Category: Histories of Film Theory

HOFT How Film Theory got lost

Ray. Robert B “How a film Theory got Lost.” How a Film Theory got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 1-14

Ardono defined the history of film theory when he defined cinema as “the crossroads of magic and positivism:? Or a more succinct definition of film theory’s traditional project than to “break the spell” p2

Ray discusses the influence of cinema on the rest of society. That major businesses like Ford and General Motors started to employ cinematic strategy when they realised that enchantment sells. Back to cinema, Eisenstien alligned himself with the artistic principles of pictorialism; the movement that sought to legitimize photography by discusing its images as paintings. While not succumbing to the retrograde qualities he did subscribe to it’s fundamental premise: “that a medium’s aesthetic value is a direct function of its ability to transform the reality serving as its raw material.” p 3 “the artist-critic whose writings create the taste by which his own aesthetic practice is judged.”p3

Cinema afforded the artist editing, and montage enabled the director to manipulate the narrative. “less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality… something must in fact be built up, something artificial posed.” p4 “Eisenstein had a thoroughly linguistic view of filmmaking, with shots amounting to ideograms, which, when artfully combined, could communicate the equivalent of sentences.” p5

Photogenie has an obvious connection to fetishism. “To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to willfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression: these are two properties that help make cinematic decor the adequate expression of modern beauty.”

 

Bazin contested the school of German and Soviet cinema saying that they “had betrayed this sacred purpose by “putting their faith in the image’ instead of in reality, convulsing the camera’s objectivity with abstracting montages and grotesque mise-en-scene”pg 8 “With photography, Bazin kept insisting, an absolutely accurate representation of the world could be produced, for the first time in history, by accident. This miraculous revelatory power made the Soviet or Expressionist imposition of subjective meanings seem a kind of misguided vanity.” p8

Directors like Welles and Wyler relied on long takes and deep focus, they had modestly permitted reality to speak for itself.

 

mise-en-scene “But at the heart of the Cashiers position lay a priviledged term that evoked both photogenie’s ineffability and the Surrealists’ “objective chance”. The term was mise-en-scene”.p9

“For me, mise-en-scene is not merely the gap between what we see and feel on the screen and what we can express in words, but is also the gap between the intention of the director and his effect upon the spectator…” pg9

“this paradigm accomplished wonderful things, above all alerting us to popular culture’s complicities with the most destructive, enslaving, and ignoble myths.”p12

“In the new dispensation, occassional film theorist Fredric Jameson would acknowledge that the appeal of beautiful and exciting storytelling is precisely the problem.” p12

“the most important debates in film theory will turn on the extreme path-dependence Barthes saw constraining the humanities.”

“Can the rational, politically sensitive Eisenstein tradition reunite with the Impressionist-Surrealist interest in photogenie and automatism? Can film theory, in other words, imitate filmmaking and recognize that, at it’s best, the cinema requires, as Thalberg understood, a subtle mixture of logical structure and untraslatable allure? Can film theory revive the Cahiers-Vouvelle Vague experiment, learning to write differently, to stage its research in the form of a spectacle?” p 13

 

 

HOFT Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogene”

Epstein, Jean. “On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie.” French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939. Vol. 1: 1907 – 1029. Ed Richard Abel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. 314-18

“The art of cinema has been called “photogenie” by Louis Delluc. The word is apt, and should be preserved. What is photogenie? I would describe as photogenie any aspect of things, beings or souls whose moral character is enchanced by filmic reproduction. And any aspect not enchanced by filmic reproduction is not photogenie, plays no part in the art of cinema.”314 – Figures given last weeks readings discussing Truffaut and the French New Wave, with Truffaut’s fascination with real people, I think it infers his fascination with capturing realistic moral character in his stories. “I now specify: only mobile aspects of the world, of things and souls, may see their moral value increased by filmic reproduction.”p 315

Epstein goes onto discuss Time as the fourth dimension, the fourth spatial dimension. “The mind travels in time, just as it does in space.” p315 “Photogenie mobility is a mobility in this space-time system, a moblity in both space and time. We can therefore say that photogenie aspect of an object is a consequence of its variations in space-time. ” p316 “To the elements of perspective employed in drawing, the cinema adds a new perspective in time.”p 316

