Mise-en-scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (Issue 1.1, Winter 2016) by MESjournal

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Greg Chan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada MSJ@kpu.ca

ADVISORY BOARD

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Vol. 1, No. 1

Winter 2016

Contents Editor’s Note / Greg Chan ....................................................... 3

Richard L. Edwards, Ball State University, USA Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago, USA David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, USA Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, USA Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, UK Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada Michael C.K. Ma, KPU, Canada Janice Morris, KPU, Canada Miguel Mota, University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada Paul Risker, University of Wolverhampton, UK Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

“Who Killed the World?”: Building a Feminist Utopia from the Ashes of Toxic Masculinity in Mad Max: Fury Road / Taylor Boulware .................................. 5

REVIEWERS

The Adaptation of Artwork in Lust for Life and Mr. Turner / Rachel Walisko .................................................. 36

Manon Boivin, KDocs Documentary Film Festival, Canada Novia Shih-Shan Chen, SFU, Canada Olivier Clarinval, KPU, Canada Duncan Greenlaw, KPU Jack Patrick Hayes, KPU/UBC, Canada Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, UK Kent Lewis, Capilano University, Canada Christopher Sharrett, Seton Hall University, USA Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada Fiona Whittington-Walsh, KPU, Canada

COPYEDITORS

Heather Cyr, KPU, Canada Irene Halliday, KPU, Canada John Donald Redmond, KPU, Canada

Articles

The Viral Image: Transmedia Mise-en-scène in the Fictional Real / Chloe Anna Milligan ............................... 22

Reification and Alienated Form in A Clockwork Orange / James Driscoll .......................................................... 49 From the Shadows: Nosferatu and the German Expressionist Aesthetic / William F. Burns ............................ 62 View from the Road: Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny / Michael Johnston ........................................... 74

Interviews

LAYOUT EDITOR

Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland Discusses Her Life in Film / Paul Risker ....................................................... 88

WEBMASTER

Featurettes

INTERNS

The Sight of Unseen Things: Cinephilic Privileging and the Movement of Wind in The Eclipse / David Scott Diffrient ............................................................... 96

Irene Halliday, KPU, Canada

Janik Andreas, UBC, Canada

Neil Bassan, KPU, Canada Lynn Doan, KPU, Canada Nikki Melton, KPU, Canada Melissa Pomerleau, KPU, Canada

Front cover image: Director Agnieszka Holland, courtesy of R. Pelka. The views and opinions of all signed texts, including editorials and regular columns, are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect those of the editors, the editorial board or the advisory board.

Perambulation, or the Real Miracle of Morgan’s Creek / Walter Metz ............................................. 103 Unseen Voices in The Wind Will Carry Us / Kenta McGrath ................................................... 107

Reviews

Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration is published by Simon Fraser University, Canada

The Film Experience: An Introduction / Joakim Ake Nilsson ................................................................ 112

ISSN: 2369-5056

Transforming Gender / Gerald Walton ................................. 116 Wizard Mode / Fiona Whittington-Walsh ............................. 120

Contributors ....................................................................... 125

One frame at a time

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Editor’s Note By Greg Chan, Editor-in-Chief

n behalf of the editorial team, I am honoured to present the premiere issue of Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (MSJ). This publication started with a simple idea: to share innovative film studies scholarship that might otherwise languish in someone’s archive of once-loved, now forgotten papers. So began the creative process of creating a platform/forum/hub for writing that deserves a wider audience. What would this look like if a non-traditional spin were applied to a traditional approach? The result is an academic journal hybrid: peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary, but also openaccess, open-review, and accessible in multiple formats (PDF and MP3). In this respect, MSJ has every intention to reflect its digitized readership.

Taking it one frame at a time, MSJ is proud to showcase the talent of emerging scholars such as the University of Washington’s Taylor Boulware, who leads the issue with “’Who Killed the World’: Building a Feminist Utopia from the Ashes of Toxic Masculinity in Mad Max: Fury Road.” It is equally gratifying to feature work from international film studies scholars like Kenta McGrath (“Unseen Voices in The Wind Will Carry Us”) from Curtin University in Australia and Paul Risker (“Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland Discusses Her Life in Film”) from the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom. I should mention that Paul’s interviews with filmmakers like Holland will be a recurring feature of the journal. Spotlighting the field work of my Kwantlen

Polytechnic University colleagues Gerald Walton, Joakim Nilsson, and Fiona Whittington-Walsh has been a pleasure, especially since it promotes interdisciplinary Canadian content in film and media studies. I invite you to engage with their book and film reviews. MSJ will continue to be a virtual community of practice for graduate students, academics, teachers, and scholars who want to share their passion for film and media studies. As editor-in-chief, I am proud to head up an editorial team of over 30 individuals that has worked tirelessly behind the scenes over the last year to make MSJ a reality. I would like to express my gratitude to the esteemed members of MSJ’s advisory board: Richard L. Edwards (Ball State University), Allyson Nadia Field (University of Chicago), David A. Gerstner (City University of New York), Michael Howarth (Missouri Southern State University), Andrew Klevan (University of Oxford), Gary McCarron (Simon Fraser University), Michael C.K. Ma (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Janice Morris (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Miguel Mota (University of British Columbia), Paul Risker (University of Wolverhampton), Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi), and Paul Tyndall (Kwantlen Polytechnic University). Their guidance has been crucial to the development of the journal’s mission to be an international, open-access publication. The review team—Manon Boivin (KDocs Documentary Film Festival), Novia Shih-Shan Chen (Simon Fraser University), Duncan Greenlaw MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Editor’s Note

(Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Jack Patrick Hayes (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Michael Howarth, Kent Lewis (Capilano University), Christopher Sharrett (Seton Hall University), Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi), Paul Tyndall, and Fiona Whittington-Walsh (Kwantlen Polytechnic University)—deserves thanks for lending its expertise to the selection of the articles found in this issue. I would like to give special mention to Kent Lewis and Michael Howarth, whose unwavering dedication to the review process set the tone for the journal’s commitment to mentoring authors and publishing high-quality scholarship. Led by Irene Halliday, the Kwantlen Polytechnic University copyediting team of Heather Cyr and John Donald Redmond worked in collaboration with the contributing authors to ensure that their articles were publication-ready. MSJ’s inaugural cohort of student interns, Neil Bassan, Lynn Doan, Nikki Melton, and Melissa Pomerleau, provided invaluable assistance to myself and the editorial team throughout the process of publishing this first volume. These two groups undertook detail-oriented work that usually goes unnoticed by the reader, but is essential to the production of a journal like MSJ. I am indebted to them for making such “invisible” work look so effortless. It is not. Finally, I would like to thank webmaster Janik Andreas, who maintains MSJ’s site; layout editor Irene Halliday, who is responsible for designing the distinctive look of the articles; John Rowell, my always-resourceful student assistant; Carrol Cornell, who brought the journal’s logo to life; Neil Bassan, who created Issue 1.1’s cover; Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Dean of Arts Diane Purvey, who has supported this publication from the very start; Kevin Stranack and the Public Knowledge Project team at Simon Fraser University, for their patience with me and constant technical support; Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Office of Research and Scholarship,

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

for its backing; and my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts, who have stood behind this project and given me encouragement every step of the way. Thank you to everyone involved for your belief in MSJ. Readers, I hope that you will be inspired by the passion the contributors have for their subject matter and the new directions in film studies that their works represent. Perhaps you will consider becoming a contributor one day. In the meantime, join the #FrameNarrative conversation online by following @MESjournal on Twitter or by liking MESjournal on Facebook. I look forward to hearing from you. Enjoy Issue 1.1.

December 2016

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration “Who Killed the World?”: Building a Feminist Utopia from the Ashes of Toxic Masculinity in Mad Max: Fury Road Taylor Boulware University of Washington

Abstract: The contemporary post-apocalypse film is utopian in its various promises for recovery from the destruction caused by the end of days, and perhaps none more so than George Miller’s 2015 installment of his Mad Max saga, Fury Road, featuring Tom Hardy as the titular character and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, the female warrior who goes rogue to save the women held as sex slaves (“prize breeders”) by the monstrous tyrant Immortan Joe. Lauded by audiences, particularly female audiences, for its feminist revisions to the one of the most aggressively masculine popular film genres – and enraging “men’s rights activists,” a sure sign of doing something right – Fury Road, and in particular Theron’s Furiosa, have become icons of twenty-first century feminist empowerment. The film is utopian, not in the sense that it presents an ideal world, but that it imagines successful liberatory revolution and the destruction of decrepit systems of oppression, out of which a more perfect, egalitarian world can then emerge. Through the grotesque, parasitic tyranny of Immortan Joe’s monstrous necropolitics that reduces subjects to mere bodies for the deathly reproduction of the decaying corpse of capitalism, the film exposes the inextricable links between traditional masculinity, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation. It reveals how these ideologies work in toxic complicity in order to name, regulate, discipline, and render subjects, in the parlance of the film, ‘half-life’; in the words of political theorist Achille Mbembe, this exercise of power serves to create “death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” This article explores the film’s utopian response to the dystopian realities of capitalist patriarchy, arguing that Mad Max: Fury Road rewrites masculinity for a post-capitalist, post-patriarchal world.

irector George Miller’s 2015 installment of his Mad Max saga, Fury Road, takes us further into the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the near-future imagined by 1979’s Mad Max: a world come undone and thoroughly ravaged by environmental devastation, nuclear disaster, and wars for rapidly diminishing resources. In Fury Road, Tom Hardy replaces Mel Gibson as the titular character, and Charlize Theron is Imperator Furiosa, a powerful warrior who goes rogue to save the five women imprisoned as reproductive slaves by the monstrous tyrant Immortan

Joe. Lauded by audiences, mainly female audiences, for its feminist revisions to one of the most aggressively masculine genres – the post-apocalyptic action film – Fury Road, and in particular Theron’s Furiosa, have become new icons of feminist storytelling and female empowerment. The film has also garnered significant industry recognition; it was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Although it did not win those categories, it won six Oscars, the most of any film in 2016; significantly, all

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

of the film’s wins were for its technical and visual achievements: Costume Design, Makeup, Film Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Production Design (Goldstein). This recognition of Fury Road’s stylistic excellence speaks to the film’s innovative mise-en-scène that creates nuanced, evocative storytelling. Mise-en-scène “encompasses the most recognizable attributes of a film – the setting and the actors; it includes costumes and make-up, props, and all the other natural and artificial details that characterize the spaces filmed… [The term] describes the stuff in the frame and the way it is shown and arranged” (“Mise-en-scène”). Examining mise-enscène is a fundamental aspect of film analysis, particularly for Fury Road, which features little dialogue and relies heavily on visual narration to articulate its political and social critique – a critique that is accomplished almost completely by its mise-en-scène and character development.

destruction of apocalyptic life that endlessly reproduces the very worst of the modern capitalist culture that killed the world, Mad Max: Fury Road offers an alternative to this ending: a new beginning. And it is a decidedly utopian beginning: the liberation of the dispossessed, the destruction of the last vestiges of patriarchy and capitalism, and a matriarchal, socialist coup, complete with the abjected masses taking over the means of production. And while it may seem contradictory, many contemporary post-apocalypse texts are in fact deeply utopian in how they offer eventual solutions to and promises for recovery from the hell from which their hardwon futures are seized, imagining the successful liberations from decrepit systems of oppression and more perfect worlds. Fury Road, however, is distinct from other action films due to its explicitly feminist politics, and even more radically, its explicitly social-

…through a rejection of toxic masculinity and an embrace of alternative, feminist masculinities, the capitalist-tyrant is overthrown. Like its predecessors – Mad Max (1979), Mad Max: Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – Fury Road begins with a solitary Max Rockatansky, “a shell of a man, hollowed by his loss” (Miller, Max: Pt. One) wandering the desert, in search of redemption for his failures to protect others, especially his wife and child. And, like the earlier films, Fury Road also ends with a lone Max setting out into the dangerous wilds, still too broken to permanently rejoin a community; but this installment of the franchise has a different ending than its predecessors. The community Max leaves this time is fundamentally changed, a significant departure from both the post-apocalyptic anarchy and the social and ideological structures that produced it. After three bleak films that explore the severity, violence, and 6

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

ist solution to the destruction caused by capitalism and its inherent dehumanizations. The film unambiguously denounces capitalism as well as patriarchy, for the fall of civilization and the wretchedness that follows; it exposes the inextricable links between patriarchal masculinity and capitalist exploitation, revealing how these ideologies are co-constitutive and function to objectify, commodify, regulate, and render subjects abject: half-life War Boys, Breeders, Treadmill Rats, Milking Mothers, and Bloodbags. The film’s linkage of toxic masculinity to capitalist economic structures is fundamental to both its critique and its utopian possibility; through a rejection of toxic masculinity and an embrace of alternative, feminist masculinities, the capitalist-tyrant is

“Who Killed the World?”

overthrown. The protagonists – Nux, the War Boy who joins the rebellion and eventually sacrifices himself for it, Max, who finally learns to trust others and himself, and Furiosa, who seeks redemption and revenge – embody varying degrees of masculinity, and offer radical complications of and revisions to it that are necessary for the creation of a post-capitalist, post-patriarchal world. Furiosa’s rebellion and her eventual overthrow of Immortan Joe’s regime with the help of Max, The Wives, Nux, and the all-female Vuvalini clan, succeeds because this cadre of revolutionary heroes has rejected and escaped the gender norms that structure capitalism. Thus, Fury Road is a condemnation of toxic masculinity and its complicity in capitalist exploitation of both resources and bodies.

patriarchy. It also exposes and rejects one of capitalism’s most brutal and necessary functions: the reduction of certain bodies into commodities for the continual expansion of wealth and hegemony. Fundamental to this is male control of sexual reproduction, and thus sexuality and gender. Fury Road co-writer Brendan McCarthy explains that the first film was a biker revenge movie, the second was about the commodity of oil and the third one, humorously, was about everybody fighting over pig manure, another power source. We wanted to take that away and actually make this about the ultimate commodity: the human race itself – about sperm and wombs and women and men. (Bernstein 13)

Fury Road…exposes and rejects one of capitalism’s most brutal and necessary functions: the reduction of certain bodies into commodities for the continual expansion of wealth and hegemony.

