All posts by NotesonFilm1

About NotesonFilm1

Spanish Canadian working in the UK. Former film journalist. Lecturer in Film Studies. Podcast with Michael Glass on cinema at https://eavesdroppingatthemovies.com/ and also a series of conversations with artists and intellectuals on their work at https://josearroyoinconversationwith.com/

The Beaches of Agnes: A Video Essay by Meg Russell

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The Beaches of Agnes – Cinécriture; memory and film – A Video Essay by Meg Russell

 

My video essay is concerned with auteur Agnes Varda and her documentary practices, constructed around the research question ‘How does Agnes Varda utilise Cinécriture to navigate the themes of memory and film in The Beaches of Agnes?’ I am interested in the aesthetic style of Varda’s filmography, specifically her documentary, and the ways that she injects charm and intimacy into her filmic portrait. The term coined by Varda herself can be defined as followed:

 

Cinécriture; (cinema-writing), meaning every aspect in her movies is included with meaning or message, something commonly used today in film.

 

Though commonly found in the film, Varda employs cinécriture in the picture by informing each image with her charming presence. This essay explores the many different conventions, both aesthetic and narrative-based, that Varda takes on to permeate the film with her enchanting charm. My essay illustrates examples of cinécriture from the film The Beaches of Agnes (2008) that translate Varda’s whimsical recollective style of memory and cinema.

 

The film opens on the Belgium beaches of her childhood as Varda begins to set up her life story that she is now ready to share, delving into the significance of the landscapes of her memories. Varda’s identity is key to her examinations of each memory, refusing to ever acknowledge the external critical labels that audiences continue to attach to her and her films. Varda is determined to tell her own story and define her own life. Delphine Benezet writes on the film; ‘What I find particularly interesting in Les Plages d’Agnès is that Varda presents her own identity as determined by the ever-shifting relationships that she has had with the beaches of her life. The philosopher Frank Kausch rightly calls it a ‘portrait en creux’ and foregrounds the elements that are in contact with and transforming Varda’s identity.’ (2014:94)

 

Varda tells her own story through these memories that she shares with us, showcasing significant people that she has met throughout her life but Varda ensures that she is the narrator of her story. It is evident that she dictates the retelling of her story with the same determined persona that aided her to elevate her artistic career that she explores later in the film. Despite Varda’s chatty and amiable storytelling of family, love, and traveling her independent and resolute role remains clear throughout.

 

Though her focus is on her own personal memories, she never fails to include her favorite subject, people. We are invited to see the world through Varda’s point of view who has an adoration for humanity and the community that she met throughout her life. As Kelley Conway has noted ‘Regardless of whether Varda draws upon the travelogue or the road film, her films continue to emphasize the specificity of “place” and to introduce an array of intriguing and often marginalized people. They also continue to offer a productive tension between a central organizational structure and elements of playful digression.’ (2015:109)

 

However, through Varda’s sustain of informative and reflective narrations, she does not prioritise a conventional sentimentality that attempts to define subjects by their personal lives and defiant struggles which can be found in many other examples of biography. My essay explores how instead, she navigates the juncture of her personal memories and her career, illustrating the ways that art and film have been her core drive in almost every aspect of her life. These stories of love and travel stem from her career as a photographer turned filmmaker who carved out her place as the ‘sister’ of the French New Wave in the 1960’s. Varda’s place as auteur and artist is explored through reflections on her many films, dissecting her development from creating her first film to where she found herself at the time of creating The Beaches of Agnes. Varda gleans memories of success like Vagabond (1985) and Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) to passion projects like Jacquot de Nantes (1991). Varda modestly strolls through her successes, acknowledging the significance of collaborators and community in her accomplishments.

 

My essay is interested in the ways that Varda illustrates these two areas of her life and the ways that she fragments memory and art. The colourful scrapbooks style of her cinema-writing injects the quirky persona that Varda is culturally known for, but this never detracts from the significance of her subjects, honouring each person involved in the memories that she handles. Though we get limited screen time with many different people from her life, Varda ensures each discussion and story that she shares that involves her friends and family are given the care that it deserves. As Claudia Gorbman has written, “The answer is clear: Varda remains the total master of her work and enjoys her cat-and- mouse game with each of us, in our relation with both Agnès the character and Varda, the elusive, always inventive author.” (2010)

 

The Beaches of Agnes is a mosaic of Varda’s memories that she carefully constructs through her cinema-writing. The success of the film comes from this distinctive, charming style and the presence of the auteur herself, who celebrates her own life and art, reflecting on her cinematic history and the communities she met along the way. Though she rejects the conventional closure of documentary, Varda tells her full story in this abundant cinematic pilgrimage of memory and cinema. The film is a bricolage-laden dedication to her memories, identity, and films. This is explored in my video essay which showcases Varda’s talent to force her audience to take an interest in all that she expresses. My essay hopes to explore the ways that Varda garners her memories in her love letter to life and art, memory and home. “Cinema is my home. I have always lived in it.” – Agnes Varda, 2008.

 

The film itself provides such a rich basis for research material and textual analysis, but due to complications from the current pandemic, I had little access to her other works and found a lack of research texts and sources that explore Varda’s cinécriture and documentary work. Her dramas have an abundant critical pool that explores her beginnings as a director, yet Varda herself seems the key source of discussions surrounding her cinematic career and artistic developments.

 

The Beaches of Agnes itself provides a rare, intimate view into the world of Agnes Varda, richer than any external critical works. To hear the auteur, recount her own life alongside her beautifully crafted cinema writing is a joy that is rarely found in other documentaries of its kind.

 

 

 

Song Used – Mozart clarinet quintet in A, K 581.

 

 

 

Bibliography

BARNET, M.-C. (2016). Agnès Varda unlimited image, music, media. Cambridge: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association.

BÉNÉZET, D. (2014). The cinema of Agnes Varda: resistance and eclecticism. London, Wallflower Press.

DEROO, R. J. (2018). Agnès Varda between film, photography, and art. University of California Press.

GORBMAN, C. (2010) Place and Play in Agnes Varda’s Cinecriture. http://archive.pov.org/ beachesofagnes/places-and-play/ .

JACKSON, E. (2010). The eyes of Agnès Varda: portraiture, cinécriture and the filmic ethnographic eye. Feminist Review. 96, 122-126.

KELLEY CONWAY. (2015). Agnès Varda. University of Illinois Press

MCNEIL, I. (2010) Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era. Edin- burgh University Press.

SMITH, A. (1998). Agnès Varda. Manchester, Manchester University. Press.

TORLASCO, D. (2011). Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnes Varda. Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. 33, 390-408.

 

Filmography

AGNES VARDA WOMEN IN FILM (9th September 2016) YouTube video added by TIFF Originals. [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF-eX4Zwk3Q [29th January 2021].

Black Panthers. (1968) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Daguerréotypes. (1976) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Faces Places. (2017) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Jacquot de Nantes. (1991) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Jane B. for Agnes V. (1988) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

La Pointe Courte. (1955) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Le Bonheur. (1965) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Parc Films.

Murals Murals. (1981) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. (1977) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

The Beaches of Agnes. (2008) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

The Creatures. (1966) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Parc Films.