“To things and beings in their most frigid semblance, the cinema thus grants the greatest gift unto death. Life. And it confers this life in its highest guise: personality.” 317

“Personality goes beyond intelligence. Personality is the spirit visible in things and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable, their future already present. Every aspect of the world, elected to life by the cinema, is so elected only on condition that it has a personality of its own. This is the second specification which we can now add to the rules of photogenie. I therefore suggest that we say: only mobile and personal aspects of things, beings, and souls may be photogenic: that is, acquire a higher moral value through filmic reproduction.” 317

 

 

Francois Truffaut: The New Wave’s Ringleader

Neupert, Richard John. “Francois Truffaut: The New Wave’s Ringleader.” A History of the French New Wave Cinema. University of Wisconsin Press 2007, 161-206

Both Truffaut and Goddard were the champions of French New Wave cinema. Each auteur brought their own school of filmmaking within the movement and proved that “they too, could display personal stories and styles that fit within their own calls for a “cinema in first person” p161 in opposition to the cold and calculating “tradition of quality” Truffaut strives for a realism of characters – the vilans are still sympathetic, the actors are allowed to play and react naturally, sound is captured while filming in an uncontrolled way.

Truffaut wasn’t afraid of injecting elements of his personal life into his film in his endeavour to capture life. “Truffaut’s interviews and articles usually stressed the parallels between his artistic output and his personal insight, further fuelling a fascination with Truffaut the individual and making his private life highly pertinent to the critical understanding of his films.” p 162 Truffaut has said of Antoine in The 400 Blows that the character is modelled on his own childhood. The respect with which he treats the character Antoine is something that has secured the films place in history. Truffaut is interested in representing children without condescension. Truffaut would use real people rather than actors within his film and play with the techniques afforded him by technology. “While the film has a very rapid pace by New Wave standards, with an ASL of 7.6 seconds, it nonetheless contains some wonderfully long takes that exploit the camera’s mobility and the deep focus possible with outdoor shooting.” p168

French New Wave was born out of the film critics turned directors and the influence of years of dissecting the films of others and identifying dissatisfaction with the medium is obvious. Truffaut was influenced broadly from the neorealist directors to American Gangster films.

Neupert discusses Truffaut’s stylistic traits:

“These stylistic traits of shooting minimally on location, employing natural acting rhythms, and alternating long takes with short, self-conscious stylistic flourishes will prove typical throughout Truffaut’s career.” 175

“This mix of tones permeates the movie, creating a casual, comic style that defies narrative unity.” 176

“One final story trait that will recur in Truffaut’s oeurve is the goodnatured way he places children at the center of his narratives. As Annette Insdorf notes, Tuffaut’s films “constitute a vision of childhood unequaled in the history of the cinema for sensitivity, humour, poignancy, and respect for children themselves.” p176

“One of the most significant sequences for understanding Truffaut’s distinctive plot and mise-en-scene tactics is the series of shots that make up the day when Antoine and Rene play hooky, ride the rotor, and run across Antoine’s mother kissing the other man. This scene displays Truffaut’s versatility, with sudden shifts in Jean Constantine’s jaunty jazz themes, a mix of camer and editing techniques, and a loose sequencing of shots, often placed end-to-end rather than building classical unity.” p185

“Like a jazz score, the film has it’s own unique structure, and it is not unusual for first-time viewers to be simultaneously impressed and confused by its meandering narrative and ironic tone.” p 198 (shoot the piano player)

“Moreover, by situation this love triangle between 1912 silent film footage and 1930s newsreels of the rise of Nazism, Truffaut connects personal and political history with the cinema, reinforcing his recurring motif of the potential for movies to help the viewer understand his or her own real-world life.” p204

Truffaut was a fan of moral ambiguity in his characters:

“If the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is to obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant and consequently pose a serious problem for a mass medium of entertainment” p202

“It was precisely the brazen amorality of Moreau’s Catherine, reinforced by the passive acquiescence of the men, that triggered initial thematic discussions of Truffaut’s film.” p202

 

HOFT Readings WK 1 Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or the Sea, Antoine, the Sea…

Conomos, John. “Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or the Sea, Antoine, the Sea…” Senses of Cinema 6 (May 2000), http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/6/francois-truffaut/blows/ (accessed Feb 26 2013)

“I still retain from my childhood a great anxiety, and the movies are bound up with an anxiety, with an idea of something clandestine.” – Francois Truffaut

The 400 Blows was Truffaut’s debut feature film, was previewed out of competition on May 4th, 1959 at the Cannes Film Festival. Truffaut got his start as one of the critics of Cashiers du Cinema.

