Zidane

Some claim that best athletes come from the worst living conditions. There are hell of a lot examples for it and Zinedine Zidane is one of them. There was a success story coming when Zidane was migrating from Algeria to France. He grew up from slums to be one of the best football players ever played the game. These are the subjects of most documentaries made about Zidane. However, even if it is not solely a documentary or only an art-film, in the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), there are less things about Zidane and there are more things about presentation.

Zidane can be seen as an individual athlete in an actual match, with his gestures, sprints, his talking to teammates, his seeing the game while not playing the ball, spitting on the floor, all in all, everything you does not see while you are watching the match in front of T.V. It is beautiful as it portrays and helps you to empathy the experience of an individual in a team, group activity.

From time to time, we see the cameramen’s perspective while s/he is broadcasting the match through the camera, and then we switch the perspective of the T.V. audience, then the perspective switches back close to Zidane. It may be done in order to show the levels of representation. There is a setup which maybe stars with the entertainment thing; in here it is football. Football is a game to entertain people. As people wants to enjoy it while not playing it, they want to see it. Some of the people have the needs to watch it in the stadium with thousands of other, in the atmosphere, some of them do not. Therefore there is another setup that connects you to the atmosphere and entertainment through your t.v. set. While the audience in the stadium sees the whole pitch according to the angle they are sitting in the building, the audience watching T.V. sees the things cameramen shows and t.v. regie directs. There is no chance of watching only an individual in both audiences while he plays; but this film breaks that bounds.

Zidane’s personal comments about his past years about the representation of the game through t.v. and comments about the experience of playing in front of an audience are given as subtitles in a composition with the starting music.

Football is a team game played by individuals can be seen in this film, through emphasizing an individual. Real Madrid has always been one of the best football teams in the world and in the time of this match against Valencia F.C. in 2005, Zidane was thought as the best currently playing football player in the world; and some critics believed that he is the third best player ever after Maradona and Pele. Even if he was thought to be the best in the world while he was playing, Madrid club had lots of bests in their squads, so, even if you are the best player in the world, the ball comes to you almost once in five minutes or so. When it comes it again goes from you in almost five seconds. It is also a film that shows, there is no individual pleasure in football, it is a team game. Also the ending of the film has an interesting parallel with the ending of Zidane’s career. As Zidane is subtitled about his future career’s ending while he walks to the locker room as he is sent off with a red card, his career ended with a red card in the world cup 2006 finale.

Change of filmic experience and quality of films

Cinema has long been a way of experiencing life and reality. The imaginary world of films is parallel to the real life. Not only the content of film affects our lives but also the surrounding of the cinema hall has an important role in this experience. As Casetti puts the idea in the terms “filmic experience” summarize the whole notion of that kind of experience. From the beginning till now cinema has evolved. In the first years, cinema was a cultural event and was a milestone to determine social status. People who belong to a determinate culture met there and they show themselves in that place. In time cinema became a place that people get news and watch not only films but also sports and important events. Then filmic experience turned into a leisure time activity. Not only the cultural classes that go to the cinema has changed but also the audience’s age has changed. Cinema is not popular among adults but it is among young. Today filmic experience reshaped and it is now an activity that we could encounter almost every place. In waiting halls, bedrooms, kitchens, cars, buses, planes and trains we could watch films. This eliminates the cinema’s one of its beneficial aspect that is being a social place. We also do not need to give our full attention to the film. We could have filmic experience while we eat, cook, do housework, have a trip and so on.

This makes me think about Deleuze’s idea about filmic experience. According to him while we watch a film there occurs sensory motor experience. There is a relationship between film and my perception and this is a circular situation. This necessitates some kind of attention. However as the filmic experience has changed we do not pay full attention to the films. In this point I think as filmic experience have changed films also changed. We do not need to make a connection with film all the time. Filmic experience is one part while we experience a multi task. In order to understand the film, as we cannot have a sensory motor experience all the time, film does not contain necessary scenes all the time. This can lead to more gibberish films. And I may say filmic experience lost sits quality.

3-D films can be count as an announcement to invite audience to cinema halls again. We need to pay our full attention to the film and in order to have that filmic experience we have to go the cinema halls again. However technological innovations let people to have 3D televisions in their halls which prevents them to go to cinema again.