The Gleaners and I. (2000) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Uncle Yanco. (1967) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Vagabond. (1985) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

Varda by Agnes. (2019) Directed by Agnes Varda. France. Ciné Tamaris.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 283 – Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

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Ethics and truth in the land of documentary come under the microscope in our discussion of Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s love letter to his childhood friend, Andrew Bagby, is a sensational and moving film that you should know as little as possible about before watching. It’s exceptionally effective, built out of a combination of interviews, home footage, still photos and more, masterfully edited to generate emotional affect – but despite its qualities, there are real issues fundamental to its form. It’s a hybrid of two types of film that find themselves in competition here: it’s a documentary, a form about openness and truth; and a thriller, withholding information until it reshapes everything you’ve learned so far. It’s a tension that may well be impossible to avoid – to resolve it might be to totally change Dear Zachary from the deeply personal, passionately made film it is.

The story Dear Zachary tells is powerful, moving and utterly gripping, and the conversation to which it will lead you is rich and illuminating. We recommend it without reservation, even though we have serious reservations about it.

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

‘Drowning in Spilled Beans: The Method Behind the Madness in The Lighthouse’ — A Video Essay by Joel Hatton

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Drowning in Spilled Beans: The Method Behind the Madness in The Lighthouse

 

Immediately after my initial viewing of The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019), I was certain it was going to enter the catalogue of my personal favourite films. However, while some of the merits of the film are immediately obvious, specifically the sensational performances and stunning cinematography, it was a decidedly difficult task to discern how the film was able to instil such a deep feeling of fear and dread. The narrative follows a character going mad, but the mere depiction of insanity is not altogether unusual. There is a multitude of films that deal with the topic of madness, but few of them can replicate the creeping unease Eggers creates in the world of The Lighthouse. Upon delving through the footage, it quickly becomes apparent that the film’s strength as a psychological character study lies not just in what it shows, but rather how it shows it.

A film that quickly became a key point for comparison was The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). The similarities between the two films are numerous and well documented – from thematic narrative links (such as the common idea of madness emanating from isolation) to visual links (such as the image of someone running away from an axe wielding maniac). However, a link less touched upon is the unusual use of form to convey madness. The Shining provides one of the most famous examples of the 180-degree rule being broken, during the interaction between the protagonist and a spectral waiter. The invisible plane in a scene that the camera never crosses is a rule adhered to by the overwhelming majority of modern films, and thus the breaking of it has to be considered both intentional and significant. In this scene it serves the function of disorienting the audience, the unusual and unexpected angle clearly conveying to the audience that something is amiss. Even if an audience member is not consciously aware of the rule, the idea is so deeply ingrained in standard editing and cinematography that the breaking of it will have a subconscious effect. While this idea is not directly replicated in The Lighthouse, there are multiple occasions where Eggers seems to toy with our assumptions regarding film editing and structure to create a similar effect.

The essay divides its points into two main categories; those related to the overall visual style of the film and those that are related to the use of perspective, both visually and narratively, with both sections touching upon the idea of subverting traditional cinematic conventions (based on a mixture of personal observations and the idea of continuity editing outlined by David Bordwell) in order to make the audience feel disconcerted. The first section was a critical inclusion simply because the visual style of The Lighthouse is so remarkably striking. The bold choice to shoot in monochrome as well as a seldom used 1.19:1 aspect ratio dominates the aesthetic experience of the film.

Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) became a key point for comparison in this regard due to being another recent film that is shot in black and white while utilising an unconventional aspect ratio (4:3). In Bait, it seems clear that this was to cement the idea of time in the film’s presentation since the narrative heavily focuses on the conflict between modernity and tradition. It would be easy to come to a similar conclusion for The Lighthouse, since implementing unusual techniques in order to establish a historical setting is clearly something Eggers is not opposed to, based on his use of accurate historical dialogue in both of his feature films. He frequently uses primary historical sources in order to craft authentic dialogue, such as the diary of Cotton Mather (a key figure in the Salem witch trials) for The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) and old nautical dictionaries for The Lighthouse.

Despite these compelling reasons for labelling the incorporation of these choices as an effort to accentuate the setting, there is reason to believe they serve another purpose by revealing details on Winslow’s feelings and state of mind. Firstly, there is the ambiguity brought on by the lack of colour and the claustrophobia aroused by the narrow frame, both of which serve as visual manifestations of Winslow’s mental struggle. Secondly, the fact the frame differs from the norm means it works to play with our assumptions, since we are used to having a much wider field of view. In The Lighthouse, this area of the frame is still vital in communicating meaning, precisely because we are accustomed to it being utilised. It is not empty space, but rather hidden space, an area that we would usually expect to be visible completely concealed by impenetrable black walls.

The second section focuses on perspective, namely how we are set up in alignment with Winslow and how the events that unfold are rendered much more affecting because of this alignment. The fact we follow him almost exclusively, combined with the cinematography used, results in a certain level of trust and sympathy from us as viewers. This works to create a great sense of unease when this character betrays this trust by acting in a deranged manner or making a surprising confession about his shady past (made all the worse by the fact images shown to us in his sexual fantasies appear to contradict his claim of innocence). Moreover, as the film progresses there a several instances where Winslow’s perception regarding the passage of time is brought into question. After previously setting us up in a position where we experience time as he does (cutting to black when he is rendered unconscious etc.) this revelation that large chunks of time may be missing from the narrative is highly distressing. Overall, this results in putting the audience in the uncomfortable position of being closely tethered to a man whose background, motives and state of mind have all been exposed as highly questionable.

In conclusion, this essay aims to shed some light on some overlooked elements of The Lighthouse and establish why those aspects work to make the film an effective psychological horror.

 

Bibliography

Bordwell, D. (2002). Intensified continuity visual style in contemporary American film. Film Quarterly, 55(3), 16-28.

Bordwell, D., Thompson, K., & Smith, J. (1993). Film art: An introduction (Vol. 7). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Haughton A. The Historical Accuracies of The Witch Part 3 (Dialogue) (2017) https://www.viddy-well.com/articles/the-historical-accuracies-of-the-witch-part3

Fleming, M. Z., Piedmont, R. L., & Hiam, C. M. (1990). Images of madness: Feature films in teaching psychology. Teaching of psychology, 17(3)

Magliano, J. P., Miller, J., & Zwaan, R. A. (2001). Indexing space and time in film understanding. Applied Cognitive Psychology: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 15(5), 533-545.

Magliano, J. P., & Zacks, J. M. (2011). The impact of continuity editing in narrative film on event segmentation. Cognitive science, 35(8), 1489-1517.

Robinson T. ‘It was a learning curve for everyone’: Robert Eggers on The Lighthouse’s tech experiments (2019) https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/18/20921056/the-lighthouse-robert-eggers-director-interview-behind-the-scenes-robert-pattinson-willem-dafoe

Filmography

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Community S2E20 (Tristram Shapeero, 2011)

American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000)

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)

The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)

One Week (Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline, 1920)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

 

‘Inherent Vice: A Mellow Trip’: Video Essay by Adam Vincent

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‘Inherent Vice: A Mellow Trip’ – Creator’s Statement

 

‘A Mellow Trip’ is, without doubt, a passion project. Stemming from my deep attachment to Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, Warner Bros., USA, 2014), the video-essay is an unashamed attempt at conversion. My own experience with the film can be characterised best by a growing sense of warmth and connection. Upon viewing the film for a second and third time, I felt myself gently drawn into its hallucinatory orbit, shaking off any initial irritation surrounding the film’s narrative obscurities. Subsequent revisits cemented this affection, leading me to the conclusion that Inherent Vice is a film which benefits greatly from multiple viewings. As a result, I want fans and detractors alike to re-watch and reconsider Inherent Vice in the light of the video-essay’s contextualisation. I would like viewers to approach the film with fresh enthusiasm, using the framework of subjectivity which I have proposed in order to advance their own interpretations. Although my video-essay does not directly reference a multitude of scholarly sources, I feel that it is resolutely academic in its attempt to inspire further research.

