Visual Poems in Gance's J'accuse

Watching films like this one truly feels as if sound really did take something away from the cinema. Out of the endless technical and visual feats accomplished in the film, Gance's visual poems still seem like quite a bold, brilliant and purely cinematic choice. When the main protagonist and poet Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) is about to tell one of his poems to his mother, a cut that is expected to lead to an intertitle of the actual poem actually leads to a series of beautifully composed shots that evoke a poem. A visual equivalent to written poetry. By doing this Gance is equating the cinema (an art that, especially in 1919, no one took seriously, it wasn't even really considered an art back then) with poetry (perhaps the most esteemed of the arts).

Jean begins to recite Ode to the Sun to this mother:

followed by:

There's a few of these throughout the film. Completely stunning. Watched this in anticipation of Napoleon on April 1.

Silent Sounds via Hitchcock

Full post via Film Studies for Free here

SEMIOLOGY/PSYCHOANALYSIS/MARNIE

Notes: 2nd semiology – enter Psychoanalysis – Freud → Lacan “Jacques the lack.” Edgar Morin (precursor) *infantile regression *plato’s cave (restrictive space) *neuroses * projection/identification. Prior to this shift psychoanalysis focus on characters or directors, now on spectatorship and the cinematic apparatus. Cinematic apparatus as dream like, functions (ideology), absence, how it positions us, looking. LACAN: the unconscious works as a language system. Mirror stage: identification, how do you build/construct yourself vs the other? During this stage you recognize yourself as different from the world, your own subjectiveness. *spectator as subject, *what makes us alive is desire, *object of desire, *part of the pleasure of desire is that it cannot be satisfied (frustration) * Place, positioned by the cinematic apparatus. *as we learn language we realize we are subjects. The cinematic apparatus as a machine to regulate desire. 1st look of the camera, 2nd look of the spectator and 3rd look of the characters (positioned by the camera). Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964): Mark uses Marnie to fill his lack, Mark’s fetish object is the jaguar, Mark doesn’t marry the sister-in-law because he’s a hunter and with her there’s no hunt since she likes him. Because momma doesn’t love her she ahs to keep buying her things, by stealing, to try and make her love her. The mother has the other daughter has her fetish object, Marnie her horse, Mark the jaguar and Lily has Mark.

Lillian Gish

yes you are Lillian, yes you are

Poto and Cabengo (Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1980)

An ingenious study, almost deconstruction, of language

"What are they saying?"

"What are they saying!?

An exploration of being a foreigner, an outsider

A critique of journalism/society

Gorin, America

The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

Note: As I watched the man in the center of the frame sitting down (right under Emil Jannings), perfect his mustache in order to portray a solider as an extra I started wondering. How it worked. How would this extra direct his performance? Does he have to do anything at all? Or is he simply a part of the mass? What sort of decisions does on extra make; how does he prepare for a 'role'? In this context everything gets even more complicated by the fact that it is an extra playing an extra. How does an extra prepare to play an extra?

NAPOLEON

via MUBI

"After the first screening of the restored Napoleon, Abel Gance’s beleagured 1927 masterwork, at the Empire Leicester Square, London, on November 30th, 1980, the director of the British Film Institute Anthony Smith was quoted as saying “After Sunday the world will be divided into those who have seen Napoleon and those who haven’t.” The world of the haves over the have-nots expanded to the US the following year when Francis Ford Coppola famously brought Napoleon to Radio City Music Hall to be performed with his father’s score, but in the intervening three decades the film has not been seen again in the US. Come March 24th, however, thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the world will once again be divided between those who have and those who haven’t when the film returns to the US for four screenings of Kevin Brownlow’s complete restoration—accompanied by Carl Davis’s score and a full orchestra—in Oakland’s extravagant Art Deco movie palace the Paramount Theatre, which, like Napoleon itself, has to be seen to be believed."

The anticipation keeps building up! Less than a month away before I become one of the haves.