A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

In one interview I read around the time of release of The White Ribbon Michael Haneke said, "Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms." After watching A Dangerous Method this quote came to mind. The film's highly classic style gave it this incredibly strange aura. More than the plot and Keira Knightley's hysteria (although her wonderful bodily contortions were one of the best performances of 2011), the form was what made this film uncanny. The plot and structure of the film, the way it sometimes it becomes a series of letters back and forth or the way it is part chronicle of Freud and Jung's crucial meetings with themselves and Sabina/part scandal story with the mistress plot/part chronicle of an artists or scientist struggles, doubts, processes, etc, all make it an incredibly bizarre plot to begin with. The classical compositions that recall Wyler or Welles with big heads looming in the foreground and other subjects in the background and overall visual style (think of the scene in the boat, does that look like any other film of 2011?) is what sets it over the top, in a good way. Another way that the film feels classical is with its craftsmanship, not only in the mise-en-scene and framing, but everything from editing to sound; reminiscent of the studio days when craftsmen could build incredibly well made films. Its endless conversations and insights into the nature of desire and its relationship with the individual and society, as well as those bodily contortions mentioned earlier, made it clearly a Cronenberg film. Also - Vincent Cassel delivers a perfect performance as Otto Gross, even though he is barely in the film, his name is well deserved in the trailer/poster.

Excerpt from "Filming Dangerously: An Interview with David Cronenberg", from Cineaste Vol. XXXVII No. 1:

(Answering a question about the film's visual style)

"In a way, it's very classical. As I say ad nauseam, I let the movie tell me what it needs and what it wants. And, in this case, thinking of the society of the time-everything was rigoursouly controlled and everyone in the empire knew his place; you had those stiff collars-I thought that a very classical style would deliver the tone of the period."

The Runner (Amir Naderi, 1985)

part of my MUBI 2012 World Cup coverage

- neorealist esque

- one of the best child performances

- survival, never giving up

- screaming

Eleventh Year (Dziga Vertov, 1928)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant utilizes different stylistic techniques to represent women. The film is almost fully composed of static compositions. These compositions constantly remind us of Petra’s entrapment. They not only signify Petra’s physical isolation in her apartment, the only location of the film, but also her entrapment as a woman in a male dominated society. The overt uses of bars of shadows cast on Petra also function for this same reason. Fassbinder also uses his mise-en-scène to flesh out some of his themes, specifically with the reproduction painting of Poussin’s Midas and Dionysus that covers the frame throughout much of the film. The painting, as Lynne Kirby points out (in his brilliant essay "Fassbinder's Debt to Poussin"), “acts as a constant source of actions, positions, and behaviors on the part of the actors, offering an array of postures and relations of power mimicked by Petra, Karin and other characters." The painting also introduces a male into the all female world of the film, foreshadowing the patriarchy that will ruin Petra and Karin’s relationship. The film employs a highly formalist style, that is counterbalanced by a number of mysterious elements. John and Ann White (in their essay "Marlene’s Pistol and Brady’s Rule: Elements of Mystification and Indeterminacy in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Film Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant") claim that the film constantly pushes realism “in the direction of the rationally inexplicable and deliberate mystification." The Bitter Tears also places high importance on the costumes (especially since Petra is a fashion designer). As Kirby (same article) points out the film uses fashion and style as a way to bring forth the claim that fashion works to “produce woman as a particular historical figure of male desire." Fashion is also one of the manners in which Fassbinder discloses the historical specificity of the film. All the costumes in the film, from “Sidonie’s flapper dresses” to “Mama’s Nazi-era mannish suit,” reference the historical period of the rise of Fascism in Germany, as well as the relation between Fascism and fashion. Similarly to Fascism, fashion works as mass conformity creating “social-sexual uniforms." Although the film cannot be read as strictly set in Fascist times because the records Petra plays are from the 1950s and 1960s, the Fascist allusion should not be ignored. Fassbinder uses this ambiguous historical setting as a way of expanding specific themes he wanted to explore. He utilizes the costumes to recall Fascist politics and Petra’s similarities with them, but he also uses the music in a similar sense. The soundtrack works to conjure a sense that even if Petra, in many ways, acts as a Fascist she also wants to escape this Fascist world and enter the more progressive world of The Platters and The Walker Brothers. Fassbinder is not interested in just fascism but grander themes represented in fascism but that also apply to societies before and after fascism. In doing so Fassbinder complicates the relationships between past and present, hinting at the old and common saying “history repeats itself.”