Slavoj Žižek remarks that “the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point,” and that its harbingers include “ecological crisis, …struggles over raw materials…food and water,” and “the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions” (xii). Hardly the first ringing of such warning bells, Žižek’s augury is nonetheless compelling for its incisive, unapologetic denunciation of capitalism and the failure of its corresponding social and political forms to address the catastrophes it creates. This critique is explored by the original Mad Max trilogy, which imagines this particular apocalypse: the world as we know it destroyed by environmental degradation and violent battles for rapidly diminishing resources. Fury Road, however, is explicit in contextualizing those battles and the devastation they bring as the inevitable result of capitalist

McCarthy explicitly states the film’s interest in stripping bare the central function of patriarchal capitalism: the commodification and control of human reproduction that leads to all manner of oppression, abjection, and exploitation of both female and male bodies. Fury Road exposes how this objectification occurs through the concomitant creation and maintenance of strict gender binaries that exist precisely to regulate sexual and reproductive behaviour for profit and social control. The film’s political stakes are even more clear in the four-issue series of official comics published by Vertigo in the months after the film’s release; cowritten by George Miller, the comics offer more detailed backstories of the characters, cleverly provide summaries of the first three films, and further explain what caused the apocalyptic Fall. Taking place not long after the events of Fury Road and narrated

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

by The First History Man, a storyteller who preserves the “stories by which to navigate the future and avoid a repetition of the past” (Miller, Furiosa), the comics historicize the stories of Immortan Joe, Furiosa, Nux, and Max. And although the story the History Man tells his class of children is not that distant, it is nonetheless obscure and murky, recorded in tattooed fragments on his skin, because “when the world fell, they burned the books, leaving nothing but a random collection of wordburgers.” But despite this opacity about the past, the cause of the Fall is abundantly clear. The History Man tells the children: In a world where commodity and greed ruled and all was powered by the black fuel…where industry chattered and churned to produce baubles to entertain the masses, spilling its wastes into the waters and the sky, poisoning the world as though there was no limit. But the resources were limited. The black fuel ran low. The land turned sour. Even precious water became scarce. Wars were fought to control what little remained. The world went beyond the tipping point. The streets were filled with fire and blood. Anarchy reigned. The History Man’s tale reinforces the film’s brief explanation of the Fall, told mostly through snippets

of voiceovers at the beginning: “thermonuclear skirmish”; “why are you killing each other…it’s the oil, stupid”; “now the water wars”; “mankind has gone rogue, killing each other for guzzoline”; “mankind is terrorizing itself”; “terminal freak out point”; “the earth is sour, our bones are poisoned, we have become half-life” (Fury Road). Humanity is a diseased, dying species, reduced to bare life and hovering on the brink of extinction, grasping on to the tattered remains of a dead world – a world killed by capitalism. This dead world is exemplified by former Marine Colonel Joe Moore, who uses the Fall as an opportunity for pillaging and self-aggrandizement. Afflicted with various illnesses and only able to breathe through the hideous snarling mask designed to instill terror, his grotesque, growth-covered body adorned with relics from pre-Fall car culture that inspires the post-Fall religious fervour for guzzoline and the V8, Immortan Joe is the literal embodiment of toxic masculinity and the inherent violence of capitalism (Fig. 1). The vicious, aged despot, a “veteran of the oil wars, hero of the water wars” (Fury Road) has not only seized a stranglehold over what few resources

Fig. 1: The monstrous capitalist, Immortan Joe, in pursuit of The Wives and their unborn children, his "property," in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

“Who Killed the World?”

Fig. 2: Immortan Joe, standing over the ovum; The Wives’ message of rebellion.

remain in the wasteland; like all tyrants, he is obsessed with maintaining his power and continuing his poisoned legacy. Thus, Joe imprisons the healthiest women he can find as his “wives,” raping them repeatedly in an effort to produce healthy male heirs. With the help of their Handmaid and teacher, Miss Giddy, a History Woman, The Wives – Toast the Knowing, Angharad, Capable, the Dag, and Cheedo the Fragile – conspire to escape with Furiosa and search for the Green Place of Many Mothers (the aforementioned Vuvalini), Furiosa’s matriarchal community from which she was kidnapped by Joe as a child. Before they flee the womb-like vault adorned with sperm and egg imagery where Joe locks his “prize breeders” away, The Wives graffiti the floor and walls with the rallying cries of their rebellion: “OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARLORDS” (Fig. 2), “WE ARE NOT THINGS,” and “WHO KILLED THE WORLD?” (Fig. 3). The question, screamed later by Angharad when she and Capable throw Nux out of the War Rig, is definitively not a rhetorical one, and the answer is abundantly obvious: Immortan Joe, and everything he represents. Immortan Joe embodies capitalist violence and patriarchy, and he controls not only material resources (food, bullets, precious water, and the even more precious, oil) but people, bodies, and humanity itself. Perpetuating myths of his immorality, he calls himself a “redeemer” and tells the masses he oppresses that it is “by [his] hand that [they] will rise

Fig. 3: Who killed the world? Immortan Joe.

from the ashes of this world,” propagating a V8-anddeath-worshipping cult with himself at the centre. Joe and his fellows Major Kalishnikov, The Bullet Farmer, the “judge and executioner,” and The People Eater, the “guardian of Gas Town, reckoner and human calculator” – control the “wasteland…across which thousands trekked, hoping to find shelter and succor...only to become commodities in his economy” (Miller, Nux). Joe rules from high atop the heavily-fortified Citadel – a natural rock formation sitting upon a wealth of clean water – with his congenitally deformed sons, rationing water to the disease-stricken, wretched masses below. He culls the able-bodied men to work his war machine, the sickly young men to be his half-life War Boys, and the fertile women to harvest their breast milk – one of the primary forms of nutrition at the Citadel. He calls the water he controls “Aqua-Cola” and promises his War Boys that if they die fighting for him, they will “ride eternal in Valhalla” where they will “McFeast with the heroes of all time” (Fury Road). Joe’s use of two of the most recognizable brand names of capitalistic global domination, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, is, of course, quite deliberate. The essential resources he controls and around which he invents his sycophantic religion bear names that are synonymous with expansive market capitalism; even after the apocalypse, water and food, when in the hands of men, remain trademarked, controlled, and used to exploit the weak. The Dag sums it up succinctly and bitterly: “Because he owns it, he owns all of us” (Fury MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

Road). Every marker of Immortan Joe’s characterization, from costume to cars, his abusive manipulation of his sons, and his commodification of bodies into property, works to illustrate the poisonous ideologies that are deathly holdovers from the world before the Fall – our world. His monstrosity and villainous stylization – his entire aesthetic – functions to instill the terror of patriarchal capitalism, and the violence and death it produces and perpetuates. The oxygen mask that he is never seen without, until Furiosa rips it off, “pumps filtered air into his body…[and] is fashioned in a way that makes him formidable, persuading all who see him that me he may be the fierce demigod he purports to be” (Bernstein 9). In addition to the grotesque mask, he wears a transparent, molded-plastic body armor to give to the appearance of muscled hardness to his soft, decaying flesh; like his War Boys, he is covered in white powder giving his skin a stark, ghoulish dullness. The most blatant piece of symbolic costuming, Immortan’s huge codpiece, bears the flaming skull logo that he brands on the necks of those he controls and flaunts long, heavy, ornamental chains that hang down between his bowed legs, suggesting an absurdly over-the-top and aggressively obvious phallus that emphasizes his patriarchal power and sexual domination of women (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: The Immortan's codpiece.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Contrast Joe’s adornments with the Vuvalini, who Furiosa and The Wives find after outrunning Joe’s war parties with Max and Nux’s assistance. The Many Mothers have become nomadic, pushed from the Green Place when the water and earth turned sour; they have little in the way of materiel besides the essentials for survival (clothing, weapons, motorcycles); each woman is at least middle-aged, several of them older, with weathered and wizened faces; they are olive-skinned, gray-haired, wear drab, utilitarian clothing, and waste nothing. When one of their own dies or when they speak of the deceased, their gesture of remembrance is one of sincere spirituality, an open hand to the sky or a closing fist brought to the heart – a clear juxtaposition to the War Boys’ V8 salute and cries of witnessing and mediocrity when one of their own sacrifices his half-life for the Immortan. And their most prized possessions are not their weapons or their motorcycles, but the heirloom seeds for which they hope to once again find fertile soil. The Keeper of the Seeds, the oldest of the Vuvalini, shows these to the Dag, who ultimately becomes the next Keeper upon the older woman’s death at the hands of Joe’s soldiers. When the Dag comments on the Keeper’s rifle and asks if she has killed many people with it, she replies with a no-nonsense, “I’ve killed everyone I ever met out

“Who Killed the World?”

here,” leading the Dag to remark that she “thought you girls were somehow above all that” (Fury Road). By way of explanation, the Keeper then shows the younger woman the bag of seeds and one hopeful plant sprouting from a small animal skull, telling her that she tries to plant something everywhere they go, but that the soil is too sour. Their conversation substantiates what has already been made abundantly clear: the violence and oppression perpetuated by Immortan Joe is responsible for the destruction of the world and its continuing demise. She also offers an expression of the film’s feminist, socialist vision when she says, “back then, everyone had their fill, back then, there was no need to snap [kill] anybody” (Fury Road). The lesson is quite clear: humanity’s salvation lies in the radical and equitable redistribution of resources by women. Notably, the Vuvalini are not pacifists, nor is their community single-sex or anti-male. The Vuvalini are wary of men, but they do not hate them, and they do not seek to excise them from their community; rather, they only welcome men like Nux and Max who have rejected traditional masculinity. Nux, the War Boy who begins his arc as the most righteous of believers in Immortan Joe and who ends by sacrificing himself for Furiosa and The Wives, is an essential character by which the film articulates its critique of patriarchal capitalism to an acceptance of matriarchal social structures and a rejection of toxic masculinity. Nux represents the possibility for and necessity of ideological change that men must undergo in order to release themselves from the oppressive violence of patriarchy and find a place in the post-patriarchal world. Fury Road is fundamentally concerned with destroying patriarchy on behalf of women’s empowerment, but the film is also invested in exposing and undoing the social, emotional, and physical violence that patriarchy thrusts upon men that is inherently misogynistic.

The War Boys, and all of the subjects the Immortan controls, are abjected bodies who are exploited in order to maintain his extreme imperialism, wealth accumulation, and sexual domination. Joe’s tyranny, particularly in his exploitation of the War Boys, enacts political theorist Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics. Mbembe argues that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” and that “[t]o exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (11-12). Mbembe complicates Foucault’s notion of biopolitics – “the numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (140) – and argues that under certain conditions, “the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (39-40). Mbembe indicts “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy, but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14, original emphasis). Essentially, necropolitics are more extreme forms of biopower wherein the deployment of force, subjugation, and social control is motivated not by a need to organize subjects for life, but for death. Necropolitics are forms of social control and abjection that go beyond determining who has the right to live and how; rather, a necropolitical sovereignty is one in which “weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathworlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (39-40). In his discussion of those subjects rendered living dead by necropolitics, Mbembe references American chattel slavery, the Holocaust, South African apartheid, and the current occupation of Pales-

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

tine. This form of sovereignty does not organize society for the maintenance of life in order to maintain capitalism, but maximizes the deaths of abjected bodies and peoples for an even more brutal and exploitative mode of capitalist domination. In a dying world in which humankind is reduced to “a single instinct to survive” (Fury Road), the violence Immortan Joe perpetuates is modern necropolitics laid bare, capitalism’s most virulent and violent tendencies exposed as the deathscapes they truly are. The War Boys, marked as “half-life” and plagued with various illnesses resulting from environmental pollution, nuclear fallout, and poor nutrition, are the most obvious iteration of the effects of necropolitical power. Existing somewhere between life and death, Nux and his compatriots live only to die; they devote their painful, sickly, stricken halflives to fighting and killing on behalf of the Immortan. The War Boys are a fascinating site of the intersections of necropolitical power and toxic masculinity, that “constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence” (Lusher and Robins 398). The violence and thirst for death and destruction – their own and that of others – is a direct result of the masculinity that Immortan Joe cultivates. The War Boys compete over who can achieve the most spectacular death of self-sacrifice so they can ride through the gates of Valhalla and “McFeast with the heroes of old” (Fury Road). A War Boy’s death must be witnessed by another who can either validate and acknowledge his sacrifice with the V8 salute, or dismiss it as “mediocre;” and thus, their martyrdom is as much performance as it is an act of devotion or sacrifice. Fundamental to Joe’s control of his army of half-life Boys is this requirement to always perform devotion to the patriarchal despot

and aggressively abide by masculine behaviour protocols. Their nearness to death is emphasized by their ghostly, skeletal aesthetic, and is perpetuated so the Immortan can more readily command acts of suicide. His power over the War Boys reduces them to bodies for the reproduction of the decaying corpse of patriarchal capitalism, just as he does to the women he imprisons as milking mothers, and breeders: nothing but “breeding stock, battle fodder,” “with his logo seared on [their] backs” (Fury Road). Nux begins to break free from the Immortan’s control when he is given a chance to kill the traitorous Imperator and fails yet again. Later, when Capable discovers him hiding in the back of the War Rig, distraught over his failure to sacrifice himself successful for the Immortan: “Three times the gates were opened for me, three times I failed” (Fury Road). She offers him something he has never had before: compassion, kindness, and a recognition of his individuality and worth as a person, suggesting that his “failures” are really his “manifest destiny” for “something else.” This is Nux’s turning point, his realization that his belief in Joe is misplaced and that he and others, including these “prize breeders,” are more than just commodities in his economy, more than half-life. He becomes an ally to Furiosa, Max, and The Wives, helping them pull the War Rig from the muddy quagmire, repairing it, and fighting on their behalf in the final showdown to kill Joe and take the Citadel, eventually driving the War Rig so an injured Furiosa can crawl to Joe’s Gigahorse and kill him.

…the violence Immortan Joe perpetuates is modern necropolitics laid bare…

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

But Joe’s death is not the end of the battle, for his war parties are still in pursuit, and they still must block the canyon pass behind them so they can take the Citadel, and it is in this effort that Nux is finally successful in sacrificing his life – his full life – for a

“Who Killed the World?”

cause actually worth dying for. Nux is not able to jam the throttle and abandon the War Rig as planned; instead, he chooses to intentionally crash the Rig while still driving, knowing the explosion that will block the pass will also kill him. Capable watches as he makes his choice, and in a beautiful moment, Nux reaches a hand towards her and calmly and quietly asks her to witness him – a stark juxtaposition to his previous screaming death cries. And Capable responds in kind: not with the V8 salute meant to honour a tyrant and a false god, but with the spiritual gesture of remembrance made by the Vuvalini to honour a fallen loved one. This juxtaposition between Nux’s failed attempts at false martyrdom and authentic sacrifice, as well as his entire character arc and development, is facilitated primarily by the emotional/romantic connection he forges with Capable; however, the physical connection he shares with Max in the first half of the film can be read as the beginning of Nux’s recovery from toxic masculinity and evolution towards an alternative, recuperative masculinity. Initially, Nux is representative of a toxic masculinity warped and tarnished by capitalist violence, and Max embodies a different masculinity that no longer has a

place in this world: that of the traditional father. As the preceding films and the Fury Road comics elaborate, Max is “road warrior in search of a righteous cause,” adrift in the wasteland after failing to protect his wife and child. Max’s arc through the film focuses on his learning to trust and connect with others again after removing himself so thoroughly from any community as punishment for his failure to live up to his masculine responsibilities. If Nux initially personifies the worst of traditional masculinity gone awry, Max personifies a less poisonous but nonetheless antiquated masculinity that, despite its apparent nobility, is still a damaging effect of patriarchal capitalism. Max is the conventional father and husband, charged with protecting his family and becoming increasingly insane and desperate as he fails, time and again – just as Nux continually fails to live up to Joe’s standards of toxic masculinity. In the film’s opening scenes, Max is captured by a raiding party and dragged back to the Citadel where he is trussed up and readied by The Organic Mechanic to be used in the Immortan’s economy. The Organic is what passes for a doctor in this world, and he regards human bodies the way a mechanic does cars: as objects to be used for male

Fig. 5: Max's organic and mechanic vitals tattooed on his back.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

power and pleasure. He examines Max and tattoos his vital information on his back, sears Immortan Joe’s brand onto his neck, completing Max’s reduction to livestock. According to the tattoo, Max is a “full-life,” meaning that he does not have the illnesses that afflict the War Boys – “No lumps No bumps;” he has “two good eyes,” “no busted limbs;” “multiple scars” but “heals fast,” and, vitally, has “hioctane,” O-negative blood, making him a universal donor (Fig. 5). He also has healthy urine and intact genitals, which not only re-emphasizes Max’s dehumanization by using livestock/veterinary language to describe his fertility and genitalia, but also suggests that full-lives like Max can be used for more than bloodbags. The tattoo also notes where Max was found and that he was without guzzoline or supplies, but with a V8 (in his beloved Interceptor), again emphasizing that his value to the Citadel is purely material; whether that material is mechanic or organic is of little concern. Further, the tattoo is meant to be

Road.” This bondage to each other, the physical intimacy they share via blood exchange, and their mutual complicity in the pursuit of Furiosa eventually leads both men to join her fight. Max and Nux are poles of a patriarchal masculinity that cultivates aggression and domination and punishes failures to live up to these standards; their shared blood is a metaphor for their mutual commodification and their shared rejection of Joe’s regime. While under the control of Joe, Max and Nux lack agency and are powerless, and the reclamation of their bodily autonomy, as they remove themselves from his economy, parallels that of The Wives. Nux’s transition towards the more egalitarian and gender-fluid matriarchal ethos is facilitated via his physical connection with Max and his emotional connection with Capable; Max’s transition, however, develops because of his growing trust of Furiosa, the film’s true protagonist and hero – and the character who represents the most radical challenge to patriar-

Furiosa…represents the most radical challenge to patriarchal gender norms with her embodiment of female masculinity. read while Max is hanging upside down, caged and muzzled, demonstrating yet again how Joe’s capitalist patriarchy subjugates and commodifies the male body as well as the female. When Furiosa’s rebellion is discovered, Nux, anemic and weak, “a War Boy runnin’ on empty” (Fury Road), begins receiving a blood transfusion from the muzzled, hanging, upside down Max. Refusing to sit out the chase once Furiosa’s betrayal is realized, Nux has The Organic hookup his bloodbag to the front of his pursuit vehicle. Max and Nux are chained together, by both metal and blood, and Max becomes an unwilling participant in Joe’s pursuit of Furiosa and Nux’s quest to “die historic on the Fury

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

chal gender norms with her embodiment of female masculinity. Fury Road is already exceptional in its portrayal of a woman warrior who is fighting to save other women as well as herself, particularly in the action film genre and the movie’s own franchise history. Furiosa is not only a fully-realized, complex female character with physical and fighting prowess, but also one who disrupts gender norms by rejecting both traditional femininity and toxic masculinity. Furiosa’s gender performance is an iteration of female masculinity, where women perform traditionally masculine gender behaviour “that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity”

“Who Killed the World?”

