On Badiou a bit 2

Badiou’s articulation of cinema as a possible raison d’etre of philosophy, which offers paradoxical/impossible relations saving philosophy from being in vain is also an outcome of Badiou’s own definition of cinema that seems to me a bit whimsical. Prior to stating why it seems whimsical to me, let me introduce again what cinema is for Badiou.

As Badiou argues via contrasting it with the avant-garde art, cinema is a “mass art” in the sense that the masterpieces of cinema are unquestionable and are seen and liked by millions from diverse social groups as soon as they are created. Badiou makes a special emphasis on the notion of at the very moment of their creation.

Badiou sets forth such a definition in order to support and justify his beforehand conception or articulation of cinema. He does this in such way that as if his definition of cinema precedes his articulation of it. But the real situation is vice versa. Anyway, via introducing two terms – viz. mass and art which may be taken as contrary to each other – in a syntagm, Badiou tries to show how cinema can offer paradoxical/impossible relations. Since, for Badiou, mass is a political and art is an aristocratic category, and form of the definition already offers a paradoxical/impossible relation.

Badiou Confusion

As a matter of fact, I’d like to start by gossiping about Badiou a little. By being aware that he does not far from politics, I cannot understand that which sides he takes: whether he regards cinema as transcending to all art or he considers it as a collage of other arts.  Also, in his Cinema as a Democratic Emblem, he has really big expressions starting in the very beginning of his article and  they dominate it. Even he says that he has chosen statement that is simpler and removed from all philosophical preformation for beginning of five attempts to cinema as a mass art; he uses his own understanding of philosophy regarding its existence only insofar as there are paradoxical relationships. Then, he has set cinema as a mass art, he indicates that cinema exists in paradoxical relationships as well and he comes to imperious point that this “philosophy” goes to cinema itself, lastly for philosophy, he says it becomes mass philosophy. For philosophy and cinema relationship, for now, I take Cavell’s side and thanks to his quote that saves me from this big issue in Badiou’s article: “Film is made for philosophy; it shifts or puts different light on whatever philosophy has said about appearance and reality, about actors and characters, about scepticism and dogmatism, about presence and absence.” (1999 25)

For I believe that it is really hard to fit philosophy in such a sentence saying big “things”, I aspire to skip to tell what kind of paradoxical relations he possibly would like to say for existence of philosophy. Thus, after arguing some points of his five attempts, I’ll speculate his article in the context of what I really work through in these days, namely whether cinema is art or not.

On “the Ethical turn of Aesthetics and Politics”

On “the Ethical turn of Aesthetics and Politics”, Jacques Ranciere

The essay is starting with the definition of “ethical turn” which has crucial importance for the paper. As a summary ethical turn is, the crossing point of first; evaluating the judgments before the power of the law and radicality of that law that is stemming from other things. That is to say, indistinction between fact and law, and as a result dramaturgy between evil, justice and redemption. (p. 28) Actually I didn’t understand what are all these means exactly and I have asked my friend to read from French original and she also said she didn’t understand the meaning of this first definition. But later on the writer explains his point as some kind of suppression on moral division. Society somehow consists of moral divisions, politics, under the name of humanism, this divisions getting lost into some kind of consensus. This is what the writer calls ethical turn.

The second definition that is used in the book is the definition of “politics” as the division of violence, morality and right. What he means I think is the politics, is a struggle between two system of value systems, violences, morals. Therefore, what we call politics is not a distinction between two sides, but the opposition, the struggle of two different violences, or morals. The writer uses two movies to explain his concepts; Dogville(von Trier, 2002) and Mystic River (Eastwood, 2002). Dogville is a politic fable for the writer; it is a clash, a struggle of two different violences and morals. I will go far ; the situation of injustice, become politic because of the change in the value system of the protagonist. The violence gets divided differently. And this is exactly the reason why the movie was scandalous; it was offering a justice against injustice, which is totally contrary common sense of Cannes Jury.

The writer also criticizes humanism after giving the example of Antigone and Oedipus. Humanism is a way of suppressing the difference between guilty and innocent. The term infinite justice is taking the form of humanism that is erasing the divisions. Than the writer explains it through the movie Mystic River, which is a moral fable. There is no more guilty or innocent, things has reasons in the nature of being human. The difference between fact and the right has dissolved.

Than the writer explains this situation in the international level, which is disappearance of right itself. The right lost its meaning because of the existence of victimhood. If you are victim you have right to do everything. “It implies constitution of a right beyond all rights, the absolute right of the victim” as Ranciere stated. After the collapse of Soviets there was a optimistic expectation of international right based on human right but new ethnic conflicts existed immediately, human right become a weapon of governments on each other. In this point I have a critic about Dogville; it seems to me what the writer stating is not different than the example of Dogville. The victim was using this absolute right of the victims to put violence on. Therefore the movie Dogville is staying in the exact place that the writer stated in the international level of the ethical turn.
In the second chapter of the essay, Ranciere is searching for the effects of this ethical turn in art. The art yesterday was “a monument against the other”, however now, for art anonymous people are “specimens of humanity” that means there is no opposition between monuments. Before art was pointing out the contradictions, conflicts, exploitations; world was more heterogeneous. But now, art is much more in the place of archiving and “bearing the witness to a common world.”

In the first part of the article what Ranciere puts is a lot similar with the approach of Frankfurt School and later the post modern theory. If we recall the Baudrillard, in the world of simulations there exist no event. We can read this in the sense of Ranciere, as the distinction between oppositions doesnt exist anymore, but a consensus; a horizontal world of simularks. The difference between fact and right has lost its meaning as all other differences does in other ways. Also it seems to me the state of artist as bearing the witness can be generalized to all society. Now we are just witnessing to the world, in which all the solids are vaporising. There is a theater of consensus in every corner, which is changing its ingredients but covering more of our moral and political judgments. On the other hand Ranciere warns us cleverly: “the simplistic opposition of the modern and the postmodern prevents us from understanding the transformations of the present situation”, that I totally agree, Baudrilards theory of simulation doesnt have this concern at all.

Ozan Kamiloğlu

On Badiou

In his respose on Badiou, Kemal has focused on the first part of Badiou’s essay. What I would like to do is mostly focus on the other parts of his essay.

The essay starts with the argument of Badiou, cinema is an ontological art, and passes to the notion that cinema is a “mass art”. Than he defines and explains the words art and the mass, reaches the point that the notion of mass art is in a way paradoxical. This is the point that he goes true to the ontological art via five examples.

Till that point I would like to discuss some points starting with the notion of “genetic popular”. Badiou states that millions of people goes to the cinema, and cinema has a wisdom that subtracts humanity from its differences. What he mean by that is more or less cinema has same representative value for different cultures and ethnic groups. More controversially he states that this claim is true not only for comic or burlesque genre, but for other as well.

Than what is in my mind in this point is if it was the same thousands of years ago. What I mean is it is not the same thing for the tribes and metropolitans to watch a movie like Office Space. The point seems to me like the globalization and post industrial societies, in which all different societies seems like a bit different from a common culture of all societies. And I believe this notion of generic humanity was not as true as today in the time of Chaplin. The example he gives, Chaplin, is not the same with the example of lets say Hababam Sınıfı. The second is neither funny or popular in other countries. Therefore the notion of generic humanity is not that strong even for cinema.

Than Badiou passes to the notion of “mass” and states that it is a category of communism however art is more aristocratic rooted. Therefore the syntagm “mass art” is has a paradoxical relation in itself because of the two words.

Later on he states that all the art works of twentieth century is avant-garde. It this point I have a critic especially on music. I believe after the use of mp3, there is no difference between the popularity of music and cinema. Millions of people listens to Michael Jackson even the Eskimos. He is missing a point in this point, while putting cinema as only mass art. Therefore later connections which sees cinema as only mass art is not that reliable in my point of view. It is mass culture that makes art mass and especially music is in it as cinema, as a part of generic humanity.

