
AS PARODY
How Non-Events Pretend to Meaning Under the Aegis of Realist Style, or Redressing the Emperor
Refocusing
our discussion of realism, we now turn to cinematic asceticism and minimalism,
which, despite their frequent appeals to transcendentalism in the style
of a Bresson or Ozu, can easily be confused with realism. While there
is good reason to be suspicious of the monastically ascetic minimalism
favored by the Japanese, from Hirokazu Koreeda's Maborosi (1995)
to volleys of sluggish pink films, we now need to pay attention to modes
of hybrid realist-minimalism that haven't even the excuse of Ozu-like
transcendentalism or S/M spiritualism. For now I will focus on French-language
examples, for in the American imagination the superiority of Francophone
cinema is still taken on faith. Minimalist films such as Jean Pierre
and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) — and sometimes just self-impressed
ones, like Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse (1991) — are guilty
of having what I call the "bon mot" ending — that is, an ending
which is the visual or dialogic equivalent of a small cleverness, a
smirking gesture, a pensive glance, even a breeze blowing through a
curtain, all fattened to undeserved, supposedly transcendental meanings
by dint of their placement at the climax of the film.17
A mere wink at the camera is supposed to be a clever profundity, and one
more on the behalf of the filmmakers than their characters.
In the Dardennes' previous pseudo-meaningful award-winner, La Promesse
(1995), the story of a death kept secret is climaxed by the death's
disclosure to the woman to whom it means the most. What is her reaction,
for which we have been agonizingly waiting over an hour? She simply
walks away — roll credits. Profound! The bon mot-ism of a generic,
universal gesture is supposed to cleverly universalize a nonuniversal
story. We may then respond to this ending only in generic ways, and
our experience of this "walking event" also becomes generic. She is
walking away! A bold existential gesture! In this cue-based formula,
a gesture first becomes uneventfulness, then is perceived as vagueness,
then as universalism, and finally profundity. In the manner of the "emperor's
new clothes," awards are won, and judges recognize their own abilities
to recognize cues pretending to meaning. But I, the unfaithful, am not
fooled by a non-event like "walking away." The character is not walking
away from us — she, and the filmmakers, abandon meaning itself.
In the more egregious Rosetta, the Dardennes disingenuously
wed a hegemonically realist style to a content so unrealistic that if
filmed in any other way would never be mistaken for profundity, even
by politically correct film festival judges. This combination of realistic
style and nonrealistic content is not new — Eric Rohmer has built
his career on this. In Rohmer's ever-pleasing Summer (1986),
the improvisatory dialog and direct-sound naturalism rub against the
grain of a content that includes its heroine fatedly discovering mystic
playing cards in her path. Yet while Rohmer subversively interposes
a realist style with fantastic content, Rosetta, conversely,
attempts to covertly transform an unrealistic narrative into "high"
realism by drenching it in the realist style cues afforded by an insistent
hand-held camera and an absence of extradiegetic music. Most offensive
is the film's embarrassingly miscalculated critique of classism: Rosetta
presumes anything dealing with the underclass's trailer-park drudgery
should be praised for its Zola-esque investigative realism, and thinks
its class analysis must be valid simply because its vaguely anticapitalist
theme is laudable, even if its psychology (the ostensible basis for
realism) is entirely unconvincing.
Rosetta's plot accounts for a few weeks in the life of its pariah
title character as she desperately tries to be a conformist and thus
lead a normative (happy) life. Her attempts at normativity include ogling
the waffle-frying job of her only, tenuous male friend and moralistically
reprimanding her boozing, whoring mom. One is leery of the overused
label "pretentious"; luckily, the film is not pretentious but simply
stupid. In the film's unrealistic solution, Rosetta snitches on her
only friend in the hopes that she will usurp his waffle-frying position.
But why would she automatically get his job — is his the only job
in the city? Earlier, Rosetta had hesitated in saving the friend from
drowning because, should he expire, that waffle gig would be all hers.
Is this convincing psychologically? No; to the drastic degree that it
engages the either/or fallacy of absolutely being or not being employed
as a waffle-fryer, it is hyperbolic, overdetermined, and thus allegorical,
yet the directors' whitewashed style and socialist good intentions attempt
to exorcise the difference between content and form, between humanist
naturalism and allegory. In the end of Rosetta, the waffle-frying
friend whom Rosetta betrayed, after mercilessly tormenting her by revving
with machismo his motor scooter in her presence, finally comes to see
Rosetta as the poor victim of capital society she is when she breaks
down crying in her trailer village. She glances up at him, and while
the bulk of his body is offscreen, he places his hand comfortingly on
her shoulder: the bon mot ending! What might be a pleasing scene in
the film's middle is infuriatingly misguided at the end, as we are insultingly
encouraged to extract giant symbolic meanings from trivial actions.
