Monday 1. Filmmaker as Author 2. Art Cinema as Film Practice 3. Introduce the Film 4. Break 5. Watch...

Monday

1. Filmmaker as Author

2. Art Cinema as Film Practice

3. Introduce the Film

4. Break

5. Watch Film

We’ve talked about the filmmaker earlier in the

semester…

• Hitchcock, Welles, Sirk, De Sica– Certain stylistic consistencies across their work– Obsessions, themes, particular M-E-S– “Signatures” or elements of a signature style– Meaning of a film originates from a single

individual and their conscious choices

• Spike Lee

• Martin Scorcese

• Ang Lee

• Sophia Coppola

• Wes Anderson

• Dario Argento

Film as an individual’s self-expression

cinema becomes a means of expressing one’s inner self

Filmmaker/director as AUTHOR

• Auteur -- serious writer, novelist

• “caméra-stylo” (camera as pen)

• auteur = the artist whose personality was ‘written’ in the film

Auteur theory

• Auteurism

• Auteurist logic

• Birth of scholarly study of cinema

Auteur criticism first found in :

• Cahiers du Cinéma - French film magazine, 1950s

• Andrew Sarris (American critic)

• Movie (British film magazine)

Director as unifying force

• Meaningful coherence emerges when Director dominates (Sarris)

• Director not the sole creator but he/she is the unifying and organizing presence (Robin Wood)

• The force of a director’s sensibility can make up for faults (lesser writing, poor acting, etc.) and thus redeem a film (Bazin)

The logic of auteurism

• If a film is made by director who is more an genuinely an artist (an auteur), then it will be more likely to express his individual personality than other films made by less artistic directors.

• The auteur critic’s job = to indentify thematic or stylistic consistencies across one film and then the entire life’s work a of director (trace ‘signatures’).

• By reading an entire oeuvre we find recurring elements -- the unconscious.

Logic of Auteurismpresumes

• Film = art

• thus a film must made an artists

• since, art = an expression of the emotions, experience, and world-view of an particular, individual

The idea of the artist

• Romanticism’s notion of the artist, – Essentially opposed to society, achieving personal expression in

the face of hostile environment

(Triumph over Hollywood System)

• Reflects Western culture’s emphasis on individualism and self-expression

• Artwork = a reflection of the unified, cohesive will of one person

Regressive aspects of Auteur Theory

• A return to the romanticist notion of the artist as the definitive source of a film’s meaning

• Removes films from their social/historical context. Decontextualizes the film.

• Ignores the role of the spectator. Don’t viewers bring meaning experience to the text? Texts change meaning over time. Resistant readers. Trash, cult, camp.

• Neglects the role of ideology. The otherwise hidden cultural structures of meaning and power.

“The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”

• AC is distinct film practice– In-between Rio Bravo and Mothlight

The films included in the category of AC are vast

(look different, cover different topics)but DB believes that they share certain features. He aruges thatAC is a formal

practice.

As a specific formal practice, AC has…

– a historical existence• situated in history, has a history

– a set of formal conventions• coherent style

– a particular viewing practice• a spectatorial protocol

• AC defines itself explicitly against the CHN and especially the c-e linkage of events.

• Linkages are looser, more tenuous in the AC film.

• Resolution not revealed. Lack of closure.

What motivates AC’s narrative if not c-e?

• Realism

• Authorial expressivity

The 2 Levels ofArt Cinema’s Realism

• Objective: Shows us things. Real locations. The Body. Contemplates real problems.

• Subjective: Introduces us to subjective vision, psychologically marked narration. Characters are psychologically complex figures that guide the vision of the film

AC’s characters are realistic -- psychologically complex.

– Characters lack defined desires and goals.– Act for inconsistent reasons– Choices are vague or nonexistent. – Drifting episodic quality to art film’s narrative

• Characters wander, events lead to nothing.

“The Hollywood protagonist speeds directly toward the target;

lacking a goal the art-film character slides passively from one situation to another.”

776

“What is essential to any such organizational scheme is that it be sufficiently loose in its causation as to permit characters to express and explain their psychological states.” 776

• The search, a trip, making of a film

• Autobiographical, fantasies, dreams

• Hero = supersenstive individual

Realism of time and space

• Violations of time and space happen for two reasons1. b/c of unpredictable and daily reality.

• The intrusion of the accidental or the unexpected seems like real life.

• THE OBJECTIVE.

2. b/c of subjective reality of complex characters• THE SUBJECTIVE. Psychological experience.

This commitment to both objective and subjective

verisimilitude distinguishes

AC from HCN.

Authorship

• AC forgrounds the author (director) as a structure in the film’s system.

• The concept of authorship unifies the text.• Author is a formal component, the

overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension.

• AC director has creative freedom denied his/her Hollywood counterpart.

• The Viewer watches an Art Film, s/he finds order not from the narrative but from the stylistic signatures in the narration.

• Authorial presence comes forward to the viewer.

• Auteur theory emerges with AC.

After proving that realism and authorship are what unify the Art film, he then steps back and says isn’t there an inherent contradiction here?

• How can a film index the real and also index the intrusion of the director? How can film be motivated by the real and authorial intent?

• Ambiguity is the device that solves this contradiction. Keeps things uncertain.

Ambiguity

Satyajit Ray

• Often listed as a key AC auteur.

• Most famous director outside of India

• The Apu Trilogy

• For many years, these were the Indian films best-known to western audiences

Pather Panchali(Song of the Road)

• Bengali -- regional ethnic group and language• State funded• First Indian film of international success

– Represents India to the world, first hand experience– Is this a film for Bengalis or for the international

community?

• Commercial film industry in India vs. Art Cinema

Questions for taking notes

• Does this film fit DB’s definition of AC? • Does this film look like Neorealism? How might

we compare it to BT?• How does this film represent poverty?