Further, I have also framed ‘A Mellow Trip’ in such a forthright manner because I see the video-essay as a singularly persuasive medium, offering an alluring blend of a film’s most arresting images and sounds. The potential to crystallise these audio-visual stimuli into an overarching argument was the primary reason I chose Inherent Vice as my subject matter. To elaborate, I believe Inherent Vice is a film which can be more fruitfully analysed through the lens of its affective and sensorial appeal, using the very images and sounds which attracted me in order to entice the viewer of the video-essay to return to the film. I have positioned this style of critique in opposition to much of the film’s negative reception. This reception focused the majority of its ire on the confusion and frustration caused by the film’s narrative wanderings. Shedding the pragmatism of plot descriptions for a slightly more poetic approach felt like a liberatory exercise, affording the video-essay a degree of emotional expression which I would find difficult to replicate in prose. I rarely situate the evidence for my ideas within its broader narrative context (unless completely necessary), as I feel this would contradict my desire to move away from a narrative-centred critique of the film.

Academic Context

I made the decision to elide academic quotes from the video in order to maintain sharp focus on the textual evidence present in Inherent Vice and keep my video-essay accessible to a wider audience. However, various pieces of film criticism were central in the creation process, guiding my methodology and informing my decision-making. It is first necessary to acknowledge the huge influence of Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’. Sontag’s clarion call to “learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”[1] forms the life-blood of ‘A Mellow Trip’, pulsing through every frame and informing every decision made in the process of its creation. Her appeal for acts of criticism which offer an “accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art”[2] particularly struck me. I thought that any act of criticism in prose would inevitably fall short in this regard. Although an evocative written description may offer a sense of an art object, I felt that the shift in medium would inevitably result in a dilution of the original audio-visual artifact. The shared medium-specificities of the video-essay and cinema, namely their multi-sensory appeal, meant that this project was the perfect opportunity to attempt this slightly esoteric, yet captivating, form of critique.

The last section of my video-essay on Doc’s heightened sensory appreciation draws on the work of influential affect theorists such as Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks. Their work on the embodied responses of a spectator to the sensory information presented onscreen is absolutely fundamental in my analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson’s recreation of Doc’s drug-addled senses. To be specific, Laura U. Marks’ concept of the “haptic image”[3] which invites an embodied reaction from the spectator had a direct impact on my choice to emphasise certain images. For example, Doc stroking the carpeted wall in the massage parlour seemed to be a moment that highlighted this concept in a succinct and straightforward manner.

Although deeply flawed in its uncritical nature, Andrew Sarris’ conception of the auteur theory provided a groundwork for the contextualisation of Inherent Vice within the wider filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson. Sarris highlights “recurring characteristics of style” as a feature which distinguishes an auteur and serves as their “signature”.[4] Despite my misgivings surrounding Sarris’ work on the auteur theory, I think his simple conceptualisation is enough to briefly ground my exploration of Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous work. Taking the reflection of his protagonists’ subjectivity as a recurring stylistic feature, I was able to place Inherent Vice more easily in a lineage with Anderson’s earlier films. This was another attempt to combat a criticism of Inherent Vice, namely, that it lacked the sheer intensity or focus which characterised the rest of Anderson’s career.

Playing with Form

‘A Mellow Trip’ represents a dualistic impulse in terms of film form and image use. First of all, I wanted to explore the capability of the video-essay medium to recontextualise images in a striking and dramatic manner. This impulse can be seen most clearly in my use of montage throughout.  From the drama and beauty of the electronic Four Tet track which soundtracks the Paul Thomas Anderson montage, to the jittery and rapid editing of the paranoia montage, these moments audio-visually reflect their content on a small-scale, while also working in parallel with the video-essay’s broader theme of subjectivity. While these montages may suggest a suspicion surrounding the ability of the film image to explain itself, other moments in my video-essay are a paean to the virtuoso filmmaking at work throughout Inherent Vice. I have often left the film’s images and sounds largely untouched and allowed them to speak for themselves. A key example of this would be my analysis of the Harlingen reunion scene. The rewind device which leads to my (re)consideration of this scene, far from a gimmick, is a combination of both of these key impulses. Self-reflexively highlighting the process of creation behind a video-essay, this moment demonstrates the necessity of an author who can curate a film’s most evocative images and place them within a new context in order to foster an interpretation. On the other hand, the essay rewinds back to the beginning of the Harlingen reunion clip which, with the added effect of Jonny Greenwood’s score, is able to express itself without the necessity for further contextualisation.

Each section is clearly modelled around the primary mood or tone which it concerns. The ‘Confusion and Paranoia’ segment opens with a sharp stab of offbeat psychedelic rock which abruptly cuts off as the montage begins. The ‘Melancholy and Nostalgia’ section on the other hand, includes longer pieces of footage and a Neil Young song from the film which poetically conveys my ideas. Again, as with the use of montage, I wanted the idea of subjectivity to be conveyed not only cognitively, but visually and aurally too. Most importantly, I wanted to be playful in my use of visuals and music as my entire mission statement revolves around enticing an imagined viewer to watch and reconsider Inherent Vice. For this, I was always looking for exciting ways to visually present an idea without resorting to voiceover to state my interpretations. Examples include my acknowledgment of Jonny Greenwood’s paranoid score, suggestively placing a red waveform over a smoke-filled screen with a murky still of Doc in the background.

Conclusion

To put it simply, I have looked to create a piece which captures the spirit of a film I love very much. I hope to inform and seduce, drawing viewers from academia and beyond to engage in a dialogue with my interpretation of the film. I see the framework of subjectivity as integral in bursting open the enigmatic surface of Inherent Vice, leading to revelations about the film’s inner mechanisms and its exploration of broader socio-cultural concerns. Inherent Vice is a film which feels loose in sensibility yet thoroughly controlled in execution. This is what I hope to have replicated. I truly hope you enjoy it.

[1] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 10

[2] Ibid., p. 9

[3] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 2

[4] Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008), p. 43

José Arroyo in Conversation With….Misha Iakovlev on SKAM (Shame)

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SKAM (Shame) is a Norwegian teen drama, originally aimed at young girls, and produced by NRK P3, which is part of the Norwegian Public Broadcaster, NRK. It’s elicited fervent fan reaction, particularly in Russia. The concept has since been sold around the globe and there are versions in France, Italy, etc. addressed to a local audience.  I’d never heard of it until the Queer Television Reading Group at Warwick brought it to my attention, asking us to see two episodes from the third series (Episode 1 ‘Lykke til Isak’  & Episode 8 ‘Mannen i mitt liv’) and asking us to read two scholarly articles:

  • Saara Ratilainen, ‘Norway Reimagined: Popular Geopolitics and the Russophone Fans of Skam’, NORDICOM Review, 41.S1 (2020), 139–53: &
  • Emelie Bengtsson, Rebecka Kallquist, and Malin Sveningsson, ‘Combining New and Old Viewing Practices: Uses and Experiences of the Transmedia Series “Skam”’, NORDICOM Review, 39.2 (2018), 63–77:

 

The reading group raised all kinds of fascinating questions on the transnational & the transmedial, on Russophone cultures and Queer Nations, and on fandom and desire.