But this is perhaps the inevitable result of a paucity of content trapped
within an excess of style.
Before
we continue, we must pause to discuss the handheld camera, the bread
and butter of the realist cues films such as Rosetta conventionally
engage. Of course, the hand-held, before it became a neurotically conventional
signifier of realism, was long used to represent violence, from Eisenstein's
Battle on the Ice to its use in early Godard or Oshima to allegorize
through insurrectionary technique the anxious political instabilities
new wave movements were attempting to further destabilize. In Oshima's
Cruel Story of Youth (1960), the use of the jittery handheld
is most conspicuous during the political demonstration sequence, an
arguably reductive equation of political and cinematic liberations.
But for our purposes, the handheld camera has come to denote for the
average spectator "realism," the liberation of our subjectivity from
its tripodic shackles and the phony spaces of movie sets alienated from
street reality.18 The
handheld camera liberates us from the monastery of the movie set, and
returns to the subject his motor feet and ability to mingle and experience
the outside, modern world in ways that the closeted monk never can. But
we know too well that the handheld's caffeinated hyperactivity, the style
which records poor Rosetta for minutes on end and in close-up scrambling
like a wounded raccoon from her numerous tormentors, cannot be a realistic
approximation of our walking field of vision.
We should consider the seeming omniscience of the "objective" steadicam,
also a liberation, but one whose Godlike glide appears the opposite
of the handheld's narcotic subjectivity. The steadicam's confident,
unbothered vision — so often used in post-Halloween (1978)
horror films to represent the greater subjectivity of a killer possessing
a Godlike view — is, however, no less realistic than the approximated
and metaphorical chaos of the handheld; in fact, its steadiness may
be slightly more like our biological vision than the handheld's overeager
mobility. This overeagerness also tends to call attention to the fact
that a human being is wielding the camera, and thus to human limitation
itself, especially since the handheld has so long been the sign of the
economically disenfranchised Super-8 filmmaker. Therefore, the handheld
humanizes the camera and the more expensive steadycam dehumanizes it,
but only as a matter of social significations.
These neoprimitive techniques of realism — no music, a handheld
camera, etc. — have, of course, been most recently and notoriously
adopted by the Scandinavian ‘Dogma' collective. The one interesting
thing the Dogmatics have added to the realist-style formula is that
only realistically possible (or probabilistic) events should be filmed.
Therefore, even the kitchen-sink realism of Loach's Family Life
(1971), which holds forth its poverty-level depression as an illuminating
lamp of Truth, would be disqualified for its "novelistic" use of the
voiceover and discontinuous sound. But firstly, for true realism to
transpire, all editing should be disallowed theoretically, for any cutting
will artificially intrude upon the Pythagorean progression of mathematically
linear time. (Jean Rouch's one-take, unedited Railroad of the North,
one of the episodes in the omnibus Six in Paris (1965), attempts
this, yet its gimmickry only reveals that such filmmaking is not viable,
either practically or philosophically.) Secondly, filming what could
happen does not necessarily mean filming what is convincing. For example,
the actions of Rosetta are "possible" and quite within Dogmatic
philosophy, but are in no way convincing to anyone who has a cursory
understanding of sociology or psychology. So we must then catechize:
"If you are serious about humanist realism, shouldn't you abandon naively
neoprimitive aesthetics and study sociology, psychology, biology, physics,
and so forth, to ensure true realism not just in appearance but also
in motivation and causality? Or is realism just what you think could
happen, and if so, wouldn't that destroy your purported disinterested
objectivity? So isn't it really the case that you are only interested
in appearances after all?"
Like
any proper artist, the Dogmatics may take pride in a yellow journalist's
bad review, figuring they are doing something correct (if not subversive)
if they are being chided by the bourgeoisie. But this is the rarest
of all cases: the chides are valid not because they are from the bourgeoisie,
but because the Dogmatics' claims are so obviously wrong that the chides
will come even from the bourgeoisie! As the product of a formulaic manifesto,
Dogmatic films are predictable in their misguided attempt to somehow
subvert decadent bourgeois individualism with a realism that is, in
fact, equally decadent and conventionalized. Do they not see realism
is the most bourgeois mode of all, and that the true evil is the institutionalized
narrativity to which we have faithfully clung since the days of Griffith?
