Daniel Robertson Reynolds's blog

Replication/repetition/repurposing

The image of simulation:The simulation of image

Any discourse about counterfeiting or simulation has a stake in essential qualities.  One thing cannot be like another or “in essence” be another without replicating some of the original thing’s essential qualities on some level—whether the perceptual, the functional, the ontological, or on any other level.  Baudrillard’s essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” which we discussed in class, is imbued with a sense of the loss or obfuscation of something that is essentially real:

“Go and organize a fake hold-up.  Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger…the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phony ransom over to you)—in brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real.” (39)

This passage interests me because it seems to lay out some of the demarcations, for Baudrillard, between what is real and what is a simulation.  The hold-up is fake, as are the weapons and as is, surprisingly, the “phony” ransom.  The money handed over is, of course, real money, but it is a phony ransom, one must assume, because “ransomness” is a quality predicated upon money.  If the assertion of something circumstantially falsifiable, that thing must be a real thing (and thus predicate qualities are real things to Baudrillard).  The hold-up is fake, but a customer heart attack motivated by it would be real (but would not be a heart attack motivated by fear from a hold up, even if fear of a perceived hold-up was what caused the heart attack).
This passage is surprising in its emphasis on the essential qualities of items and actions.  People feel real fear even when being held up by fake weapons.  Real transactions can take place, real impressions can be made, real change can be effected.  Baudrillard does not specify that the weapons are fake; it could be that they are unloaded real guns.  Is an unloaded gun a real weapon, or does it become a weapon when loaded?  What if it is loaded, but is wielded with no intent to shoot?  This seems to invalidate its status as a weapon to Baudrillard.  The process of clarification in this passage whittles things down to bare essential qualities: a gun is, at most, a potential enabler of violent intent.  This intent, itself, seems to be an essential quality—in fact, the most important single essential quality in the passage, and the one upon which the status of all other things hangs.  Its lack falsifies the situation, though emergent contingencies can, on their own terms, be very real.

Dancing in Your Head

What if something was to be used in a way completely unrelated to its design?  A fake weapon used in a hold-up, of course, is being used in a way that parallels or simulates the use for which it was designed.  In Takehito Koganezawa’s “Dancing in Your Head,” various household implements and other items are manipulated in ways that elicit sounds from them; these sounds (along with accompanying images of their production) are orchestrated into rhythm-heavy musical pieces.  The film begins with a shot of a hand pressing “play” on a tape boombox; what we hear is not the sound of the tape being played but rather the incidental sounds that the apparatus makes, the click of the play button and the sound of the drive engaging.  This image and sound is repeated (click, whirr, click, whirr) establishing the rhythm of the piece.  Soon, this rhythm is broken up by the sounds (and images) of a daikon radish and an eggplant being sliced and a celery stalk being broken.  By the end of the piece, a syncopated rhythmic orchestra of popping caps, slicing knives, and spinning washers.  Some of these items are being used in accordance with their design (knives cut, lids cover containers), but here the “relevant” features of those uses are subsumed to the noises they make; the items and the actions are effectively repurposed for uses oblique to their original design.
To Baudrillard, I do not think that this would entail simulation.  When he writes that “events no longer make any sense,” (66) Baudrillard is referring to what might be called “secret nonsense”—he is making reference to public policy that hides its own incoherence in plain view by replacing itself with a substitute that approximates its own nature; he refers specifically to the end of the Vietnam War, the logic of which, he claims, obscures the true logic at work.  The willful illogic of “Dancing in Your Head,” however, seems to push back against Baudrillard’s implication that things can have true functional natures—natures to which representation can be more or less faithful.  In one way, the entire system at work here—the manipulation of the objects, the recording of the sounds they produce, the assemblage of those sounds into rhythmic patters—emulates a drum or other rhythmic instrument.  But the film is overt about the unusual sources of its sounds; it makes it very clear that it is not simulating anything.
In this way, the film is anti-essentialist exactly where Baudrillard veers into essentialism.  For the runtime of “Dancing in Your Head,” anyway, springs, radishes, and knives can be anything and can be used in any way.  The film is charming and its rhythm is infectious—these qualities surely help it “get over” on its audience.  That rhythm is real—really real—and this quality is not undermined by the objects from which it is elicited or the technical assemblage that underlies it.  There is room for whimsy (and thus for resistance), perhaps, even in a world dominated by imposed simulacra.  One might tap out a real rhythm with the tip of a fake gun; one might hold up a bank with an unloaded banana.

Film ist./Wir sind./All go to the same place/in the end.

Film ist.