And than the essay passes to “five different ways of entering into the problem : to think cinema as mass art”. First one is on image; that is to say cinema is the final mastery of the metaphysical cycle of identification, because identification occurs with semblance whose height is cinema. In this first attempt, the problem is in seeing cinema as the height of the visual offered by the semblance. When I think of the video and the highly developing new technologies, I can not be sure about correctness of this assumption. Second attempt is “on time”, which means cinema is a mass art because it transforms time into perception. It is the most powerful becoming visible of time. Third attempt is, the series of arts, in the mean of cinema takes parts of other arts, that are at generic humanity. This part is important for Badiou’s article, however it didn’t convince me at all. Cinema takes sometimes more from music, but less from theater or vice versa. I am not sure it is that easy to reach the conclusion that Badiou did. Fourth way is impurity. This part mostly based on the property of cinema that it is in the border of being art and non-art. And cinema reaches purity through impurity. However my question is what about pop art? Anyway this is the most convincing part of this series of ways in my point of view. And the final attempt is ethical figures. Cinema is an art of the great figures of humanity. It is where this figures and the most classic struggles are still on scene, like good and evil. However this part seems to me a sub-cathegory of the one before, impurity. Because, this heroic nature is the reason of banality of the cinema, that makes it non-art and sometimes more art.

Final words for me is, the essay of Badiou is contraversial but clever as his other essays. There are a lot of point that I would like to discuss widely, but after finishing the text, I had an essay in my mind that I can refer time to time.

Ozan Kamiloğlu

On Badiou a bit

In the first two paragraphs of his article Cinema As A Democratic Emblem, French philosopher Alain Badiou tries to give an account of philosophy through cinema. In this account, middle term enabling the account is paradoxical relations. For Badiou, philosophy only exists insofar as there are paradoxical relations and cinema offers us paradoxical relations. So without a difficulty, it can be inferred that cinema has a vital role for the existence of philosophy.

Although it is problematic, I do not disagree with the claim that since it offers paradoxical relations, cinema is crucial for the possibility of philosophy requiring paradoxical relations. But in order to say that philosophy only exists insofar as there are paradoxical relations [italic is mine], one should show that without these paradoxical relations, philosophy does not exist. Or if he argues that cinema alone can manage to offer paradoxical relations, he should not base his claim on the idea that there is a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema or vice versa, because via this additional claim, his argument seems to be circular.

Moreover, although cinema’s offer of paradoxical relations requires some kind of requisitioning, I think, it is not requisitioning of cinema by philosophy, but rather requisitioning of philosophy by cinema, because it is cinema which offers paradoxical relations, argues Badiou.

Meanwhile French philosopher makes a strange definition of philosophy stating that philosophy is the violence done by thought to impossible relations. Although it is also worth mentioning, strangeness of the definition above is not due to the use of the word impossible instead of the word paradoxical as if they are synonymous, but rather due to the use of the word violence which has negative connotations. But it is used in sense that since it is done to impossible relations having also negative connotations, the word violence seems to get rid of its pejorative sense.

Apart from my views concerning the definition, via it, Badiou refers to Deleuze. Although thinking seems an intentional act which is under our control, Deleuze maintains that we do not think, but thinking happens to us surpassing our anatomy of choice or beyond our morality. Violence of thinking or thought implies this situation as a kind of necessity (Colebrook, 2006, p. 38).

For Deleuze, since it demands a reconsideration of both time and image, cinema also offers a reconsideration of both becoming and life. As far as cinema transforms it, philosophy remains open to life and in this respect cinema’s offering of an image of time is crucially important (Colebrook, 2006, p. 29). So   the expression of “after Deleuze” which is followed by the statement there is a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema is the only expression about which I am not skeptical in the first two paragraphs of Badiou’s article.

Since they are both short and yet dense, these first two paragraphs have quite indirect character. More than this, Badiou does not convey his prior arguments and justification causing the remarks that he expresses. So they are difficult to make sense of.

As far as I understand, in the fourth paragraph, Badiou posits cinema as an ontological art in the sense that cinema offers a more fundamental relation, namely the relation between being and appearance, than the relation between the virtual and the actual. At this point, in my opinion, it is important to note that Badiou avoids using the concept of reality, but instead he prefers using the concept of being. Since the concept of being along with the concept of event is crucial in Badiou’s philosophical project. So it is important to understand what being means to Badiou for further elaboration.  Anyway the fundamental relation offered by cinema stems from a kind of simultaneity between the copy of reality and the artificial dimension of this copy. But prior to articulating his proclaim as cinema as an ontological art, Badiou uses concepts such as real, artifice and false in such a way that he ends up with devastating statements for my mind. The false copy of a false real or the real artifice of the copy of a false copy of the real are some illustrations.

After stating it is an ontological art, Badiou offers a new definition for cinema: Cinema is a mass art. With its emphasis on “at the very moment of their creation”, Badiou’s definition is relevant as well as interesting. I think cinema’s being a mass art is directly related with the concept of generic humanity. Since, though not always, cinema can offer a view of humanity which is devoid of its differences, it can be liked millions of people from different social and cultural backgrounds. If “at the very moment of their creation” will be taken as the main criterion for the masterpieces of mass art, cinema as a mass art has no opponent.

When Badiou further elucidates his notion of mass art, why cinema offers various paradoxical relations become more apparent. Since the syntagm of mass art itself is paradoxical in its own. Although I am still not sure about the meaning of paradoxical in Badiou’s lexicon, the contrast between mass and art, i.e. democracy and aristocracy makes sense.

Colebrook, C. (2006). Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.

M. Kemal İz

Representation of a Traumatic Event: Diamonds of the Night (1964)

Adapted from A Loaf of Bread, the story of Arnost Lustig, Diamonds of the Night, [Démanty Noci] (1964) is the first feature of Czech New Wave director, Jan Nemec. The film is about two Jewish boys who escape from Nazi transport train and search for some food to live. Through the end they are caught by German home-guards and they prepare to execute them. Yet, by the last scene, the film left its path to the audiences i.e. it is ambiguous since the film does not show what happened in reality;  they may or may not be executed. By the all elements of the film such as the signs and transition of memory, the representations of psychological conditions of Jews who threat to have trauma and both social and personal memory of past, even if  Diamonds of the Night has Bunuelian surrealism in a sense, it can be analyzed by trauma theory (and yes, the examination of whether surrealism has traumatic aspect or not is not subject of this analysis). As Radstone argues that “Nonetheless, the notion of victimhood, the emphasis on history and power(lessness), the anxiety about memory, its ambiguous relation to an inner psychic reality and to an outer, public (or cinematic) representation, all tend to align trauma theory” (195), that is why I’d like to write about this Eastern European after war film which I regard, by means of its theme, as it can be one of the best instances for analysis of trauma theory of screen studies. Also, by having a few dialogues and emphasizing physical and psychological conditions of boys, the film itself shows the effects of Concentration Camps to human life. Thus, it means that the film mentions both personal and social history.

Diamonds of the Night, as a matter of fact, seems to have timeless story but indicates time by means of signs of memory such as letters KL – Konzentrations Lager, (Concentration Camp) – on coats of boys in order to make us to understand goings-on in the film. Like trauma theorists’ expressions that of opening up to the memory of events as personal memories, autobiographies, testimonies of family history, the film makes audiences to recollect memories of events by providing it in a timeless zone in terms of hallucinations or dreams of characters. In this sense, if audiences are not aware of the effects of signs of past like why their hallucinations causes flashbacks, they cannot see the ‘real’ trauma. Thus, signs of past, for Diamonds of the Night, especially their boots and coats with letters KL, provide us to understand their psychological conditions  in the sense that they have traumatic personal history connected social realm or history.

Nemec creates a world that the world of war, death and escaping, in which words has lost their meanings; in this world, the hallucinations of characters shows how traumatic their previous life is.

Since the hallucination of the one of  them is also traumatic event, as Radstone also mentions, it can be said that distinction between psychic time of boy and chronological time seems suspended since that traumatic event links other memories as if they happens at the same time. There may not be any distinction between them. For the memory of traumatic event is different from memory of everyday event, it causes to speculate truthfulness of the recollected events in the understanding of traumatic cinema. However, Diamond of the Night is not the traumatic cinema that approaches the past through an unusual admixture of emotional affect, metonymic symbolism and cinematic flashbacks (214)

Just as flashback of our memories that re-collect past events like fragment, Jan Nemec, by using flashbacks, emphasizes KL and connected it both characters and audiences memory. In this sense, flashbacks of this film, reference to Tourim expressions, in the context of trauma theory, do not appear abrupt flashbacks in films of mass distribution (207).