back to the roots

the dream machine

lighting

editing

the essence of cinema

visibility for the cinematograph (light)

differentiation from theater (edit)

the dream machine/audience perception (sleep)

Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997)

The word Hitchcockian gets thrown around more often these days than his films most likely get seen. So, every time I see that word come up in a review I don't attach too much importance to it, and as I watch the film I try to see if there really is any connection to the films of Hitchcock. So as I watched the supposedly Hitchcockian thriller Breakdown, I kept this in mind. While I'm not a fan of the word or its overuse, there was one scene in Breakdown that clearly brought to mind Hitchcock, particularly Strangers on a Train. Both films have extremely tense endings; where the tension comes from the cinematic ability to extend time and events. How long before the Carousel tears into pieces? How long before the 18-wheeler falls to oblivion? Both of these events are rendered longer and more suspenseful by adding the sense that at any moment the place where the good guy is fighting the bad guy is going to be destroyed and the actual fight does not matter because everyone will be dead.

The fight:

The tension:

(the old man is the only who can save the carousel from spiraling out of control)

(this small piece of metal is the only thing keeping the 18-wheeler from falling from a bridge)

Notes on Genre & Semiotics

- MINELLI: genre/”auteur”. Flamboyant style, “oscar wilde of Hollywood,” combines high fashion and art with pop genre. Design à painting, implementing into Hollywood. Flamboyant color, camera (cranes, pans instead of shot/reverse shot). Acting style is like a mannequin (back to soviet notion of actors as objects). Collision of high and low culture. Structural oppositions in Gigi: youth/age, male/female. Gigi wanter her individualism through marriage (reinforces the musical and heterosexual marriage though the setting (France) makes it seem like she is being a rebel and individual).

“Thank heaven for generic structures” (Baudry)

- Raymond BELLOUR: looking for repetition/rhyming. Segmenting/Analyzing, strict structural analysis. Micro-segments, “scenes”, macro-scenes all reiterate the same themes. Hollywood as a controlling/unifying machine. BAUDRY: genres are about resolutions. Astaire à freedom vs society (stasis), Gene Kelly à Utopia. What does Gigi and Gaston marriage symbolize at the end? Marriage conquers all (with a wink, Honore).

Roland Barthes and Semiotics

- Semiotics: where does meaning come from? Tools of structural analysis: binary oppositions (we make sense out of the world by comparing and contrasting). Masculine vs feminine. Syntagmatic structures (a + b + c) ßà horizontal (word-word rules) vs paradigmatic structures, which are vertical, (elements to be substituted). Language and mind come in 2 axis (vertical and horizontal) à shot/reverse shot, Kuleshov effect and eyeline matching. The grammar of cinema: semicolon, commas, periods à what are their cinematic equivalents and their meaning? BARTHES and the rhetoric of the image. Barthes finds 3 messages in the Panzini ad. 1) Linguistic: based on the language codes, à “Panzini” and sense of “Italianicity,” language codes anchor the image, “fixing the floating signifieds,” thus linguistic structure has a REPRESSIVE function, Barthes suspicion about its inscribed function opens door for reading against the grain… finding what the image is trying NOT to have us think. 2) DENOTED IMAGE – the photograph is a message without a code (vs. painting) and no apprenticeship needed and allows the myth of naturalness = easy recognition of image’s referents (bag, the cans, tomatoes…) 3) Connotations (coded and uncoded iconic meaning) = Rhetorical function to test the symbolic/cultural meaning. Different sorts of knowledge: national, cultural, practical. Barthes: any complex communicating cluster of codes can constitute as text: Panzini ad, novel/poem, song, film. Text implies that there are multiple semiotic systems at work, “competing voices/structure/systems” What are cinematic codes/signs? Long shot vs close-up, hand-held vs crane. We as viewer/spectator/critic should go into films or any other text and see the various codes/signs and what they imply. SEMIOTICS IS EVERYWHERE. Semioticians will praise films that punch holes in Classicism, call attention to different semiotic systems, camerawork, editing, etc. Even simple scenes are complicated for semioticians, for example: the Panzini ad.