(Halberstam 9). Echoing many feminist and queer scholars, J. Jack Halberstam articulates traditional masculinity as a gender performance that “conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege; it often symbolically refers to the power of the state and to uneven distributions of wealth… [M]asculinity represents the power of inheritance, the consequences of the traffic in women, and the promise of social privilege” (11). Furiosa has gained access to this promise of social privilege in Joe’s world by carving a space for herself as one of Joe’s most trusted military commanders, enacting a traditional masculinity with her female body so effectively that her physical sex is no longer the determining factor in her status. She exemplifies the feminist/queer notion that “masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects” (2), and that strategic disruption of these norms allows for more radical, and even utopian possibilities of resistance against hegemonic gender and sex norms.

committed acts of violence on behalf of Immortan Joe in his obsessive quest to “ensure healthy male heirs…strong children to carry on his vision and justify his tyranny” (Miller, Furiosa). Her escape from sexual slavery and her entrance into Joe’s army, a strategic act of survival, is achieved via her performance of “a fully articulated female masculinity [in relation to] a seemingly fortified male masculinity” that “coincides with the excesses of male supremacy” and, and thus “codifies a unique form of social rebellion” (Halberstam 9). Just as Immortan Joe’s costume is designed to represent his toxic masculinity, Furiosa’s appearance functions precisely to convey both her gender transgression and her history of victimization. Her androgyny is such that, when she is first introduced, her physical sex is ambiguous according to normative markers. While not hairless like War Boys, her hair is shorn almost to the scalp, and her forehead is painted with black grease. In a gesture towards feminist cyborg theory, Furiosa also wears a mechanical prosthesis on her left arm, which has been amputated just below the elbow – a part of her body and history that remains unexplained in both the film and the comics. More important than how she lost part of her arm, however, is that the prosthesis – and how she uses it – facilitates a fundamental challenge to hegemonic gender ideologies and the capitalist exploitation they buttress. In her landmark work, A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway articulates a revolutionary model of feminist politics that disrupts the ideological dualisms of gender and the nature/technology divide. Inhered by patriarchal capitalism, and fundamental to its continual perpetuation of exploitative dominance, these binaries strive to deny and prohibit the

Furiosa’s appearance functions precisely to convey both her gender transgression and her history of victimization.

The Furiosa comic explains that she was once one of Joe’s Wives, although it does not shed light onto how she escaped his sexual slavery; it does, however, explain that Furiosa was originally assigned by Joe to watch over and protect The Wives (particularly from his child-like and violent son Rictus), and that it was her sympathy for their plight that led her to rebel once she was given a War Rig (Fury Road). In a conversation with Max in the film, she tells him that she is seeking redemption for what she has a done as Joe’s lieutenant, kidnapping others for his economy, the way she had been taken from the Green Place as a child. Furiosa is at once a victim of patriarchy and complicit in its perpetuation; she has been a trafficked woman and has trafficked other women and

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

revolutionary potential of their undoing. Essential to Furiosa’s role as an anti-capitalist feminist rebel is her embodiment of Haraway’s cyborg theory. Her prosthetic evidences the abuse she has endured at the hands of Immortan Joe, but it also serves as a visual, aesthetic, and political embodiment of her rejection of his domination. The mechanical arm has been created for her by his regime, likely by The Organic Mechanic, the foul man who manages and modifies the bodies of Joe’s captives and War Boys. Under Joe’s regime, the nature/technology divide that defines the cyborg renders Furiosa’s body, the Treadmill Rats, and the Milking Mothers, as mechanically manipulated and commodified to maintain his war economy and sexual slavery. When Furiosa goes rogue and uses her prosthetic as a key tool and weapon to facilitate the revolution – first saving Max as he falls from the Rig during the final chase back to the Citadel, and then viciously killing Joe by ripping off his face – she is turning his mechanical manipulation of her body against him and his regime. Whereas the Immortan’s blurring of the organic/mechanic divide is used to oppress for the benefit of patriarchal exploitation, Furiosa rejects his

mechanical commodification of her body and wields the disruption of the nature/technology dualism to save yet another victim of Joe’s economy in a feminist reclamation of the destruction of this master binary (Fig. 6). Both female and male, organic and mechanical, Furiosa’s power emerges from her deployment of her part-mechanical body in order to transform herself from a commodified mechanical body into a feminist cyborg. Furiosa is a daughter of the Vuvalini, who value nature and female power, who bear deep suspicion towards men, and who look to the land to heal the world; she is also a product of patriarchal capitalism that manipulates the mechanical and the natural in order to maintain necropolitical control. Haraway writes that “the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism…[b]ut illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (293). Furiosa is this illegitimate offspring, rebelling against her inessential “father,” turning his creation of her cyborg body against him and reclaiming the blurring of the distinction between nature and technology for socialist purposes;

Fig. 6: Furiosa's prosthetic arm, her organic/mechanical body that she uses against the patriarchal regime that has rendered her a commodified cyborg.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

“Who Killed the World?”

she integrates this rejection with her disruption of gender binarism, thus facilitating her socialist feminist revolution. Furiosa’s stature and demeanor imbue her with traditionally masculine power; when she is introduced without an immediate recognition of her gender, the camera focuses on Immortan’s brand on the back of her neck, signaling her role as a commodity in this brutal economy. Her clothing is utilitarian and pragmatic, perfectly suited to her work as a warrior; her shirt is made from layers of thin white fabric pieced together. Later, when The Wives are introduced, they are swathed in white linen wrapped in various skin-baring styles, and it becomes quite clear where exactly Furiosa obtained her clothing. This costuming choice explicitly links her to The Wives and their plight, and further emphasizes her history as one of Joe’s sex slaves; it also provides a fascinating juxtaposition to one of the other key pieces of her uniform, the codpiece she wears, which is a smaller replica of the Immortan’s. Like his, Furiosa’s bears the flaming skull logo with long chains that hang between her thighs, a symbol of phallic power that she is both reproducing and challenging by wearing the codpiece on her female body and deploying the masculine power it grants her for a radical, feminist revolt.

read guns as phallic objects and a tool of male violence and power. The female body’s ability to carry and nurture offspring is at the root of misogyny and patriarchy, and patriarchal capitalism is deeply dependent on the control of women’s reproductive capacity. If a gun is the phallus, then a bullet is semen, the anti-seed. Plant one and watch something die: a woman’s bodily autonomy, her independence, her identity, and often, her life. But to argue that Fury Road’s clear condemnation of patriarchal control of women’s bodies makes the film anti-male is not just reductive, but also a misreading of the movie’s narrative and character arcs. Furiosa’s rebellion is assisted in crucial ways by Nux and Max, two men who are recovering from and rejecting the violence of capitalist patriarchy. Both men actively reject the toxic masculinity placed upon them, and they forge alternative models of male masculinity that work in harmonious concert with Furiosa’s female masculinity. This is best demonstrated by the evolution of Max and Furiosa’s relationship, which happens largely via their shared use of guns, another blurring and deconstruction of traditional gender norms. After Max and Nux manage to survive the violence following Furiosa’s initial escape, Max awakens in the wreckage of Nux’s car to find that they are still chained together. Hauling the unconscious War Boy on his shoulders, he approaches the nearby War Rig and finally meets Furiosa and The Wives. Still muzzled, he comes upon them as The Wives are washing themselves and using bolt cutters to remove claw-toothed chastity belts; with just an expression of shock and a grunt of recognition, Max realizes and acknowledges the sexual slavery they are running from. But despite this recognition and apparent sympathy, Max does not immediately trust the women, and Furiosa most certainly does not trust him.

If a gun is the phallus, then a bullet is semen, the anti-seed.

Furiosa wields the male privilege of driving the War Rig, the biggest ship in the Immortan’s armada; but even more significant is her skill with guns. Guns are a, if not the, dominant symbol and weapon of toxic masculinity and patriarchal power that deploys and actualizes the violence of patriarchal capitalism. The Dag and Cheedo, following Angharad’s death, remark that she called bullets “anti-seeds, plant one and watch something die” (Fury Road). Her naming of bullets as “anti-seeds” resonates further when we

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

Max first tries to shoot himself free of Nux with his sawed-off shotgun, but the phallic weapon misfires and fails to liberate him. He then approaches the War Rig, bluffing with the empty shotgun, relying on the weapon’s symbolic power to intimidate them. With some clever distraction from the Dag and Angharad, Furiosa tackles Max and makes quick work of overpowering him. She takes the shotgun from him, puts it under his chin, and pulls the trigger, only to be further enraged when she realizes it is empty. She then goes for a pistol she has hidden on the War Rig, but Max wrestles it from her and manages to press the magazine release, leaving only one round in the chamber; again she puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger, and again Max is able to avoid the bullet. Max and Nux, still chained, work together to reload the pistol – Nux thinking that Max will kill Furiosa, but Max again chooses to use the weapon to intimidate only, this time with warning shots, first at Furiosa to subdue her, and then at Angharad when she tries to return to the Rig, accidentally wounding her leg in the process. Twice Furiosa tries to kill Max using guns – one aspect of the traditionally masculine power she has been able to wield in order to survive Joe’s tyranny – and twice she fails. Significantly, these two moments are the only instances that Furiosa is not devastatingly lethal

with guns. Max may physically embody traditional masculinity, but he abides by an alternative masculinity that prevents him committing the violence that toxic masculinity demands and celebrates. Despite Furiosa’s masterful deployment of masculine power, the symbolic failure of her guns against Max confirms that he is not her enemy; thus traditionally masculine forms of power become useless and unnecessary when gender norms are dismantled. Max embodies a masculinity that she does not need to struggle against, but can, in fact, trust to complement her own rebellious gender embodiment. Once Max steals the War Rig and allows Furiosa and The Wives back on, he joins their flight from the Citadel, but he immediately collects her guns, clearly not trusting her yet. Despite this, Furiosa still asks for his help when they approach the mountain pass and the warrior tribe with whom she has made a deal; she tells Max that she needs his help driving if the deal does not go as planned, and in a sign of extraordinary trust, she tells him the ignition sequence for the War Rig. The deal goes bad, and three of the Immortan’s war parties pursue them. Furiosa returns to the Rig and Max drives them out of the canyon; he also immediately returns her guns, finally

Fig. 7: Max returns Furiosa's guns in recognition of their mutual trust and plight.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

“Who Killed the World?”

Fig. 8: Max acknowledges Furiosa’s superior skill with firearms.

returning the trust she has shown him (Fig. 7). This wordless exchange relies completely on visual narration and mise-en-scène, again using the symbolic power of guns to convey their evolving relationship and recognition of equal power. Now united with Max in the same righteous cause, Furiosa is able to wield the phallic power at which she is so skilled, and she and Max perform an elegant choreography of driving and shooting. These two figures of alternative masculinities, initially untrusting of each other, bridge the gap of suspicion by acknowledging their mutual oppression under patriarchy, and then unite in their shared strategic skills of using patriarchy’s most potent weapons against it. Later, in a radical reversal of traditional gender norms, particularly in the action film genre, Max further acknowledges Furiosa’s skill with firearms/phallic power when the War Rig is bogged down in the mud, and they only have three bullets for their most effective weapon, a long-range rifle. The Bullet Farmer (the anti-seed farmer) is racing towards them with a spray of machine-gun fire, and Max makes two attempts to shoot him but misses twice. With only one bullet left, Furiosa approaches him and silently reaches for the weapon, which he wordlessly hands over. Using his shoulder as a rifle

stand and ordering him not to breathe, Furiosa calmly makes a perfect shot that blinds the Bullet Farmer, giving them the crucial extra minutes they need to winch the War Rig out of the bog (Fig. 8). Max’s recognition of Furiosa’s superior firearm skill is a result of his acceptance of her ability to better wield traditional masculine power than he, some thing that his own alternative masculinity makes possible, just as Nux’s transforming masculinity inspires him to join their cause. These three characters, each subjected to differing levels of violence, abjection, and exploitation under patriarchal capitalism, have developed alternatives to toxic masculinity that embrace a rejection of normative gender performances and hierarchies, which thus allow them to defeat their captor. During the climactic race back to the Citadel, with Joe still in pursuit, Furiosa is near-lethally stabbed in the abdomen while driving, yet she is still able to stop Max from falling to his death by catching him with her cybernetic hand. And later, even closer to death, she asks Nux to drive and fights her way over to the Immortan’s Gigahorse, with Cheedo’s help. After fighting off another Imperator, complete with a swift kick to the groin and a vicious scream of rage, Furiosa is victorious: face bloodied and broken, with

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Taylor Boulware

Fig. 9: Furiosa, using her cybernetic prosthesis, tears off Joe's face with a snarling "Remember me?"

a snarling, “Remember me?” (Fury Road) she grips Joe’s grotesque mask with her mechanical fingers and brutally rips off his face, which also tears off her prosthesis, and she begins to fall to a certain death – but Max, who has been fighting his way towards her since the moment he saw her crawl out of the War Rig – is there to catch her, just as she had caught him moments before. Furiosa’s mechanical arm, a sophisticated piece of technology made by the same mechanics that keep Joe’s armada of war vehicles, is yet another iteration of the film’s aesthetic hybridization between nature and technology, the organic and inorganic, the mechanical and the natural, the traditionally masculine and the traditionally feminine; it further blurs the gender binaries that are fundamental to the film’s utopian promise. It is no surprise then, that this arm, weighted with the symbolism of her female masculinity and the embodiment of her disruption of the patriarchal commodification of organic bodies with the mechanical, is the weapon Furiosa uses to kill the embodiment of capitalist patriarchy. She does not kill the tyrant with her bare hands – she does one better by killing him with the hand he made for her so she could better do his brutal bidding (Fig. 9). Max saves Furiosa from the fall, but she is still

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

at risk of bleeding to death from the stab wound. In Joe’s captured Gigahorse, now driven by one of the Vuvalini as they race to take the defenceless Citadel, Max saves her once again, this time with his universal blood. Equipped with new medical supplies that he stole from The Bullet Farmer, he gives Furiosa a blood transfusion. Previously, Max’s blood was taken from him by force to sustain half-lives destined for violent deaths; now, allied with the Many Mothers and the liberated Wives, he chooses to give his blood willingly to save Furiosa’s life in both a demonstration of their bond and a reclamation of his own bodily agency. As Max transfuses his blood to Furiosa, the cinematography emphasizes the needles penetrating both of their arms, signifying a rescripting of the role of the male body in relation to the female body. The male act of penetrating the female body for reproduction – the crux of Joe’s obsessive quest to maintain patriarchal power – is rewritten as a reclamation of female control over life. Whereas penetration and the male seed has been coded as a bearer of death throughout the film, Max’s symbolic penetration of Furiosa is a life-affirming act of physical intimacy that saves her life. This salvation and recuperative act allows her to finally claim her place as liberator of the oppressed and founder of the utopian socialist matriarchy, thus reaffirming the film’s

“Who Killed the World?”

radical assertion that the socialist revolution must first and foremost be a gender revolution (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10: Founders of the utopian socialist matriarchy.