Film ist. is a lot all of things at once; of course, film itself is a lot of things all at once.  The compilation films we have seen this quarter (I am thinking especially of Film ist. and Fast Film) both have a frenetic quality to much of their editing and imagery, as if they are panicking in their attempts to catch up to and keep up with the history of film aesthetics.  Fast Film embodies this race in its depiction of a horse trying to outrun a locomotive; Film ist. (the more effective of the two to my mind) does it by slowly building what seems to be an argument about what film does the best and what film does the most.  While Film ist. conducts a complex examination and demonstration of what film is, the period in the title, which implies that the verb “ist” is to be understood in its nontransitive sense, seems to indicate that the film is ultimately a statement that film is.  To be, though, is not necessarily to be forever, and Film ist. draws provocative comparisons between the transience of human life and the lingering but ultimately also transient quality of the cinematic image.
A few patterns emerge over the course of the 12 parts of Film ist.: a focus on shot-reverse shot construction seems to be commenting on or celebrating one of the most already-celebrated capacities of film.  Time and again, we

Reversible ostrich

see what seem to be eyeline matches constructed from what are obviously excerpts from different films.  Part 1 of Film ist. focuses on another commonly commented-upon convention of film: screen direction—we see an ostrich running left-to-right intercut with bullets moving in the same direction.   The film then cuts to a bulldog running right-to-left—convention would dictate that the ostrich and the bulldog are about to collide—but in the next shot, the ostrich is running backwards (an effect achieved by replaying the previous shot in reverse).
The film moves from this basic illustration of cinema’s constructive abilities to an examination of the power of film to absorb and pacify its viewer; in Part 2, flashing lights cause a pupil (seen in extreme close up) to react.  The film cuts to a shot of a man in profile, who, seemingly held entranced by the flashing light, does not react as he is engulfed by a fireball.
A later sequence in Part 2 depicts a flashing red light accompanied by a pure, synthetic tone.  This approaches what Umberto Eco calls “undercoding”: “a case of imprecise coding, a tentative hypothetical ‘gesture’ subsuming one or more large-scale portions of text under a given heading.” (A Theory of Semiotics 135)  Much of the entire work, in fact, has this quality—it feels like it must be some kind of code, but it also feels indecipherable.  “Undercoding,” writes Eco, “proceeds from non-existent codes to potential codes.” (136) Watching Film ist. attentively is an exercise in mental organization.  Patterns begin to suggest themselves, only to be broken or altered before they can be defined.  The film is alternately mesmerizing and opaque (and often both).  Part 2 ends with a pixelated field of swirling dots that seem to resolve into rough patterns; in this way, its ending is reminiscent of the ending of Copy Shop, in which filmic representation seems to break down into the dots that make it.
This emphasis on the constituent parts of things is, I think, at the center of the theory of film that Film ist. seems to develop.  Film (understandably) has taken the human form as its primary subject.  Film ist. illustrates the constructedness of both the film medium and of the human body, emphasizing their component parts (an eye is cut out in Part 5; later in the same part a camera is shown reflected in a mirror that it is filming), their functional uses, and their ultimate decay.  In Part 4, titled “Material,” the film compares the decay patterns of celluloid to the growth patterns of human organs with repeated images of people that have decayed in patterns that make it appear as if the organs of the people in them—lungs and brains especially—have become exposed (the decay patterns of the images look like clusters of alveoli, a fact that the film exploits to great effect).  This succession of still images gradually moves toward systematic removal of whole people from the frame; death and decay—of people and of film—is followed by disappearance.
This message of decay is further developed in Part 10, “Writing and Language,” with its repeated images of a man writing in the sand of a beach only to have his words washed away by the surf.  Film can suspend a moment, Film ist. seems to be saying, but that does not mean it can truly preserve it.

This cat is long dead

Film ist. ultimately embraces the decay of the cinema in Part 11.2 (Part 11 as a whole is called “Emotions and Passion.”)  In this part, the film cuts between footage of the surface of a body of water, from which a bright light is reflected, and a sunny forest grove.  In the shots of each of these locations, the celluloid is somewhat worn away; in these black-and-white shots, the whiteness of the lost parts of the image becomes indistinguishable from the mise-en-scène.  At this point, one feels, we are left with the reality of what film is: a surface.
In many ways, there is no mise-en-scène at all; how can something be “put into” light, or into celluloid?  Film, after all, is no more than this.  Film is merely a fleeting record—what Gilberto Perez calls a “material ghost”—and so, for that matter, are we.  There are only a few recognizable figures in Film ist.  There is a real urge, after all this unfamiliarity of form and subject, to shout out, “That’s Theda Bara!” (in Part 7) or “That’s Clara Bow!” (in Part 11), but by the time we see them, the film has taught us that that is not Theda Bara and that is not Clara Bow; both of those women are long dead, and their bodies have long since broken down into their component parts.  It is only through the minor miracle of film that we can hold onto their images, and even then only for a little while longer.

Wir sind.

Film scores/Of animals killed

Sergei Eisenstein - Стачка(1925)

You have to hand it to the Alloy Orchestra—they aren’t afraid to put their stamp on a film.  Some of the time, the effects of their scores are devastating; their score for Sherlock, Jr. changes the tone of much of the film, supplementing Buster Keaton’s unlikely grace with crashing noises that are anything but graceful and making inappropriate and distracting musical allusions to spy films that came half a century after the film was made.
Their style, so ill-suited for physical comedy, works wonders with formalist film, though, as their industrial-sounding but melodic scores for Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera and Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike illustrate.  The score for Strike blends an affinity for Eisenstein’s manipulations of visual rhythm with a unifying thematic sensibility that lends the film an extra touch of spatial and perceptual continuity without sacrificing the quality of “juxtapositions and accumulation, in the audience’s psyche, of…’montage fragments’” that have a stronger effect when taken as a whole. (Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” 41)  That is to say, the score conveys a unity of purpose and a holism that complements the overall effect of the film, adding to its sense of unity without detracting too much from the affective power of its constituent moments of montage.

