“The cinema is an invention without a future.” ― Louis Lumière
From the readings this week I realised the importance of the change in what determines audience approval. At the very start of cinema, spectators were amazed and intrigued purely by the apparatus that permitted images to move across a screen, whereas nowadays we expect films to project an image of reality so real that we may become lost in it. As Williams mentions, “it seems to be that case that the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on screen” (605), that is, if we are watching a ‘chick flick’ or a “weepie” (605) as Williams calls it, we expect it to make us cry, and we expect a horror to scare us or make us jump, and that is the bar by which films are now judged, I feel, by how close they are to reality.
I found it interesting reading Gunning’s point about how “the usually small scale of trompe l’oeil paintings and the desire to reach out and touch them contrast sharply with the “grandeur naturale” of the Lumière train film and the viewer’s impulse to rear back before it, as well as with the spectator’s physical distance from the illusions of the magic theatre.” (740). It seems to demonstrate a shift in audience participation from one of active to passive. I ask myself whether this is to our detriment. Bazin states that “photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts” (163) because it enables us to represent reality exactly, as “no matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image (161)”, with which I entirely disagree. What about the discovery of linear perspective in the Renaissance? Or the sheer effort it took to make paints and pigments? During the Renaissance an artist’s studio would have been more like a science lab than the stereotypical well-lit room strewn with easels and sheets we see today. The subjectivity present in a work of art produced by a human hand is what makes it a work of art, I feel. It seems that the invention of the photograph has indeed enabled us to present an exact copy of reality, but in doing so we have also lost the ability to capture the viewer’s engagement, making them less likely to want to reach out and ‘touch’ a photograph, and also making it harder to impress an audience and elicit the desired response.
No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.
—Leon Battista Alberti, 1435
“The cinema is an invention without a future.” ― Louis Lumière
From the readings this week I realised the importance of the change in what determines audience approval. At the very start of cinema, spectators were amazed and intrigued purely by the apparatus that permitted images to move across a screen, whereas nowadays we expect films to project an image of reality so real that we may become lost in it. As Williams mentions, “it seems to be that case that the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on screen” (605), that is, if we are watching a ‘chick flick’ or a “weepie” (605) as Williams calls it, we expect it to make us cry, and we expect a horror to scare us or make us jump, and that is the bar by which films are now judged, I feel, by how close they are to reality.
I found it interesting reading Gunning’s point about how “the usually small scale of trompe l’oeil paintings and the desire to reach out and touch them contrast sharply with the “grandeur naturale” of the Lumière train film and the viewer’s impulse to rear back before it, as well as with the spectator’s physical distance from the illusions of the magic theatre.” (740). It seems to demonstrate a shift in audience participation from one of active to passive. I ask myself whether this is to our detriment. Bazin states that “photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts” (163) because it enables us to represent reality exactly, as “no matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image (161)”, with which I entirely disagree. What about the discovery of linear perspective in the Renaissance? Or the sheer effort it took to make paints and pigments? During the Renaissance an artist’s studio would have been more like a science lab than the stereotypical well-lit room strewn with easels and sheets we see today. The subjectivity present in a work of art produced by a human hand is what makes it a work of art, I feel. It seems that the invention of the photograph has indeed enabled us to present an exact copy of reality, but in doing so we have also lost the ability to capture the viewer’s engagement, making them less likely to want to reach out and ‘touch’ a photograph, and also making it harder to impress an audience and elicit the desired response.
No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.
—Leon Battista Alberti, 1435
Gender Issues
Foucault gives three major emplicit codes that governed sextual practices in eighteenth and nineteenth centrury –canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law. And the marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints. Whether it is for the political or economical purpose to confine the norms of , under such social background, homosexuality is condemned as a crime in the court. The control and surveillance were imposed by surroundings, and traps were laid for compelling admissions…but on the contrary, its target expanded and branched out, penetrating even further. Driven by perpetual spirals of power and pleasure, the homosexual was now a species, a natural order of disorder. This power and pleasure, do not cancel or turn back against each other, they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement. A kind of perverse is implanted.