Also, Radstone comes to point that “Hence, the emphasis on temporality and spatiality but ‘displaced’ in relation to event: “trauma” would then be the name for a referentiality that can no longer be placed in a particular time of place, but whose time-space-place referentiality is nonetheless posited, in fact, doubled and displaced relation to an ‘event’” (200) I believe that trauma theory, rather than limits us to time and space or determinates events in their limited relations in that space and time, it provides to integration of psychological conditions to physical “realm” so that we can take timelessness of some films as a reference point. In order to emphasize true reflections of the events such as Holocaust without using any determined reference point, namely, by not manipulating the traumatic event, the film itself reflects trauma of protagonist with hallucinations and repeated scenes which is not far from realism at the end.

I actually would like to say that it is not easy to evaluate trauma cinema in the context of film itself since it is also about the issue of “who makes a film for what”. At least, in the context of Diamonds of the Night, I do not believe that it makes false memories of true experience which can be easily manipulated in terms of memory. Thus, by being one of the best and different example of  concentration camps film, Diamonds of the Night is not a traumatic cinema but it is the film that can be analyzed by traumatic theory in a sense.

You can watch the whole film via youtube. All part of it exists as related videos. It takes 63 minutes.

And you can also check the book, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,(1967 in English) which is Borowski’s collection of concentration camp stories related to the film in order to understand how traumatic events people have lived.

Sinem Aydınlı

Body and representation

A few days ago I came across a video of Grace Jones song “Corporate Cannibal”. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgMn2OJmx3w

It made me think about the notion of “body” once again. (Although this is a music video not a film, I think its worth thinking on.) It distorts the image in such a fashion that the body becomes something else. It is almost liquified. The distortions are quite shocking at first but as we get used to them, it begins to create another effect. As we normalize the distorted body, we begin to see the synchronizations of the distortions with the beats and this alien, liquified body becomes “familiar”. Yet we still keep our distance to it since we cannot predict its actions. Boldly enough, the images gets closer and closer and at some point we only see fractions of Grace Jone’s mouth or eye. We are aware that there is actually a solid body in front of the camera but this feeling withers away after a while. This “liquified body” begins to represent its own distortion. This represents a realm we cannot experience. Still though we experience the effects of this body and its relation to us. From this point of view the distorted body (accompanied by strange and creepy words such as: “pleased to have you on my plate…your meet is sweet to me…”) looks quite annoying. The image of the body turns back to itself: now it only represents itself. The realm put before us is so sterile that our only reference is the distortion and the distorted body itself.

Alev Değim

Struggle for Understanding Deleuze 2

Why is it difficult to read philosophical texts?

Prima facie, this question may seem irrelevant as a means of beginning a response paper for a course such as Film & Genre, but while I was reading the texts taken from Cinema 2: The Time Image by Deleuze, the question above – which is an unceasing one for me – rises up again.

Everyone with a piece good luck of meeting a philosophical text can experience the congested feeling in his/her chest. If the experience is intense enough, it is inevitable to be confronted with such a question and when the question is once asked, it will be very difficult to act as if it is not. So it is expected quite easily that being plausible or implausible, everyone that undergoes the process above has his/her own set of answers.

At this point, I will not list all the answers in my own set, but I want to emphasize one of them. Take the first 13-line of Deleuze’s text with the title Cinema, body ad brain, thought as an illustration. Although I acknowledge – because of their distinctive linguistic styles, vocabularies, and metaphors as a part of their philosophies – the fact that it is more difficult to make sense of texts by 20th century French philosophers such as Baudrillard, Derrida and Deleuze, present text of Deleuze seems to be a plausible illustration for my points.

In that 13-line part of Deleuze’s text, Deleuze does not use any term which is specific to philosophy. If we skim the recurrent words in the text, we see words such as body, thought, life and category with which everyone is familiar in his/her daily life. Although this familiarity with this vocabulary seems to assist the reader in appreciating the text, I argue that this familiarity with these words is a transparent obstacle between the reader and the text. This familiarity is the origin of illusion that makes the reader to think that s/he can easily permeate into the text.

Since – apart from neologism – philosophers do not have distinctive words, they have to make use of the same words that the readers also use, but with different connotations. These different connotations are the building blocks of the obstacles separating the reader from the text, because the readers also have their own sets of connotations stemming from their own history with these words. If the readers do not – at least partially – put their own sets of meanings into brackets before approaching the text – because of the mismatch between different connotations originating from the same words – they would face the transparent obstacle. Since the connotations which a philosopher attributes to a word are the means of embodying his/her abstract thoughts and of conveying his/her vast readings of it, if the reader can manage to uncover connotations some of which are explicit and some of which are immanent in the text, s/he can make the transparent obstacle visible, though s/he cannot completely get rid of it.

In our daily lives, body is not a subject-matter about which we think so much. Perhaps the reason for this lack is the fact that we often think through body. Body along with its extension to life provides the medium that we think through and this close relationship with our bodies may conceal its importance in the manners we think. Anyway almost everybody has own sets of meanings which are related with the words body and life. But Deleuze’s usage of these words may not be match with what others think about them and this situation stands as an obstacle in front of one who wants to understand him. With his/her meanings sticked to a concept, it is not easy for someone to grasp what Deleuze says via this word in his own understanding. So before trying to grasp what Deleuze wants to mean via words such as body and life, I think, beginning from what body and life mean for Deleuze is a more proper way.

Deleuze does not see the body as an obstacle separating thought from itself. What does ‘itself’ mean at this context? Is it thought or thinking or both? What about the body?

The story of body as an obstacle can be traced back to Descartes, even Plato. But the term body is also reminiscent of Spinoza as well as categories of thought being reminiscent of Kant, and life which is of Bergson. I think that Deleuze’s reading of body is immersed in at least Spinoza, Kant and Bergson. So such a sentence as ‘Give me a body then’ can become a formula of philosophical reversal. Reading the body not as an obstacle separating us from thinking but as a force enforcing us to think is the source of the reversal in philosophy.

Life is unthought in the sense that it is what is concealed from thought, argues Deleuze. And the body, I think, is the intersection between one that thinks and life, through which categories of thought will be thrown into categories of life. What are the categories of life then? They are the attitudes of body. Attitudes or postures of body are tiredness and waiting which are related with the before and the after, respectively. I think this relation enables the attitudes of body to become also the categories of life. Although Deleuze talks about three attitudes, namely tiredness, waiting, and despair, later on he states that tiredness is both the first and the last one, because it is tiredness that contains the before and the after simultaneously. A thinking-thing learns what a non-thinking thing is capable of and this is called thinking by Deleuze.

M. Kemal İz

Movement-Time-Image: Struggle for Understanding Deleuze 1

From the titles of two books that Deleuze wrote on cinema, i.e. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), it is not difficult to understand that French philosopher’s main concern in cinema is image. Beginning with Plato, with different connotations such as representation, experience, phenomenon, consciousness, simulacrum, subjectivity etc., image always happens to be one of the main and crucial topics of philosophy.

Through being both an essential part of cinema and crucial topic of philosophy, image is like a capstone by which Deleuze conjoins his views on cinema with his philosophical claims. For Deleuze, cinema undergoing a transformation from the movement-image to the time-image reveals the true nature of time (Trifonova, 2007, p. 221). At this point the question arises: What is the true nature of the time (at least for Deleuze)? Omitting this grand crucial question for a great while, we can go on saying that according to Deleuze, cinema also transforms philosophy via offering a cinematic form such as time-image. In this way he wants to conjoin cinema and philosophy. By the means of time-image, cinema demands a new mode of thinking for both itself and life. Since the couple of movement and time can be seen as essential for the couple of cinema and life, through that new mode of thinking which cinema demands based on the time-image, new perspectives can be developed concerning the becoming in life. But at this point let’s turn two cinematic forms that Deleuze focus on his books, viz. movement-image and time-image.