Sherlock Jr Money Clip

(Eisenstein’s comments on most Russian filmmakers’ inability to “construct attractional schemas consciously” provides interesting perspective on why the Alloy Orchestra’s scores do not work when they do not: “The American detective film and, to a greater extent, the American comedy film (the method in its pure form) provide inexhaustible material for the study of these methods,” writes Eisenstein. (44)  The Alloy Orchestra’s scores for Sherlock, Jr. and the Buster Keaton/Fatty Arbuckle shorts seem to be working exactly against the construction of attractional schemas in these films, breaking down and inflecting motion within shots as well as the elements of montage.  Their scores for the Russian films, however, seem more sensitive to the effects of montage and to the larger affective arcs of the films to which they are joined.)
*****

Blood of the Beasts (Calves Clip)

I want to take a second to address the issue of animal slaughter in film.  We have certainly seen a lot of it this quarter, and I would be surprised if we have seen all that we are going to see.  To watch an animal die onscreen is a strange experience, stranger, perhaps, than to watch a person die, and I wonder why this is.  In the footage from Strike, Blood of the Beasts, and (I think) at least one other film, we see the slaughter of animals in graphic detail; the blood and the life can be seen slowly draining from their bodies.  When I have seen humans killed on film, it has always been a more punctuated process, depicted usually in news footage of people being shot.  I read a few months ago (in the book Stiff by Mary Roach) that there is no clear reason why people should crumple to the ground motionless when shot; it seems that it may be a deeply-ingrained learned behavior rather than a natural reaction to what a bullet does to a human body.  On the other hand, it may be in line with our evolved responses to sudden, threatening sights and noises: we tend, when threatened with severe injury, to slacken our bodies as if to absorb a heavy blow (cf. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature).

Blood of the Beasts (Sheep Clip)

So part of the difference may be in the particulars of the killings of humans and animals that I happen to have seen on film, and part may be because of the dying human’s seeming tendency to collapse rather than struggle like the headless corpses of the calves in Blood of the Beasts.  I would guess that there is something going on the receiving end of these images, as well.  We are accustomed to seeing (simulated) human-killing onscreen, and mass audiences notoriously tend to be more squeamish about seeing fictional animals killed than they are about seeing the killings of fictional humans.  Could it be that the amount of fictional human killing we have all seen has planted a seed of doubt in our minds that makes itself known even when what we are watching is a real killing?  There is a real shooting of a man in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger; I did not know this at the time that I saw the film, but the reality of the man’s death is, I think, captured in something appropriately convincing about the way he moves—though just barely—as he succumbs to the bullets.  All the same, this shooting, surrounded as it is by fictional narrative, seems to recede in the consciousnesses of people who see the movie, so that it has the ability to re-surprise people each time they see the film.  How can narrative make a real death harder to remember?  Shouldn’t the real death be what we remember about the film?  Why, on the other hand, is the slaughter of the bull the thing that many people remember the most vividly about Strike?  It could be something about the way these images are used rhetorically in their respective films, but there seems to be a broader pattern here—animals, death, and film don’t mix so good.  [Revisiting this post a couple of weeks later, it occurs to me that maybe animals, death, and film mix TOO well--Eisenstien is making effective  use of these images, but their impact may lead to that unwelcome rhetorical effect where people remember the images employed metaphorically more clearly than they remember the effects of the metaphor themselves.]

What is Lola Montès?