“Truffaut, amongst his peers inclduing Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, Rozier, Demy and Rohmer, regarded the screenplay as the essentail stage of filmmaking.”

Maybe the natural progression out of the silent film era to realise the potential of scripting in film.

The French New wave introduced the world the the auteur. “The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen.” Introducing art and real life into the world of cinema. Truffaut and his contemporaries were the first to explore the “mundane” life of the every man, exposing the beauty in life as it is, rather than as it is imagined. “A cinema that speaks of ordinary experiences and situations, fragile individuals, daily recognisable language and emotions where the director displays a non-superior relationship to his characters.”

“Truffaut forged a highly personal cinema that owed a lot also to Bazin’s spatial realism and is crucially sympathetic to the fluid and ambiguous realit of the portrayed characters, their beauty, sadness, desire, timidity and loss. Consequently, French New Wave films value a cinema that does not follow in the steps of an “old cinema”, but instead features the human sensibility of the director-writer creating an art that is noted for its spontaneity, improvisation and obsessions.”

My experience of French New Wave is quite limited but this makes me think of Goddard’s Vivre sa vie in Intro to Cinema studies where it struck me that rather than capturing the extaordinary events in his characters lives, Goddard was instead depicting the every day in between these defining events, which was such a departure to everything else i’ve seen. To have auteurs preoccupied with representing life as it is and seeing the beauty in that is really refreshing to see on screen, even today. I think it also speaks to the evolution of storytelling since, where indie films and more and more mainstream films are giving us characters we can relate to more and more… maybe i’m just starting to bullshit now. Anyway I want to watch more French New Wave to appreciate it more. Particularly Breathless and would love to watch Vivre Sa Vie again.

“The 400 Blows, along with Les Mistons (1975), The Wild Child (1969 and Small Change (1969) represent one of the most tender and loving depictions of childhood in cinema. Truffaut’s characteristic sensitive and non-sentimental view of his children characters denotes a respect for children living in a difficult world made by adults.” – apparently Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1947) influenced Truffaut and significantly informs Truggaut’s hypnotically moving debut feature.

“As Antoine flees, we hear his feet running along the country road: the sound has a hypnotic rhythym which expresses Antoine’s sensuous delight in being free, a freedom rooted in the everydayness of his life and its simple pleasures. As Antoine descends a set of steps onto the beach we are already on the beach savouring the enchantment Antoine experiences as he rushes towards the sea. In the sea, Antoine’s footsteps are erased suggesting a new beginning of selfaffirmation. And when Antoine turns towards us, Truffaut’s camera zooms in an d freezes his face, forcing us to contemplate the lyrical dialectic and its paradoxical tension between the still of his face and the kinetic nature of the film medium itself, and forcing us, as Douchet suggests, to react morally concerning Antoine and his own world. This impulse of Truffaut’s to capture and animate as his camera consummately freezes or tracks his characters recalls, as Annette Insdorg points out, the unmistakable texture of the romantic poet John Keats.”

 

Truffaut’s passionate beliefe that cinema “is an indirect art… it conceals as much as it reveals.”

 

Readings: The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

Bazin, Andre. 1997, The evolution of the language of cinema, Defining cinema, Lehman, Peter (ed). p 59-72, London: Athlone Press

This article explores the evolution of cinema, editing techniques, namely montage vs deep focus long shots through the transition of silent cinema into talkies. Bazin indicates that rather than being viewed as cinematic values operating in direct opposition to each other, we view the two as different concepts of cinematographic expression that are free to employ stylistic influence but are ultimately different “families of styles”.

Bazin highlights two opposing trends within cinema of the 192os-40s. That being the directors who’s artistic influence is felt through the “image” versus those who capture reality and inflict their influence through the editing process and the effects allowed by montage.

Bazin defines the school of IMAGE as “everything that the representation on the screen adds to the object there represented.” where as the school of REALITY directors relate to the “resources of montage, which after all, is simply the ordering of images in time.” pp 60.