Another question is, when someone really propose to enact legislation to make homo mariage legitimate, does the public really get ready to accept this “tolerance”? Like what has happened few months ago in Frence, thousands of people marched on street and protested against this further perverse, preventing it becoming a civil law. So in reality, it seems like the public allows some perverse to some extent, but not totally tolerent with the progression of the perverse elevate in the form of actual law.
Till now there are still marching parades for supporting homosexual, fighting for more attetion. Generally it is a well-accepted fact that homosexual will not be judged overly n the public. Somebody says that they are still a group of people at the margin of the society, they tend to gathering and hanging out their pubs, but the reality is, are general public to be blamed for putting them at margin? or homosexual themselves choose to marginalize their group?
Color TV, VCR and memory
Is inevitable not being nostalgic reading Anne Friedberg’s article “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change”. After she mentions the change that VCR, cable television and television remote control represented for technology and culture, I just want to add that those events also took an important place in my family live during 1980’s and 1990’s.
We did not have color TV until late 1980’s. My grandparents gave us a color TV as a present. I think this change was fundamental in the history of film, perhaps for Friedberg’s is not, but I think when my family and I started to watch in technicolor, the value of image increased a lot. Perhaps some of the readers of this blog did not have a black and white television, but when you pass from that gray and somber image to a new one in color, the relation with the image is other. I remember watching cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry or The Flintstones in black and white, but when I started watching them in colors it was awesome! The color gave this texture that before it was impossible to determine, gave them character, personality.
We also had a VCR and sometimes we rented movies for a low price. The selection of the movie was a ritual: my sisters and I trying to agree about what children or pre teen films chose, and my parents trying to select one that both could probably enjoy, because we did not have enough money for renting more. But it was a really good deal, if we think in economic terms: my father paid for two films the value of two movie tickets, so besides taking the whole family in a bus to the movie theatre and pay for five tickets, and for popcorn and sodas, we can just lay down in the bed, watch the film, and drink juice or 2 litter of Coke and make our popcorn. I say in bed because we usually did not have the TV on the living room, it did not was this “window-wall designed to bring the outside in” as Lyden Spigel mentions quote by Friedberg (810), but it was located in my parents bedroom. The film, that usually took place Sunday’s afternoon, after lunch, it was almost like the representation of the end of the weekend, the last rest before we starting to prepare for terrible Mondays. Usually, someone took a nap when the movie started ⎯there is nothing like napping when the TV is on⎯, and usually, after forty minutes or an hour that one who was napping, woke up and asked the question: “I missed much of the movie?”.
I remember, also, about twenty years ago, my dad brought a VCR camera to the house. I his work sometimes they have to record on video meetings or events, and the employees can borrow the camera for personal events, well in certain occasions. I remember my father recording an asado, a barbecue, with this huge VCR camera during a holiday time. He worked as a camera man and director looking for smiles, interviewing spontaneously friends and visitors, taking funny shots from different perspectives. When we saw the film two or three days after the event took place, it was funny to note the faces, the attitudes of people in front the camera. But two or three years ago I was looking for a VCR video for my job and I found this one stacking within other. My mother started to watch the video with me and I think both of us watched everything with different eyes, perhaps we were a little shock: many of that people, young or not so young, children that day were dancing or playing with each other, have passed away during the last twenty years. It was very hard to see that, but also we saw a lot of the video trying to remember names, and figuring out what had happened with all that people.
What I want to say is perhaps not so critic. I just want to recognize that my memory is linked to technology that was developed during the last twenty five years. The objects that were part of that technology are not only history of the film but part of the cultural live of most of many people. The idea of seeing myself trough this old-fashioned apparatus let me know who am I, how I conceived the world according to the possibilities I had then and now.
To conclude, there are some films related to this topic: the unassailable pass of the time and changes of that technology produces, and the nostalgia for those days of VCR. I present two examples: one of my favorite scenes from The artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, the “sound” part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qvNfSwTAfE
and this scene from the movie Be kind, rewind, directed by Michel Gondry, a film about how to reconstruct a VCR world and what represented for communities (I could not found it in English or French)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DscBAc0zXUU
The trailer in English
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0M9rSpjlDM
Color TV, VCR and memory
Is inevitable not being nostalgic reading Anne Friedberg’s article “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change”. After she mentions the change that VCR, cable television and television remote control represented for technology and culture, I just want to add that those events also took an important place in my family live during 1980’s and 1990’s.