In the grandest of ironies, these Realists do not want the cinema to
be as organically polymorphous and adaptable as are "real," lifelike
organisms, but stubborn, stoic, and dead. There is a certain absurd
nobility to their manifesto that ironically reflects the times: can
you imagine the modernists or Dadaists every thinking that realism
would require a manifesto!
Realism Judged, Disproved, and Rejected by Pseudorealism
Throughout the history of naïve, misleading realism, there has been
a countercurrent of pseudorealism, which has satirized the shortcomings
of this mode we have been conditioned to unquestioningly accept. Yet
so strong has been realism's conviction that it can with a wink and
tooth-hidden grin homogenize its lampooners, rendering all criticism
academic. Realism is too well established to be threatened and, as we
know, the anti-bodies of the culture industry where realism thrives
can absorb any and all threats to its sovereignty.
The silent-era term "actuality" — what we now call "documentary"
because we are too sophisticated to believe in the "actual" — implied
that the uncorrupted reception of film images can somehow magically
leap over the intrusion of the medium itself to invest viewers with
actual experience: the illusion of realism. But even in earliest cinema,
the actuality film was as phony as is present-day reality television.
Documentary footage was regularly faked at least as early as 1899, when
Edison manufactured propagandistic "newsreels" for the Boer War. While
he was shooting a fake Boer newsreel in the mountains of New Jersey,
the premature discharge of a cannon really injured the two star actors,
prompting the British Journal of Photography to remark that the
injuries, captured on film, would invest the sham production with much-needed
realism.19
One
of the first admitted documentary parodies was Chaplin's Kid
Auto Races at Venice (1914). This impromptu, on-the-spot film features
Chaplin's Tramp, engaging in the play-for-its-own sake that is the clown's
forte, intruding uninvited into the frame of the documentarian camera
as it attempts to film a children's auto race, a curio of the time.
The auto race transpiring behind Chaplin is indeed a genuine event,
but the Tramp challenges history as his subversive art repeatedly annoys
the camera's pretense at truthful, documentarian intention. Let's return,
as we all must do, to Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction":
"…the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passerby
to movie extra. In this way any man might find himself part of a work
of art, as witness Vertoff's Three Songs About Lenin or Iven's
Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed.
But the clown is not "any man;" nor would he wish to be either a Vertovian
communist or a film extra. He must intrude upon the camera and destroy
its control over him. Yet the Tramp, ever a symbol of the socio-economically
marginalized, is here literally cut off by the frame's margins when
the camera reprimands him by panning away whenever he attempts to sneak
into its view like a mischievous child waving behind the on-the-spot
newscaster's camera. What is enacted before the camera is at once the
contrived comedy Chaplin performs and a pseudodocument of the actual
event20 into which his
clown has unconsciously wandered. As we would not know how the camera
would behave had he not intruded upon its vision, we also do not know
how the auto race would behave without the camera intruding upon it, and
we realize our perception of the actual event is compromised by the camera's
presence, just as the mere presence of sociologists influences the behaviors
of their human subjects. And then we realize Chaplin is a metaphor for
the camera itself, who clowns with our vision and then tells us it is
truth, as does the licensed, soothsaying Shakespearean fool.
Buñuel, too, subverted verite in his alleged "documentary" Land
Without Bread (1932), which, as Gilberto Perez has noted, uses the
cues of realist filmmaking to subversively mask unrealistic content,
specifically that poor goat whose fall from the cliff could not have
been recorded without some outside "assistance" from the cameraman.
The goat's involuntary death gesture, that mortal extreme which should
be the summit of realism, is rendered suspicious itself, for it is too
coincidental that cameramen would happen upon the animal at the very
moment of its death. The pseudodocumentary's point is to reveal shivering
and bony the self-conscious illusions of the camera such that its lens
does not wink at the audience but is momentarily blinded, bringing it
from a posture of masterful pride to one of blushing humility. If some
slow-witted audiences should ever be fooled into thinking an especially
realistic pseudodocumentary is authentic — some reports claim early
audiences of This is Spinal Tap (1984) were fooled — we
should not blame them or make them objects of ridicule, for they are
objects already. Because the difference between parody and mimesis can
be thin, and because our criterion of parody's value is not merely accuracy
but subtlety, such confusions are but eventualities. The same
logic applies to allegory: if one abides by the law of subtlety, the
cold war politics of William Klein's allegorical satire Mr. Freedom
(1969) are embarrassing; but if one discards subtlety, the film may
be perfect.