– Does it glorify the poor? Make the simplicity of the impoverished life seem noble and gorgeous in a problematic way? Or does it try to counter the idea that impoverished lead empty lives?

Themes and other things to look out for…

• Village life versus Modern life

• Transfer of emotion onto objects

• Memory -- both thematically and also our own as we watch.

Wednesday

• My offices hours canceled today. Appointments available.

• Exam

• Paper #2 Due: Monday at start of lecture.

Pather Panchali

“Best Human Document.” stunned by a moving, humanist

masterpiece by an unknown from a part of world that had produced

little if any cinema seen by the judges.

• A humanist cinema. – Universal experience of being human. Cultural

difference is important but shared human condition transcends all difference.

• A humanitarian cinema.– Raises consciousness through narrative. Exposure to

certain themes and conditions evaded by commercial cinema.

– Filmed with a “tenderness” for the human life? Triggers sensitivity in viewer?

– What politics are connected to this approach? Humanitarian aid? Charity work?

My hypothesis

• Post-WWII new understanding of humanism and new understanding of what it means to go to the cinema.

• The otherwise passive activity of viewing mass-mediated images (e.g., film-going) is re-imagined as an engaged activity.

• Eye-witnessing becomes a form of political involvement in the world.

• Emphasis on vision as the means of international connectivity.

• What’s the relationship between the rise of a global humanism and the image of poverty?

• Does humanism need mediated-experience of human suffering to establish the universal value of human life?

• Why are their other ways to quantify human life?

The Politics of Critics Aestheticizing Poverty

• Communicating a world in need is a central value for mid-century critics and commentators across the west.

• An ethical imperative to recognize the beauty and transcendent humanity in cinemas of poverty.

• Cinema as a testament, and the film critic as a kind of social advocate.

• Generating sympathy. The film spectator’s charitable gaze = a precursor of humanitarian aid, a subjective ground for humanitarian aid.

Goals for last unit of course:

• Exposure to key filmmaking practices outside the mainstream

• Examine different approaches to depicting social issues of a specific moment– In particular, the politics of representing

humans struggling with economic hardship.

• These films not only introduce us to cultural situations outside our own experiences, but they also talk to us about the process of depicting those situations.

• In different ways, they politicize what it means to experience the world through cinema.

• Concerned with the description of their local situations to a global audience.

• Challenge their audiences by asking them to question conventional means engaging with the outside world.

• All depict a specific place, usually in the present• All concerning with politics of depiction, what it

means to represent real situations. • Specific understanding of culture: cinema = always a

means of both social change and artistic expression. – Never simply agitprop (agitation propaganda)

• Political rhetoric

– Never art for art’s sake• Devoid of political argument

– Never pure entertainment

Thus, when we’re analyzing a film, we should ask not only

by whom? from where?how made?about what?but also: for whom?

For Whom? Can be answered in several ways.

• Looking at the industrial history. Release records, promotion, reception records. Who went to film? How did they get there?

• Critical reception and film history. How the film was received in the day and what position it holds in film history.

• Look at the film itself

Look at the film itself

• What space does it hold open for the spectator? (Form: cinematography and editing work to establish terms of narration and spectatorial POV)

• How does it position the viewer in relation to action? How does it orient its viewer to the world on screen?

• Can this tell us something about how it imagines its own audience?

For example, how would we describe the address of Pather

Panchali?

• Insiders?

• Outsiders?

• Both at the same time?

• Switches?

Does Pather Panchali participate in these ideologies of humanism?

Does the film present itself to the newly engaged Western spectator?

Or does the film critique this position?

Or simply disallow us from identifying in this way?

To answer these questions, let’s look at a clip

• How are we positioned in relation to action in general?

• What does this scene tell us about modernity? What qualities does modernity have?– Sound and image key here.

• Think about POV (and the ethnographic gaze) in the long take from field back to the woods.

• How is the event of Auntie’s Auntie narrated? Different from other film deaths?

Ray talks about seeing BT and other neorealist films, as central to his conception of what this

film would look like.

From watching the film, what do you think Ray saw in these

Italian films? What about NR is carried through to Pather

Panchali?

What does viewing this film as an auteur’s masterpiece or art

cinema might occlude?

How certain motifs carry historical significance.

• The legacy of English Imperialism and Colonial Rule. – Train, The Band, etc.

• The Partition.

• Modernization.

• Societal changes brought on by Post-Independence policies.

Motifs inPather Panchali

• Vision – Modern technologies of vision vs. old technologies of

vision– Apu’s intro = un-blanketing of eye– Bioscope

• Modernity as sensory overload– Train, wires, etc.– Our relationship as spectators to this overload.

Motifs in Pather Panchali (cont)

• End of traditional ties to place and birthplace

• Poverty

• Migrancy. The move to cities. The question of mobility.

Historical Context: Independence

– New society, concerns about civil rights.

– Caste system abolished official.

– Gender inequality• The film’s critique of family, assumes an awareness of the

difficult roles accorded to women and girls.

– The concept of poverty as a social ill. Poverty always existed.

• With Liberation, the becomes amplified as problem b/c of nationalism and democratic society.

• 80% of population living in abject poverty.

PP centers around certain shifts in society that come with

Independence• Land rights influx.

• Zamindari system ends. – Akin to European feudal system. Zamindars = landed gentry.

• Definition of community shifts radically.– The elders.

• Extended family system in flux.

• Private Property in the film. Stealing, land ownership, familial obligations.

stuck between two moments

• The Old Way = untenable, foreclosed

• The New Way = unknown, ominous

• The current condition = dislocation

Conclusion

Tension within the film (and within Ray). It asks to be read as both

A. document of universal and trans historical human experience

and

B. reflection on a specific historical situation