The roots of the movement-image can be traced back to early cinema, i.e. the pre-WW2 cinema and archetype of movement-image can be found in the Hollywood genre film emphasizing movement and action. This emphasis on movement is important, because in that type of cinema, time is also conveyed through movement. In other words, time is determined and measured by movement. Via camera angles skimming across a visual field, movement is expressed and via this expression of movement, time is presented indirectly, i.e. determination of time based on the movement itself. So “The movement-image is a form of spatialized cinema” says Totaro, which means that as in the everyday life, time is thought as a grand link connecting movements and it used to track changes (Totaro, 1999 and Colebrook, 2006, p. 29).

On the other hand, image-time is a characteristic of modern cinema, i.e. post-WW2 cinema and roots of it can be found in the European modernist or art film. In this type, time is presented directly. So in the movement-image, characters that are situated in a narrative content, perceive the events around them and take action based on these perceptions. But in the time-image, characters cannot react in a direct way. In other words, in the movement-image which time is expressed indirectly, characters react in a direct fashion, but in movement-image, although time is expressed directly, characters do not seem to react in a direct fashion (Totaro, 1999).

For Deleuze, power of cinema lies in this transformation from the movement-image to the time-image. By the means of time-image as a cinematographic form, a new kind of perception, i.e. acentered perception is offered (Trifonova, 2007, p. 227). In our daily life, we perceive things through imposing concepts on them, which suit our interests. But camera as an eye with no interest, i.e. a camera that does not organize images from a fixed point as a human eye, conveys the image in its entirety. “But the cinema is not simply the camera: it is montage” acknowledges Deleuze, and montage reminds me the subjectivity, in other words when the montage is taken into consideration, it is not very difficult to talk about a point of view, but Deleuze responds: “And if from the point of view of human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one” (1989, p. 81). So Deleuze seems to secure the disinterestedness of camera. But these two broad concepts, viz. movement-image and time-image, their realization in cinema and how Deleuze secures the disinterestedness of camera are still puzzling for me.

Colebrook, C. (2006). Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.

Totaro, D. (1999). Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project (Part 1: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image). Off Screen. [On-line]. Available: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze1.html

Trifonova, T. (2007). The Image in French Philosophy. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

M. Kemal İz

Mix of thinking

“Decisions that we can understand as the thinking of the film” said Frampton.


As spectators, we understand those decisions as images from the eyes of directors and producers. We may be aware of these images, may be not. But some people think and re-think on those images with the relation to their own world. If we look the films different than “thinking”, we can always find consciously enjoyed activities.


Do we have to focus in films to think? or there are may be films that have more than we think. The perception and the attention of people changes but always the focused or unfocused person has thoughts about it even film does not match with him/her.


I do not think that every spectator can easily think on a film like they have a film mind. Because we know that there are lots of people that they go films to separate from everyday life but besides them, there are also some people that they can not stop the relation of themselves from the reality of films. In these two circumstances, there are stimulants that the spectator is aware of or not. We know, the stimulating thing is the moving image but we have to examine these two situations in that how do those people think about the images they saw?


The words of Kubrick; “Watching a film is like having a daydream” are suitale for the people who watches film as separate themselves from the world. But all the images we saw, gives us experiences about the film. Experience is series of filtered thoughts and we all experience the life and even the films, differently. Thinking a film needs mental process that a person gained the experience from a film. Frampton clarifies the film experiences that “this is not much more than saying we experience film using the same brain that we use to experience reality” and we can say that understanding the reality is different from the understanding a film. But I do not know how much of the understanding reality is suitable for daydreamers?


But it can not be rejected that films help to create new ways of thinking from the real life. Filmgoers does not need imagination, they experience the films buy their perception on images. Before the cinema industry developed that much, there were lots of books that people tried to improve their imagination skills. By the developments, now we have moving images that may be makes us a bit lazy on thinking written sources, but it improves our perception may be more than imagination.


Absolutely, the perception has a direct relation with our thoughts because it is also related with our mode of thinking while watching. We are always selecting and choosing, so “our thinking chooses a way of joining the film”.


As a conclusion, we have just experiencing films to get meaningful thoughts. Furthermore, the people who feel the film like real life, I believe, they do not have a thought at the end of the film because they never experienced it as a film, they live and feel it.


Pelin Gezginer

Scénario du film Passion

“…not creating a world, but the possibility of a world…” says Godard.

In the following link, there is a video in which Godard explains his process of developing the scenerio of Passion. I think, there are some clues in the video on Godard’s approach to film and thought. The video is not only of an interview with him; it is presumably produced by himself using his montage techniques. For those who are taking Andreas’ class, you will remember that I have mentioned this video in the discussion on Godard, but after reading the article of Deleuze, it has been a more interesting spectacle for me.

Segah Sak

A metaphor: American Beauty

After reading Thought and Cinema and Image part in Seven-film thinking, two rhyming words, which are metaphor and metonymy, led me to think about.  In the Thought and Cinema, metonymy is defined as which separates images whereas metaphor connects images together with the whole. Eisenstein mentions two different images can have the same harmonics for making metaphor.

At that point, American Beauty clearly exemplifies the concept of metaphor.  There are two striking metaphors in this movie or maybe we can also say first one is metaphor and second one is metonymy: The first one is rose imagery referring to beauty.  Mena Suvari is depicted as an object of desire because of Kevin Spacey’s fantasy about this girl and the rose image is detached herself with the imagination of Spacey.  Except this detachment, the red is apparently used as the color of door, flower standing on the table, Real Estate posters of Peter Gallagher, Annette’s clothes and Spacey’s new car.  Alan Ball, the screenwriter of American Beauty, uses red color in different ways during the film.  As for the question of what this color generally symbolizes is life force.  Every character defines their life force (soul, sex, assertion, individuality, ambition etc.) differently.  Also, Suvari is an object of hatred linked with Annette Bening that she cultivates the roses in her garden at the first scene.  Second one is the plastic bag dancing in the air also has a red wall behind it.  We can say this is another object symbolizes again beauty in more spiritual way.  Wes Bentley’s words explain why I said it is spiritual: “I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid”.  Also, this object is again used at the end of the film because now it is associated with Spacey’s death at peace.

Here, we can see the red color as a distinctive metaphor generally referred by viewer to the rose in the film and then embeds the other images.

Eisenstein also adds in the first article: “A circuit which includes simultaneously the author, the film and the viewer is elaborated.  The complete circuit thus includes the sensory shock which raises us from the images to conscious thought, then the thinking in figures which takes us back to the images and gives us an affective shock again.”  Here, the rose appears as a way of transmission from the image to thought, then coming back for recall of our sensory shock.

Lastly, Nietzsche declares On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense that truth is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors and metonymies’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus to retinal image (first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor).

I think our mind actually needs syntagmatic and synthetical connections between signifiers and signified or metaphors and metonymies in a movie to make meaningful, instead invasion of signs without any connection as Godard does in Histoire(s) du Cinema.  That’s why it gets help from our memory.

Actually, discussion about metaphor and metonymy goes on but now it is just a little end waiting for the new ones..

References:

“Metaphor in Philosophy”, Wikipedia

“Thought and Cinema”, (156-187)

“Seven-Film thinking”, Image

Aytul Demiray

Economic, industrial and technologic realities of cinema

After we had discussed the history of the cinema at the lesson, I just think about the unification of economic, industrial and technologic realities of cinema. By these developments, nobody focus on works and authors’ as much as latter works. The result of the financial and technological factors, these changes still effects and it seems that it will affect the future of cinema history.

Technology develops rapidly and at the each period of it, we use different equipments and styles for each of them (cameras, lenses, new techniques…). So, here is the question that how can we know the resistance of a technical device to time? Will it be resist to change or demise for ever?

By the technological change the succession of financing films may not be acceptable. I want to give an example that I saw in a music &film market a few weeks ago. A guy and his girlfriend asked to the salesperson of the shop, a movie that they could watch. He gave some CD to them then asked them in which media will they watch the movies. But it does not any meaning for them because they only wanted to watch it. Salesperson told them the CD is in HD quality and they could not watch them with high visual quality at DVD players. However, it again does not matter for them and they said “we only want to watch it, visual quality is unnecessary”. So, here I ask, where are these technological developments going for these kinds of people? Or, do they protest the technology to watch films at low prices? Therefore, it can be said that the economic processes are also important for cinema as technology.