I wanted to continue the discussion and no one of my acquaintance knows more about SKAM than Misha Iakovlev,  a researcher on Queer Theory, Gender, Sexuality& Race in Russian Cinema During its Transition from Communism. In the podcast, Misha and I discuss form, aesthetics, the representation of race & sexuality, queerness & queering & how the TV show is both an example of  transnational and the transmedial but also raises interesting questions about how those categories are conceptualised.  We hope you find it interesting and useful,

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

 

‘American Honey: Redefining the Road Movie Through the Female Gaze’, by Edie Straight

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‘American Honey: Redefining the Road Movie Through the Female Gaze’, by Edie Straight

 

 

This video essay aims to explore how American Honey utilises the female gaze to depart from the traditional masculine aesthetic of the road movie, so as to achieve a better understanding of how the female gaze is constructed – visually and thematically – and of why the film is so ground-breaking within its genre.

 

When I first watched American Honey I was struck not only by its focus on the story of a young female protagonist, but how it framed the women of the film with an unobjectifying and realistic perspective. This was especially significant as its status as a road movie placed it alongside an archive of genre films that predominantly prioritised male protagonists and the exploration of masculinity. As Timothy Corrigan notes, it’s “a genre traditionally focused, almost exclusively, on men and the absence of women”,[1] and even when they are included, they’re relegated to the roles of, as David Laderman describes, “passive passengers and/or erotic distractions”.[2]

 

When I began to delve further into an investigation of American Honey’s style (one that evoked feeling, compassion and total absorption) I realised how wholly it diverged from the cinematic viewpoint of the male gaze.[3] Instead of fetishizing the women of the film, treating them as objects viewed purely from the heterosexual masculine perspective, it aligned the viewer with them and gave them the space to express their own desires and needs. During my research I came across a masterclass given at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival on the female gaze.[4] Delivered by Joey Soloway, the lecture highlighted how the female gaze is a way of shooting a film that allows the audience to be plunged into its world through the visceral and tactile visuals of the feeling/seeing camera, and to not just experience how it feels to be seen as an object of the male gaze, but also how it feels to take ownership of it (and subsequently return it). With the knowledge of this theory, I began to explore how and why American Honey was an exemplary instance of the female gaze in action.

 

Instead of just “inserting female protagonists into this male-orientated genre”, which Shari Roberts asserts “neither simply subverts or subsumes its masculinist tendencies”,[5] the film uses a variety of formal aspects and thematic techniques to redefine the road movie from a feminine perspective. The film’s poetic cinematography that reveals both beauty and brutality, the camera’s physical proximity to Star, as well as its expression of the world from Star’s perspective as we follow her gaze, establishes this. Simultaneously, the audience experiences how it is to be gazed by the male characters that Star encounters throughout the film.

 

The format of a video essay fully lends itself to the ability to express these points, as a visual and aural engagement with the text is necessary to experience the female gaze in totality. The soundtrack of American Honey is equally significant in establishing the film’s ambiance and reinforcing identification with the characters. Therefore, the ability to incorporate this iconic music into my video essay aided in recreating the atmosphere of the film, a tone that was an integral product of the female gaze.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, A., ‘Director Andrea Arnold on the Cross-Country Party that Produced American Honey – Interview’, The Verge, (September 29, 2016), https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/29/13109072/american-honey-movie-director-interview-andrea-arnold-tiff-2016, date accessed January 30, 2021.

Cohan, S., Hark, I., (ed.), The Road Movie Book, (London/New York: Routledge, 1997)

Corrigan, T., A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991)

Laderman, D., Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2002)

Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 16(3), (Autumn 1975)

Roberts, S., ‘Western Meets Eastwood’, in Cohan, Hark (ed.), The Road Movie Book, pp. 45 – 69

Soloway, J., Masterclass lecture given at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LukysI8R4g8&ab_channel=FestivaldeCannes%28Officiel%29, date accessed January 2, 2021

 

FILMOGRAPHY

A Perfect World (Dir. Clint Eastwood, Prod. Malpaso Productions, USA, 1993)

American Honey (Dir. Andrea Arnold, Prod. British Film Institute/Film4 Productions/Maven

Pictures, United Kingdom/USA, 2016)

Badlands (Dir. Terrence Malick, Prod. Warner Bros., USA, 1973)

Bonnie and Clyde (Dir. Arthur Penn, Prod. Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 1967)

Die Another Die (Dir. Lee Tamahori, Prod. Eon Productions/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Pictures, United Kingdom, 2002)

Duel (Dir. Steven Spielberg, Prod. Universal Television, USA, 1971)

Easy Rider (Dir. Dennis Hopper, Prod. Pando Company Inc./Raybert Productions, USA, 1969)

Fish Tank (Dir. Andrea Arnold, Prod. BBC Films/UK Film Council, United Kingdom, 2009)

Mad Max 2 (Dir. George Miller, Prod. Kennedy Miller Entertainment, Australia, 1981)

Midnight Run (Dir. Martin Brest, Prod. City Light Films, USA, 1988)

The Mask (Dir. Charles Russell, Prod. New Line Productions/Dark Horse Entertainment,

USA, 1994)

Thelma & Louise (Dir. Ridley Scott, Prod. Pathé Entertainment/Percy Main

Productions/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA, 1991)

Vertigo (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Prod. Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, USA, 1958)

Wasp (Dir. Andrea Arnold, Prod. FilmFour/UK Film Council/Cowboy Films, United Kingdom, 2003)

[1] Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 143

[2] David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 20

[3] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 16(3), Autumn 1975, pp. 6 – 18

[4] Joey Soloway, Masterclass lecture given at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2016

[5] Shari Roberts, ‘Western Meets Eastwood’, The Road Movie Book, Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (ed.), (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 64

Helen Rose’s dresses and designs for Designing Woman (Vincente Minnelli, 1957)

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Helen Rose was MGM’s chief designer from the late forties to the late sixties and designed many of MGM’s major films throughout the fifties. She worked with Minnelli on Father of the Bride, won an Oscar for his The Bad and the Beautiful and also did The Long Long Trailer. The Cobweb (uncredited) and other of his films. In her day she was perhaps most famous for designing the wedding dresses for Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to Nicky Hilton and for Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco.

The story of Designing Woman was suggested by her and in a short film that accompanies the Warner Home Archive version of the blu-ray, she speaks of trying to make chic, flattering but basically simple clothes, the outfit basically a setting for the woman, like the setting for a jewel.  I find her clothes do the opposite of this,.They’re fussy, often bordered by useless frills or statement enhancements like mink. The clothes move well but are not properly fitted and sometimes bunch up in the most inappropriate ways and in the most inappropriate places. The backs tend to be bunched up hideousness.  I like her sense of colour, but they’re designs that are best seen at a distance. She’s not generally ranked among the major designers of the classic era (Adrian, Orry Kelly, Travis Banton, Irene, Edith Head, etc.) She’s also not represented in Deborah Nadoolman Landis’ Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration. That said, there are images below where you’ll see how glorious Lauren Bacall looks in them.