We did not have color TV until late 1980’s. My grandparents gave us a color TV as a present. I think this change was fundamental in the history of film, perhaps for Friedberg’s is not, but I think when my family and I started to watch in technicolor, the value of image increased a lot. Perhaps some of the readers of this blog did not have a black and white television, but when you pass from that gray and somber image to a new one in color, the relation with the image is other. I remember watching cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry or The Flintstones in black and white, but when I started watching them in colors it was awesome! The color gave this texture that before it was impossible to determine, gave them character, personality.
We also had a VCR and sometimes we rented movies for a low price. The selection of the movie was a ritual: my sisters and I trying to agree about what children or pre teen films chose, and my parents trying to select one that both could probably enjoy, because we did not have enough money for renting more. But it was a really good deal, if we think in economic terms: my father paid for two films the value of two movie tickets, so besides taking the whole family in a bus to the movie theatre and pay for five tickets, and for popcorn and sodas, we can just lay down in the bed, watch the film, and drink juice or 2 litter of Coke and make our popcorn. I say in bed because we usually did not have the TV on the living room, it did not was this “window-wall designed to bring the outside in” as Lyden Spigel mentions quote by Friedberg (810), but it was located in my parents bedroom. The film, that usually took place Sunday’s afternoon, after lunch, it was almost like the representation of the end of the weekend, the last rest before we starting to prepare for terrible Mondays. Usually, someone took a nap when the movie started ⎯there is nothing like napping when the TV is on⎯, and usually, after forty minutes or an hour that one who was napping, woke up and asked the question: “I missed much of the movie?”.
I remember, also, about twenty years ago, my dad brought a VCR camera to the house. I his work sometimes they have to record on video meetings or events, and the employees can borrow the camera for personal events, well in certain occasions. I remember my father recording an asado, a barbecue, with this huge VCR camera during a holiday time. He worked as a camera man and director looking for smiles, interviewing spontaneously friends and visitors, taking funny shots from different perspectives. When we saw the film two or three days after the event took place, it was funny to note the faces, the attitudes of people in front the camera. But two or three years ago I was looking for a VCR video for my job and I found this one stacking within other. My mother started to watch the video with me and I think both of us watched everything with different eyes, perhaps we were a little shock: many of that people, young or not so young, children that day were dancing or playing with each other, have passed away during the last twenty years. It was very hard to see that, but also we saw a lot of the video trying to remember names, and figuring out what had happened with all that people.
What I want to say is perhaps not so critic. I just want to recognize that my memory is linked to technology that was developed during the last twenty five years. The objects that were part of that technology are not only history of the film but part of the cultural live of most of many people. The idea of seeing myself trough this old-fashioned apparatus let me know who am I, how I conceived the world according to the possibilities I had then and now.
To conclude, there are some films related to this topic: the unassailable pass of the time and changes of that technology produces, and the nostalgia for those days of VCR. I present two examples: one of my favorite scenes from The artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, the “sound” part:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qvNfSwTAfE
and this scene from the movie Be kind, rewind, directed by Michel Gondry, a film about how to reconstruct a VCR world and what represented for communities (I could not found it in English or French)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DscBAc0zXUU
The trailer in English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0M9rSpjlDM
“Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who am I today?” You, my queen, are a victim of scopophilia today
Maybe it is because the semester is quickly coming to an end. Maybe it is because we spent the last two weeks talking about gender studies and feminism. I could not help it but to roll my eyes when I started to read Mulvey. After one page, I was already frustrated. I guess I am […]
“La teta asustada”
In the essay “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: an Introduction”, by Robert Stam and Louise Spence, specifically in the section “Some Definitions”, the authors say: “In response to such distortions [the one that the colonialism representation make], the Third World has attempted to write its own history, take control of its own cinematic image, speak in its own voice” (757). When I read this quote, I immediately thought about the contemporary Peruvian cinema and especially on one movie, La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow in English, which is not an exact translation; but this is another topic of discussion). This movie of 2009, directed by Claudia Llosa, almost wins the Oscar for the best international film.