Lola Montès Publicity Still

Lola Montès opens with a strange retrospective tone: its heroine, having been involved in an escalating series of sexual associations that has culminated in an affair with the king of Bavaria, is now the central feature of a circus in which she is discussed, displayed, and prodded by a ringmaster and his audience.  The film begins with this circus and then provides us with a series of flashbacks on some of the important events in her life.  This structuring device inflects the film tonally; by showing Lola on display in front of a crowd and casting their curiosity as exploitative if understandable, the film puts its own audience in a somewhat defensive position.  The film's flashback structure amounts to a prodding-through of Lola's life; surprisingly, we don't learn nearly as much about her as we might think we are going to.  Near the beginning of the film, the ringmaster of the circus encourages the crowd to ask Lola “anything,” but he then rebuffs most of their requests, telling some of them that they will have their answers “in time.”
The film, with its semi-linear series of flashbacks, teases its audience in a similar way, obscuring aspects of Lola’s experience while holding her ultimate fate right in front of us.  Through all of this, Lola remains a curiously obscure figure.  She is silent throughout the circus act, there are long parts of the flashback sequences in which she does not appear or does not play a major role in the action, and the film is blocked in a way that makes Lola visually indistinct at several key moments.  At the same time, the film strongly asserts the power of the filmic image to connote story information (that is, to connote in a way that is similar to the connotative nature of language as postulated by Christian Metz), and it makes interesting connections between connotation in language and language’s natural, culturally-oriented ability to be suggestive—a way in which the connotative, rather than denotative (and thus, some might say, impoverished) nature of language as a system of signification is employed in order to allow the speaker to refer to things that might otherwise be culturally taboo topics.
Thus, when the circus depicts Lola’s married life as a tableau vivant of the couple spinning on a platform while a another, circular platform spins around them, the ringmaster can only go so far in describing the details of their married life before he has to stop with a throaty, leering pointing-out of “leur boudoir.”  He mentions only the name of the room and not what is done there; the context and, especially, his intonation, carry the suggestion much further.  Language points at what is left out—an interesting way in which the arbitrariness of the relationship between words and their referents can be subverted.  If one refers to nothing, but implies a connection to something that is thought, by its nature, to be unmentionable, one has not been quite so arbitrary as one would have been had one just out and mentioned the thing itself.  The unsignifier, we might say, has an unarbitrary connection to the unsignified.  This compares interestingly to a later scene in which Lola, ridingthrough the Bavarian alps in her carriage, picks up a young hiker.  Her companion gets out to leave Lola alone in the cab with the hiker, and the camera holds on the outside of the carriage with Lola just visible in the lower left-hand corner of the frame, seen through the window of the cab.  When she puts the window up, there is no mystery as to what is happening inside the cab; the film thus neatly mirrors the suggestive/connotative(/unsignifying) capacity of language in a way that is closer to what language itself does, I think, than are the examples of connotation in film (from Que Viva Mexico!) furnished by Metz in his article.

Lola Montès

Lola’s closing of the carriage window also connects this scene to a prominint motif of the film: on many occasions, we see Lola through windows or in other situations that partially obscure her features.  A key sequence with the king of Bavaria plays out behind lace curtains, for instance, and many early scenes are shot through somewhat distorted window glass.  This motif climaxes as Lola rides in a carriage for a second time with the young hiker, this time escaping a revolt against the king.  As Lola delivers her final (and possibly first) substantial speech of the film, summarizing what her experiences have taught her, her face is obscured, most of the time, by a prominently placed candlestick that splits the screen up the middle.  Even as we see Lola at her most fully constituted (and at her most emotionally accessible), her image, and our understanding of her, are split.  Lola Montès is, in many ways, a film about reconstitution, but more specifically one about how things can never really be put together again.  In this way, the film has an implicitly subversive aspect. Kaja Silverman writes that “films are articulated and the viewing subject spoken by means of interlocking shots.”  (The Subject of Semiotics 201)  This idea of interlocking applies to the linking of elements of narrative as well as to the linking of shots. To Silverman, the film takes as its ultimate subject “the centrality of a passive and compliant female representation to the operations of classic cinema” while indicating that this does “not necessarily assure the [male subject] a dominant position.” (229)  To me, the film comes across as more of an examination of the process of constructing meaning, itself an ideologically and politically charged pursuit.  Gender is certainly central to the discourse of the film, in either case.  Attempts at reconstructing the past, no matter the gender context, seem to reveal more through their processes than through their products.  An attempt by a man to define a woman’s past—especially the past of a woman with a “past”—is a pursuit that will likely reveal much about the one doing the reconstructing.  The film Lola Montès, I think, is very sympathetic to the character of Lola; if it allows her to remain a fractured figure, this is not out of disdain or disregard for who she is, but rather a way of acknowledging, in an unflinching way, the sad reality of her situation.

Lola Montez, 1955, by Max Ophüls

Metz/Eisenstein/Adieu Philippine

In “The Cinema: Language or Language System?,” Christian Metz discusses Sergei Eisenstein’s desire to “make the lesson of events visually apparent” (36) by “conquering other minds” (32).  To Metz, Eisenstein’s seeing the (filmed) world as an opportunity for fragmentation and ideological reconstitution is a desire to maximize the connotative power of film while minimizing film’s natural denotativeness.  
To Metz, spoken and written language is mostly connotative in that it makes reference, through the workings of its own consistent internal systems, to systems external to it (its real-world referents) in such a way that the internal relationships of language are analogous to the relationships between those things to which language refers.  Film, however, is naturally a more denotative medium than is language, as a filmed image or event makes direct (indexical, one might say) reference to that which it portrays.  Thus, a film image of the action in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) denotes Humphrey  Bogart really doing all of the things that we see Sam Spade do.  Since film denotes not just objects and formations (as do photographs) but also actions, it could be said that any film that fragments these to the point that they are unrecognizable (or barely recognizable) results in less denotation than would a film with longer takes or clearer images. 