The architectures and decorations of cinema halls had been changed, according to these changes; the ticket prices increased. Additionally, if we add the financial film price which has high technological devised at the production, we can ask: who will watch those films at cinemas. There is a cinema culture in our society. Some movies should be watched at the cinema saloon for the fans of films, but who will pay these high prices that are the results of the economic and technological factors or for whom are those films made for? In which class of people do producers produce those films, do they classify people according to their many by using the technology?

Also by these developments in technology, cinema always takes the benefits of it. I don’t think that people try to develop technological devises for cinema, I believe it develops and cinema affects from it.
However, by these developments, I just ask “for whom” for prices and now I am asking again it for the technological products. Technology develops very rapidly and the progress of the humanity has some difficulties to catch those developments in some cases. It changes every day in fact every minute. But do viewers intelligent enough to understand them as quick as it do. I believe a time period need for the people to understand what does it for and what it is describe.

I think the savior of the cinema technology is sound technology. It takes some of the loads on the viewer from some misunderstandings about the film and raises the intelligibility.

As a conclusion, I just criticized the economical and technological changes on cinema. But do not misunderstand me that I did not say technology is not necessary and nobody knows its worth. I believe technology add many technical data to cinema industry. I just discussed and ask do this industry make classification on people by playing their money.

Pelin Gezginer

Godard’s signifiers

I want to start with a quotation from the text “Godard, Cinema, (Hi)stories” ;
“History is a mode of shared experience where all experiences are equivalent and where the signs of any one experience are capable of expressing all the others. Novalis succinctly summed up the poetics of the age of history in his famous dictum:”everything speaks”.

What does “everything speaks” mean though? And what are its connections to the cinema are main questions of following paragraphs.

First of all we can remember the Saussure’s semiology and its definitions of sing, signifier and the signified. We all read his text so I do not want to rediscover America, instead, I want to point out my ideas about what is this speaking of everything in Saussure’s terminology.

The “everything” in the motto-like sentence is, although it seems like it is commuting with “the sign”, this every thing in actually “the signifier” in cinema. I believe that the sentence can be reread as “signifiers are constantly creating each other”.

As an example lets consider any single image in Godard’s documentary. Every single shot signifies something in our mind, because of our personal experiences and the social conditions of ours(actually Hall explains in his encoding/decoding how complicated is this ‘because of’). And the sign lets say the table becomes a signifier which creates its meaning through the movie again and again.

My first claim is that: there exist no sign in a movie like Godard’s. Every single image perceived in our brain with its whole bunch of connections in our mind. I know this sentence seems a bit provocative, but lets focus more. In a movie with continuous narrative the images can be signs, which become(or not) a signifier later on. And again the process works; the thing finds its meaning again and again through the movie. Lets consider the ear in one of the very first scene of Blue Velvet. First it is pure ear but than, our mind tries to find the signifier. And this signifier change again and again till the end of the movie. If we think of the ear at the end of the move, it doesnt have the same signifier in our brain as it had in the beginning. Therefore, what a the time in the move makes is to lead us to change the signifier of images that it is showing to us.

For Lynch, I believe this process works in a very obvious way. I do not remember the source(maybe one of our readings), it was talking about a exposition in France, in which different objects from Lynch movies are gathered together. It is meaningful and possible to do such a exposition for Lynch because it plays with the signifiers of certain object through all the movie.

So what is going on is “everything” which is firstly a sign that immediately a signifier, talks, changes its connections, through the movie.

Now, lets turn back to Godard and my pretentious claim. There is no sign but a constant and powerfull change of signifiers in Godards documentery. Only sign is maybe the written words, or sentences in the documentary.

What Godard is trying to do is let the signifiers to change. He shows images one after the other, even sometimes we can not find the time to “understand” the image, but to see it. Sign become the signifier, and he plays with its meanings.

The narration in Godards documentary is this “talk” of signifiers and their fabulous dance of changing the meanings of the ones before.

In the Godards documentary every scene falls on the others. You can not think of any single image without the others; it includes all the images before and after. Therefore I am feeling something magnificent in this process. The scene in the 3th minute of the documentary is actually carries the one in the end. Some kind of future in the moment. Because Godard plays with the signifiers. You can not talk about his documentary in a time line like first this happened and than this and that. But what you can talk about is the movie whole. There is no separate image than the others, no lines no borders but kind of loops, and flows of meanings.
In the documentary of Godard everything speaks with us and with eachother.

Ozan Kamiloğlu

Uzak İhtimal (Wrong Rosary)

I watched Uzak İhtimal (Wrong Rosary) yesterday. It is the first feature of Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun and I think that it really deserves good criticism. Actually, I liked it since I’m an emotional one and I liked to see different kind of naïve love stories as a narrative. To feel naivety of love always makes me think deeper for the existence of love especially if there is any kind of spirituality in it. Anyway, here is the plot of it for who doesn’t know:  Musa, coming from Beypazarı, is a muezzin at a mosque in İstanbul; he moves to apartment where Clara, the Catholic Nurse, leaves in. Musa also works for bibliopole Yakup and he falls in love with Clara. Then, new dynamics are learned and suprises arise. Yes, like you see nothing special for this story and also there are clichés. There are a man and a woman who lead to story. It is a naïve, simple and average unfinished love story. Thus, the preferred meaning (if it exists) can be this:  A Muslim man falls in love with a Catholic woman. (Yes, it can be radical for some “others”) There can be other meanings and the movie can be analyzes from other aspects by considering what kind of person Musa is. How is it possible to save from (pre)judges and then fall in love with a Catholic? Or, is the love just about to be man and woman and their (luckily) encountering in any single moment? Or, is it their destiny and does God examine them in order to see their attitudes toward their encountering? Or, we can ask that should religion keep people out of humanitarian love? Since some regards religion as a thing that whatever meaning they add in, they can ask:  if Musa is a “real” Muslim how is it possible to ignore the women’s religion that he falls in love with? (but can we label people like they are “real” Muslim or not?)

Anyway, the questions can be increased. What I’d like talk about is technical side of this movie. At first, I really thank to Nuri Bilge Ceylan, I really don’t know what we would do without him… Thanks to him since he is the one leading to Turkish Cinema. Yes, Semih Kaplanoğlu, Reha Erdem, Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu and all other best do exist even Ceylan doesn’t exist… But he breaks new ground for real. In recent times, whatever I perceive/watch/see like I watch a shot from Ceylan. People imitate him. Thus, after this kind of pampering of him (as a matter of fact, I don’t think he needs it, but anyway) I’d like to pass Uzak İhtimal to compare its some parts with Ceylan and others.

The first familiar shot that I know its technique from Nuri Bilge is that voice comes from next shot but we still see the present shot, or namely there is contrast between audio and image. Consider İklimler, when we saw İsa and Bahar on the beach, there was a moment that Isa was talking with himself about their separation and we see Bahar’s swimming but then when he continued to talk, we were aware that Bahar has came and she has already been there when Isa lied back. However, in İklimler, that audio and image contrast (I don’t know how it is called) is really adorable and it is different from the one in Uzak İhtimal. However, in Uzak İhtimal we see that the director tries to make this kind of transition from one scene to another. Also, the color of scenes of Uzak İhtimal again reminds me techniques of Ceylan, and yes Uzak İhtimal imitates  İklimler in some sense. Yes, it reminds me cinema of Ceylan. That is why I see Nuri Bilge Ceylan effect in Uzak İhtimal.

The second thing about Uzak İhtimal which leads to think us the gaze of Demirkubuz is choice of charecters. As we know that Demirkubuz is a good observer of society, he knows what happens in the lower class of it and he reflects it to his cinema. Thus, when I see Musa’s relationship with the relative of him and aim of Musa’s relative, I think that the men came from Bekir’s territory. (Yes, Bekir in both sense; Bekir in Masumiyet and Kader) I mean the director treats as he is one of the observer of society like Demirkubuz (in reality, the relative of Musa looks like Bekir in Kader)

Also, there is small performance of ablution of Musa, after I see it I really think that the best instance of this ritual was performed by Erkan Can in Takva. However, the protagonist, Musa could stay hard for this performance.