Two Issues in Serge Daney's Tracking Shot:2

This time Daney compares the “tracking shot” in Kapò (1959) to the death scene in Ugetsu monogatari (1953) in which we see barely a death scene. About the fact that the death of the character is not emphasized or dramatized like the way it was done in Kapò, Daney claims that Ugetsu’s director Mizoguchi “did the exact opposite of Kapo”. In a way, he suggests that showing the event in a point of view that is given indirectly rather than showing in detail and make exploitation. As he divides the effect of a cinematic image in history as before WWII, after WWII and nowadays, I agree that they are giving something different now. Reflecting the war and ethics about it, is something but I cannot find a morality issue in using a shot technique. It is never simply choosing a technique but the things argued about the intended meaning and the effect on audience is, I think relative on audience and only can be an assumption about the mind of the director. The tracking shot is seen as an emotional exploitation and trying to individualize the events that effected the masses, but going from one to a whole is a way too. I do not think it is a thing about being true to cinema or being honest to the medium. It is I think relative in the way people look at life in general.

I know that it is not same to compare a war situation deals with masses with this seemingly individual story of some people but I would like to give the ending close-up example from The Edge of Heaven (2007) of Fatih Akın. As is known, story deals with a couple of deaths which are looking like the unfortunate situations in life that can happen with the choices that made by characters. All the time the dramatic events occur and they are tried to be given in the way like Mizoguchi did. However, after the climax, in resolution, the protagonist or the main character is seen in a different way than the rest of the film. A close up is seen which tells a lot, from being a human with hope for a new beginning to see the beautiful details of emotions can be seen on a human face. Fatih Akın is not the inventor of this type of direction, but putting the close-up, saving it to last second and I thought that giving it in the end was the most sincere thing to do. That was the closest moment I felt to the character even if there are no parallels among our lives.

Anyway, while reading the text of Serge Daney, as it is autobiographical with stories from Daney’s life and it gives similar feelings like the book The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. His tone and writing style is really enjoyable for me as he passes from one subject to another combining personal experiences and film theory and he is writing like he is chatting. He gives his experiences of affection he got from the visuals in cinema as a young boy and gives the details of what made him decide to deal with cinema. He talks about being a cinephile, the experience of it and in a way makes his definition of it.

http://sergedaney.blogspot.com/

This blog has the writings, thoughts, interviews and videos about and of Daney, all translated into English.

And this is a video from the blog that can be an introduction to Daney’s ideas about the history of cinema, American cinema and cinema in general that we talked also in the class.

Journey of a "Cine-Son" (excerpt) from ibeescus on Vimeo.

Two Issues in Serge Daney's Tracking Shot:1

Daney tells his story about the “tracking shot” in the 1959 film Kapò, which is about a group of Jewish people led by a girl to escape from a concentration camp in WWII. He talks about representation of history through cinema and the deals with being a “moral issue” of a tracking shot which was argued back then. There is also an important comparison between the two films Kapò (1959) and Night and Fog (1955) or rather the attitudes towards the representation of the events that occurred in camps. I cannot differ the tracking shot and showing the things with their nakedness from each other in terms of being “just”. There is also an atmosphere intended to be created through the wonderful music by George Delerue, through a text, a narration and an editing in Night and Fog. I think it is relative to choose between this two today as the facts are known today, but back then it was a different argument as cinema was not used as an instrument of informing the world about what is happening over there; as there are very few footage about the crimes of humanity. Nevertheless, it was not only the cinema that was in silence; with all the instruments of civilization, the world kept its silence for a time in terms of reacting to the horrific situation. This is an issue still used as a criticism of civilizations, most of the time a criticism of German civilization, in cinema too. In recent examples The Reader(2008), we see that there is an argument occurs among the German law students of the first generations after the WWII in the academy of law about the inaction against the systematic tortures of Nazis against the Jewish race in Nazi Germany and the places it invaded.


Of course people did not approve the cruelty, however, they maybe could not, but for me, did not do anything about it. I know it is easier to say than it is done of course, there were different circumstances back then. This is dealt in the 9^th episode of “Band of Brothers” (2001) named “Why We Fight”. Of course these are two examples from American cinema that has an attitude of looking things from a bossy perspective like “we had to come over there to save your asses, therefore we can deal with it in the way we want” or “we fought as nobles to save the humanity, and when we fight we fight for noble reasons” maybe trying to justify their actions nowadays etc.


However, after all, this is an issue should not be forgotten about human in general and for me it should not bother people to see the Holocaust, remember it from time to time. Even if the perspectives change, even if the style of narration changes, even if it is not sincere and has different theoretical intended meanings under it; even if these are all thought to be constructs, it is secondarily for me how you deal with it, I think it is an issue about dealing with it and world is still trying to purify itself by constantly doing that as it did not at the time of war.