Works Cited Bernstein, Abbie. The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road. Titan Books, 2015. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books, 1990. Goldstein, Micheline. “Mad Max: Fury Road Wins the Most 2016 Oscars.” The Oscars. 29 Feb. 2016, http://oscar.go.com/news/winners/mad-maxfury-road-wins-the-most-2016-oscars. Accessed 17 July 2017. Halberstam, Judith Jack. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Routledge, 1991.

Cyborgs,

and

Women.

Lusher, Dean., and Gary Robins. “Hegemonic Masculinities in Local Social Contexts.” Men and Masculinities vol. 11, no. 4, 2009, pp. 387- 423. Mad Max. Directed by George Miller, performance by Mel Gibson, MGM Studios, 1979. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Directed by George Miller, performances by Mel Gibson and Tina Turner, Kennedy Miller Productions, 1985.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Directed by George Miller, performance by Mel Gibson, Kennedy Miller Productions, 1981. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture. Translated by Libby Meintjes, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11- 40. Miller, George., et. al. Mad Max: Fury Road: Furiosa. Vertigo. Aug. 2015. ---. Mad Max: Fury Road: Nux & Immortan Joe. Vertigo. Aug. 2015. ---. Mad Max: Fury Road: Max, Part One. Vertigo. Sept. 2015. ---. Mad Max: Fury Road: Max, Part Two. Vertigo. Oct. 2015. “Mise-en-Scène.” College Film & Media Studies: A Reference Guide, collegefilmandmediastudies.com/mise-en-scene-2. Accessed 30 January 2016. !i"ek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010.

Mad Max: Fury Road. Directed by George Miller, performances by Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, and Hugh Keays-Byrne, Warner Brothers, 2015.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration The Viral Image: Transmedia Mise-en-scène in the Fictional Real Chloe Anna Milligan University of Florida Abstract: In network culture, marketing often sets the scene for the media being promoted. This article argues that mise-en-scène begins outside the film through transmedia storytelling. Out in the “fictional real,” viral media marketing's impact hinges upon a “factualization” of fiction, which directly utilizes the technologies of its media culture to extend film’s visual thematic effect through film’s promotion by exploiting actual settings and typically non-fictional media formats. By first examining The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—among the most iconic films noted for its impeccable mise-en-scène—and its marketing, and then the “found footage” horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999), indie thriller Sound of My Voice (2011), the science fictional epic District 9 (2009), and superhero blockbuster The Dark Knight (2008), two separate, yet similar, cultural histories reveal how mise-en-scène can be transmediated. Mise-en-scène, translated literally from French as “placing on stage,” can also suggest “telling a story”; transmedia storytelling becomes transmedia mise-en-scène. But how that story gets told filmically matters both within and outside the film; therefore, the mise-en-scène becomes the establishing (and lasting) image of a film’s diegetic world. Through analysis of the marketing campaigns alongside the films, it becomes evident that transmedia mise-en-scène begins in the fictional real with the viral image. “It’s not quite reality. It’s like a totally filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is” (The Blair Witch Project).

Promoting Fact, Fiction, and Film n network culture, film narratives increasingly begin before the film’s release, through media marketing. Network culture, as we conceive it today, describes the way we perceive society as interconnected through new media and computer technology, and film gets subsumed into and distributed across those connections. Even long before the concept of a media virus could spread across any semblance of networks, one famous media promotion already “went viral” to start its story. Now almost a century old, Robert Wiene’s 1920 expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is an essential film example of mise-en-scène staged exceptionally well.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Yet its aesthetic was actually already established outside the film by boasting a rather contemporary marketing strategy that, read in the context of our current culture’s spreading fascination with viral media, should be considered a progenitor to recent, more popularly regarded examples of transmedia storytelling. Without explanation of any product tie-in, various posters and print ads exhorted, “You must become Caligari”; they did not suggest any fiction to passersby, only the uncanny contemplation of whatever this strange message could mean. That real unease was both relieved and heightened by the film to come, as consumers realized their factual feelings were complicated by fictional entertainment. It was the marketing campaign, therefore, that implicated the film’s mise-en-scène in the “fictional real,”1 as it exploited actual settings and typically non-fictional

The Viral Image

media formats. If this transmedia trope seems familiar, it should be; since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Internet, as an extension of these settings, has become the playground for similarly inspired projects promoting films through a blurring of the real and mediated. This article argues that the impact of viral media marketing hinges upon a “factualization” of fiction, which directly utilizes the technologies of its media culture to extend a film’s visual thematic effect through a film’s promotion. By engaging first with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)— among the most iconic films noted for its impeccable mise-en-scène—and its marketing, and then the “found footage” horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999), indie thriller Sound of My Voice (2011), the science fictional epic District 9 (2009), and superhero blockbuster The Dark Knight (2008),2 this article connects two separate, yet similar, cultural histories that reveal how mise-en-scène can be transmediated. Therefore, when analyzing marketing campaigns alongside their films, we see that transmedia mise-en-scène starts here in the fictional real.

Michael Cowan calls “the mobile spectator” (473). Mise-en-scène is mobile now, not just in the streets, but across the information highways of the Web, spreading virally, according to media expert Henry Jenkins. Its diffusion reinserts “the photographic image” (14) back into the conditions of time and space from which André Bazin claimed film was free. Yet this time and space is both temporally and spatially real and fictionally unreal, making it the viral noplace made of place: the fictional real. The fictional real turns Bazin’s depth of field into a literal condition near and far. Transmedia mise-en-scène in the fictional real then begins with the viral image, registering within the moviegoer outside the movie.

Mise-en-scène is mobile now, not just in the streets, but across the information highways of the Web.

Mise-en-scène is widely regarded as “cinema’s grand undefined term” (Henderson 6), so a working definition for this article’s argument is in order. Mise-en-scène’s literal French meaning “placing on stage” can be read as “telling a story,” in order to refer to transmedia storytelling as transmedia miseen-scène. But how that story gets told filmically matters both within and outside the film; this article regards mise-en-scène as the establishing (and lasting) image of a film’s diegetic world. Film storytelling in network culture, nuanced in this article from Brian Henderson’s “long take” theory of mise-en-scène, must establish its long take outside the theater in short time to capture the attention of what scholar

Convergence Cabinet The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s marketing strategy demonstrated that convergence culture was already in its early form in Weimar Germany. Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture defines its titular model as a place “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (2). Convergence, according to Jenkins, necessitates what he calls a participatory culture, which he believes “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship” (3). Describing how participatory culture narratively engages media, he explains that “transmedia storytelling refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence—one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities” (20-21), as stories can begin in their own marketing and spread virally. While he clearly has interactive media in mind for his definitions, Caligari’s

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Chloe Anna Milligan

The Viral Image

mediaposters formats. may If this worktransmedia as prototypes tropeifseems we contest famil- Jeniar, itkins’s should estimation be; sinceofthe“older turn of notions” the twenty-first and entertain century, the film’s the Internet, covert advertisements as an extensionasofanthese earlysetkind of tings,consumer has become participation. the playground The posters for similarly mean to inhypnospiredtize projects viewers promoting into “becoming films through Caligari”; a blurring therefore, of theviewers real and “passively” mediated. accept This article their argues participation that thein the impact transmedia of viral media mise-en-scène marketingfrom hinges print upon image a “facto film. tualization” of fiction, which directly utilizes the The film is clearly a product of its time, released technologies of its media culture to extend a film’s into a culture reeling from shell shock and fascinated visual thematic effect through a film’s promotion. By by hypnosis. The First World War had just ended in engaging first with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)— Germany’s humiliation, and Caligari premiered less among the most iconic films noted for its impeccathan two years later. Its plot draws much of its horble mise-en-scène—and its marketing, and then the ror from the then-cultural vogue of pseudo-scientific “found footage” horror film The Blair exhibits of hypnosis. In Shell Shock Cinema, Anton Witch Project (1999), indie thriller Kaes insists that these facets are inextricably linked, Sound of My Voice (2011), the science for hypnosis was a popular method used to treat fictional epic District 9 (2009), and sushell shock victims. Caligari works at the nexus of perhero blockbuster The Dark Knight both, and speaks to its viewing audience on dual (2008),2 this article connects two separate, yet similar, cultural histories that reveal how mise-en-scène can be transmediated. Therefore, when analyzing marketing campaigns alongside their films, we see that transmedia mise-en-scène starts here in the fictional real.

Michael Cowan “the mobileKaes spectator” (473). fronts. Mostcalls compellingly, suggests, “Stage Mise-en-scène mobile now, not just in thehypnosis streets, exshows andisillustrated lectures featuring but across information of the Web, isted inthe a twilight zone highways between scholarly-scientific spreading virally, according to media expert(59). Henry pursuit and downright charlatanism” As the Jenkins. diffusion reinsertsas“the photographic imfilmIts depicts Dr. Caligari both a sideshow charlatan age” and (14) back into thepsychiatrist, conditions ofitstime space the a respected plotand inhabits fromblurred which André Bazinof claimed filmfact, was as free. Yet acdimensions fake and visually this time andthrough space isitsboth temporally and spatially cented German Expressionist mise-enreal and fictionally unreal,real making the viral scène. The fictional settingit within thenofilm is placemarked made ofbyplace: the fictional real. The impossible architecture (e.g.,fictional twisted, anreal turns depth of field into a literal condi- and gled, Bazin’s and bizarrely-proportioned buildings tion props) near and far. Transmedia mise-en-scène in the or that favours symbolism over functionality fictional real then begins the viral regisverisimilitude, whichwith indicates thatimage, its story of fake within the distinct moviegoer and fact istering simultaneously fromoutside reality yet theofmovie. reminiscent it.

Mise-en-scène is widely regarded as “cinema’s grand undefined term” (Henderson 6), so a working definition for this article’s argument is in order. Mise-en-scène’s literal French meaning “placing on stage” can be read as “telling a story,” in order to refer to transmedia storytelling as transmedia miseen-scène. But how that story gets told filmically matters both within and outside the film; this article regards mise-en-scène as the establishing (and lasting) image of a film’s diegetic world. Film storytelling in network culture, nuanced in this article from Brian Henderson’s take” of mise-en-scène, Fig. 1:“long German Worldtheory War I propaganda poster, reading: “Your Fatherland in Danger, Register!” must establish its long istake outside the theater in short time to capture the attention of what scholar

media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (2). Convergence, according to Jenkins, necessitates what he calls a participatory culture, which he believes “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship” (3). Describing how participatory culture narratively engages media, he explains that “transmedia storytelling refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence—one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities” (20-21), as stories can begin in their own mar2: Promotional poster for Thehe Cabinet Dr. CaketingFig. and spread virally. While clearlyof has interligari subverting wartime propaganda’s conscriptive activelanguage, media in mind for definitions, Caligari’s demanding “Duhis Musst Caligari Werden!”

Mise-en-scène Convergence The blurring of the real and fictional already beCabinet is mobilegan that visualThe theme when Caligarimarposters Cabinet of Dr.the Caligari’s now, not just in keting strategy demonstrated that culture was already in its the streets, but convergence early form in Weimar Germany. Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture across the its titular model as a place information defines “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate mehighways of dia intersect, where the power of the the Web. media producer and the power of the

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

(“You must become Caligari!”).

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Viral Image

started appearing around Berlin. The posters similarly work on what Kaes identifies as dual fronts of postwar trauma and hypnotic fascination (68). Actual propaganda ads leading up to and during the Great War itself were similarly posted around the city and carried with them conscripting language featuring rhetoric like “You must [do your part/support the troops/buy war bonds/etc.]” (Fig. 1).3 The Caligari posters, unveiled while the war memory was still fresh, functioned as the film’s “propaganda”4 by subverting the language and using the emotionally evocative colour schemes (passionate palates like red and black, for example) of war propaganda in a way that reminded consumers of recent war rhetoric and simultaneously offered a way out of their disillusioned identities. “You must become Caligari!” (Fig. 2). Kaes says, “The exhortation to become someone else resonated in the postwar years, when many Germans found themselves in a state of denial and disavowal about their identity” (68). Calling the cinema “the cabinet of the movie theater” (68), he continues that viewers could then split their identity by becoming Caligari through seeing Caligari. The posters, drawing upon the dimensions of not just propaganda, but advertising, function then as the circus flyers for Caligari’s stage show within the film, thus including moviegoers in its mise-en-scène outside the film. This effect draws upon the posters’ other dimension—its hypnotic aesthetic, described by Kaes as “a spiral that suggested hypnotic power” (67). Academic Stefan Andriopoulos similarly calls it “a hypnotic, vertical spiral” (13), but he more explicitly links the posters’ mesmerizing power to their enigmatic role as promotion. In his argument, the posters’ worded message equally hypnotizes and advertises: “The almost coercive imperative ‘You must’ foregrounded and simultaneously enacted the ‘suggestive’ or ‘hypnotic’ power of advertising, which was still a fairly new mode of shaping social behavior” (13). The posters then, as the film’s establishing image of the fictional real, feature advertising framed

as hypnosis just as much as they do hypnosis framed as advertising. By working along the tensions of hypnosis and advertising, the posters were not entirely inexplicable. In fact, Cowan surmises that Berliners would have likely recognized them as advertising something, even if it isn’t clear what. This hazy association rests upon the Caligari posters’ appropriation of an already established product brand, Manoli cigarettes (Fig. 3). Cowan argues that [the poster] harkens back to the first electric light advertisement of Berlin, a display for Manoli cigarettes erected in 1898 on the roof of a building on Alexanderplatz, on which a circle of lights appeared to spin furiously before giving way to the blinking command… ‘Smoke Manoli!’… Significantly, the famous ‘Manoli wheel’ gave rise to a well-known Berlin expression ‘Du bist manoli’ meaning ‘You must be crazy’. At least one of the initial Caligari advertisements from 1919 appeared to imitate the Manoli advertisement by showing the phrase ‘Du musst Caligari werden’ in a simulated circular movement, and it would be no surprise if the film’s first viewers also made the connection. (465) This allusion to something as innocuous as a cigarette brand works on two levels. First, by relaying a different, more enigmatically sinister message through a recognizable product slogan, the Caligari

Fig. 3: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari poster echoing the famous “Manoli wheel” advertisement.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Chloe Anna Milligan