I offer the images below not as an analysis but mainly as a teaching tool. This is a film about a designer where the designer of the film is based on not only gets to design clothes for its two leading ladies (over thirty changes for Bacall alone) but also gets to create a fashion show in the middle of the film. I’ve provided images for all the outfits,  from various angles, and in chronological order, partly because they are a pleasure to see, and partly because it might be a useful teaching tool to some of you.

Helen Rose and her Designs:

 

Lauren Bacall’s Changes of Outfits in Chronological Order and viewed from different angles:

 

Dolores Gray’s Outfits, also in chronological order and viewed from different angles.

 

The Fashion Show, also in chronological order and viewed from different angles.

José Arroyo

Queering Kirk Douglas and Hoagy Carmichael in Young Man With A Horn

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I’m going to make it a project to acquire some photoshop skills over Easter….but in the meantime here’s Kirk with Hoagy in ‘Young Man With a Horn’

It was actually quite difficult to put lipstick on Kirk. It’s not only that he’s got thin lips, usually wrapped around a trumpet here, but that his stance and look are so macho and self-possessed. It made me think that my previous choices were all in moments when Henry Fonda or the others were anguished or troubled or in pain, as if that was somehow the necessary factor to ‘queer’ them. So this time I took moments of pleasure and blissed them, though with difficulty.

 

José Arroyo

Matthew Smolenski, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’: Movement in the Beatles’s Fiction Filmography

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Creator’s Statement

In this video essay I discuss the Beatles’ fiction filmography that spans from 1964 to 1968, constituting A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, United Artists, UK, 1964), Help! (Richard Lester, United Artists, UK, 1965), Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles, Apple Films, 1967), Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles, Apple Corps, UK, 1967), and Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, United Artists, UK, 1968). Although my focus on the movement of the central performers’ bodies could certainly be extended to Let It Be (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Apple Films, UK 1970), I was primarily interested in the integration of this movement into specifically narrative cinema that opposes a “safer” audio-visual context that isolates musical performance as its primary attraction, such as the band’s legendary appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

For both this reason and for chronological convenience, A Hard Day’s Night proved a natural starting point for a consideration of the Beatles’ movement within a narrative context, which works towards putting the Beatles within the familiar comfort zone of tele-concert spectacle. As a ‘low-budget exploitation film’, [1] A Hard Day’s Night’s narrative could be considered a vessel for its musical performances, and so Tom Gunning’s ‘Cinema of Attractions’ theory of early and avant-garde cinema, defined by the act of display and direct, self-conscious address, emerged as an obvious comparison point. [2] The film’s structure contains a degree of self-awareness that centres diegetic fans as stand-ins for its diegetic audience who eventually have their desire for the “attraction” of pure performance fulfilled with the same direct address of, for example, an Edison Company film, but through this comparison I wanted to highlight that the narrative’s continuous flow covertly turns every moment into one of performance. In the same way that much of the appeal of a Beatles’ concert lies in the band’s sarcastic banter in-between songs, movement between and within specific locations in the narrative becomes its own attraction rather than an obligation, defined in this essay as ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ movement respectively. If this ‘macro movement’ can be considered analogous to deep focus cinematography that provides multiple ‘micro movements’ to choose from, A Hard Day’s Night certainly merits Andrew Sarris’ evaluation of it as ‘the Citizen Kane of pop musicals’.[3]

As this video essay defines its selection of films in relation to its musical stars as auteurs rather than its filmmakers, I wanted its structure to depend more strongly on the concept of discography than filmography, using its focus on rhythm and movement to instil within the spectator the feeling of voraciously consuming the ‘macro’ of every Beatles album within the ‘micro’ of its short run-time. ‘Glass Onion’, from 1968 album The Beatles, reveals the self-referential nature of the Beatles discography, explicitly calling back to older songs such as ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Lady Madonna’ in its lyrics with intertextual aplomb that assumes listener familiarity, and as such this video essay could also be considered a tribute. After a long silence, its filmography is accompanied by ‘Her Majesty’, the final hidden track on the band’s final album, as both a reference to the musical legacy that scores the video and as a reminder of the essay’s condensation of a much deeper career. One advantage of this condensed structure is an absence of didacticism. Although the recurrence of trains in early cinema is explained in relation to the linear, continuous flow of A Hard Day’s Night, the video’s continuous flow need not be broken by frequent comparisons to Help’s planes, Magical Mystery Tour’s coach or Yellow Submarine’s submarine; these comparisons are instead invited by the temporal proximity of the images.

Speaking of the amount of cover songs on the Beatle’s first album in an NME review of Please Please Me, Hamish McBain writes that ‘the Beatles at this point were born interpreters’.[4]  A similar impulse exists in my reliance on comparisons to early cinema and Italian Neo-Realism in ‘Part One’, defined by a sense of the Beatles “interpreting” cinematic language, and just as the Beatles’ discography eventually phases out cover songs altogether, comparisons increasingly focus on previously discussed Beatles’ films, with a prominent comparison to the work of Busby Berkeley even considered a bad object for its pollution of the essence of the performers. In this instance, the Beatles do not provide an interpretation of another artist, studio, and period’s style, but rather an imitation. A handover of sorts could be said to occur around the midway point of the video, with the introduction of psychedelia destabilising conventional cinematic means of representation and forcing a centralisation of the Beatles’ boundary-pushing internal world, which is reinforced by an accelerated reverse montage that gives the video’s first half a pseudo-palindromic structure. “Essence” is thus articulated as intrinsic, and so apparent are its virtues in the cinematic movements of the Beatles that I have considered the act of depiction as self-evident, instead staging my argument around the framing of this essence in each film.

The essay’s concluding argument essentially turns its opening question on its head: yes, the Beatles provide a valuable lens through which to consider cinematic movement as a pleasure in and of itself, enforcing its privileged position within a cinematic hierarchy through their inability to conform to the plotty mould of the Bond film, the limpness of its laboured enforcement in Magical Mystery Tour or its totalising effect on the world of Yellow Submarine. However, what is also revealed in this analysis is the value of cinema as an archive of the Beatles’ movement in a context that prioritises it through form, and it is this that cannot help but shine through in not only this selection of films, but the video essay itself. The spotlight enjoyed by the Beatles was indeed as ephemeral as A Hard Day’s Night’s ninety deadline-oriented plot structure, but testament to their energetic optimisation of that spotlight is my hope that even the ten-minute spotlight of this video should convey even the periphery of the band’s capability during this period.