By the way, the movie called “Wrong Rosary” which is Yanlış Tesbih in Turkish. When you see the scene causes this title, you understand why they’ve chosen it; it is so ironic and funny. I congratulate them.

Like we know some expressions of Nuri Bilge, we understand that some films are made for festivals. In addition to that, some films are made by knowing what the jury of festival would like to see. Maybe, Uzak İhtimal is a collage of the late Turkish movie style  which brings festival awards and thus that explains why it won awards in Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Maybe, it is better to thank to Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos for being an inspiration to Nuri Bilge. Anyway, if you like to naivety, minimalism, and purity of love (or, as a matter of fact, if you think that the naïve or pure love exists) or regard life as a harmonic unity with its chaos and if you want to see a part of this unity on screen, you can watch Uzak İhtimal.

Also, you can watch it even to see ending part.

Last comment: Since we live in Turkey, we don’t ignore the socio-political issues. If we think from all aspect, I’m sure that we can interpret this movie by saying that “yes, there is a dialogue issue in it”. Turkey becomes a “moderate” religious country like they want. Nonetheless, it is not about film itself, don’t take my comment seriously and enjoy the naivety of love.

It is just stream of thought thanks to space in our blog.

Sinem Aydınlı

Godard’s New Cave: Histoire(s) du Cinema

“Cinema is only industry of escapism because it is the only place where memory is slave” *

Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema… One of the cinematic manifestations for cinephilic love… I really don’t know how I can start but I know to use words. And yes, I’ll use the words and sentence-fragments as speeches like he did in his Histoire(s) du Cinema but with a huge difference: There is no image in here. There won’t be image-fragments in whatever I’ll do. Thus, I’m on the opposite side. I can only deal with the words. I left images to Godard.

According to Plato, the Ancient Greek philosopher, basically and simply, there are two worlds: The world, namely, the visible world which appears to our senses and fills with error; and the world called intelligible world which has perfect realms, namely forms. The world appearing to our senses is the image of the world of forms. The things we see are only mere images of forms. Furthermore, there is an allegory in order to tell the difference of these two worlds: Some men living in a cave where they’ve been chained by from their childhood and they cannot move. There is kind of wall in front them and an elevation behind them that people carry something and the other animals walk on; and there is a fire behind these beings. Thus, the chained persons only see the wall and they can see neither the other walking beings nor fire; they can only see the shadows of the walking beings projected on the wall. When they see a shadow and hear a voice, they assume that the sound is coming from the shadow. For these chained persons, the only reality is the shadows formed on the wall. They are in the cave and assume that the images that they see are real. Likewise, for Godard, the idea of cinema is the same as what the chained people regard reality, namely, shadow on the wall which is the image of the reality. Also, for him, the reality that we named for anything that we sense is was always already image so thus what’s left for cinema is the image of images. That is why he articulates Histoire(s) du Cinema in terms of experiencing “image of images”.

According to Godard, the world of image of images is the spirit of the forms; it is interiority of work of art (Ranciere 2006). The interiority combines artistic forms with shared form of life. The history, at first, is a shared “thing”. Thus, any image-form can be associated with other shared images and the number of combination of images can be made. It means that experience of them is the history, itself. In this sense, as an image, anything belongs to cinema and individual experience of forms of images can be named under history. According to Ranciere, history is the mode of shared experience where all experience are equivalent and where the signs of any one experience are capable of expressing each other (p.178) and so the dictum is on the scene: Everything speaks. This means that any sensible form can signify any sensible form of collective experience and it is open to relationship with other forms. That expression of history is the transformation of Histoire(s) du Cinema to the language. However, Godard wouldn’t like this transformation since he is the one who is only deal with the images. His images talk in the cinematic language i.e. in the audio-visual expression. That indicates that why he challenges the language and meaning and tries to save himself from chains of language. Thus, he turns his face to the video art by Histoire(s) du cinema since he mentions that essence of cinema should be present. However, by mentioning cinema’s betrayal, Godard tried to emphasize that cinema has already became tyranny of the words rather than record of images. His turning to video can be understood in this sense since video has instant feedback and also, by means of its feedback, it is surely known that anything that happens is recorded. As regards to recorded images, cinema is seen that it is the place where memory is slave since you can combine any image with any other images that you’d like to combine as long as your memory allows you to do. Also, Godard says that “Cinema, like Christianity, is not founded on historical truth, it supplies us with a story and says: Now believe”. He does not disallow historical truth and I really do understand what he means by this expression: Yes, he means image of images, yes he means personal cinematic history in the sense of  arbitrary integration and combination of different images and their re-combination in any other forms of images (Like he did in Histoire(s) du Cinema, take one shot from a notifiable cinema work of century and add other image from other work) In addition to that, yes, it really shows us the memory is the slave of it. Also, in dialectical perspective, this slave seems to depend on its master; in fact, its master cannot exist without slave. It means that images depend on the memory. The memory remembering images creates the other images. It makes any history of cinema i.e. any history of “image of images” personal history of “image of images”. In this sense, Godard really breaks new ground in the “history of cinema” and draws his ways to the video which is seen objective recording of “truth”. It is the new way to try to unfold the truth. Yes, it is the Later Godard who has seen this new technique but we also know that he was one of the masters of French New Wave in the years between 1960 and 1968. As a new wave director, Early Godard has tried to tell us there is no reality on the screen and we can see only the images; however, even he plays with images by using tracking shots or long shots (e.g. Week End) he wouldn’t escape territory of language since he has used the speeches to show image of “reality” in the sense of criticizing capitalism, exploitation of women and tendency to the gun. Thus, his cave, at least, his early cave, was surrounded by words not by images.

Ranciere, Jacques. “A Fable without a Moral: Godard, Cinema, (Hi)stories, “in Film Fables pp.171-188

*  Histoire(s) du cinema: Une Historie seule [Chapter (1(b)] (Jean Luc Godard, 1989)

Sinem Aydınlı

Struggle for Exculpation After Apathy Towards the Tracking Shot in Kapo

Daney have already broken up with me: “I would definitely have nothing to do, nothing to share with anybody who wasn’t immediately upset by the abjection of ‘the tracking shot in Kapo’ “.

Before watching the scene, I was unaware of this divorce that was foreseen by Daney; even the quoted sentence did not take my attention at the first reading. The article was totally clear and agreeable for me with the images that I constructed in my mind of the tracking shot. I could no more agree with Daney on his uneasiness towards the “way of adding an extra parasitic beauty or complicit information to scenes that did not need it”. Such pornography was something that I was familiar and uncomfortable with.

The problem of me emerged after the screening of the scene at the class: I was not at all stroke by what I saw and I eventually got confused about what I had read. Now, I, as someone who is out of the profession of film-making, was convinced that it was my unfortunate illiteracy and/or, somehow, my dreadful insensitivity against the genocide to be not “immediately upset” by the scene in question. Yes, I seem to have taken it personal.

The struggle than began. I watched the scene over and over again. I read “On Abjection” of Rivette (can be retrieved from http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/OK/abjection.html) and the article of Daney one more time.
The scene did not strike me in any of the consequent watches. It is not that the scene, for me, was beautiful or impressive. I, without enough knowledge on the techniques of film-making, could agree upon its vulgarity. Being able to differentiate the tracking shot in the scene, I could also consider the absurdity of the shot, because, I could not see the use of it as it seemed to be an excessive attempt to emphasize the death of the woman which was probably already grasped by the audience. Still, this shot was only an unnecessary or an inferior one for me; it was not a pornographic one that deserved such fevered attacks.

Perhaps, such a horror did really become a “part of the mental landscape of modern man” as Rivette claimed. Abasement accepted.