McBride's David Holzman's Dairy (1968) is exemplary of antirealism
because it satirizes not only realism's physical techniques, but its
very ideology. The film tells of a filmmaker attempting to achieve reality
by filming it, but quickly realizing Godard's glib claim of "truth-at-24-frames-per-second"
is disastrously wrongheaded. As his obsessive filming, newly acquired
fish-eye lenses, and nocturnal sleuthing do nothing to further his cause
of realizing either nuomenal or Platonic truths, we see that his solipsistic
character's existential distress is that of cinematic technique itself,
forever alienated from the three-dimensional reality that is capable
of making truth claims.
In the pseudodocumentary, the insistently handheld camera mimics the documentary
camera's intrusive prowling. However, the handheld's journalistic inquisition
and guerilla scopophilia — which allegedly stand for the democratic,
public-domain knowledge of the world when it is projected onscreen —
still remain the privately sadistic voyeurism of the original cameraman,
who is as invulnerable behind the camera as the screen is itself. Peter
Watkin's debut Culloden (1964), a made-for-British-TV parody of
the "new" 1960's British realism, provides as effective a critique of
this hypocrisy as we have yet to see. The Battle of Culloden is filmed
in the style of a grainy black-and-white BBC documentary, replete with
a self-righteous, offscreen interviewer time-traveled, with cameraman,
back to 18th century England.21
The film pretends that because the action seems to be recorded by only
a single camera, and not by a safely organized troop of cameramen, we
should ally ourselves with the unprotected edginess of this filmic thrill-seeker,
who sticks his nose into danger on our behalf, to disclose titillating
secrets.22 The interviewer
insensitively questions the doomed Clansmen of Bonnie Prince Charlie,
seen here as the doltish product of legitimated incest, before they
suicidally face Cumberland's forces, which massively outnumber their
own. Whereas the normal British TV interviewer is an Oxfordized twit
who patronizes the lower-classes he interviews, here the interviewer
has not only the advantages of class but the knowledge of history on
his side. Yet, although he surely knows what will be the battle's outcome,
his ethical objectivity makes him impotent to do anything beyond straightforwardly
yet moralistically asking the soldiers how much they own ("this one
has 2 cows"… "this one owns nothing"), as if they were on the British
welfare rolls, as if to shame us viewers two centuries later. As the
camera zooms in on each interviewee, initiating a Q&A between the 20th
century announcer and the inbred response of broken-toothed history,
the cameraman, unlike the meddling cinematographer of Buñuel's Land
Without Bread, stands idly by recording the ensuing carnage without
changing the course of history at all — a good demonstration of
the difference between satire and (Buñuelian) surrealism.
Culloden's overrealist style (which includes moderately strong
violence for 1964) reveals the limitations of what such an investigation
can feasibly do — the documentary's probing objectivity is in fact
worthless and politically impotent. We learn how much are the sad soldier's
salaries, the dimensions of their facial sores and dragoon pistols,
and their clump collision speed converted into the 20th century rhythm
of miles per hour. This incongruity, however, is sentimentally tragic,
not comic, and negates the essential parody of the pseudodocumentary
mode. We have said earlier that musical expressionism occurs when there
is a moral element between the music and image. Culloden, through
its visuals and without recourse to music, now also achieves that level
of expressionism, for the tension existing between the camera and what
it records is invested with a moral element that abruptly reveals the
sentimental truths of history far more than can slavish historical accuracy,
all the while questioning the very medium that brings those truths into
being.
Now let us compare Culloden's "realist humor" to Rosetta's
only successful scene — its one comic scene — wherein Rosetta
is having her first dinner with the male friend she will betray. The
friend, in an awkward attempt at ingratiation, plays for her a tape
of him amateurishly playing the drums with his band. The camera then
records them eating a meager dinner while his tinny music provides bracingly
ridiculous counterpoint; the humor is derived from the "isn't-this-how-real-life-is?"
absurdity we recognize in the scene.23
We are delighted that, for once, Rosetta's style is finally paying
off, and relieved that it is possible for this style to allow the actors
to demonstrate expert timing and, in effect, demonstrate there has been
some plan to what has often appeared arbitrary. Yet as effective as this
single moment is, we must reject its humor, for when we consentingly laugh
we weakly submit ourselves to this unself-critical mode of representation
(whereas Culloden expressionistically challenges its own form).