Chimes at Midnight

In Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), the Battle of Shrewsbury quickly becomes so visually and kinetically fractured that one must rely on vague patterns of screen direction to construct a narrative from what one is seeing; at this moment in the film, denotation gives way to connotation in that direct reference to space , time, and perception are abandoned in favor of conveying ideas or impressions about infantry battle

Que Viva Mexico

Metz makes reference to a similarly chaotic (though much more spatially coherent) sequence in Eisenstien’s Que Viva Mexi o (unfinished; released 1979) in which men, buried up to their necks in the desert, are trampled by horses.  To Metz, this scene is assembled according to Eisenstein’s lifelong desire to fragment reality into segments that can be reconstituted according to one’s intellectual goals.  Still, writes Metz, the denotative power of film is unmistakable (and unavoidable).
The French New Wave is most lauded for its formal innovations and its free interpretations of genre conventions.  Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1963) has many of the qualities that are most often used to charcterize the films of the French New Wave: a loose treatment of temporal relations, an unscripted quality, the murky look that results from low-budget cameras and shooting on the fly, an emphasis on private or idiosyncratic moments, and a fascination with youth.  The formal experimentation of this film and many of the others that emerged from its loosely-defined movement often results in moments and actions being oddly inflected through repetition, elision, and fragmentation.  In this way, the films are structurally experimental.  One might even say that they are more so than Eisenstein’s films, which tend to be carefully targeted toward specific effects.  In Adieu Philippine, the spirit of experimentation gives the impression of being less concerned with desired results than with simply seeing what effects might result from new formal manipulations.

Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo

The continued popularity and appeal of the New Wave films is often credited to their exciting and innovative experiments with  filmic connotation; what is often overlooked, I think, is that the films can be extremely appealing on a denotative level as well.  Many (probably a large majority) of the films are concerned with youth culture.  The looseness of the films allows us to associate the characters with the actors, and in some of their best moments, these films feel like they are freeing us up to (vicariously) be silly, emotional, intellectual French teenagers in the early 1960s.  Beyond their depiction of action, much of the films’ appeal rests, I think, on the physical attractiveness of so many of their characters.    The principal characters in Adieu Philippine are uniformly good-looking, and they join the company of Jean-Pierre Leaud, Jeanne Moreau, Chantal Goya, Jean-Claude Brialy, and especially (in my humble opinion) Anna Karina, as well as innumerable other attractive young French New Wave film actors.  The denotative appeal of a compelling face or body should not be underestimated.   The French New Wave directors seem to have understood this.  Eisenstein’s own use of faces, I would argue, was more on the connotative end of things; although he used many people with cinematically compelling faces in his films, the way he used those faces had much more to do with their connotative power (as symbols of social classes, ideological alignments, emotions) than with their connections to people who really lived.
Still, all the fragmentation, reassembling, and connotative focus in the world, it seems, can never  fully deprive an interesting face of its inherent denotative value: this person, who looked like this, lived.

Ivan the Terrible

No Seeing Without Hearing/”Compound Signification” in Blowup

Blowup

Each time I see Blowup, my feelings about the caddish, selfish man at its center change.  I first saw the film when I was a teenager, and at the time I found it to be impressive, but also repulsive and dated.  Part of this effect, certainly, came from my feelings about its protagonist.  I couldn’t like him—who could?—and I thus found it hard to care about him or to become engaged in the movie in an emotional way.  It was hard to connect, as well, with the world the film portrayed; from my vantage point as an adolescent in the early grunge era, the styles, postures, and positions of mod-era “swinging” London were so alien as to be indecipherable.  I don’t think I resisted the movie, per se, and I know I didn’t reject it out of hand because it seemed dated; it is a hard movie to get a hold of, and it was the obscurity of its perspective that I found frustrating rather than that perspective itself.  Blowup brings its audience along with it in some unusual ways—ways, anyhow, to which it took me some time to become sensitive.

The early scenes with Thomas almost beg us to reject him—he is cruel to women, bratty at work, and clearly narcissistic, not to mention sweaty and pretentious.  Above all, though, he is strangely disengaged from the world, seemingly holding himself above that which surrounds him while at the same time indulging in the worst of it.  The film aligns us with him formally from the beginning, constructing its spaces as relative to his presence and motion and aligning itself, for the most part, with his attention.  This conventionally standard treatment of the film’s protagonist is somewhat at odds with what we seem to be asked to feel about him as a person; the overall effect is a strange coupling of alienation and forced empathy

Thomas is a photographer, and the film demonstrates the power of his eye through the “art” photographs he has taken for his book and through the effect his (never seen) fashion photographs seem to have on the young models who hang around him, desperate to have their pictures taken.  He remains alien, though, to his subjects, holding the models at arm’s length except when he wants something from them, and shooting his “art” subjects from afar and attempting to do so without their knowledge.  Thomas is at a remove from the world; one of the things that the film does very interestingly is that it shows his alienation dissolving at the same as it moves us into a position of greater subjectivity relative to Thomas. 

One key to this, I think, is sound.  To me (and, I suspect, to many), the most memorable sound from Blowup is the rustling of the wind through the leaves of the trees in the park in which Thomas takes his photographs.  From the moment Thomas walks into the park, the sound of the wind is high in the mix; it comes back later, equally loud, on the other occasions on which Thomas returns to the park. 

Looking closer

The sound also reappears during the exhilarating sequence in which Thomas makes progressively bigger blow-ups of the shots he took in the park; it is in this sequence, I think, that a number of intrasubjective thresholds are crossed.  At this point, though the compounded effect of what we see and hear, I think we move into Thomas’s subjective space in a new way.  The developments on the soundtrack are the first indication we have that Thomas is really thinking retrospectively about something, acknowledging that he was somewhere, in a place that had a feeling that he remembers.  The emergence of the sound of the rustling leaves on the soundtrack retroactively re-situates Thomas, making a much stronger connection between him and the place where he was before.