Watching Nuit et brouillard, which was compared to Kapo in the articles of Rivette and Daney, did not ease my confusion. I was certainly disturbed by and terrified of the history. In the film, the documented reality was so ugly that I find it hard to approach and discuss such documentation as an artifact. If the problem in consideration here is, as far as I understand, showing too much of death or aestheticizing death, then, I do question the showing of the vicious pauses on the open eyes of dead men in Nuit et brouillard. Why did not Resnais insisted on showing the scenes that concentrated on the eyes of the dead? Is this because the film judged not only the slaughter but also the coldblooded recording of it? Could be.

Then, is the issue the difference between showing the reality and narrating related to a reality? Perhaps, an emphasize on the spectacle of a dead wo/man in a documentary has its ground on reality which makes the scene reasonable (after all, the showing of such a harsh reality can not be worse than the reality itself), whereas in a fiction, in which everything is in the hands of the film maker, it is objected for redundantly aestheticizing death. Roughly, in the documentary the killer is someone else, whereas in the fiction the killer becomes the film-maker. What is the significance of Kapo? It seems to me that if the fiction is grounded on a historical reality, then aestheticization is perceived as being insensitive to the reality- the criticism targets at not only her/his artistic abilities but also her/his humanitarian side.

Being well aware of its irrelevancy to the discussion, I can not help questioning the screening of Nuit et brouillard at a middle school…

No conclusion. It is just me trying to understand what I read and watched and to exculpate myself.

Segah Sak

An Overview of Korean Cinema

When I think about the editing styles, I come think about the recent styles of uses of editing in the modern period. It is going to be like a repetition but being the most significant one of the pieces of the film world for me, I will again mention about the Korean films.

As I read through the piece on the styles of editing.  It was very interesting for me to read about the close-up style of editing at times of dialogue. Since, for instance, Kim-ki Duk rarely uses long periods of dialogues in his movies. I have realized that he has transformed the use of close-up on such shots into close-ups where he uses symbolic objects or facial expressions instead of words. When we observe such scenes in for instance 3-Iron, we can clearly get the continuity of the plot through the observation of the close-up scenes. Personally, I find the use of facial expressions on the close-ups to be rather symbolic as well. It thus also increases the potential of the film in terms of delaying the cinema, the sensation and the feeling of suspense by not clearly revealing all the emotional details of the movie and thus keeping the motives of the characters hidden. I find this strategy quite successful since it not only keeps the attention and intrigue of the audience alive but also performs an example of the close-up editing in a different but stylistic and successful manner.

On the other hand, I want to mention another aspect of the film, The Dolls by Takeshi Kitano or Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring by Kim-ki Duk. In both of them the visual imagery of the seasons, famous with the cherry tree and all kinds of different flowers of all colors, stand for different symbolic meanings, while the symbolism of nature in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring could be interpreted as the cyclic flow of one’s life time and experiences of wisdom, the visual imagery of the nature in The Dolls could well be said to stand for strength and resistance of love between two against the erosion of the flow of time. Of course the symbolism and the meaning behind it can be interpreted as different things by many, but it is something definite that they stand as a symbol like many different objects and mise an scenes in the films.

I cannot help, but look for things that carry multiple causes within and I believe that the films that are rich of them, thus, possess a greater potential within them.

Canan Gürel

The Reception Issue Regarding Hollywood Blockbusters

As far as the reception of Hollywood blockbusters is concerned, I believe that these movies are not simply products of the audience. No matter what is said about interpretation of the audience, a blockbuster has some fixed patterns and explicit ideologies encoded by the producers, which is essentially the white patriarchal capitalism. In this regard I believe that reception of an avant-garde movie and a conventionalized Hollywood movie is rather different by the audience.

First of all, a classical Hollywood movie’s objective is to be consumed by as many audiences as there can be. To achieve this goal, there are some certain standardization of style and structure applied by the producers:

1)      A classical Hollywood movie has an invisible style, because it contains no distinctive style which calls attention to it. In that way, the viewer stays emotionally trapped in a film’s story, and all aspects of mise-en-scene consistently help the audience remain in the domain of the film.

2)      All information about movie is explicit waiting to be taken by the audience without an effort.

3)      Stereotyping makes the reception easier. The stock characterization of a villain and a good guy draws upon pre-existing social and cultural stereotypes. In that way, the audience does not put much effort in distinguishing the good and the bad.

4)      All classical Hollywood movies have a beginning, middle and an ending.  A closure must tie up all of the story’s loose ends, which affirms that all problems are solved and the audience does not need to think about it further.

Regarding all of the traits of a classical movie, it can be said that they are not made for an interpretation but for consumption. In such movies, the audience just takes what s/he anticipates to take, no more no less. An interpretation of such movies would only draw attention to the same dominant ideologies since they are designed not to raise questions or explore social issues but to maintain the ideological status quo.

Thus, while interpreting a blockbuster movie, I do not think that there will be a clash between decoder and encoder since in such cases encoder tries to eliminate all the possible factors which can lead to misinterpretation of the film. Therefore, a Hollywood blockbuster has an apparent meaning in all social and cultural contexts as John Ellis states: “meaning in cinema is obvious: the average cinema film appears straightforward and can be understood immediately (with subtitles) by virtually everyone on the planet”. This is simply because they aim not to get the audience to participate in meaning making process but make them take always-already made meanings. In that way, the audience, who does not expect something more, will be satisfied with what they have seen.

To conclude, Hollywood blockbusters can give an idea about the historical context they are shot, they can highlight the dominant ideologies of the time, (which, in fact, have not been so diverse in America over the time) but the message they convey is unchallenging, meaning is evident in various contexts so you do not have to be a wise person to interpret and absorb it.

Merve Ersoy

Some notes on F for Fake

Let’s skip the intro for a while, i.e. the introduction part which I always hate, and begin with a sudden question: F FOR FAKE, what kind of film is it?

Since it is a multi-faced monument, it is not easy to put F FOR FAKE, Orson Welles’ 1974 dated magnum opus, under a definite category. So the question above which is easy to ask, but difficult answer seems inevitable to me. As a possible answer, in his book Orson Welles, Joseph McBridge says that it is a free-flowing and idiosyncratic essay film. For critic Stuart Byron, F FOR FAKE is grace-note metafilm (1996, p. 181).

May it be a documentary?  At a lunch with  Orson Welles in La Méditerranée Paris, Jonathan Rosenbaum asks a similar question. Probably with his cigar from which he just taken another puff is between his fingers, Welles replies, “No, not a documentary–a new kind of film” (2007, p. 289). Since it is consisted of different sequences and footages from different productions which were sophisticatedly re-edited and woven together, F FOR FAKE seems to deserve an adjective such as a new kind. “Girl-Watching” sequence in the beginning, footages from François Reichenbach’s BBC documentary on the famous and fabulous art forger Elmyr de Hory, EARTH vs. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956) and THE WAR OF THE WORLDS radio broadcast are some of these sequences and footages (McBridge, 1996, pp. 182-185).

Although “It isn’t even a film” for film historian Lotte Eisner, name of this new kind of film was also problematic. In 1972, when Orson Welles was working on it, it was called HOAX. One year later, now it was being called FAKE. Before the issue was settled film’s production company even announced that title of the film was QUESTION MARK. Finally Oja Kodar who was the assistant of Welles and co-writer of the film, suggested the name F FOR FAKE (Rosenbaum, 2007, p. 290).

Because of the fact that F FOR FAKE was co-directed by Welles & Reichenbach (recall that it was largely reedited documentary of Reichenbach), and co-written by Welles & Kodar and leading actors such as Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, it took a while for the names issue to be settled. So wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum with such a quizzical fashion in Film Comment:

For the time being, I am content to call it THE NEW ORSON WELLES FILM, co-directed by Irving and de Hory, written by Jorge Luis Borges, and produced by Howard Hughes…. As Welles remarks about Chartres, the most important thing is that it exists (2007, p. 291).

If I examine the name-issue in more detail, although I cannot say that all of them are intended, it is not difficult to find interesting and thought provoking connotations related with the names.

Take HOAX for example. THE HOAX is the name of the film directed by Lasse Hallström and is a section from Clifford Irving’s life, who was the author of the biography of Elmyr de Hory and fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. By the way if you have not watched THE HOAX yet, do watch it, because watching F FOR FAKE again, after watching THE HOAX becomes more enjoyable and significant.