Representation of Illusion

The act of seeing actually starts with the act of seeing images, which involves such complex phases and makes us the inspectors of visual stimuli, even in the case of visual impairment; people are able to adapt their selves to sense images by defining them with a different type of transduction and in a different sphere of knowledge. Wherever we live, we live with images. We are surrounded by images and unlike words; images construct our ways of thinking and imagining. We introduce ourselves with sense of self-images, we are introduced with other kinds of images by means of images and we imagine images through mental images. So, within these intertwined concepts about “images”; realization of a separation between real, fantasy, image and representation get quite impossible. There is a double-edged argument on alienation of real through images and in the absence of images; we are exposed to representation of images and images of representations within the same context and that makes spectators both to be able to feel secure and alienated through what they see.

Photography, due to its use in the areas like medical science, archeology, history and architecture, is considered as a tool for ‘giving a permanent form to the enlarged images of the microscope’ (Hugh Diamond – editor of The Photographic Journal), which illustrates the effect of photography on the documentation/construction of the real. The photographic “document” is predictably perceived as neutral, styleless and objective record of visual information. Beneath this understanding about photography, as we all know, the existence of photographer is ignored and camera is evaluated as if it can work independent from an operator. While documents are seen as objective, mechanical copies characterized by detail and functionality, “art photography” stand for the status of invention and subjectivity. However, this kind of discrimination is considered as pseudo-separation due to the characteristics of photography in general, as an invented tradition or ideology that performs in modern society, specifically, in mass image forms like advertising, legal documents, pornography, anthropological images, topographic views, and so forth. In his essay “ The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin stated that photography and cinema, serve the basic human need for illusion and realism, which actually a confusing definition due to the problems in classifying these concepts. In Bazin’s perspective, photographs are objective and authentic copies of things and looking at a photograph force viewer to accept it as real the existence of the object reproduced. He stated that; the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of space and time that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image might be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model which it is the reproduction; it is the model.

To conclude, within this endless range of images in modern narratives, images do more than just representing reality, they construct it. This construction of reality repeated itself with the help of culture and history as a myth of nature. Images are documents to help the myth of “real” or “nature” repeating over and over in various spectrums. So, having a sense of distinction between fiction and real / art photography and documentary / nature and culture is just for the sake of having the sense of distinction but nothing else. This sense of distinction about representation and image serves our understanding of understanding, because we use schemata in order to define everything, and without distinctions or boundaries schemata would not work as it has supposed to do. Besides “widen” our understanding about the self and the other, for me, having the distinction between illusion, reality, representation and image does not refer anything about illusive reality or reality itself.

References:

Edwards, S., (2006) Photography: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press

Photograph: Roger Fenton - Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)

Some Problems of Bazin's Phenomenological Image - 3

Mitchell uses the concept of family resemblances in order to deconstruct the use of image in certain discourses. He draws a diagram in which certain uses of the word “image” is shown:

I added photography to show its place in Bazin’s hierarchy. Mitchell’s argument, as well as Wittgenstein’s, is that this hierarchy does not reflect reality. It only reflects language in use. The graphic image, or in Bazin’s case the photographic image is the most “literal” use of the word image. As we go towards right, the use of the word image becomes more and more figurative. In other words, the photographic image is the image that is most realistic because the other images are somewhat improper copies of the real objects. For example the impressions of objects in our minds are not as stable as photographs so we tend to argue that mental images cannot represent reality as successfully as photographs can.

So Mitchell tries to make a Wittgensteinian move by describing a situation where there are no minds. If there were no minds, than there would be no more images. Not because we could not make any more images, but because there would be no one to recognize an image as an image. This is a “paradoxical trick of consciousness”. When we see a photograph of an apple, we recognize the apple as “there” and “not there” at the same time. We do not say that there is an apple there, but we recognize that it is an apple. However when a duck responds to a decoy duck, it is not responding to an image of a duck, it is responding to a duck itself. This is because the duck does not recognize the image of the duck as an image. The same thing happens when people see TV for the first time in their lives, they cannot discern images from real people or things.

When we try to point to a mental image and say that there is a mental image we are unable to recognize it as an image because we do not know how to recognize it as an image. We do not have that knowledge because we cannot point to it. Can it be the only difference between a photograph and a mental image? That we cannot point to a mental image?