The Viral Image

started poster appearing can be around suggested Berlin. as anThe earlyposters form ofsimisublimilarly nal workmessaging, on what Kaes truly identifies advertising’s as dual covert fronts complicaof postwar tion trauma of hypnosis’s and hypnotic overt suggestion. fascinationSecond, (68). AcCowan tual propaganda argues that the adsimages leading needed up totoand be simple, during yet theevocGreatative, Wartoitself capture werethe similarly “fleeting posted glance” around (473)the of the city and busycarried city-goer. with After them conscripting the end of the language Great War, fea- city turingliferhetoric was speeding like “You up and must consumers [do your were part/supmore in a 3 port hurry the troops/buy than ever war before. bonds/etc.]” Advertising (Fig. had1).to The keep up. Cowan states, “Suchwhile a transformation in the Caligari posters, unveiled the war memory wasvisual 4 culture of advertising a new functioned as theimplied film’s “propaganda” still fresh, by concept of language spectatorship, for thethe parsubverting the and using emotionally adigmatic now underevocative colourspectator schemeswas (passionate palates like red stood for above all asofmobile spectator in a way and black, example) war propaganda and advertising agencies soughtwar to atthat reminded consumers of recent rhetoric and tract such mobile the of nodal simultaneously offered gazes a wayat out their disillupoints of circulating sioned identities. “You musttraffic” become(473). Caligari!” (Fig. He elaborates advertising, there- someone 2). Kaes says, “The that exhortation to become fore, “sought ‘direct’ the traffic else resonated in thetopostwar years, whenofmany Gerattention” mansconsumer found themselves in (474). a state Unpackof denial and disahis traffic metaphors, Cowan ex-the cinema vowalingabout their identity” (68). Calling suchmovie descriptions stop“the plains: cabinet“If of the theater”of (68), he continues ping thecould eye then and steering move-by becomthat viewers split theiritsidentity ments seem to echo the Caligari. languageThe of posters, ing Caligari through seeing traffic regulation, this is hardly a co-just propadrawing upon the dimensions of not incidence: advertising layouts ganda, but advertising, function thenwere as the circus understood traffic signals, flyersindeed for Caligari’s stage as show within the film, thus regulating the trajectories of visual at- outside including moviegoers in its mise-en-scène tention in effect motion” (475). Thethe Caligari the film. This draws upon posters’ other posters thenhypnotic had to elicit some kind dimension—its aesthetic, described by legibility” (474) to get their power” Kaesofas“rapid “a spiral that suggested hypnotic mise-en-scène into the minds (67). mobile Academic Stefan Andriopoulos similarly calls it of passersby. Cowan’s “a hypnotic, vertical spiral” (13),point but heimmore explicportantly distinguishes for this argu-to their enitly links the posters’ mesmerizing power were notthe literally ment the CaligariIn posters igmatic rolethat as promotion. his argument, post- hypnotizingmessage viewers,equally only engaging a hypnotic aesthetic ers’ worded hypnotizes and adverremain memorable a visually ‘You overloaded tises:to“The almost coerciveinimperative must’ culture.5 For and foregrounded simultaneouslytoenacted this mise-en-scène registerthe with‘sugthe mogestive’ ‘hypnotic’ of advertising, bileorspectator, thepower invitation to “becomewhich Caligari” was still a fairly newbrief mode shaping social behavneeded to be butofpowerful to succeed—and ior” (13). Theitposters as the establishing succeed did, forthen, the film wasfilm’s substantially successimage of the fictional real, feature advertising framed

as hypnosis just as much as they hypnosis framed ful, remaining in theaters fordoweeks and even returnas advertising. ing a couple of weeks later (Robinson 46). In a proto-participatory culture of a different time, audiBy working along the tensions of hypnosis and ences participated in the viral marketing of Caligari advertising, the posters were not entirely inexplicaby entertaining its fictional real of being “hypnoble. In fact, Cowan surmises that Berliners would tized” by it, thus handing over their wallets for ticket have likely recognized them as advertising something, after ticket, entering and reentering its staging which even if it isn’t clear what. This hazy association rests began outside the theater. Consumers were savvy upon the Caligari posters’ appropriation of an alenough to know they were not actually becoming ready established product brand, Manoli cigarettes Caligari, but accepting the posters’ in(Fig. 3). Cowan argues that vitation to do so made them feel in [the poster] harkens the firsttheelectric on the back trend,tomeaning marketing light advertisement of Berlin, a display for Macampaign at least hypnotized them to noli cigarettes erected in 1898 on the roof of a “buy Caligari.”on Potential building on Alexanderplatz, which amoviegoers circle of lights appeared to spin before traffic giv- of caught up infuriously the advertising ing way to therapidly-moving blinking command… ‘Smoke Berlin were then diManoli!’… Significantly, the famous ‘Manoli rected through the haunting gaze of wheel’ gave rise to a well-known Berlin expresthose posters toward sion ‘Du bist manoli’ meaning ‘You The mustCabinet be of crazy’. At least Dr. oneCaligari. of the initial Caligari advertisements from 1919 appeared to imitate the Almost eighty years later and Manoli advertisement by showing the phrase ‘Du musst Caligari in a simulated acrosswerden’ the Atlantic, the trafficcirof viral cular movement, and it would be no surprise marketing circulated in a more ifmedithe film’s first viewers also made the connecated avenue. To echo Cowan, if “the tion. (465) language of traffic regulation” (475) This allusion to something as innocuous as a cigasounds similar, it should, for it is still rette brand works on two levels. First, by relaying a how the flow of Internet navigation different, more enigmatically sinister message is explained today. At the turn of the through a recognizable product slogan, the Caligari twenty-first century, circa 1999, the modern viral movie marketing campaign would kick off with The Blair Witch Project and a new kind of traffic had to be detected. Internet traffic now directed consumers toward a mise-en-scène that straddled both physical space and cyberspace. In Spreadable Media, Henry Jenkins, et al. establish their concept of “spreadability” versus “stickiness” to highlight how media texts signal such traffic to draw attention and merit sharing that gets substantial attention. Beginning their book by bluntly stating, “if Fig. 3: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari poster echoing the famous it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” (1), they describe how “Manoli wheel” advertisement. content has to be circulated to remain relevant in the

For this miseen-scène to register with the mobile spectator, the invitation to “become Caligari” needed to be brief but powerful to succeed—and succeed it did.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Viral Image

rapid information culture. In their estimation, “stickiness” is the creation of content which enlists deep audience engagement and attention at centralized locations—such as websites designed for specific purposes and communities (like those to be discussed)—while “spreadability” encompasses the practices of sharing content—memes, videos, even ideas—across media platforms that can then be accessed in multiple ways. Though they do not put the terms directly at odds, they do suggest their mode of “spreadability” as “a corrective to the ways in which the concept of ‘stickiness’ has developed over time to measure success in online commerce” (4). Despite their decision to put these terms at odds, both still contribute to the phenomenon of viral marketing in compelling ways, as they describe the ways in which web “traffic” gets routed toward media content even when new shortcuts are constantly created. They furthermore suggest that mise-en-scène in the fictional real can stick visually as it spreads virally. The Internet can evoke many mixed metaphors though, so the direction of traffic toward virality merits explanation. Intent on updating popular terminology, Jenkins, et al. move away from this commercially popular notion, exclaiming, “We’ve found a cure for viral media!” (16). They argue, “the viral metaphor does little to describe situations in which people actively assess a media text, deciding who to share it with and how to pass it along,” highlighting the irony, in their words, that “this rhetoric of passive audiences becoming infected by a media virus gained widespread traction at the same time as a shift toward greater acknowledgment that audience members are active participants in making meaning within networked media” (20). Wanting to move away from the negative connotations of the metaphor, the authors offer “spreadability” as its replacement (20). Nevertheless, virality and all its complications still best describe our interactions with transmedia storytelling. Jenkins, et al. build their point around the safely assumed rhetoric that no one

wants to get “infected,” but active audiences actually undo their claim and choose infection by their media. This phenomenon is not passive; consumers know what they are doing when they spread the sickness. Just like the media-savvy Berliners pretended hypnosis with the Caligari posters, consumers furthermore know that to “spread the sickness” is to play a figurative game in order to be in on the trend. They willfully, therefore, enter this metaphorical setting and participate in an aesthetic of infection. For example, in the case of Caligari, audiences play the hypnotic impetus to “become Caligari,” not just seeing the film, but taking on a new mediated identity through spectatorship. For the contemporary films to be discussed, the Internet’s role as the “site of infection” in the factualization-of-fiction model makes viral media marketing’s major symptom, “reality fever.”6 Reality fever describes the network’s influence upon consumer desire for a more playful blur of the fictional real. As fact and fiction are scrambled through contexts of transmedia mise-en-scène, what starts in the network extends outward to its users, and the media virus infects both consumer and technology. The Fictional Real from Physical to Cyberspace Infected consumers and technology meet in Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s 1999 “found footage” horror film The Blair Witch Project. The film tells the story of three amateur documentarians investigating the Blair Witch legend in the small town of Burkittsville, Maryland, only to never be found again once they take their filming into the woods. As seen through the promotion leading up to and content of the film, the factualization of fiction via establishing transmedia mise-en-scène reaches new levels thanks to network culture. To explain network culture, Steven Shaviro begins his book, Connected with “Today, we are inclined to see nearly everything in terms of connections and networks. The network is the computer, we like to say. We think that intelligence is a distributed, networked phenomenon” (3). MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Chloe Anna Milligan

rapidShaviro information claims culture. that we In their “see…everything,” estimation, “stickas netiness”work is the culture creation reinforces of content that film’s whichmise-en-scène enlists deep beaudience gins engagement in the fictional andreal. attention Helping at centralized us “see” through locations—such that, scholar as Chuck websites Tryon designed argues forthat specific The Blair pur-Witch posesProject, and and communities horror films (likelike those it, diagnose to be diswhat is cussed)—while wrong with that “spreadability” network: encompasses the practices of sharing content—memes, videos, even These films seem to imply that electronic ideas—acrossmedia mediawill platforms can then social be ac- relalead tothat fragmented tionships illusion of aucessed in multiple ways. because Though of theytheir do not put the further thenticity and their potential to terms directly at odds, they do suggest their mode of isolate people from a larger community. More“spreadability” as “a corrective to the ways in which over, the films seem to imply, because of the concept of ‘stickiness’ over time their emphasishas ondeveloped perceived threats to docto measure success in online commerce” umentary authenticity, that(4). TV,Despite video, and undermine grounds their decisionthe to Internet put thesewill terms at odds,our both still for interpretation and knowledge. (40) contribute to the phenomenon of viral marketing in compelling as they describe the ways intechnologies which Using ways, contemporary communication web “traffic” gets toward mediafound content even horas critique of routed those technologies, footage whenrornew shortcuts are“interpretation constantly created. They films imply that and knowledge” furthermore suggest mise-en-scène in the fic-Project (40) are at risk ofthat reality fever. The Blair Witch tionalstands real can stick visually as it spreads virally. out as the turn-of-the-new-century archetype to play with the the fictional real. It The Internet can boundaries evoke manyof mixed metaphors usessoitsthe contemporary make this though, direction of technologies traffic towardtovirality move; the film’sIntent opening “correlates video merits explanation. on shot updating popular ter- with subjective vision objective, imperminology, Jenkins, et al.rather movethan awaythe from this comsonalpopular shots associated with a standard film” (Tryon mercially notion, exclaiming, “We’ve found 43). The film’s mise-en-scène is tied directly into a cure for viral media!” (16). They argue, “the viral its filming technology, as it suggests that in thewhich handheld metaphor does little to describe situations the film video camera is more “real” assess a media text,than deciding whocamera. to people actively Yet this media commentary is nothing that has share it with and how to pass it along,” highlighting not been done already. 1719, Daniel Defoe the irony, in their words,Inthat “this rhetoric ofpublished pasRobinson Crusoe with ainfected written by disclaimer everysive audiences becoming a mediathat virus thing described in itsatpages actually gained widespread traction the same time happened—a as a shift necessary move in a culture still distrustful of the toward greater acknowledgment that audience memand long-form fiction 32).meaning The “fear of bers novel are active participants in (Rose making within networked media” (20). Wanting to move away from the negative connotations of the metaphor, the authors offer “spreadability” as its replacement (20). Nevertheless, virality and all its complications still best describe our interactions with transmedia storytelling. Jenkins, et al. build their point around the safely assumed rhetoric that no one

The Viral Image

wantsfiction” to get (31) “infected,” butcontrasts active audiences actually in the past our current culture, undowhich their claim and choose infection by theirand media. is absolutely replete with fiction, exhibits This instead phenomenon is reality not passive; know signs of fever consumers through a fascination whatwith theythe arereal, doing when spread even the they fictional real.the sickness. Just like the media-savvy Berliners pretended hypnoThe fictional real is implicated in both The Blair sis with the Caligari posters, consumers furthermore Witch Project’s marketing and release through transknow that to “spread the sickness” is to play a figmedia mise-en-scène. Following the bloody footurative game in order to be in on the trend. They steps of the proto-found-footage horror film, Rugwillfully, therefore, enter this metaphorical setting gero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Myrick and participate in an aesthetic of infection. For exand Sanchez created a film that really began through ample, in the case of Caligari, audiences play the hypnotorious reputation before the release of the actual notic impetus to “become Caligari,” not just seeing 7 film. Deodato restricted his actors from appearing the film, but taking on a new mediated identity in any other projects for one year after filming of his through spectatorship. For the contemporary films project wrapped, so their absence would intensify to be discussed, the Internet’s role as the “site of inword-of-mouth surrounding the controversial film. fection” in the factualization-of-fiction model makes That tactic proved too effective once Deodato had viral media marketing’s major symptom, “reality feto produce the actors in court to be acquitted of acver.”6 Reality fever describes the network’s influence tually murdering them (“In the Jungle”). Myrick and upon consumer desire for a more playful blur of the Sanchez attempted a different approach, both far fictional real. As fact and fiction are scrambled less extreme and even more haunting. Cannibal Holothrough contexts of transmedia mise-en-scène, what caust, advertised conventionally by contrast, incites starts in the network extends outward to its users, only immediate reaction; The Blair Witch Project took and the media virus infects both consumer and techits time in unveiling a thorough transmedia narrative. nology. Before the film was on anyone’s radar, its staging was The set Fictional Real from Physicalappeared to Cyberspace when www.blairwitch.com on the Web. Infected consumers and technology meet Told through text, photographs, videos, andinaudio Daniel Myrick and Sanchez’s 1999 “found recordings, theEduardo website features a history of the Blair footage” horror film The Blair Project. The film Witch legend, profiles for Witch the “missing” filmmakers, tells the story of three amateurthedocumentarians in- disan explanation reporting aftermath of their vestigating the Blair in the townjourappearance, andWitch even alegend facsimile of small Heather’s of Burkittsville, onlyembodies to neverRose’s be found nal (Fig. 4).Maryland, The website descripagaintion onceofthey take their filming into the woods. the Internet as “the first medium thatAs can act seen like through the promotion leading up to and conall media—it can be text, or audio, or video, or tent of the film,above” the factualization fiction viadistribute esall of the (2). It can,oftherefore, tablishing transmedia mise-en-scène reaches new levels thanks to network culture. To explain network culture, Steven Shaviro begins his book, Connected with “Today, we are inclined to see nearly everything in terms of connections and networks. The network is the computer, we like to say. We think that intelligence is a distributed, networked phenomenon” (3).

…our current culture…is absolutely replete with fiction, and exhibits instead signs of reality fever through a fascination with the real, even the fictional real.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Viral Image

Fig. 4: “The Legacy” section of The Blair Witch Project’ website, presenting material left behind from the found footage as realistic documentation, committing fully to the factualization of fiction.

mise-en-scène across all these media. But the film’s transmedia promotion even extended onto television through a documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel, The Curse of the Blair Witch (Tryon 42). The Blair Witch, completely fabricated by the filmmakers, appeared as factual now as any other grisly small town true story.8 To continue the effect, Myrick and Sanchez wisely did not abandon these elements of the narrative as window dressing for the film. Details from the website are recalled in the film’s narrative, and as the film’s amateur documentarians conduct interviews around Burkittsville, Tryon describes, “In one interview, a mother holding her small child incorrectly remembers hearing about the Blair Witch on the Discovery Channel, rather than the Sci-Fi Channel, thus casting doubt on her reliability as an authority but also reminding knowledgeable viewers about the transmedia elements of the Blair Witch narrative” (43). The film’s factualization of fiction renders elements of its story into non-filmic contexts and then loops the non-filmic back through the film again. Its mise-en-scène began outside the film, but

it makes that outside compellingly a part of the film’s image within as well. In a different viral strategy, video precedes film in Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice. Batmanglij’s 2011 indie thriller, co-written with its star Brit Marling, advanced a recently successful viral video campaign, especially for a low budget indie film. Batmanglij’s film perfectly utilizes the Web as its delivery platform for its transmedia mise-en-scène, truly the place for inexplicable viral videos that generate conversation. Rather than implicate the film’s technical composition with the “did this actually happen?” gimmick à la The Blair Witch Project, this film takes up belief as a more thematic concern, and its viral marketing component sets that up eerily. Sound of My Voice tells the story of Peter and Lorna, two journalists bent on exposing a popular cult leader as a fraud. To do so, they infiltrate the cult, after which a wedge is driven between the two, as Peter starts to reservedly believe in the cult leader too. Before the film was released, two videos began circulating from YouTube and then around the Web: one an invita-

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Chloe Anna Milligan

Fig. 5: Richard Warton (left), pictured here with Christopher Denham in the film, was first seen in Sound of My Voice’s initial viral video.