At this point, our ability (such as we ever had) to pin down the film’s connotative and denotative meanings gets shakier. Thomas makes a series of optical blow-ups of details of his photographs and begins to think he sees something in them, and the sequence becomes more patently artificial as it goes along, ending with a series of blow-ups that get closer and closer to what seems to be a figure with a gun.  Once we see what might be a gun, the film moves back to one of the earlier shots that shows more of the context of the figure, and now—all of a sudden—there he is, unmistakable and visible in much more detail than he was before.  In the past, I have thought of this a botched effect, but watching the film this time, I felt as if I was being carried into Thomas’s point of view, that he began to see with more clarity and confidence a figure in the bushes.  It is unclear, at this point, what the film is denoting and what it is connoting.  I think that much of this complication comes from the sound of the leaves on the soundtrack, which provide a modality marker for the images we are seeing; we haven’t been given any conventional visual cues that we are seeing a subjective point of view, but the evidence presented by the visuals is complicated and called into question by the film’s sound design.  The term “compound signification” in the title of this entry is meant to refer to this quality.

The film follows this tendency through to its end, which includes a very strange sequence of shots in which Thomas returns to the park to look for the body he saw the night before.  Thomas approaches the tree next to which the body lay and looks down, and the film forestalls the knowledge we may be anticipating—that the body is gone—by holding on Thomas in a medium close-up before finally tilting down to show an empty patch of grass at his feet.  Bent down over the spot, he looks up for what I think is the first time at the rustling leaves above him; watching the film last night, I read this as an indication that he was coming into some new kind of embodiment, putting sight and sound together in a new, physically present, way.  At this point, things are maybe “anchored” (as Barthes might say via Silverman) by a confluence of implied perspective, sound, and image.

The next cut, though, is a strange one; we go from the image of the leaves shot from below to a shot of Thomas standing up, his eyeline matching the spot where we just saw him crouching; it is unclear whether any time has elapsed between the two shots (the soundtrack seems continuous, but it is not easy to pick up the sound of a splice among the rustling of leaves), but the implication seems to be that Thomas is outside of himself, or perhaps that he has split in two.  This seems to have strong connections to the trauma he has just encountered at finding himself in a new kind of embodied relationship with the world; his forced acceptance of his own subjectivity seems to have had what Benveniste (again, via Silverman) calls an effect of “splitting” his subjectivity and compelling him to find new ways to engage with a world in which he is suddenly an embodied, mortal inhabitant.

Mime

The film’s final scene, after all this, played out more sadly for me than it had before.  Thomas allows himself to be drawn into a world of extreme subjectivity—the play-world of the modish mimes and their tennis game—and, in so doing, he seems to lose himself completely; in the film’s final shot, just before the end title, Thomas himself disappears from the image.  The film does a lot in the beginning to make us dislike him, but by the time it ends, we are sorry to see him go.

Greenaway/Saussure/Exercycle/Light Speed

Vertical Features Remake

Structural thinking seems to have a way of getting under your skin.  The Greenaway films last night were mesmerizing in their own right, but they also seem to have primed me to think about things in terms of physical and temporal structures in my day-to-day life.  Vertical Features Remake seems to be mostly interested in our perceptions of temporal structures, though the overt-yet-hidden-in-plain-daylight theme of Tulse Luper’s film is physical similarity: he has made a film about narrow, vertical things, mostly trees.  Interestingly, Vertical Features Remake (the Greenaway film) is also interested in narrow, vertical things; that is, strips of celluloid.  It keeps coming back to the “found” film strips from the Luper film.
Here, the spatial and the temporal are merged in a way that is easily grasped

Not likely

by anyone: a physically longer strip of film will yield a temporally longer film as projected, assuming it is projected at a constant speed.  So much relies on this one variable being constant; projection speed, in this case, is what allows the rest of the structure to snap into place.  I have had foreign friends remark to me that Americans (and especially Western Americans) tend to talk about distances in terms of time: Sacramento is six hours from Santa Barbara, the hotel is five minutes from the beach, and so on.  I suppose this can be partially attributed to American pragmatism, but I think it also has something to do with increased mobility and shared assumptions about how fast one can move through space.  Even if one’s speed does not remain constant when traveling from Santa Barbara to San Diego, we are all on common ground when talking about how long it will take, because we know we have to deal with Los Angeles traffic on the way.
This is to say that we structure our knowledge, I think, in perceptually accessible, functional ways first.  We connect space and time when they both mean the same thing for us, but we tend to think of them as separate when they are not explicitly functionally linked in terms of the job that needs doing.  My father told me that he once led a class activity in which students figured out how tall they were in terms of time—something made possible by the fact that the speed of light is a universal constant.  A student, uninterested in the connection and finding the assignment silly, refused to participate, saying that he did not have time for that sort of thing.  “Maybe,” replied my father, “you just aren’t tall enough.”
The morning after seeing the Greenaway films, I rode the exercise bike at the UCSB gym.  I decided to experiment with a program that I hadn’t used before called “personal trainer.”  The exercise bike was thus transformed into a bossy taskmaster; it would command me to alternate between 60 revolutions per minute and 100 RPM, all at a constant level of resistance.  As time went by, I realized that there was a temporal structure here not unlike that in the “Vertical Features Remake 2” (or 3?) part of Vertical Features Remake; the bike would have me ride at 60 RPM for three minutes, then 100 for one; 60 for 2:30 and 100 for 1:30;  60 for 2:00 and 100 for 2:00, and so on.  I thus had to suffer the mental anguish of calculating how long my physical anguish would last, though in some ways I was grateful for the distraction.  Coincidentally, I happened to glance down at the timer on the bike just as it read 11:11, the most important number in Vertical Features Remake.