But because clever pseudodocumentaries such as Zelig (1984)
and Forgotten Silver (1996) pay inherent, if unintentional, homage
to the genuine object they parody, the most stinging attack on realism
will not be a parody of its form or technique, but of a content as uneventful
as Godot. In Fassbinder's Why Has Herr R Run Amok? (1969),
we eavesdrop on the horrifically bureaucratic life of an architect,
who must endure an enervating desk job, browbeating wife, and the mundane
coffee-table chatter of a neighbor who cannot resist sharing her uninteresting
vacations plans in excruciating detail. According to the verisimilitudinous
dictates of handheld realism, the camera must record these banalities
precisely and without embellishment, and in excruciatingly long, unbrokenly
"real" takes that test the patience. We must endure this boredom as
does Herr R; realism is for our own good, the noblest medicine despite
its bitter taste. Likewise, Herr R must endure the uneventfulness of
his bourgeois lifestyle, which also is allegedly a great benefit to
capitalism. So healthy is his lifestyle that near the end of the film's
brief running time Herr R, in the midst of a coffee-table chat, suddenly
murders his wife and neighbor with a middlebrow candlestick for no apparent
reason, and then hangs himself in the bathroom of his workplace. When
a coworker discovers his swinging corpse, the title finally appears
onscreen: "Why Has Herr R Run Amok?" We know why too well — the
only question is why we don't behave thusly ourselves. The "R" of Herr
R is the R of Realism: Realismus Run Amok. As the film equates
realism with the uneventful life of the bourgeoisie and in turn with
death, we see that the bourgeois demands of realism are not as sane
as they appear. Herr R, that is Realism, is craziness itself, the illusions
of the real psychotically unaware of its false consciousness.24
The mystique of uneventfulness can also be defrocked by revealing how
much better things would be if films were eventful. Andy Kaufman's satire
of uneventfulness My Breakfast with Blassie (1983) hides this
thesis by choosing as its parodic model a film many would consider the
most uneventful of all films, Malle's My Dinner with Andre (1981).
Yet that film's endless intellection in fact makes it exhaustingly eventful,
and only those children who have been conditioned to equate eventfulness
with sadistic action and physical movement will miss the point. Kaufman's
shot-on-video-tape parody uses as extradiegetic music the familiar Satie
Gymnopedie that marks Malle's film. When the cheaply recorded,
stupidly "natural" dialog comes to a lull, the beautiful music immediately
enters as a sarcastic exclamation point drawing attention to the dialog's
vapidity, and further revealing that the emptily "hip" realist dialog
more recently promulgated by post-Tarantino indie film directors is
no more eventful than an action scene in which there is no physical
movement.
Takeshi Kitano's A Scene By the Sea (1997) is notable because
the camera's disinterested observation of social networks is far more
sociologically realistic than most mimetic realism ever hopes to be.
The plot — an unpopular surfer slowly attracts followers and imitators
as he simply goes about his business oblivious to the changing public
opinion about him — is so carefully yet unassumingly observed in
its minute detail that its insight into patterns of group socialization
is far ahead of Rosetta's award-winning pseudosociology. When
the insecure, ridiculed surfer suddenly sets a new trend which others
silently follow suit, disinterested yet secretly bemused long shots
record the tacit nature of social coercion perfectly. Indeed, the camera
records everything almost exclusively (and prettily) in long shot; reactions
and responses are traded among characters shyly, awkwardly, with human
attachments developing as tacitly as they do in real life. The microcosmic,
or "sociological," minimalism of Scene is also more "realistic"
in its comedy than the deadpan minimalism of Kitano's yakuza satire
Boiling Point (1990) because, unlike that film, Scene
exists wholly outside of genre. Scene is neither satire nor allegory,
and although its chosen style may be minimalism its avoidance of genre
delivers its minimalism from Rosetta-esque antiphilosophy to
a "real realism," one realistic in its ideas and not its appearances.