I remember that I went to the cinema to see the movie almost immediately it was released. A great expectation surrounded the movie. I like very much the film. My first positive impression of the movie was that it breaks a terrible tradition in Peruvian cinema that was full of stereotypes (i.e. the people of “lower” classes were represented as vulgar or criminals). Claudia Llosa and her work, I think, have the three virtues that Sarris considers in his auteur theory (technical competence, a distinguished personality and “soul”).
However, I had certain dissatisfaction with the movie. Even it deconstructs some stereotypes, in some way it also reinforces one that is present in the Peruvian society: the people who come from the Andes to Lima have a big melancholic sentiment that makes them desperately hold to their traditions and reject Lima. In the movie, the main character (Fausta) and her family live in a small mountain (cerro) far from the city and they need to climb an enormous stair to get home (this, in fact, is the reality of many poor people in Lima that came escaping of the terror that the terrorist group “Sendero Luminoso” -and also the army- infused in the Andes). There, they try to reproduce some of their costumes and traditions. All these, along with other elements of the movie, give the sensation of isolation and rejection to Lima and its society.
In an article entitled “Una Heterogeneidad no dialéctica: sujeto y migrantes en el Perú moderno” [A Undialectical Heterogeneity: Subject and Migrants in the Modern Peru] (1996), by a renowned Peruvian literary critic, Antonio Cornejo-Polar, the author states that neither the position that says that the migrants are hold to their traditions and the one that says that they renounce to their traditions (the so called “aculturamiento” that Argueds rejects) and adopt the ones of Lima, are true. He talks about a mixture, a negotiation; a middle point, we can say. And there are examples, for instance, in the music. I agree with him and everyone that goes to Lima could see this mixture.
So, in the case of La teta asustada, the problem of present the migrants as melancholy and hold to their traditions could reinforce a racist and classist idea that still persists in the present in some groups of the middle and upper classes of Lima: the migrant is a strange “other”, an exotic that does not fit in the society. Therefore, is rejected and discriminated. And Lima continues to be an “arcadia colonial” (colonial arcadia), as the writer Sebastián Salazar-Bondy states in his famous essay Lima la horrible [Lima the horrible].
I have no doubt in the good intention of Claudia Llosa in criticize the Peruvian society showing it in a crude way. However, the kind of approach that she presents could be somehow a reinforcement for some racist and classist patterns that exists since the Colony. I think this case is a good example of what Stam and Spence also say in their article: “But this laudable intention [of women filmmakers to counterpoint the discourse of patriarchy] the Third World is not always unproblematic. ‘Reality’ is not self-evidently given, and ‘truth’ cannot be immediately captured by the camera” (757).
I want to finish saying that I recommend the movie. Despite the critique I have made, it is a very good film.
Here the link of the movie with English subtitles:
Here the link to the article of Cornejo-Polar. Unfortunately, it is only in Spanish:
http://www.cholonautas.edu.pe/modulo/upload/corn.pdf
The Perversity of Cinema
When I read Metz’ From the imaginary signifier, I couldn’t avoid the temptation to consider myself a fetishist in regards to. I have been always fascinating by the magic of these “shadows” in comparison of theatre, literature or painting.
The first element that intrigued me was the psychoanalytic approach from Freud and Lacan, establishing analogies with the mirror stage and the sense of lack that maintains the object of desire from the distance. As one progresses on the reading, Metz’ arguments will make a statement (i.e. cinema is the most perceptual art since it mobilizes a larger number of axes of perception) and then showed that this affirmation is not an absolute as everything happens in absence, so technically speaking it would be the least perceptual. It is precisely its unique form of perception what makes cinema so different.
Another point that it would be interesting to discuss is position of the spectator in the middle of all duplications: the projection of bringing live to objects by make them appear on camera and the introjection at the level of the consciousness (698). So, when we talk about movies are we also projecting them by bringing them up to the conversation and internalizing the content by reflecting on them?