The Viral Image

Fig. 6: Actors from Sound of My Voice stand outside Los Angeles’s Ukrainian Culture Center welcoming people into the film’s fictional cult initiation class.

an alternate Johannesburg, South Africa in which altion to join the cult from the film, and the other foliens left landed back have rounded a woman places the ’ website, cult leader Fig. 4:lowing “The Legacy” sectionwho of Thevisits presenting material behind fromin the1982 foundand footage as been realistic docu- up Blair Witch Project mentation, committing fully to the factualization of fiction. by the government and ghettoized in the titular DisMaggie has been (Fig. 5). Both oscillate between bitrictthat 9. The film’s narrative blurs fact fiction by zarre and unsettling, especially theBut first, outside compellingly a part of and the film’s mise-en-scène across all these media. thewhich film’smen- it makes the actual District 6, where black South tions a promotion specific meeting and time the cult’s imagereferencing within as well. transmedia even place extended ontoforteleviAfricans were segregated during apartheid. Before In a move the Web back into sion initiation through aclass. documentary onfrom the Sci-Fi Channel, In a different viral strategy, video precedes film the story’s unveiling, however, its viral marketing the world, from the film 42). actually The Curse of the actors Blair Witch (Tryon The held Blairthese in Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice. Batmanglij’s strategy outside the film obscured fact and fiction on meetings at thefabricated UkrainianbyCulture Center in Los Witch, completely the filmmakers, ap- An2011 indie thriller, co-written with its star Brit Mara more literal location-based level. Just like The Cabisparsely attended, geles (Fig. 6).now Theasmeetings peared as factual any otherwere grisly small town ling, advanced a recently successful viral video camnet of Dr. Caligari did nearly ninety years earlier, Neill journalists occasional true mostly story.8 by Tofilm continue the and effect, Myrick viral and marpaign, especially for a low budget indie film. BatBlomkamp’s 2009 science fiction film placed enigketing devotees, butabandon the absolute of the Sanchez wisely did not these dedication elements of manglij’s film perfectly utilizes the Web as its delivmatic signs and posters at major points of pedestrian actors toasthe rhythms and conversations of their ficthe narrative window dressing for the film. Details ery platform for its transmedia mise-en-scène, truly and mobile traffic in major cities to generate interest cult actually made in thethe lack of turnout part of fromtional the website are recalled film’s narrative, the place for inexplicable viral videos that generate among consumers looking forward to the project thethe fictional here: documentarians those that attended were choand as film’s real amateur conduct conversation. Rather than implicate the film’s techthat will explain the ads. These posters depicted alsen messengers, special and distinct from the interviews around Burkittsville, Tryon describes, “In nical composition with the “did this actually hapien-shaped silhouettes crossed out above stark warnmasses, imbued withholding the responsibility to spread one interview, a mother her small child in- the pen?” gimmick à la The Blair Witch Project, this film ings that read “FOR HUMANS ONLY / NONword.remembers And just as viral media do, word correctly hearing about isthewont BlairtoWitch takes up belief as a more thematic concern, and its HUMANS BANNED!” at locations such as bus didDiscovery spread across the web, tangling the Sci-Fi physically on the Channel, rather than the viral marketing component sets that up eerily. Sound stops and restrooms. These posters extended the performative in with informative. Channel, thus casting doubtthe on networked her reliability as an of My Voice tells the story of Peter and Lorna, two physical congregation of pedestrian traffic into userThe but depth field defining mise-en-scène gets exauthority alsoofreminding knowledgeable viewers journalists bent on exposing a popular cult leader as generated Web traffic though by advertising a webhere into the fictionalofreal theWitch physically theand Blair abouttended the transmedia elements a fraud. To do so, they infiltrate the cult, after which site, D-9.com (Fig. 7). This additional innovation is reachable an extension and combination of diginarrative” (43).asThe film’s factualization of fiction a wedge is driven between the two, as Peter starts to a feature of our network culture, being directed from tally distributed storytelling. renders elements of its story into non-filmic contexts reservedly believe in the cult leader too. Before the one place to a new place that is technically no-place: and then loops the non-filmic film sign Similarly, District 9’s back “Forthrough Humansthe Only” film was released, two videos began circulating from the story gets entangled in the Web, and mise-enagain.campaign Its mise-en-scène beganhow outside film, butcamdemonstrates viralthe marketing YouTube and then around the Web: one an invitascène sets a cyber stage. As media become more impaigns utilize actual spaces to construct transmedia mersive than ever, the events of Blomkamp’s film mise-en-scène. Set in 2010, the film tells the story of 30

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Viral Image

start to seem as reasonable as the technologically innovative ways we tell stories across not just across

Fig. 7: District 9’s “FOR HUMANS ONLY” poster including a link to the film’s fictionalized website.

format, but across the network. Shaviro quips in response, “You may say that all this is merely science fiction. None of it is happening: not now, not here, not yet” (250), suggesting that our media culture’s present feels like a science fictional future. Living in network culture then constantly involves a blurring of fiction into the real. The transmedia mise-enscène is established: it is here that the fictional real thrives.

Fig. 8: The famous “Du musst Caligari werden!” scene inserted the film’s cryptic promotional line literally into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s setting.

What The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari presciently started, District 9 and D-9.com continue. Though now just a homepage for the film, the promotional website initially linked to the page for Multinational United, the private military company depicted in the film, with whom main character Wikus van de Merwe works.9 This website, full of information on the world of the film through documents and videos, committed fully to the factualization of fiction. Its fictional real continued the segregation enforced at sign locations by offering two navigation paths, one for Humans and one for Non-Humans. The NonHuman interface offered the option to have text read aloud for help assimilating into human culture. The website also featured nods to the film’s plot as well, for typing certain character names into its search bar results in a ban from the website for violating particular “MNU regulations.” Just as “You Must Become Caligari” first featured in the film’s ads before it “penetrate[d] the image” (Kaes 70) and was incorporated into the film (Fig. 8), versions of the “For Humans Only” signs similarly re-feature in District 9, (Fig. 9). Conversely then, elements of the film District 9 feature online through the transmedia miseen-scène outside the film. Describing the “becoming Caligari” scene, Kaes writes that, “Writing as a competing and ‘older’ representational form threatens

Fig. 9: A slightly modified version of the “FOR HUMANS ONLY” posters appears within District 9’s alternate Johannesburg scenery.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Chloe Anna Milligan

start the to seem integrity as and reasonable exclusivity as the of the technologically visual” (70). Jay innovative David ways Bolter weand tellRichard stories across Grusin, notinjust their across book Remediation, see the threat move in the opposite direction: “Arguably the most important popular art form of the twentieth century, film is especially challenged by new media” (147). Their idea of remediation, “the representation of one medium in another” (45) absolutely typifies transmedia mise-en-scène, as the examples in this article show. We should, however, aim to do away with the language of media threatening media. Rose insists that “the way we tell [stories] changes with the technology at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative” (2), and he is right; but part of that change encouraged through viral marketing is media inhabiting other media. No threat, no challenge, just collaboration— just like the collaboration this transmedia approach Fig. 7: District 9’s ONLY” poster encourages. As“FOR for HUMANS that spirit of interaction, both including a link to the film’s fictionalized website. Wiene’s and Blomkamp’s films, through their sign format, but across the network. Shaviro quips in recampaigns, began in the fictional real. To paraphrase sponse, “Youthey maytook say that is merely science Cowan, it to all thethis streets. fiction. None of it is happening: not now, not here, Out among those streets, The Dark Knight’s alnot yet” (250), suggesting that our media culture’s ternate reality game Why So Serious? (2007) shows present feels like a science fictional future. Living in most clearly that viral movie marketing begins a network culture then constantly involves a blurring film’s mise-en-scène right here in the real. The Dark of fiction into the real. The transmedia mise-enKnight is the second of Christopher Nolan’s wildly scène is established: it is here that the fictional real profitable and acclaimed Batman trilogy. Telling the thrives. story of Batman facing off against his comic book nemesis, The Joker—and even managing a last act showdown against Harvey Dent turned TwoFace—it is an epic film with an epic viral marketing campaign played out through an alternate reality game. This experience was designed from site to street by 42 Entertainment, a company that specializes in creating alternate reality games to promote particular films and other media. Rose explains:

The Viral Image

intelligence assemble the Whata group The Cabinet of Dr.emerges Caligari to presciently pieces, solve the mysteries, and, in the process, started, District 9 and D-9.com continue. Though tell and retell the story online. Ultimately, the now just a homepage for the film, the promotional audience comes to own the story, in ways that website initially to the can’t page match. for Multinational movieslinked themselves (14) United, the private military company depicted in the A well regarded early example would be The Beast film, with whom main character Wikus van de (2001), the game promoting Steven Spielberg’s A.I. 9 Merwe works.Intelligence, This website, of information Artificial whichfull required players toon follow of the film through documents and videos, the world “rabbit holes” across various websites in a nonlinear committed to the factualization fiction. Its The fashionfully to unlock the complete of story. While fictional continuedsolely the segregation enforced Beastreal is traversed over the Web, what at distinsign locations by offering two navigation paths, one guishes Why So Serious? as an even more ambitious for Humans andisone Non-Humans. Thecomponent Nonexperience its for sprawling real world Human offeredmuch the of option haveoftext (Fig.interface 10). Of course, it did to consist piecing read together aloud forbackstory help assimilating into human culture. across websites containing ficThe website also featured nodsmaterials, to the film’s as tional police files, political andplot newspaper well, articles. for typing character names into its that It wascertain the game’s mastermind, though, search bar results in a out baninto fromthe thereal: website for viobrought the play the Joker himself. latingIndeed, particular “MNU regulations.” Just as “You the film may be Batman’s, but the game is MustJoker’s. BecomeThrough Caligari”online first featured in the film’s ads and real-world instructions, before “penetrate[d] the image” (Kaes 70) and wasiconic theit Joker rallied “accomplices” masked in his incorporated into the (Fig. 8), versions the inred and white facefilm paint to storm publicofplaces, “Forcluding Humansbakeries, Only” signs similarly re-featurephones in Dis- that where cakes concealed trict 9,allowed (Fig. 9).him Conversely then, elements of the to further contact them. Asfilm Harvey District 9 feature online through the transmedia mise- the Dent and Batman also attempted to influence the film. Describing “becoming en-scène outside game, the Joker always remainedthe a step ahead, endCaligari” scene, Kaes writes that, “Writing as a com-single ing the game by defacing everything: every peting and ‘older’ threatens website, mediarepresentational material, all of it.form In total, Why So Serious? rallied over ten million participants in seventyfive countries, which contributed to The Dark Knight’s billion-dollar revenue.10

Therefore, it is arguably proven that audiences are willing to engage transmedia mise-en-scène as it extends into the real world. For viral movie marketing of this kind starts the mise-en-scène in the real and invites moviegoers to become part of it, outside the film and in the streets. Out in the physical world, Alternate reality games…are a hybrid of game transmedia mise-en-scène more specifically makes and story. The story is told in fragments; the the public into participants in the fictional real, for Fig. 9: A slightly modified version of the “FOR HUMANS ONLY” postFig. 8: The famous “Du musst Caligarithe werden!” scene ingame comes in piecing fragments together. District Knight 9’s alternate ers appears within serted the film’s cryptic promotional line literally into The The Dark and Johannesburg these other scenery. films. Millions of task is’stoo complicated for any one person. Cabinet ofThe Dr. Caligari setting. But through the connective power of the Web,

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Viral Image

Fig. 10: : Promotional page for Why So Serious?, the alternate reality game preceding The Dark Knight.

people in nearly one hundred countries played as citizens of Gotham City, a fictional metropolis. Gotham City was founded everywhere but physically exists nowhere. Sound of My Voice staged meetings in the Ukrainian Culture Center for a cult that did not exist. The Blair Witch Project drew thousands of unwanted tourists to Burkittsville when the film was actually shot in Seneca Creek State Park, over twenty miles away. And District 9, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari before it, posted hints of a reality not quite real, be it science fictional or marked by impossible expressionist architecture. All of these films are not only transmediated through viral marketing; they are implicated in the actual hypermediated world. The factualization of fiction is completed by participants acting like it is real. Transmedia Mise-en-scène’s Lasting Image A film does not begin with the film anymore. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari challenges that film ever did. Robert Wiene’s film and its proto-viral marketing strategy make a compelling case for evaluating

not only the film, but how its mise-en-scène begins in its promotion. Moreover, these other films from 1999 onward tell their stories across transmedia platforms in ways different from and newer than Caligari, but they merely utilize the technology and cultural interests of the present moment as they did in the latter. From 1920 to 2012, and continuing today, transmedia mise-en-scène, through viral marketing in all its forms, shows that we are always looking for new ways to extend the establishing image of film storytelling outside “the cabinet of the movie theater” into the fictional real. Therefore, rather than limit mise-en-scène to the depth of field inside the screen, network culture deepens the image into the fictional real, a space where the reel meets the real. Though Caligari went viral before the term was coined, its proto-network culture maps well onto our irrevocably connected one today, indicating how networks both enmesh media and are mediated. Transmedia mise-en-scène leaves a lasting image of film storytelling outside the film and of the moviegoers participating within it.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Chloe Anna Milligan Fiona Whittington-Walsh