And this from a film whose very title allies it with painterly uneventfulness.25
Conclusion: Not that Realism Isn't Real Enough, But That It Isn't Fake
Enough
Most film theorists pick apart the spectator's apparatus for experiencing
pleasure; some contemplate his passive masochism. But in a deadened
age when a film is little more (and often less) than the sum of its
diverse, demographically cunning advertisements, there remains for me
little pleasure left in watching films, an activity that seems less
a perverse masochism than simply a pain without secret pleasures. Realism,
surely, is not the only culprit, yet it is the most oppressive, for
it infects not the children's product we avoid anyway, but the "alternative"
films allegedly above them. We forget that realist aesthetics directly
affect our whole perceptions of the world — the "modernity" of
film even demands that gender must be "realistically" performed, unlike
theatrical traditions that have used transvestism as an integral and
self-reflective part of their artifice. I can be sympathetic to uneventfulness
(nonvitality is a legitimate parts of human experience), and Ferruccio
Busoni insightfully knew that you a judge composer not by his show-stopping
climaxes, which any breast-beating Hollywood hack can toss together,
but by the connective tissue and "filler" that reflects his genuine
personality and unaffected, everyday character. Indeed, in film, you
do need some filler, else you wind up with Oliver Stone and a migraine;
but filler must be as carefully measured as a palette-cleansing sorbet
served before a roasted goose — it must not connive to become
the goose.
Phony realism has always been the province of dictators and propagandists
like Andrei Zhdanov, the Stalinist cultural czar who oddly defined realism
as distinct from "formalism," as if the formalistic demands of realism
itself came to us naturally, without any evilly intellectualized affectations.
I do consent there exists a much-needed and more valuable (if
not more authentic) realism: we desperately need more Frederick Wisemans,
more films like Welfare (1975) and Public Housing (1997)26
— and fewer films like Rosetta. There also are films that
passionately believe in their realism, but have their self-reflective
wits about them, such as William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take
One (1968), a realist film-within-a film that is redeemed when one
of the actors self-criticizingly comments, "Human life is not necessarily
well-written." But this, too, is American realism's way of excusing its
proud illiteracy.
I
also consent that pleasure can be derived from the "there-ness" of realism,
the losing of our egos in the reality of the screen while our superegos
remain safely in theater seats. The opposite happens to Buster Keaton
in Sherlock, Jr. (1924): we realize Keaton's projectionist does
not know how to romance his girlfriend at the film's end because he
left his knowledgeable ego inside the screen and came out as a naked
superego. But when we sacrifice our egos to the cinema, it takes everything
else with it; the artifice of realism may make us lose ourselves, but
to what, exactly, is this sacrifice made?
If the antonym of realism is not fantasy, but disappointment, the solution
is simple. We must, to borrow Nietzsche's term, reevaluate all values,
or to borrow the verbiage of current politics, enact a regime change
in America. To overthrow realism's regime, we need no tanks or cruise
missiles, but only the conviction to not be disappointed.
Notes
1. The Tavernier-narrated version of Workers is available on Kino Video.
2. I oversimplify for effect; for example, the Russian animator-fantasist Starewicz, whose early animations (The Dragonfly and the Ant, 1913) were rooted in silent primitivism, continued to make films well into the sound era.
3. Peter Bogdonavich, interviewing the title person in This is Orson Welles, cites arcane terms once suggested for the new medium of film: "reeltaux," "actorgraph," and "living toned pictures." These suggestions focus fetishistic attention on the aspects of technology ("reel"), performance/technique ("actor"), and realism ("living"), respectively. The "realistic" suggestion, however, is self-contradictory: since the "tones" presumably refer to tinting effects added after the photographic action, the pictures would be curiously both "living" and illustrated.
4. One instrumental exception, perhaps, is the wind machine, which can physically produce wind.
5. With Pacific 231, Honneger claimed his desire was to give only the impression of an abstract, non-programmatic rhythm — but then we may ask why he titled it so and not "Abstract Rhythm for Orchestra."
6. The film's "banana-slipping" slapstick sequences, admittedly, are the film's Achilles' heel, for they revert to the type of musical Mickey-Mousing that the film otherwise overcomes and even, arguably, satirizes.
7. Harrison's character also gives a speech about the night he spent at the movies, one of which (I paraphrase) conventionally questioned the values of matrimony for 8 reels only to conclude its necessity in the 9th. Of course, this is the very pattern that Sturges satirizes.