In terms of the process of identification, what I found revealing is the fact that the subject sees himself/herself as all perceiving rather than saying the identification is with the characters on the movie, which would be a secondary or tertiary identification (700). As technology progresses, this process will present new challenges; I’m thinking about the current popularity of 3D when sometimes it does not add anything different to particular films. Is this perception of projecting reality beyond the screen a replacement for what we used to perceive in a regular movie or a reinforcement? How is the consciousness affected for this special effect of fiction within a fiction film? Do we “wake up” every time we see an object coming out of the screen, and then we go back to a lethargic stage when we forget we see a 3D movie? Or, it might be a mere distraction.
The Perversity of Cinema
When I read Metz’ From the imaginary signifier, I couldn’t avoid the temptation to consider myself a fetishist in regards to. I have been always fascinating by the magic of these “shadows” in comparison of theatre, literature or painting.
The first element that intrigued me was the psychoanalytic approach from Freud and Lacan, establishing analogies with the mirror stage and the sense of lack that maintains the object of desire from the distance. As one progresses on the reading, Metz’ arguments will make a statement (i.e. cinema is the most perceptual art since it mobilizes a larger number of axes of perception) and then showed that this affirmation is not an absolute as everything happens in absence, so technically speaking it would be the least perceptual. It is precisely its unique form of perception what makes cinema so different.
Another point that it would be interesting to discuss is position of the spectator in the middle of all duplications: the projection of bringing live to objects by make them appear on camera and the introjection at the level of the consciousness (698). So, when we talk about movies are we also projecting them by bringing them up to the conversation and internalizing the content by reflecting on them?
In terms of the process of identification, what I found revealing is the fact that the subject sees himself/herself as all perceiving rather than saying the identification is with the characters on the movie, which would be a secondary or tertiary identification (700). As technology progresses, this process will present new challenges; I’m thinking about the current popularity of 3D when sometimes it does not add anything different to particular films. Is this perception of projecting reality beyond the screen a replacement for what we used to perceive in a regular movie or a reinforcement? How is the consciousness affected for this special effect of fiction within a fiction film? Do we “wake up” every time we see an object coming out of the screen, and then we go back to a lethargic stage when we forget we see a 3D movie? Or, it might be a mere distraction.
In addition to telling the time, it’s a geiger counter, a powerful magnet, and a saw that can slice through rope.
Halberstam argues that masculinity itself cannot be fully understood unless female masculinity is taken into account. I find this idea intriguing as we have grown up in a society that has found it difficult to acknowledge gender uncertainty and has been very ready to either ignore it, or acknowledge it in using pejorative terms such as ‘tomboy’ or ‘butch’. Empowering models of female masculinity have been neglected or misunderstood because of a cultural intolerance towards the gender ambiguity that the masculine woman represents. I agree when Halberstam says “that as a society we have little trouble in supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust” (935) (think, Diet Coke ad all those years ago) yet a hint of “male femininity” (953) would be detrimental to the brand’s perception, I am sure.
Our perception of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when talking about gender ambiguity I think comes down to our social conditioning. Halberstam addresses the issue of tomboy-ism, which is perfectly acceptable whilst a girl is still pre-pubescent, she maintains, yet any continued foray into the world of the tomboy and the child will more than likely find herself defeated or ushered to the sidelines of peer groups.
I think Halberstam is right to address the notion that female masculinity has been widely ignored by society, perhaps because it is considered a ‘taboo’ subject within sexuality as Foucault might claim.
Certain questions that have been bothering me revolve around the idea of when a woman is considered to be masculine (either by herself or by society)? What are the boundaries? Also is there anything wrong with female masculinity? Has it been repressed because males see it as a threat to their species? I think the media is largely to blame for negativity surrounding female masculinity, but I also feel like it can encourage female empowerment with things like the ever-growing popularity of CrossFit. Images are published of ‘strong’, that is, athletically capable women, lifting more weights than men, covered in sweat yet are still able to fulfill their ‘feminine’ duties; of procreation and nurturing a child. Though, as Halberstam mentions, “when female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval” (954), and I entirely agree. Yes, it is inspiring to be confronted with the image of female empowerment, but what has society done to us that when confronted with this idea of female empowerment and homosexuality that we shy away and go back to admiring Bond’s Rolex Submariner and wondering “how he is going to get out of this one?”