The Viral Image

2013/08/critiquing-temple-grandin.html. Accessed September 15, 2016. 2. In the song, “Pinball Wizard,” the main There eightfever” members of thefrom club, in4. idea character, Tommy,invented is described “that 6. The forare “reality is adapted 1. All terminology for this as article willdeaf, cluding fiveReality youngHunger adults ,with intellectual and/or dumb, and kid.” During the closing David Shields’s an important book be bracketed in blind quotation marks only once tocredits es- to developmental disabilities. Together, we are Wizard Mode , “Pinball Wizard” is used as the tracing how readers and authors want to blend the retablish its use throughout the article. disability in motion backdrop to psychedelic images of Robert playing. real searching and fictional throughrepresentation genres like literary col- pic2. Having established these films as the exwritten chaptermoviegoers for an InternaThe song is performed byincluding David Hartley’s lage,tures etc., and just have as this articlea argues ample texts, other recent films elementsband, Text on Disability and the Mediatransand have Nightlands.storytelling The descriptor formentioning Tommy is changed and tional filmmakers hope to engage through of transmedia worth are presented at numerous conferences in B.C., Canwhat(1999), sounds like a pinball “half check media storytelling. FighttoClub Memento A.I. Artificial (2000),name: ada, where we live. The includes whiskey.” David Cloverfield is also a pinball enthusiast 7. Cannibal Wanted and Holocaust (2001), (2008), is club technically theKya firstBezIntelligence anson, Christian Burton, Katie Miller, Jacklyn even played at the 2013 Professional and Amateur (2008), Paranormal Activity (2007), Inception “found footage” horror film, not The Blair Witch McKendrick, Emma Sawatzky, and Colton Turner. Pinball Associations (PAPA) world tournament, (2010), The Last Exorcism (2010), Bullhead Project, as is often mistaken. 5. Currently unemployment rate for workattempts Pinburg, in Pittsburgh, (2011), 8. The Prometheus Ex Machina All Blair Witchthe Project (2012),Pennsylvania. (2015), had its own poster ing aged withadvertisements disabilities is 400,000 in Canat trying find films the actual change shouldlyric indicate thathave this not etc. This list oftomany campaign as adults well, with masquerSee: Prince (2014). beencontribution successful.to the critical study of misearticle’s adingada. as missing posters for the main characters has been by someof memen-scène 3.isGrandin not limited to acriticized small analysis in the film.6. According to the media stereotypes, the “successful savant” is of also always bers of the autistic community, including Public Inunique titles. 9. This documentation lostalmost transmedia plotwhite and male. Temple Grandin is an exception to this. terest Law Scholar at Northeastern University 3. All images included in this article were obresembles a twenty-first century version of scholA full analysis of the intersection of disability, social School of Law and disability rights activist Lydia ars discussing lost silent films via censorship rectained under the United States legal doctrine of Brown. See Lydia’s blog, Autistic Hoya, and in parords.class, race, and gender is beyond the scope of this Fair Use. review. ticular post, “Critiquing Grandin,” 10. The current argument does not have the 4. Stahlthe and Arpke likely did Temple not literally intend August 10, 2013: http://www.autistichoya.com/ space to further analyze the fact that alternate rethis subversion with their iconic poster, but the timality games function as complete rejections of Baing these trends draw, the poignant Fig.and 10: : similarity Promotionalof page for Why alternate reality game preceding The Dark Knight. So Serious? correlation. zin’s claim that the photographic image mummifies 5. This clarification is mentioned to add that change (15). When participants outside the screen not only the film, but how its mise-en-scène begins people in Works nearly one hundred countries played as citjoin in the image, then part of that image becomes AndriopoulosCited and Kaes take Caligari’s hypnotism in itstemporary promotion.and Moreover, other from realizenstoo of literally, Gotham City, a fictional metropolis. Gospatiallythese bound. Thefilms alternate which condescends the moviegoer. Bellrichard, Chantelle. “Motherto sues B.C. Ministry of International FlipperbePinball Association. “World Pinity game cannot really played over. tham City wasChildren foundedafter everywhere but physically baby dies in foster care.” CBC News,1999 onward tell their stories across transmedia platball Player Rankings.” International Flipper Pinball 2015, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ brit-forms in ways different from and newer than Caexists nowhere.March Sound 24, of My Voice staged meetings in Association, www.ifpapinball.com/rankings/ ish-columbia/mother-sues-b-c-ministry-of-chiloverall.php. Accessed August 23, 2016. ligari, but they merely utilize the technology and culthe Ukrainian Culture Center for a cult that did not dren-after-baby-dies-in-foster-care-1.3008289. Ac-

Notes

Cited cessed 23, 2016. tural Cannibal interests of Michael. the present moment as Disabilities they did inNeed exist.Works The Blair Witch August Project drew thousands of unPrince, “Canadians with Holocaust. Directed by Ruggero Deodato, per- Real Work, Real Pay, Real Leadership.” The Globe formances Gabrieltoday, Yorke, and and A.I.tourists Artificial Intelligence. Directed by film Steven 1920bytoRobert 2012, Kerman, and continuing wanted Burkittsville whenTemple the wasSpielberg, ac- Autisticthe latter. From Brown,toLydia. “Critiquing Grandin.” Mail, August 29, 2016, Francesca Ciardi, United Artists Europa,www.theglobe1980. by Haley Joel Jude Law, Hoya, August 10, 2013, www.autistichoya.com/ transmedia mise-en-scène, through viral marketing tually shotperformances in Seneca Creek State Park,Osment, over twenty andmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commenFrances O’Connor, and William Hurt, Warner Ac2013/08/critiquing-temple-grandin.html. Cameron. Usare Every Thursday tary/canadians-with-disabilities-need-real-workin allCook, its forms, shows “Join that we always looking with for the miles away. And District 9, like Cabinet of Dr. CaBros. Pictures, 2001. cessed August 23,The 2016. Soundreal-pay-real-leadership/article31587898/. of My Voice.” Fox Searchlight Pictures, Mar. 5, Acnew ways 2012, to extendfoxsearchlight.com/post/3310/join-usthe establishing image of film ligari Andriopoulos, before it, postedStefan. hints of“Suggestion, a reality not Hypnosis, quite real, and Burgess, Rebecca. “Understanding the Spectrum.” The cessed September 17, 2016. every-thursday-with-the-sound-of-my-voice/. Crime: RobertorWiene’s Cabinet of Dr.exCaligari storytelling outside “the cabinet of the movie theabe it science fictional markedThe bytheoraah.tumblr.com/post/ impossible Oraah, 2016, Track, Laura. Able Mothers: The intersection of parenting, disWeimar All Cinema: An Essential to Classic Ac-ter” Cowan, 142300214156/understanding-the-spectrum. into theMichael. fictional real. Therefore, rather than pressionist(1920).” architecture. of these films Guide are not “Taking it to the Street: Screening ability, and law. West Coast Women’s Legalthe EducaFilms cessed of the Era, edited by Noah Isenberg, Columbia August 23, 2016. Advertising Film in the Weimar Republic.” Screen, tion and Action Fund, 2014. limit mise-en-scène to the depth of field inside the only transmediated through viral marketing; they are University Press, 2009, pp. 13-32. vol. 54, no. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 463-479. Oxford “Canada without Poverty: Just the facts.” Canada Without the A image intoHarperCollins, the implicated the actual hypermediated world. The by screen, network Townsend, Pete.deepens Who I Am: Memoir. Journals,culture screen.oxfordjournals.org.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/ Bazin, in André. What is Cinema?, Volume I. Translated Poverty, www.cwp-csp.ca/poverty/just-the-facts. 2012. content/54/4/463.full. fictional real, a space where the reel meets the real. factualization of fiction is completed by participants Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1967. Accessed August 23, 2016. Turcotte, Martin. Insights on the Canadian Society: Caligari went viral before term was actingThe likeBlair it isWitch real. The Dark Knight. Directed by Christopher Nolan, perfor-Persons Project. and Directed by Daniel Myrick Drillot, Nathan, Jeff Petry, Wizard Mode.and SalazarThough with disabilities and employment. Statistics Canada, mances by Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Eduardo Sanchez, performances by Heather DoFilm Production Company, 2016. coined, its proto-network culture maps well onto ourHeath DeTransmedia Mise-en-scène’s Lasting cember 3, 2014. Ledger, and Aaron Eckhart, Warner Bros. Pictures, nahue, Michael C. Williams, and Image Joshua Leonard, irrevocably connected one today, indicating how Inclusion BC and Family Support Institute of B.C. Stop 2008. Artisan A film does Entertainment, not begin with1999. the film anymore. Hurting Kids: Restraint and Seclusion in B.C. Schools –networks both enmesh media and are mediated. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari challenges that Remediation: film November ever Un- 21, District 9. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, performances by Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Survey Results and Recommendations. Transmedia mise-en-scène leavesCope, a lasting Sharlto Copley, Jason and image David of James, derstanding New Media. Massachusetts Institute 2013, www.inclusionbc.org/sites/default/files/ did. Robert Wiene’s film and its proto-viral market- of TriStar outside Pictures,the 2009. Technology Press, 2000. film and of the movieStopHurtingKids-Report.pdf. Accessed Augustfilm storytelling ing strategy make a compelling case for evaluating Club. Directed by it. David Fincher, performances by The Cabinet23, of 2016. Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Wiene, goersFight participating within performances by Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, and Friedrich Feher, Decla-Bioscop, 1920.

1, No. | Winter 2016 2016 1, 1No. 1 | Winter 124 Vol. Vol.

Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, 20th Century Fox, 1999. MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Viral Image FOR HUMANS ONLY. Sony, 2008. Traileraddict, traileraddict.com/district-9/poster/1. Henderson, Brian. “The Long Take.” Film Comment, vol. 7, no. 2, Summer 1971, pp. 6-11. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/43752806. “In the Jungle: The Making of Cannibal Holocaust.” Directed by Michele De Angelis, Alan Young Pictures, 2003. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2008. Jenkins, Henry, et al. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York University Press, 2013. Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton University Press, 2009. “The Legacy.” The Blair Witch Project, blairwitch.com/legacy.html. Robinson, David. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. British Film Institute, 2013. Rose, Frank. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. W.W. Norton and Company, 2012. Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Knopf, 2010. Sound of My Voice. Directed by Zal Batmanglij, performances by Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicius, and Brit Marling, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2012. Stahl, Erich Ludwig and Otto Arpke. Du Musst Caligari Werden!. 1919. PosterConnection Inc., posterconnection.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/the-cabinet-ofdr-calilgari-the-posters/. Tryon, Chuck. “Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures, and Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 61, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 40-51. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/20688633. Why So Serious?. 42 Entertainment, 2007, 42entertainment.com/work/whysoserious. Zabel, Lucien. Dein Vaterland ist in Gefahr, Melde Dich!. 1918. Library of Congress, loc.gov/pictures/item/2006680285/. Zborowski, James. “District 9 and its World.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 52, Summer 2010, ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/zoborowskiDst9/index.html. MISE-EN-SCÈNE

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration The Adaptation of Artwork in Lust for Life and Mr. Turner Rachel Walisko Abstract: A film can be adapted from almost any source, including literature, history and art. One specific kind of adaptation, the artist biopic, often draws directly from the work of the artist featured to recreate a similar visual style on screen. Directors of artist biopics, who have an understanding of their subject’s defining aesthetics, are able to replicate the artist’s style visually in a film, through sets, costumes, colour, and light. In his article “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” André Bazin states, “All it takes is for the filmmakers to have enough visual imagination to create the cinematic equivalent of the style of the original, and for the critic to have the eyes to see it” (20). When directors have the creativity to reconstruct the aesthetics of artwork on screen, and the audience has the historical knowledge to recognize the featured visuals, a new layer of dimension is added to the artist biopic. In the films Lust for Life (1956) and Mr. Turner (2014), filmmakers successfully adapt the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and J. M. W. Turner to create the mise-en-scène of the films.

film can be adapted from almost any source, including literature, history and art. One specific kind of adaptation, the artist biopic, often draws directly from the work of the artist featured to recreate a similar visual style on screen. Directors of artist biopics, who have an understanding of their subject’s defining aesthetics, are able to replicate the artist’s style visually in a film, through sets, costumes, colour, and light. In his article “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” André Bazin states, “All it takes is for the filmmakers to have enough visual imagination to create the cinematic equivalent of the style of the original, and for the critic to have the eyes to see it” (20). When directors have the creativity to reconstruct the aesthetics of artwork on screen, and the audience has the historical knowledge to recognize the featured visuals, a new layer of dimension is added to the artist biopic. In the films Lust for Life (1956) and Mr. Turner (2014), filmmakers successfully adapt the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

J. M. W. Turner to create the mise-en-scène of the films. In his essay “Adaptation,” Dudley Andrew describes the distinctive feature of film adaptation and all representational cinema as “the matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievements in some other system” (28). In order for a film to be an adaptation, it must have some overlapping content unique to the original source. Although “the problem of digests and adaptations is usually posed within the frameworks of literature” (Bazin 19), all biopics or biographical films are adaptations, because they feature elements of the real lives of their subjects. A popular subcategory of the biopic is feature films about actual artists. Of this subgenre, Lynda Nead comments, “given the overwhelming presence of artists on film, it seems fair to categorize these works as a cinematic genre, complete with specific codes and conventions” (74). This statement indicates the widespread popularity of artist biopics

The Adaptation of Artwork

and that the similarities they share could be considered trademark characteristics of the genre. In the book Art and Artist on Screen, John A. Walker discusses biopics of artists and points out that “like all histories, such films are schematic reconstructions based upon whatever evidence – works of art, photographs, letters, memoirs, anecdotes and so forth – remains in existence” (13). When filmmakers adapt literature for screen, they often have a single, selfcontained source from which to work. However, in the case of artist biopics and all films about historical events or persons, the source material is anything relevant still in existence, all of which the directors must consider and interpret.

probably only one circumstance in which the conscious evocation of an artistic style can be justified as the ‘sight’ of the diegesis” (“When History” 27). Indeed, this stylistic technique, in which filmmakers match the visuals of an artist biopic to the aesthetics of the subject’s artwork does seem fitting; it is almost as though the artists themselves have a hand in the creation of the mise-en-scène of the film, and therefore, the telling of their own biography. Pretty Pictures, written by Tashiro, describes director Peter Watkins’s desire to achieve identification with the painter Edvard Munch for his biopic Edvard Munch (1974) and his decision to ignore “traditional notions of history, historical representation, and narrative structure in an effort to mirror on film the intense subjectivity of the painter’s work” (129). In the case of Watkins’s Edvard Munch, the painter’s art was a key asset in the creation of the biopic’s aesthetics and a crucial component in telling the unique story of the subject. In Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts, Steven Jacobs describes how the cinematography of Munch “is characterized by a spatial flatness through the use of zoom lenses as well as pale colours and blue shades acquired by using stock for artificial light in daylight without corrective filters” (14). Edvard Munch’s visual style is composed of deliberate artistic choices used to mimic the palette and composition of Munch’s paintings. This technique, which is used frequently in the creation of artist biopic films, played a significant role in Lust for Life and Mr. Turner.

…almost as though the artists themselves have a hand in the creation of the mise-enscène of the film…

When filmmakers choose to adapt the history of an artist’s life to screen, Charles Tashiro writes, they can appeal to “historical knowledge as a set of names, places, and dates” in order to re-create the past, but also “to a sense of the past as a group of appearances and images” (“When History” 19). In other words, artwork of artists is a reliable source for the creators of artist biopics to reference. Due to their value, these works have usually been very well preserved over the years in museums and private collections, and are readily available source material. Once a filmmaker decides to reference artwork when creating a biopic, the aesthetics of paintings are easily transferred to film, because as Nead notes, “if a painting could imitate reality, then the film could go one better and actually animate the picture and transform it into a living form” (76). Nead explains that, as paintings are a representation of reality created by artists, films are able to depict that representation of reality in a more developed and life-like way through moving images. In the opinion of Tashiro, the biography of an artist “is

Lust for Life Director Vincente Minnelli was deemed an auteur by Cahiers du Cinéma, meaning he was categorized as an artist and filmmaker able to “work through and transform the resources and constraints MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Rachel Walisko

of the industry to express” his unique vision (Vacche 13-14). In his book, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Stephen Harvey characterizes the filmmaker’s signature as “a lush and daring use of colour, the seamless fusion of music and camera movement, and a decorative scheme that mates the cast with inanimate objects in voluptuous counterpoint” (15). These unique features of Minnelli’s films were developed through his training in the visual arts as a painter at the Chicago Art Institute. This education “enabled him to develop a filmic style that would transcend the routine look of an MGM production, without going against the fundamental tenets of the industry” (14). Minnelli’s passion for the arts shaped not only his form, but also content, as he “continued to tackle the theme of painting as creativity” (15) throughout his career as a film director. Minnelli’s artistic style and love of painting are proof of a personal connection to the story of artists and substantiate his decision to direct a biopic about Vincent Van Gogh. The screenplay for the film Lust for Life was adapted from Irving Stone’s biographical novel by the same name, written in 1934. Although the plot of the film was directly influenced by Stone’s book, Minnelli was intent on recreating the vibrant aesthetics of Van Gogh’s art in the mise-en-scène of the biopic. Minnelli wanted the scenery in Lust for Life to be as close as possible to the settings featured in Van Gogh’s art, and as Van Gogh painted in Holland and

Fig. 1: Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh. Lust for Life. Minnelli, 1956.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

France, the crew shot on location throughout Europe during the summer of 1955 (Walker 43). When Minnelli was not filming on site in Europe, he tried to keep the production as true to the art as possible through “period clothes and by the construction of sets from the visual information supplied by the artist’s paintings” (43). All efforts were made to recreate settings in which Van Gogh lived and worked, either by filming on location in the places where the art was actually created, or by building sets inspired by his creations. Another element of the film that was taken directly from the paintings is the “uncanny likeness of its star, Kirk Douglas, to self-portraits by Van Gogh” (Nead 76). The physical appearance of Kirk Douglas on screen (Fig. 1) was designed from the self-portraits that Van Gogh painted of himself, such as Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (Fig. 2). Not all critics are convinced of this resemblance, however. In “Lust for Lifelikeness,” Tyler Parker states: …the spectacle of Kirk Douglas made up and posed to look like Van Gogh in a self-portrait with the artist in a straw hat, Douglas' photograph being placed next to a reproduction of that painting, would be enough to make the artist cut off his other ear. (133) Parker feels that Van Gogh would see Douglas’s costume as offensive, as though mocking his self-portraits and memory. Walker disagrees and

Fig. 2: Self-Portrait with Straw Hat. Vincent Van Gogh. 1887.