Time-stamped

We talked in class about how structure is imposed on systems, most interestingly, I think, in our discussion of how Ferdinand de Saussure limited the scope of his inquiry in such a way that it enabled what he thought of as a scientific approach.  He seems to have done this with a pure disciplinary boundary—he erects this boundary and says that it is the limit of what he wants to describe.  I think his approach rings a bit false to me because the boundary does not seem to be motivated by any natural boundaries between the categories he sets up (between lange and parole, between synchronic and diachronic inquiry)—they seem to be there just because they are convenient to the way he wants to look at and describe the world.  Instrumentalist approaches like this aren’t always a bad thing, but language is such a dynamic system that Saussure’s instrumentalism seems doomed from the start (as seen in retrospect).
Greenaway’s structuralism is more playful, and tends to look for connections between patterns that are already established, and then to look for patterns in those connections.  This very interesting approach, with its fascination with the mathematics of things, leads to some provocative connections being made.  I especially liked the “Vertical Features Remake 2” segment, in which lengths of film were opposed to one another in a shifting but consistent pattern, and in which the musical structure lent a touch of narrative to the film.  There, composer Michael Nyman takes advantage of the fact that the film is structured around the number 11, while the standard musical scale is based around the number 12, to create shifting tension between a repeated major chord and a single note in the next octave up that slowly ascends the 12-tone scale, ending in a kind of resolution that the visual structure of the film does not give us.  Thus, we are able to mark out time in terms of a destination, even if we have not kept track of how many shots have gone by.  We can count seconds, and do math, and try to make sense of the visual world in terms of structures that we know have a pattern, or we can just look and listen and, thanks to the structural design of the score, know what is coming in due time. 

Copy Shop/Come into My World/Double Articulation

copy shop - youre xeroxed

Thinking back to the reduplication of elements that we saw in Copy Shop and “Come into My World” yesterday, I think that the repetitions in each of these pieces are articulated in markedly different ways, and to different effects. Each film portrays the duplication of (1) mise-en-scène elements; (2) narrative developments; and (3) formal devices. Especially important to the various effects achieved by the films are the different ways in which they use repetitive sounds—I will come back to this later, but first I want to look at how some of the effects in Copy Shop are achieved.

Copy Shop seems to be mainly concerned with the loss of identity in crowded, homogenized, or repetitive situations. It also, interestingly, has a lot to say about complexity and emergence. When the film begins, we are presented with a character who, as far as we know, has lived a normal life up until this point; we see him going through what looks like a morning routine (indicating that he’s done it many times before); his longing gaze at the woman on the street is staged so as to make it seem like something he has anticipated and hoped for—intimations that this man has a backstory.

There is something invested in this man, in short, that we don’t get for the duplicates; we are inclined to ask why they are there rather than what their lives have been like up to this point. After the first couple of duplicates appear, we are less likely to wonder about their status (and their relevance) as individuals—at some point, they become a mass. In the film, the progressive effect of the appearance of new duplicates seemed to be something like this:

Man: Personal investment

1^st duplicate: Uncanniness

2^nd duplicate: Horror

3^rd to about 6^th : Whimsy

6^th onward: Chaos

End of film: Emergence of a graphic pattern

As the film goes along, we are less and less invested in each new duplicate. As we discussed in seminar, we don’t even know if our “hero” is the original or just a duplicate who is picked out by the camera. In any event, his fate is not unique, as we can see in the shot of many duplicates climbing to the tops of many smokestacks. The last shot of the film is particularly interesting, I think, because it shows the duplicates as a graphic pattern of almost-dots as camera, from the point of view of the falling man, moves toward them. At the beginning of that last shot, they are almost beginning to resolve into pixels. Given the film’s preoccupation with the production of graphic elements, it is interesting that it ends by asking us to think about both what can emerge from a pattern of action and what goes on at the level of the action itself. At what level of complexity, the film seems to be asking, does one tier of action become irrelevant (or uninteresting)?