Bazin argues that it was “montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.” pp60

Three processes of Montage:

Parallel montage – conveying a sense of the simultaneity of two actions.

Accelerated montage – depicting change in pace/time – accelerating speed by a multiplicity of shots of ever-decreasing length.

Montage by attraction – reenforcing the meaning of one image by association with another image not necessarily part of the same episode. “Montage as used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not show us the event, it alluded to it.” pp 61

Bazin suggests that “expressionism of montage and image constitute the essence of cinema.” However notes that several directors of the silent era refute this by engaging in no way with montage, and in fact the strength of their work in fact relies on its absence.

“We would undoubtedly find scattered among the works of others elements of nonexpressionistic cinema in which montage plays no part – even including Griffith. But these examples suffice to reveal, at the very heart of the silent film, a cinematographic art the very opposite of that which has been identified as cinema par excellence,  a language the semantic and syntactical unit of which is in no sense the Shot; in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it.” pp. 62

Bazin explores the cinematic language that emerged between 1930 – 1940, largely driven by the american hollywood system which consisted of major film types:

1. The American comedy

2. The burlesque film

3. The dance and vaudeville film

4. The crime and gangster film

5. psychological and social dramas

6. Horror or fantasy films

7. The Western

Then Bazin comments that the real driver of cinematic language’s development came in the 1940s-1950s when new blood and new themes were explored; that “the real revolution took place more on the level of subject matter than of style.” pp63

The three contributing factors to the classical perfection were 1. the maturing of different kinds of drama, 2. the drama inherited from the silent film and 3. the stabilization of technical progress.

THE EVOLUTION OF EDITING SINCE THE ADVENT OF SOUND

From the era of Image vs Reality came the artifice of montage “expressionist” and “symbolistic”, in the modern era we can describe the new kind of storytelling as “analytic” and “dramatic”.

In the era of image vs reality “the changes of point of view provided by the camera would add nothing. They would present the reality a little more forcefully.” pp 65

When moving forward into the modern era Bazin explores directors like Orson Wells in particular and the influence of Citizen Kane on bringing to life the method of single take, deep focus shots. “whole scenes are covered in one take, the camera remaining motionless. Dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on montage were created out of the movements of the actors within a fixed framework.” pp66

“The soft focus of the background confirms therefore the effect of montage, that is to say, while it is of the essence of the storytelling, it is only an accessory of the style of the photography.” pp 66

Welles’ composition in depth is partially a replacement of montage…”It is based on a respect for the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, of its duration.” pp67

Rather than viewing the lack of edit points as an element of cinema missing, Bazin argues that Welles’ long shots “[refuse] to break up the action, to analyse the dramatic field in time” pp67 which is a positive action.

AFFECTING THE RELATIONSHIPS OF THE MINDS OF THE SPECTATORS TO THE IMAGE

1. Depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.

2. It implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.

3. in analyzing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. – montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of expression.

Quotes:

“Through the contents of the image and the resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator.” pp61

“The framing in the 1910 film is intended, for all intents and purposes, as a substitute for the missing fourth wall of the theatrical stage… [whereas the cinema of Welles or Wyler] the setting, the lighting, and the camera angles give an entirely different reading. Between them, director and cameraman have converted the screen into a dramatic checkerboard, planned down to the last detail.” pp67

“What we are saying then is that the sequence of shots “in depth” of the contemporary director does not exclude the use of montage – how could he, without reverting to a primitive babbling? – he makes it an integral part of his “plastic.” pp67

“This is why depth of field is not just a stock in trade of the cameraman… it is a capital gain in the field of direction – a dialectical step forward in the history of film language.” pp67

“neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality” pp69

“The sound film nevertheless did preserve the essentials of montage, namely, discontinuous description and the dramatic analysis of action. What it turned its back on was metaphor and symbol in exchange for the illusion of objective presentation.”pg70

“it draws from it the secret of the regeneration of realism in storytelling and thus of becoming capable once more of bringing together real time, in which things exist, along with the duration of the action, for which classical editing had insidiously substituted mental and abstract time.” pp70

“In other words, in the silent days, montage evoked what the director wanted to say; in the editing of the 1938, it described it. Today we can say that at last the director writes in film.” pg 71