As you can easily recall FAKE was the another alternative title for the film. It was also the name of the biography of Elmyr de Hory, written by Clifford Irving in 1969. It was Fake! that was made Elmyr de Hory was a famous and followed by Reichenbach’s BBC documentary about Elmyr and Welles’ F FOR FAKE.

Like one of its old names suggested, F FOR FAKE contains hoaxes which are quite interesting. For example, towards the end of “Girl-Watching” sequence in the beginning of the film, she is not Oja Kodar, but her sister Nina Kodar who is approaching to us in the frontal long shots (Rosenbaum, 2007, p. 293). Although in 07:47 of the film, Welles says that “Her name is Oja,” she is not Oja, but Nina – I think.

If I am not wrong, I realized that in the 07:25 of the film, bracelets of Kodar that were on her right wrist before are seen on her left wrist.

Title sequence of F FOR FAKE also contains o hoax, i.e. in 05:19 of the film, “practioners” is written instead of “practitioners” (Rosenbaum, 2007, p. 292).

One final note about film is that there is a nine-minute trailer of F FOR FAKE which was released three years later film’s production. This trailer contains excerpts that was not shown in the film and nude figure studies of Oja Kodar, which was especially filmed for the trailer. A four-minute excerpt from that trailer can be watched via YouTube. The trailer is as striking as the film itself. So it is also strongly recommended.

References

McBridge, J. (1996). Orson Welles. Da Capo Press.

Rosenbaum, J. (2007). Discovering Orson Welles. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

M. Kemal İz

In the mood for Reception: Back to the films themselves!

Here are the some comments of audiences for Mirror (1975) from Andrei Tarkovsky’s own book, Sculpting in Time:

A woman civil engineer wrote from Leningrad: ‘I saw your film, Mirror. I sat through to the end, despite the fact that after the first half hour I developed a severe headache as a result of my genuine efforts to analyze it, or just to have some idea of what was going on, of some connection between the characters and events and memories. . . .We poor cinema-goers see films that are good, bad, very bad, ordinary or highly original. But any of these one can understand, and be delighted or bored as the case may be; but this one?! . . .’ (p.8)

And another engineer, this time from Sverdlovsk, was unable to contain his deep antipathy: ‘How vulgar, what trash! Ugh, how revolting! Anyhow, I think your film’s a blank shot. It certainly didn’t reach the audience, which is all that matters. . (p.8)

A woman wrote from Gorky: ‘Thank you for Mirror. My childhood was like that. . . . Only how did you know about it? ‘There was that wind, and the thunderstorm . . . “Galka, put the cat out,” cried my Grandmother. . . . It was dark in the room . . . And the paraffin lamp went out, too, and the feeling of waiting for my mother to come back filled my entire soul . . . And how beautifully your film shows the awakening of a child’s consciousness, of this thought! . . . And Lord, how true . . . we really don’t know our mothers’ faces. And how simple . . . You know, in that dark cinema, looking at a piece of canvas lit up by your talent, I felt for the first time in my life that I was not alone . . .’ (p.10)

A worker in a Leningrad factory, an evening class student, wrote: ‘My reason for writing is Mirror, a film I can’t even talk about because I am living it. ‘It’s a great virtue to be able to listen and understand . . . That is, after all, a first principle of human relationships: the capacity to understand and forgive people their unintentional faults, their natural failures. If two people have been able to experience the something even once, they will be able to understand each other. Even if one lived in the era of the mammoth and the other in the age of electricity. And God grant that people may understand and experience only common, humane impulses—their own and those of others.’ (p.10)

A working woman from Novosibirsk wrote: ‘I’ve seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn’t go simply to sec it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people. . . . Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light and warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me—it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that’s why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.‘ (p.12)

After giving comments of different audiences or recipients and how they see or read the Mirror, it can be continued by introducing briefly cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky in order to understand from which perspective they should read his movies. As a Russian director, Tarkovsky’s cinema is, by his own words: “In all my pictures the theme of roots was great importance: links with family house, childhood, country, Earth…”

When Tarkovsky talks about his movies, he points out that the aesthetically pressure of visual is more important than to know meaning of the film. Thus, he uses different colors to show transition from fantasy to real or emphasizing dreams. The colors are the unit of the meanings and he uses Technicolor and sepia to tell different level of reality. For instance, in Stalker (1979), the real life is shot in chrome; dreams, desired places and events in real time are colored. Also, he refuses symbolism and metaphors in his movies but audiences try to give different meanings that what they see as you read above. Actually, he mentions that he just reflects his own outlook to the world: “I never create allegories. I create my own world. That world does not signify anything unusual. It just exists, it has no other meaning. I think symbol and allegory rob the artist”.

For him, when someone talks about a book or remembers his memories, a bottle of milk can throw down at the same time but it is just a bottle of milk since these things happens in real life, too. In other words, that a bottle of milk does not signify anything. Also, when it is asked what the coins (e.g. Sacrifice) or what the black dog symbolizes (e.g. Stalker), he says that he doesn’t know but they are same things as what they are in dreams or real life. It means that he does not add any special meaning to images that he created.

Although he does not assign special meaning to his movies, it can be inferred from his sayings, Tarkovsky wants audiences read same meaning from his movies but how is it possible?

In reality, it is not simple as Tarkovsky’s expressions since the audiences cannot be alienated from the film, itself. Thus, this issue, namely, the meaning of the film or how to read a film is the controversial topic for the ones who are interested in film analysis or film interpretation since it has different aspects and it is made by “audience”. As an audience, you can criticize or analyze a movie from different perspectives. Whether or not every audience can be a film analyzer or critic of every movie that s/he watches and whether only selective audiences having academic background analyze a movie from some perspectives are really controversial issues.

However, now, I’d like to speculate one of that perspectives focusing on phenomenological film criticism, namely, interest of Stanley Cavell. According to Cavell, the audiences must let the films themselves teach them how to look at them and how to think about them (1981). As you see, it is contrary to what Tarkovsky expects since there is no “how to look” issue in his films; they are already reality itself (i.e. not appearances). On the contrary, the other controversial issue arises that if there is an auteur cinema like Tarkovsky’s one, i.e. the eye of director and his pen and if the director makes all film as his outlook to the life itself, without knowing his “life philosophy” how can an audience interpret the film, can the meaning that the audience took from it be the same as he’d like to give? If we leave the film teach us how to think about it, don’t we miss out opinions or thoughts of creator of this art?

Thus, all issue is about how you regard as the movie, you can say that the audiences create the meaning by being in relation with the film. Since the audiences come to scene, there can be different meanings based on audiences’ socio-cultural background and also their “life philosophy”.

By taking Cavell’s saying further, I also think that once a work of art is created, the recipient of it becomes the owner of that work; at least, in the context of the film, integration of audiences to the film creates the meaning and it means that there is no meaning-in-itself in the film-in-itself even the director – especially auteur one, as Tarkovsky, expects that audiences take the same meaning like the case of his Mirror. In other words, what if the film does not want to say that what the audience takes or reads from it? Yes, the question is this: Is there really meaning-in-itself in the film? The questions can go further and bring us to bigger issue that mentioned above: There is a work of art but to whom does it belong? In the case of cinema art, if the audience interprets the film and takes whatever meaning s/he attributes to film, then doesn’t the film belongs to that audience?

Or contrary to that, if the critics of audiences contradict with opinions of director or scriptwriter, can the critics of audiences be “true” for the meaning of the film in the context of film itself?

In this respect, it is plausible to consider combining phenomenological critic with pragmatism: while considering meaning in the film, can I say that the meaning in the film is determined by what I’ll do with the meaning? As a matter of fact, yes I can say. As an audience, I do not loot the film, I engage with it and then I interpret it. According to William James, the pragmatist philosopher, “Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience” (1907: 34) so thus I’m in a relation with a film, I take the meaning and my relation with film makes the meaning true for me. It is all about my conscious experience with the film itself. No director, no scriptwriter, there are only me and the moving images.

References:

Tarkovsky, Andrei, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, 1987

King, Noel, “Hermeneutics, Reception Aesthetic, and Film Interpretation”, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, 212-23.

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