Matthew Smolenski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Armour, Nicole, ‘The Machine Art of Dziga Vertov and Busby Berkeley’, Images, 5, November 1997

Dyer, Richard, In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film (New York: Routledge, 2012)

Glynn, Stephen, A Hard Day’s Night: Turner Classic Movies British Film Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2005)

Gould, Jonathan, Can’t Buy Me Love: Beatles, Britain and America (London: Piatkus, 2008)

Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’ in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser and and Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), pp. 56-61

Gunning, Tom, ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions’, Velvet Light Trap(1993) 3-12

Kirby, Lynne, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)

MacBain, Hamish, ‘Looking Back On The Beatles’ “Please Please Me”’, NME, 2016 <https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-beatles-please-please-me-769691> [accessed 4 February 2021]

Mulvey, Laura, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006)

Neaverson, Bob, The Beatles Movies (Michigan: Cassell, 1997)

Roth, Mark, ‘Some Warners Musicals and the Spirit of the New Deal’ in Genre: The Musical: A Reader, ed. by Altman, Rick, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 41-56

Sarris, Andrew, ‘Bravo Beatles!’, The Village Voice, 27 August 1964, p. 13

Filmography

A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, United Artists, UK, 1964)

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (Ron Howard, StudioCanal, UK, 2016)

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, Produzioni De Sica, Italy, 1948)

Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (Georges Méliès, Star Film Company, France, 1896)

Help! (Richard Lester, United Artists, UK, 1965)

Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros., USA, 1933)

‘Four (August ’64 to August ’65)’, Episode Four, The Beatles Anthology, UK, ITV, tx. 17.12.1995

‘From the ABC Theatre Blackpool’, Blackpool Night Out, UK, ITV London, tx. 1.8.1965

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Melvin Leroy and Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros., USA, 1933)

The Kiss in the Tunnel (George Albert Smith, UK, 1899)

‘Lady Lazarus’, Episode Eight, Mad Men, Fifth Series, USA, Sky Atlantic, tx. 8.5.2012

L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Louis Lumière and Auguste Lumière, Société Lumière, France, 1896)

Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles, Apple Corps, UK, 1967)

Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, VUFKU, Soviet Union, 1929)

Trapeze Disrobing Act (Thomas Edison, Edison Company, USA, 1901)

What Happened in the Tunnel (Edwin S. Porter, Edison Company, USA, 1903)

Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, USA, 1959)

Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (Louis Lumière, Lumière, France, 1895)

Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, United Artists, UK, 1968)

[1] Stephen Glynn, A Hard Day’s Night: Turner Classic Movies British Film Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), p. 9

[2] Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant’ Garde’ in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), pp. 56-61 (p. 57)

[3] Andrew Sarris, ‘Bravo Beatles!’, The Village Voice, 27 August 1964, p. 13

[4] Hamish MacBain, ‘Looking Back On The Beatles’ “Please Please Me”’, NME, 2016 <https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-beatles-please-please-me-769691> [accessed 4 February 2021]

Giulia Tronconi: In the Mood For Love: A Visual Poem

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A wonderful video essay where one feels one is learning something more about the form of the film through feeling and thinking, and the video essay demonstrates the condensation of effects that achieve this. …and without voiceover. The Creator’s Statement is essential to the understanding and appreciation of the video essay and I include it below:

 

Creator Statement

 

Through In the Mood For Love: A Visual Poem I express my admiration for Wong Kar-Wai’s ability to let visuals speak poetically. I resort to film theory and literary criticism to explore how images on screen may be employed as objective correlatives and subsequently traced back to semantic fields, which in return convey physical and emotional sensations to the spectating subject through what Barbara Klinger has named the arresting image. Although Klinger’s original formulation contemplates the presence of just one arresting image in a film, I conjugate her theory in a slightly different fashion, dissecting the film’s mise-en-scène according to a range of emotions, interlinked yet discernible. Simultaneously, I engage with theories of haptic visuality as formulated by Vivian Sobchack, exploring how the cinematic image may stimulate the viewer’s sensorial receptivity in order to achieve emotional impact, framing the film experience as “a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression”[1]. Through my essay I investigate whether film may be considered a poetic medium: I understand the use of certain elements of mise-en-scène as a visual extension of literary devices, ultimately enhancing the medium’s expressive capacities.

In the Mood for Love is an invitation to feeling – material and emotional. Wong Kar-Wai subtly creates tensions which carry throughout the film, allowing the viewer to physically perceive, albeit virtually, the textures, prints and patterns on screen; to experience the tender feelings of loneliness, yearning and heartbreak which permeate the text. Thus, I divide the essay in three chapters corresponding to these emotions, which together encompass what the viewing experience of In the Mood for Love is to me. I consider each section to be a semantic field comprising of a number of objective correlatives and provide a range of arresting images which epitomise the moment of highest emotional intensity.

The objective correlative is a literary device coined by T.S. Eliot and defined as the only truly artistic way of expressing emotion: “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[2] Eliot envisions the objective correlative as a powerful tool whose presence in the text inevitably arouses an emotional reaction. The correlatives themselves contain a universally understandable meaning, affordable to any reader; they do not require explanation on behalf of the author, for they are objectively expressive[3]. Objective correlatives tend to respond to semantic fields: a collection of words and images employed to subtly establish a specific idea, atmosphere, emotion[4]. References to such literary devices advance my claim of In the Mood for Love as a visual poem, in that the film presents what I name visual objective correlatives: camera movements, framing devices, details such as food, clothing and cigarettes, which work together to convey loneliness, yearning and heartbreak. These semantic fields culminate in arresting images, namely what Klinger refers to as ‘memorable cinematic fragments’, a ‘site of lingering affective power and uncertain meaning’[5]. The arresting image holds significant evocative force, for it slows down the narrative. The film’s forward motion is momentarily suspended, allowing for the contemplation of an ‘exquisitely composed, significantly evocative and/or uncanny image’ [6].

Objective correlatives, semantic fields and arresting images all emphasise the strongly affective dimension of art, its capacity to agitate the reader’s sensorial and emotional receptivity. Klinger attributes the allure of the arresting image to the way it exploits the emotions that have been mounting in the spectator throughout the film[7]. In the Mood for Love progressively creates meaning by leveraging the sensorial nature of the cinematic medium, building patterns of motifs which trigger emotions. The video essay references haptic theory as conceptualised by Vivian Sobchak: “we do not experience any movie only through our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium.”[8] Film, although inherently immaterial, is a medium which manages to establish sensorial engagement and emotional involvement. This form of participation entails identification, prompting the recollection of past events and past selves, necessarily affecting the viewing experience[9]. For such reason, I focus much of my research on tangible, perceivable objects which speak to the viewer universally, encouraging to reminisce of certain smells, flavours, sensations on the tip of the finger.

Therefore, I associate semantic fields as follows. Loneliness, the primary feeling experienced by the two characters during the film, conveyed through visual techniques such as the horizontal pan, the mirrored image and the frame within frame. I manipulate, superimpose, contrast the footage to show how the text speaks of solitude by creating movement in cramped spaces, obstructing vision and centring the frame around reflected figures rather than actual characters. I provide this image as the epitome of loneliness, where all visual devices are suspended to create a puzzling moment of contemplation.

 

Yearning, the impulse to pursue passion and the painful refusal to do so, symbolised by food, hands and the qipao. First, I find one arresting image for the act of eating as alternative expression of sexual desire; secondly, a different image, containing both the objective correlatives of the hand and the qipao, expressive of the acknowledgement of the impossibility of fulfilled love.

And finally heartbreak, the end of love and the bittersweet closing line of the film. I find one arresting image for the objective correlatives of cigarettes and one for the pink slippers, as two moments with an unusual temporal status, almost appearing outside of time, in a fantasy dream-like dimension[10].