In order to understand how our consciousness works, we try to imagine it as things which reflect images. In certain points in philosophy, mind has been imagined as a mirror, a camera or a camera obscura. Bazin imagines mind as a camera which takes pictures of the world. Although it is a camera which works with language (I know this is a very crude metaphor), it is still another picture of how consciousness works. Wittgenstein argues that mind can have an image of itself in anyway it fancies or it may not have an image of itself at all. But when the mind is pictured as a camera, this is not a necessity or in other words, this is not an ontological claim. The mind can refuse to represent itself just as it can refuse to see a painting as a representation of something. There are no rules of representation in painting or in cinema; it is my opinion that otherwise we would not have those dialectic movements that Bazin talks about. If there is something necessary, maybe it is the necessity for different representations or schemes of formation of mental and material images.

Bazin privileges photographic image because mental image is a mystical thing. On the other hand, is it not more natural than a photograph to have a mental image? We can move from right to left in the above diagram just as easily we move from left to right:

“We  could just  as  easily replace  what  we  call  "the  physical  manipulation of  signs"  (painting, writing,  speaking)  with locutions such as "thinking on paper, out  loud, in  images,  etc."

I really like the idea that we can think painting as “thinking on paper” and argue that photograph itself is a false representation of how we perceive or think about the world. Although I get how photographic image is more similar to our ordinary perception, I think that is only one way to think about our perception. We are also capable of having extraordinary perceptions of reality. And why would we want to get rid of these different ways of imagining or perceiving the world just because they are not similar to our ordinary perception?

Impressions of Reality

Photographic image; as a mechanic tool for immortality, as a way to freeze and keep the impression of reality, as an art...

Andre Bazin’s ideas of realism in cinema try to place this incredible/magical mechanic agent in the most effective position to serve as a ″reality catcher″. For this reason, he offers some basic applications to realize this aim: deep-focus cinematography which keeps all actions in focus as given equal importance in the same shot and long-take used in parallel. And also offers an analytic editting procedure, unlike montage, just to serve altering emphasis and viewpoint, not for imposing expressionistic meaning or distorting unity of an event. As he offers that it is the most democratic way camera can work, still there is the problem of subjectivity. As one tries to represent the impression of reality, although one tries to abstract his/her self ideally, abstraction of subjectivity and human factor is almost impossible and the result is always –even if not intended- one’s impression of reality.

And the realism aimed by Bazin has 3 facets: ontological, dramatic and psychological. Bazin suggests that ontological status is realized due to the photographic image’s automatic and mechanical recording capacity, ″taking an impression, by the manipulation of light″ and transfering it to the image. However, fulfilled developments changed the recording capacity of the photographic image to a great extent, the procedure do not need only a ″click″ to start the chemical process anymore and digital environment became able to function without reality and also beyond reality. The first example of that beyond reality perception was Muybridge’s, as human eye may not perceive horse’s feet were actually all of the ground, photographic image was able to represent this. Digital capabilities offer people to see much more than they can perceive with their naked eyes. For example, in macro photography one become able to notice the tiny hairs of an insect; although bursting of a balloon full of water was perceived only in few steps burst and splash, high-speed photography represents the impression of reality, the water remaining in air before splashing, which is not possible to be perceived by the naked human eye. As photographic image became capable to represent without and beyond the reality today it is much more complicated to talk about an ontological realism that Bazin defines. On the other hand as Bazin offers, deep-focus and long-take cinematography is the most efficient technique to create dramatic and psychological realism, perception of reality changes in time. One camera movement once perceived unreal, may be perceived part of the impression of reality in time, like shaking the camera etc. and vice versa, one realistic camera movement in an old movie may be perceived unreal today.

As we try to examine the impression of reality in fiction film it is seen that spectator is open to perceive cut scenes as a whole and fill the blanks; for example, in one scene one gets in the train and the next scene one arrives. Getting inside to the train and steping outside creates the impression of reality that one traveled –even if travel process is not shown. Contemporary film theorists such as Heath defines this impression of reality not based on image’s relation to reality but rather, spectator’s positioning and relation with the image as Buckland states: ″According to this theory, realism is nothing more than an effect of the successful positioning of the spectator into an imaginary relation to the image, a position which creates a sense that the film’s space and diegesis is unified and harmonious. (p.202)″

After all, even the most objective object (camera) is not able to limit completely the presence of the subjective subject and although representing strong impressions of reality is possible, absolute reality is hard to catch.

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Links:

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