8. Certainly, sound experiments in the 1900's were too clumsy to be employed on a large scale, though it is widely accepted that early audiences preferred the "pure" image uncorrupted by dialog.
9. See Carl Dahlhaus' Realism in Nineteenth Century Music, page 58.
10. See Josephine Siao's "naturalistic" performance in Always on My Mind (1993).
11. Sometimes Wishman used this angle/reverse angle technique when the original soundtrack was lost; still, this seems consistent with the idea of economic lack.
12. This should be differentiated from the powerlessness the viewer experiences in watching cropped, butchered videotapes, for Wishman's alienation is financially determined and intrinsic to the text, and not the result of distributors tampering with the text after the fact.
13. In his early days Renoir had experimented with nonrealist devices, such as the interminable and entirely decorative use of a woman dancing in slow-motion in his silent short Charleston (1927). Though Renoir would most likely write off Charleston as a youthful indiscretion, we may wonder if slow-motion is a more "acceptable" distortion of the cinematic soul's time-space continuum because it does not have a "dualistic" quality. Perhaps the split-screen is the visual equivalent to dubbing's duality?
14. Since HK film subtitles are poorly translated, viewers must retranslate the subtitles into grammatical English while they are being read, which makes for a second intellectual exercise.
15. Insofar as the news anchor's hairpiece is a ridiculous, unrealistic costume, we may also think it is expressionistic, too, though what it "expresses" is debatable.
16. The zoom-out, like the dolly out, generally signifies a character or thing's alienation or discovery, and seems to be an intensification of the zoom, especially as the viewer is painfully aware that the effect results not merely from an adjustment of the lens but from an entire piece of heavy camera equipment being moved around on tracks.
17. I do not mean to suggest a bigotry against the French or the Belgian, who are indeed our cultural superiors. Yet the French do seem the most guilty of this bon mot-ism. For a non-French example, consider Ringo Lam's Full Alert (1997), a competent policier which ends with the protagonist's anguished face superimposed over ominously-scored ending titles. Although the hero admittedly has some problems, I was unaware that he was experiencing angst deep enough to warrant his face being equated with the lasting testament of the final credits. But because the film is not terrible, I question my own judgment and wonder if the emperor is partially dressed after all. Percy Adlon's Bagdad Café (1988) offers a rare successful example of a bon mot ending, for it summarizes the film by building on its themes rather than fearfully abandoning them.
18. That the hand-held camera has become a cliché of MTV and expressionistic music videos seems only to show that MTV producers need to appropriate the handheld camera's street realism to impress teenage audiences who, assuredly, believe that realism is hip — for realism is all they can understand.
19. See Elizabeth Grottel Strebel's article "Imperialist Iconography of Anglo-Boer War Film Footage," in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1983.
20. The film is thus an early example of filmmakers capitalizing on the appropriated spectacle of a preexisting event. Generally, this is used for the purpose of social verisimilitude, as in the street demonstrations of Wexler's Medium Cool (1969). This is now also manufactured by computers as a second-generation phony verisimilitude, as in Forrest Gump (1994). So comparatively, Kid Auto is still fairly subversive in its spoofing of social realism.
21. Watkins' solemn German telefilm Edvard Munch (1975) uses the same time-travel documentary approach to the historicization of the titular artist's life.
22. A less complicated example of this thrill-seeking subjective camera is Remy Belvaux and Andre Bonzel's derivative Man Bites Dog (1992), which uses blood squibs as the ironically conventional cues of its outlaw verite.
23. When I saw Rosetta in the theater, this comic scene was the only one that met with audience approval precisely because it is the film's only scene that is, if not truthful, at least entertaining.
24. Kaurismaki's apparently similar The Match Factory Girl (1989), a straight-faced comedy about a poor girl who poisons unsuspecting dolts, was admitted by its director to be an attack on Bressonian minimalism. As an attack on minimalism as opposed to realism, it achieves the formal critique of Herr R without that film's antibourgeois politics.
25. In Kitano's Getting Any? (1994), a loser goes on one of the cinema's wildest string of events in order to win a girl with whom to enjoy "car-sex." He becomes a movie actor, a gangster, an invisible man, and eventually a monster who is killed in the tradition of the kaiju-eiga. In other words, the end result of great cinematic eventfulness is nothingness, a death.
26. Yet it is no accident that Wiseman's most socially revealing films are the least distributed.