 

 

By selecting these images, I find frames in the film which seem to stand outside the narrative flow, marked by a profoundly affective, puzzling and arresting quality. Physical and emotional feelings travel from the screen to the viewer by means of expressive images which function as visual metaphors and infuse the film with its distinct poetic aura. I let the images speak for themselves, allowing an uninterrupted flow on screen, temporarily arrested only to encourage the viewer to experience a brief, yet profound, sense of loneliness, yearning, heartbreak.

 

 

 

[1] V. Sobchack, The address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience (Princeton University Press, USA, 1992), pp. 9;

[2] T.S. Eliot, Hamlet and His Problems 95-103, The Sacred Wood: essays on poetry and criticism (Methuen Publishing, UK, 1960);

[3] Olsen, F., Eliot’s Objective Correlative: Tradition or Individual Talent? (Sussex Academic Press, UK, 2012);

[4] H. Rapaport, The Literary Theory Toolkit: a Compendium of Concepts and Methods (Wiley Backwell, USA, 2011)

[5]B. Klinger, The art film, affect and the female viewer: The Piano revisited, 19-41 (Screen, 47:1, 2006, Oxford University Press, UK), pp 26;

[6] B. Klinger, ibid., pp 26;

[7] B. Klinger, ibid., pp 24;

[8] V. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University of California Press, UK, 2004), pp 63;

[9] B. Klinger, op. cit, pp. 21;

[10] B Klinger, op. cit, pp 25;

 

 

Filmography

  • In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai, Block 2 Pictures, Jet Tone Production, Orly Films, Paradis Films, China, 2000)

Bibliography

  • Ciment, Michel, Niogret, Hubert, Interview with Wong Kar-Wai: In the Mood for Love / 2000, Positif 477 in (ed.) Kar-wai Wong, Silver Wai-ming Lee, Micky Lee, Wong Kar-Wai: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, USA, 2017);
  • Eliot, Thomas Stearns, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Methuen Publishing, UK, 1960);
  • Kar-wai Wong, Silver Wai-ming Lee, Micky Lee (ed.) , Wong Kar-Wai: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, USA, 2017);
  • Klinger, Barbara, The art film, affect and the female viewer: The Piano revisited 19-41 (Screen, 47:1, 2006, Oxford University Press, UK);
  • Olsen, Flemming, Eliot’s Objective Correlative: Tradition or Individual Talent? (Sussex Academic Press, UK, 2012);
  • Rapaport, Herman, The Literary Theory Toolkit: a Compendium of Concepts and Methods (Wiley Backwell, USA, 2011);
  • Sobchack, Vivian, The address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience (Princeton University Press, USA, 1992);
  • Sobchack, Vivian, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University of California Press, UK, 2004).

 

Designing Woman (Vincente Minnelli, 1957)

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DESIGNING WOMAN got good reviews and Lauren Bacall claimed it as a favourite role. When I saw it last night – and in spite of the visually gorgeous Warner Home Video version – I found it hard to understand why. It had all been done more expertly, with greater lightness and depth, in George Stevens’ WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942).It’s perhaps no accident that Bacall would be attracted to the role of Tess Harding, and have a big hit with it as a musical on Broadway in 1981.  If you can forget the controversial ending, Woman of the Year seems a masterpiece next to DESIGNING WOMEN. Bacall and Gregory Peck sink every joke here. They’re game but no cigar. No circus going on in THEIR heads when they say those lines either.

Minnelli makes everything look beautiful. Peck and Bacall ARE beautiful but…. In some ways this career woman vs sports writer offers an interesting exploration of masculinity but a tentative one that backtracks at every opportunity. Here, a choreographer played by the great Jack Cole, himself the choreographer of the film, defeats a whole mob of gangsters with dance steps…but he reassures everyone that he’s married and a father of three. And if you already haven’t gotten the message, he’s named Randy Owens. The film is an interesting commentary on appearances and very Minnellian for that but also a liminal step out of the closet that backtracks into it at the highest speed possible. The story is autobiographical and suggested by designer Helen Rose, my least favourite Hollywood designer. She has a great sense of colour but the dresses all bunch up in the most inappropriate and least flattering places. I was sorry I’d shelled out so much to get the film, however beautiful the version.

It’s perhaps a measure of the film’s limitations that it takes one cute poodle joke and doesn’t know when to stop:

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 282 – Lapsis

Eavesdropping at the Movies, podcast, , , , ,

First-time writer-director Noah Hutton imagines, in Lapsis, a near-future gig economy dystopia that isn’t that different from our own. Unable to pay for his brother’s healthcare, Dean Imperial’s Ray takes on contracting work for a Google-esque tech giant, hiking through forests laying cables. Imperial’s performance is a standout, his Ray always sympathetic and legible, and Hutton’s sketchy, piecemeal world-building suits the film – until it doesn’t. Lapsis creates a recognisable milieu and has a leftist politic with which we broadly agree and are happy to see, but as its story develops it wants to evoke the feeling of doom one would expect of a revealed conspiracy, without the burden of having to bring together its disparate subplots and building blocks in order to explain anything.

Despite our reservations, we enjoyed Lapsis and are glad to have seen it, and are keen to see what comes next for Noah Hutton and Dean Imperial.

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

José Arroyo & Richard Layne on Downpour (Bahram Beyzaie, Iran, 1979), Wales One World

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We continue our discussion of the Iranian programming at the Wales One World Film Festival with Bahram Beyzaie’s great, Downpour (1972),  influenced by Italian Neo-realism and European Art Cinema, one of the films that spearheaded the Iranian New Wave counter cinema, poetic and critical, and managing to synthesise realism and allegory. A great film.

The film was part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project (No. 3). It received a restoration from the Cineteca di Bologna in 2011 and now has a Criterion release. The podcast refers to Hadmid Naficy’s very interesting piece on the film and the Iranian New Wave that you can access here.

https://soundcloud.com/user-766042506/jose-arroyo-richard-layne-on-downpour

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

In the podcast we discuss, the brilliant editing, the imaginative choice of editing, the variety of impactful shots, the beauty of the images, and some of the ways the film allegorizes. We criticise the sub-titles and wish they’d been better.

Ehsan Khoshbakht, the director of Filmfarsi, contextualises Downpour and The Deer in this brilliant Q&A, shown as part of Wales One World Film Festival:

 

In the discussion Ehsan refers to Chess of the Wind as part of this New Wave. We podcast on it from Bologna here: 

José Arroyo

The Youssef Chahine Podcast No. 32: Youssef Chahine’s Cinema — An Egyptian Perspective, Part II

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We continue our discussion with Hussein, to garner an Egyptian perspective on the career of Youssef Chahine to 1985. We touch on Son of he Nile/ Nile Boy (1951), The Blazing Sun,/ Struggle in the Valley (1954) ‘The Turn of the Decade’ films (Forever Love/ Forever Yours (1959), In Your Hands (1960), A Lover’s Call (1960), A Man in My Life (1961). We continue with all his major films and discuss how some phrases from them have become common parlance in Egyptian culture. We also touch on the complicated relationship with Mohsen Mohieddin Mohsen Mohieddin and we end with Dalida and The Sixth Day (1986). It’s a conversation still to be continued, and we will cover the last phase of his career in the next podcast.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Hussein also sent some wonderful photos which he describes as follows.

First photo (above) is a film poster from one of his first films, not sure which.

Second (below) is from Forever Love, the first of the four “turn of the decade” films.