Come Into My World(Kylie Minogue)

“Come into my World,” by comparison, keeps things squarely at street level; its characters are duplicated three times over the course of the video, and (as in Copy Shop) the situations that emerge have to do with clashes of personality and mounting complexity, but in this case things seem to remain rooted at a more personal level. The four Kylies look out for one another and interact playfully; the clashes that erupt in the background seem to be specific to situations that were already issues when there was just one of everybody. This can be related, I think, to the structure of the soundtrack of the video. “Come into My World” is a very repetitive song, one that gains a lot of its power from the predictable ways in which it withholds but always comes back to its catchy chorus. The resultant tension in the song is mirrored by a tension in the video; after Kylie’s second lap around the street scene, we know pretty well what kind of thing is coming next, but we wonder a bit about what it will be like for us this time around. During the third (I think) lap around the intersection, we get a little variation in the correspondence between the song and the video; the song’s bridge delays the chorus until later in Kylie’s lap and also causes some of the duplicated Kylies to go out of synchronization with the vocal track.

This structure of long, repeated segments with minimal variations is actually quite different from what happens in Copy Shop. It could be said that that film is about emergence though repetition, while “Come in to My World” is more about invocation through repetition; Copy Shop shows us how things can look different when seen from different levels; “Come into My World” shows us that “more of the same” doesn’t always produce the same results. The sound design of Copy Shop works along with this: while it is certainly repetitive, it doesn’t have the readily identifiable long, repeated sonic structures that “Come into My World” does. In its sound design as well as in its visual and narrative structuring, Copy Shop is concerned with how little details can add up to what seems like a fundamentally different overall effect—in terms of the concepts from semiotics that we discussed in class, Copy Shop seems to be more related to the concept of double articulation than does “Come into My World,” in which meanings seem to be more taken for granted. Copy Shop starts out on what seems to be a discursive level—showing us a man with what seems to be a backstory going to work—but breaks that (and the man’s and the film’s own construction) down into its component parts before rebuilding things to a level higher than that at which it began. In linguistic terms, the film’s levels of engagement might look like:

UTTERANCE->PHRASE->LEXEME->MORPHEME->PHONEME->(NEW KIND OF) MORPHEME->(NEW) LEXEME->(NEW) PHRASE-> (NEW) UTTERANCE -> DISCOURSE

The film breaks down its levels of representation—visual, sonic, and narrative –in order to be able to rebuild them with a new understanding and then to (eventually) go beyond its original scope. This is closer to double articulation than what “Come into My World” does—that video’s repetitions are less about producing new kinds of meaning than about showing how more of the same is sometimes just that—more of the same.

Vox Bloggin'

Well, the semester's over, and I have one last piece of media use on which to report.  In a postmodern turn, I am here to blog about blogging, at least briefly.  I have tried twice before to run blogs.  One, long defunct and never really gotten off the ground, was about all of the movies I watched during the two weeks it lasted.  Another, still (semi-)active, is more free-form, but is also mostly about movies.  It's just what I do.
Vox is a handy tool and it makes putting images with and designing the look of my blog easier.  What it can't make easier is the writing part.  I ran into a few snags this semester in terms of lack of motivation regarding things to write about---points where my media use had been the same, day in and day out, for a while, etc.
Overall, this was a worthwhile exercise, and I'm glad I did it in blog form; not only was it appropriate to the class, but it also kept me thinking about blogging and expressing what I wanted to say in ways that were appropriate to a semi-public forum and to the electronic format.  Being able to use visual aids helped, too.
I think the exercise also led me to think more actively about my media use, something I am sure I will be doing involuntarily for the foreseeable future.  Probably a good thing, since I should get outside more often.

Uuh....books?

Strangely enough, I've gone the whole quarter not thinking about the fact that reading books is media use...i wonder why the use of media in which I partake the most was functionally invisible to me.  Maybe the term "the media"--meaning mostly newspapers, radio, and TV, but also websites and other ways of disseminating and critiquing new information--has polluted my idea of "media," skewing it toward the ephemeral or pseudo-ephemeral.
I did read a lot of books this quarter, though, and a lot of course packets, too.  I only read two novels, I think...that's how busy I've been with starting school.  The novels were:

Dark Back of Time

Javier Marias

Dark Back of Time, Javier Marías's follow-up to All Souls.  It was an arduous read in a lot of ways, but it was fully worth it in the end.  He's a difficult writer but one of the most rewarding ones now working (that I know about, anyway).

The Emperor's Children

Claire Messud

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.  A very ambitious and mostly successful panorama of New Yorkers, most of them in their early 30s, before and just after September 11, 2001.  Superficially structured like From Here to Eternity, I suppose, but much more of a sweeping modern approach to its subject matter.  When I mention it to people, they tend to compare it to The Corrections, but this is the much better book, I think.












Also, I read a ton of film and especially new media theory.  In addition to course material, I read a couple of pretty brilliant books on video game theory:

Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism

Ian Bogost

Unit Operations, by Ian Bogost, bills itself as "an approach to videogame criticism," but it is actually that and something more ambitious: an attempt to set up a critical framework for looking at all kinds of media and scientific and philosophical information through an examination of "units of meaning."

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

Jesper Juul

Half-Real, by Jesper Juul, is a meditation on the ontology of video games, and a very successful and convincing one.  Juul is like an information-age Cavell here, but without the insane flights of fancy that you find in some of Cavell's more indulgent work (not that I don't enjoy Cavell's flights of fancy--it's just that Juul is more grounded in his approach).

Then, of course, there are the innumerable books and texts I have read for classes...I'm not going to get into all of that here, for obvious reasons.