 

Third is a photo  I took on my way home from work today of the building where Chahine lived most of his life till death, he lived in one of the three upper floors with the many windows. He actually shot many scenes there, in Egyptian Story (1982), Alexandria Again and Forever (1989), Cairo as seen by Chahine (1991)and Silence on Tourne (2001).

 

The last one is the plaque at the entrance of the building memorializing him. He used to live in the downtown Nile island of Zamalek, one of the more affluent neighborhoods of Cairo back in the days and still today.

José Arroyo

José Arroyo and Richard Layne on The Deer/ Gavaznha (Masoud Kimiai, 1974)

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We continue with our exploration of the Iranian Cinema on offer at the Wales One World festival with a discussion of the extraordinary The Deer/ Gavaznha (1974), a metaphor for pre-revolutionary Iran’s social relations, focussing on down and outs living in a courtyard with a heroin addict and a bank robber as heroes. The influence of Italian neo-realism is everywhere present in a film that is simultaneously symbolic but also pulpy and visceral. It’s an iconic film extra-textually as well: a cinema showing the film was burned down killing hundreds of people. It’s a film that is still banned in Iran. Behrouz Vossoughi gives an extraordinary performance.

Thanks to a friend, Richard and I have also been able to see the film’s original ending where Ghodrat (Faramarz Gharibian) believes Seyed (Behrooz Vousoughi) has betrayed him and shoots him. As Seyed is on his knees he explains that friendship comes before anything and Ghodrat , visibly moved, gives himself up to the police. The film ends with the promise of the two friends re-uniting at the end of the prison term with the promise of healing and solidarity in the aftermath of the current situation. It’s very moving.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

A ban robber tries to convince a heroin addict to change

A life imprisoned. Setting doves free will be a metaphor. In the meantime, it’s all barbed wire.

When people are seen as sheep but also as ranking below them to the extent their homes are turned over to animals

The courtyard

Is it a queen who’s long hair gets shaved in prison?

 

Ehsan Khoshbakht, the director of Filmfarsi, wrote us a quick note to pick up on some of the points discussed in the podcast on The Deer:

‘The Deer is a black & white film and the colour version on YouTube is ….(an) unauthorised digital colorization. Colour films were very rare in Iran, even as late as mid-70s.
‘Another point that I wanted to raise is that with the exception of the opening dialogues added to the film in post-production (which you read in bracketed subtitles), this was the most complete version of the film which I telecined from Kimiai’s own battered print — the only way I could show it in the west. So this was the uncensored version, but since I didn’t have access to the separate audio track of the film, I couldn’t remove those forced lines and the best approach was to present them in brackets’.
Many thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht for his film, for helping the The Deer circulate, and for answering some of the questions we posed in the podcast.
Those of you who want to follow a more extended discussion on Iranian genre  cinema in general and The Deer in particular can do so in this fascinating conversation  between Kaveh Askari and Ehsan Khoshbakht
here:

Ehsan makes an interesting comparison of it with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, particularly the ending

José Arroyo

 

 

 

José Arroyo & Richard Layne on Filmfarsi (Ehsan Khoshbakht, 2019) Wales One World Festival

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The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

A discussion of Filmfarsi, a film by Ehsan Khoshbakht, on a mode of filmmaking extremely popular in Iran — urban gangster films, melodramas, musicals — set in urban working class milieus, that evoked and challenged the country’s vaunted leap in modernity. IAccording to Ehsan Khoshbakht, the film’s director, ‘Something rare, euphoric and mad was recorded on celluloid: the Iranian way of life after the second world war, with all its paradoxes. Even the sleaziest films became documents. If the majority of key Iranian arthouse films of the 1960s and 1970s were set in villages and rural areas (a tradition continued until after the revolution), filmfarsi was about the thriving cities, which were expanding blindly, thanks to petrodollars’.

t’s very different to the type of cinema Abbas Kiarostami was also doing in this period. It’s a cinema quickly banned after the ’79 revolution, and a cult on VHS. The filmmaker shows the wide range of filmmaking, its transnational perspective, its ritual and fetishistic post -79 consumption, and well evokes why it was so powerful, why it’s been banned and why it is so cherished.

He’s also offered a wonderful introduction in The Guardian, which can be found here.

It begins with: ‘Shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the country’s national newspapers published a joint subpoena, unique in film history. All the key stars of “filmfarsi” – a form of popular cinema that embodied the aspirations and illusions of a modernising society – were summoned to the revolutionary court. The careers of hundreds of actors and directors ended overnight. Unlike the Hollywood blacklisting of the McCarthy era, there was not even the opportunity for a mock hearing. The cinema, seen as emblematic of corruption, “westoxification” and the decadence of the ousted Pahlavi regime, was consigned to oblivion.

 

Those of you interested in watching the film can follow up bookings here. Many thanks to Wales One World for their superb programme and for the free screenings.

You can see Ehsan Khoshbakht speak to David Gillam on Filmfarsi here:

 

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 281 – The Day of the Locust

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Another discussion of — if not a classic — a still remembered film, on Hollywood, and — to add a cherry on top — with the great Karen Black.

An expensive flop in its day, The Day of the Locust maintains a cult intrigue for its critique of Hollywood and descent into madness. It’s new for both of us, and we discuss the qualities its cast brings, what could be better about its industry commentary, its moments of surprisingly graphic violence, and who, or what, its titular locusts are.

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

A quick note on End of the Century (Lucio Castro, 2019)

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If you liked Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011),  you might want to give End of the Century/ Fin de sieglo  a go. Ocho (Juan Barberini) and Javi (Ramón Pujol) meet in Barcelona. Ocho’s Argentinian, living in Madrid and has just ended a twenty year relationship. Javi is a native of Barcelona but is now living with a husband and child in Berlin. They cruise each other, have wild sex and meet again the next day to wonder around the city. As they chat, they remember they met and mated twenty years before in the same city. A slow-paced absorbing film, sexy and romantic, wistful and sad. There are about 12 minutes with no dialogue and it is not missed. The last section, a what might have been, is particularly affecting. I think it better than Weekend and highly recommend. It’s on BFI and on Vimeo through Peccadillo pictures.

José Arroyo

The Youssef Chahine Podcast No. 31: An Egyptian Perspective of A New Day

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The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

This podcast has been very lucky with its listeners. Hussein, not only provided us with a possibility of viewing the wonderful Dawn of a New Day, but produced the sub-titles necessary to understand it. We can’t thank him enough. I took the opportunity of talking to Hussein to ask him about things we as English-speaking viewers might not have understood. i.e an Egyptian perspective on the politics, the history, the significance of streets and buildings, the customs, the reputation of the actors in the film(Saifuddin Shawkat, Sanaa Gameel) and in Chahin’s other work (Mohsen Mohieddin) . All proved illuminating and enlightening and has certainly helped me understand Dawn of a New Day better. The conversation then continues onto Chahine as a figure in Egyptian cinema and culture and it was so interesting and informative that we will continue with that strand of conversation onto the next podcast.

 

Hussein has also kindly provided us with a link to two interesting stories:

Click on “the cairo tower” and “if lions could speak”. The first is the tower’s story, the other on the two lions on each side of the bridge that tarek crosses to meet Nayla. Hussein tells us, ‘They are of extreme importance in our history and almost became synonymous with downtown Cairo’.
José Arroyo

Lecture on Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976)

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