The Adaptation of Artwork

claims, “with his hair cut short and his beard dyed ginger, Douglas closely resembled Van Gogh” (41). Walker’s observation cannot be denied, as the side-by-side comparison of Douglas in costume and Van Gogh’s self-portrait are remarkably similar. Douglas’s likeness to Van Gogh was influenced by the artist’s own vision of himself, and his self-portraits became the basis for the actor’s on screen appearance. Thoughtful consideration was given as to which medium would be the most appropriate to record Lust for Life, as “any film about Van Gogh had to be in colour” (Walker 40). It was shot in Cinemascope on Metrocolor, “the trade name used by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for films process in their laboratories and shot of Kodak’s Eastman Colour film, developed in the 1950s,” which allowed the bi-

Blacks, browns and greys define the sets of the film’s first half, when Van Gogh is searching for artistic inspiration, living in poverty and sketching in charcoal on paper; it is only when he begins to paint in oils and watercolours, and moves to Arles that the screen becomes saturated with colour. (13) In the adaption of Lust for Life, colour plays a double role. In addition to replicating the imagery of the paintings, it is also strategically placed throughout the film to mirror the phases of Van Gogh’s life. The colour used in Van Gogh’s art is representational of his emotional state at the time it was painted. By recreating the paint colours in the miseen-scène of the film, Minnelli conveys Van Gogh’s altering mindset and creative vision. The colour yellow features prominently in Minnelli’s films and has significant weight in the repre-

By recreating the paint colours in the mise-enscène of the film, Minnelli conveys Van Gogh’s altering mindset and creative vision. opic to exploit “this new colour film to almost hallucinogenic levels” (Nead 76). Van Gogh’s use of colour is such a significant element of his paintings that only colour film would be able to accurately convey the saturation of his paints. Again, critic Parker voices an adverse opinion. He says, “the idea that colour-photography can do anything but remotely suggest the true optical import of Van Gogh’s oil paintings is fraudulent when based on more than simple ignorance” (132). While Parker feels that Van Gogh’s colour could never be justly imitated by any medium other than in its original form, colour film provides a closer representation of Van Gogh’s paintings than black and white film. In her article “Minnelli’s Yellows: Illusion, Delusion and the Impression on Film,” Kate Hext describes another important function of colour in the biopic:

sentation of Van Gogh’s art and life. Hext feels yellow “is the keynote colour of Lust for Life and it is used to explore the relationship between imagination and madness so prevalent in fin de siècle art and culture” (13). As the film evolves from the blacks, browns, and greys of the beginning to vibrant colour, yellow appears more frequently as the progression of Van Gogh’s artistic inspiration parallels his descent into madness. One of the final moments in Lust for Life (Fig. 3), featuring Van Gogh’s last painting Wheatfield with Crows (Fig. 4) epitomizes this representation of the colour yellow. In the wheat fields of Auvers, yellow appears as “great wash of colour” (13), which mimics the painting of the same scene. The colour fills the frame, just as Van Gogh’s insanity reaches a breaking point. Soon after putting down his paintbrush, he walks over to the shade of a tree

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Rachel Walisko

Fig. 3: The wheat field scene inspired by Van Gogh’s last painting. Lust for Life. Minnelli, 1956.

and shoots himself, demonstrating the link between yellow and mental illness. In addition to the overwhelming presence of yellow, other elements of the painting Wheatfield with Crows are reproduced on screen. Walker points out, “since the canvas used was a long oblong, this painting is one of the few which matches the elongated shape of the CinemaScope screen” (45). The similar shape of the canvas and the frame allows the imagery of the painting and screen to align almost perfectly when overlapped. Nead recognizes the crows in flight as another common feature to both works; “as his desperation grows, he stabs with his brush at the

canvas, adding the crude black marks of the crows, which are the signs of his impending tragedy” (76). The metaphorical nature of the crows in the painting, which represent Van Gogh’s imminent death, means that the birds are a vital component of the mise-en-scène in Lust for Life. Walker writes, “six hundred crows were bought and tethered by lengths of monofilament. Men hiding in the cornfield made noises to make them fly and then pulled them down

Fig. 4: Wheatfield with Crows. Vincent Van Gogh, 1890. Oil on canvas.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

The Adaptation of Artwork

Fig. 5: Recreated mise-en-scène in Lust for Life. Minnelli, 1956.

Fig. 6: Auvers Town Hall. 1890. Vincent Van Gogh. In Lust for Life. Minnelli, 1956.

again” (41). Minnelli intentionally recreated significant visual features of Wheatfield with Crows in Lust for Life, because a key component of a successful adaptation is the transfer of symbolic elements between the original source and the adapted content. A cinematic device, used by Minnelli to reinforce the aesthetic ties between the mise-en-scène of the film and Van Gogh’s art, is the fading of the film set (Fig. 5) to a photograph of the real painting upon which that scene was based (Fig. 6) Walker feels the connection between the two is immediate and states “when Van Gogh’s paintings – in fact colour photos of them – were introduced into these scenes, the correspondence between set and painted image was,

naturally enough, exact” (43). Minnelli, perhaps knowing his audience may not be familiar with all of Van Gogh’s artwork, or that they would not immediately identify the painting upon which a scene was replicated, sought to prevent this lack of recognition by visually linking the artwork and the mise-en-scène of the film. Nead describes the result of this side-byside comparison: Accompanied by a melodramatic musical score the film revels in the equal brilliance of the landscape and of Van Gogh’s canvases; environments reconstructed from the paintings frequently dissolve back into colour photographs of the painted canvases. The conflation, within the film, between what Van Gogh apparently

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Rachel Walisko

saw and what he painted is patent and absolute. (76) According to Nead, Metrocolor film shot against the vivid sets in Lust for Life, paired with the photos of Van Gogh’s art allows for a direct connection to be made between the paintings and the biopic, and therefore, a greater appreciation of the similarities between the two. Both Walker and Nead believe that the success of this technique allowed them to perceive the merging of the paintings with the aesthetics of the film. Through the synthesis of art and film, the audience is able to see subjectively from Van Gogh’s perspective and understand what he saw when creating his art.

painted. Quart describes the time period of early to mid nineteenth century London: It’s an England where new technologies like railways, the tugboat, and the camera have begun to appear. The film takes full cognizance of this aspect but the last word on the subject comes from Turner: ‘The past is the past. You’re observing the future! Smoke. Iron. Steam!’ As a painter and a man, Turner is willing to embrace change and the future. (35) Turner was an artist who embraced the new, which is shown explicitly in the scene where he slabs a streak of vibrant red onto his muted green painting of ships at sea, titled Helvoetsluys. He proceeds to turn the red spot into a buoy, but not before shocking half his colleges in the Royal Academy with his avant-garde methods. Turner’s approach to working on the cusp of innovation inspired Leigh’s filmmaking process. The director says “‘it’s also important that we shot the film on a digital camera, which meant that we were able to use, during filming and in postproduction as well, all the new techniques and possibilities of this twenty-first-century tool’” (Quart 36). Leigh’s use of the modern digital camera to film Mr. Turner reflects his progressive style and desire to create art with the latest technology. Leigh also comments that there are “places in the film where Dick Pope has been able to enhance and develop what he photographed by digital techniques” (36). A benefit of working in a digital workflow is that Leigh and his cinematographer, Dick Pope, were given more flexibility in postproduction to accurately replicate the style of Turner’s paintings on screen.

Leigh felt it was crucial that the colours on screen match those of Turner’s artwork, so that the audience would be able to draw parallels between his paintings and the visuals of the film.

Mr. Turner Like Minnelli, director Mike Leigh was also educated in the arts. His time at London’s Camberwell College of Arts in the 1960s led him directly to the work of J.M.W. Turner, of whom he would later make the artist biopic Mr. Turner. Commenting on his developing relationship with Turner, Leigh says, “‘once I started to see him and understand him, from the point when I was in art school, it took off. But it was a long journey’” (45). Leigh’s introduction to Turner while in art school, followed by additional research on the artist, facilitated his interpretation of the work from an artistic point of view. This insight allowed Leigh to take the necessary steps to recreate Turner’s unique style of painting on screen, which “emphasize pure light, intense, swirling colour, and the elemental forces of nature” (Quart 34). The method chosen to record the film paralleled Turner’s own ideals in the rapidly changing world in which he

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

The Adaptation of Artwork

Fig. 7: The reconstruction of a painted space in Mr. Turner. Leigh, 2014.

The colour on Turner’s canvases is one aspect of the mise-en-scène the filmmakers felt crucial to replicate. Leigh believed that the look of the film had to be informed by “a sense of palette and actually hit the moments that became Turner images” (Shattuck). In other words, Leigh felt it was crucial that the colours on screen match those of Turner’s artwork, so that the audience would be able to draw parallels between his paintings and the visuals of the film. Hubert explains, “with cinematographer Dick Pope, Leigh looked at Turner’s paintings and colour charts to get a better sense of the palette they would use in the film” (45). In order to match the colours on screen as closely to the paintings of Turner as possible, Leigh and Pope studied his colour palette and determined that “Turner used warm yellow in the highlights and blue/teal in the shadows as his two main, complementary colours” (B. 67). Yellow and blue are used as the two main colours in the paintings, and so they became the two main colours on screen, often produced by tailored lighting techniques. Pope describes how the lighting scheme was crafted in Turner’s house: I had acrylic sheets of Full CT Orange made up for all the windows in order to imbue the house with a warm, corrected light. That’s the daytime feel I wanted for the film: this soft, warm light reflecting Turner’s work… (B. 69)

Fig. 8: The Artists and His Admirers. J.M.W. Turner. 1827.

In addition to synthetic light, Leigh also used a filming process “that skewed the actual colours of what he was shooting toward a Turneresque palette of yellow highlights and teal shadows,” in which “lenses from the 1950s and ’60s, fitted onto his digital camera, served as an atmospheric elixir” (Shattuck). This method imbedded a desired texture and glow to all of the film’s images, aligning more closely with the aesthetics of Turner’s paintings. In order for Turner’s light and colours to appear consistently throughout the film, Leigh and Pope would often have to embrace unique filming techniques and design lighting so that these traits appeared artificially.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Rachel Walisko

While matching the light and colour of Turner’s artwork was a key component in recreating his aesthetics, the filmmakers also designed sets to match the settings featured in his paintings. The film’s production designer, Suzie Davies, drew inspiration directly from Turner’s own renditions of the landscapes he came across, and used his “own palette and architectural sketches” to conjure the homes he lived in (Shattuck). An example of the deliberate reconstruction of a space featured in Turner’s art (Fig. 7) is that of his watercolour The Artist and His Admirers (Fig. 8). Of this shot, Pope says it “was in the old library at the top of Petworth House, and it was one of the few times we had a go at recreating a famous ‘Turner,’ a watercolour he painted in that very same room” (B. 72). To reproduce the scene in this watercolour as closely as possible, the crew shot on location and designed the room to appear exactly as it had when Turner painted it. By placing the camera in the exact same direction as Turner looked when painting, the frame of the film and canvas of the watercolour align perfectly down the centre.

the sun. We weren’t carrying a reference with us, but that moment just happens to match [his canvas]” (B. 68). In this scene, Leigh and Pope were able to capture the sun setting above the water at just the right moment, so that the colours of the light reflected off the clouds and water match those of the painting. The only non-natural element of the scene is the CGI ship, which brings the scene as close to the original painting as possible. By mirroring the location, colour, and light of Turner’s art in the biopic, Leigh aims to show exactly what Turner saw when he painted. Of the efforts to show the world from Turner’s perspective, Pope says: [We were] certainly trying to evoke what he saw…looking through him, through his eyes, in terms of camera movement. One thing is lighting and the other thing is where we put the camera, because that’s what’s more important in one of Mike’s films, more than anything else, is where do you see it from? A lot of the vantage points in the film are from Turner looking at what he is observing. (Cipriani).

…Leigh visualizes Turner’s creative moments by placing the audience in the landscapes from which he drew artistic inspiration.

Even though some instances of imitation in Mr. Turner are manmade, other times Turner’s paintings were captured naturally, “like the steam locomotive that blew a perfect smoke ring as it huffed along in northern Wales, or the three wild ponies that galloped up behind Mr. Spall as he walked toward a stone chapel in Cornwall” (Shattuck). Another example is the perfect replication (Fig. 9) of The Fighting Temeraire (Fig. 10), a scene that was shot “almost in the same place as where the painting was depicted, bringing the Temeraire up the Thames to be broken up” (Cipriani). Commenting on this shot, Pope says “the image is very similar to the painting, including the position of 44

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

In addition to lighting, Leigh and Pope illustrate Turner’s point of view through the camera itself, using it as a lens to reflect exactly where Turner was within landscapes and what he saw while in them. Scott Macaulay writes, “Together, Leigh and Pope have made Mr. Turner, a rare artist biopic that imbues within its visual strategies a sense of its subject’s own ways of seeing.” He goes on to describe the opening shot, which shows a peasant woman walking past a windmill in the setting sun, and explains that this scene exemplifies how the film contains “a sense of how the artist’s visual consciousness was shaped by both geography and the historical currents of the Industrial Revolution” (Macauley). By recreating the

The Adaptation of Artwork

Fig. 9: Replicating The Fighting Temeraire in Mr. Turner. Leigh, 2014.

aesthetics of Turner’s paintings on screen, Leigh visualizes Turner’s creative moments by placing the audience in the landscapes from which he drew artistic inspiration. Leigh confirms this objective, saying there are many moments throughout the film when the audience is “looking over his shoulder, looking at what he’s painting, what he’s sketching, the viewpoint of his world” and that those artistic decisions are intended to show viewers “what he was inspired by” (Shattuck). Yet, even after all of the efforts to convey exactly what Turner saw when he was painting, Leigh feels the creative moment of an artist cannot be completely shown on screen. He says, “You can evoke it, you can imply it, you can present the justification of images, but the actual creation itself is elusive and I would say, in strict terms, unfilmable” (B. 70). While exposition and camera angels give the audience an opportunity to draw parallels between the landscapes Turner inhabited and his artwork, Leigh believes that Turner’s internal moment of inspiration is intangible and cannot be captured in the mise-en-scène of a film. Conclusion While paintings are valuable source material to filmmakers in the creation of artist biopics, there are implications to this creative choice. Walker describes

Fig. 10: The Fighting Temeraire. J.M.W. Turner, 1838.

how films with aesthetics influenced by paintings reverse “the artist’s original process by turning his twodimensional images back into their three-dimensional models. This device, so typical of films about artists, often generates a sense of the uncanny” (32). Sigmund Freud defines uncanny as “something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it” (245), or something, which even through transformation, resembles itself in a previous form. Walker believes that when the audience sees the aesthetics of a wellknown painting in the mise-en-scène of a film, they may experience a sense of the uncanny, because of the effect of recognizing a two-dimensional image so familiar to them in three-dimensional form. Further, Freud states that the highest degree of uncanny can MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Rachel Walisko

be achieved “when an inanimate object – a picture or a doll – comes to life” (246). Films with aesthetics imitating artwork are uncanny, as they effectively bring an inanimate picture to life through moving images. Lust for Life evokes a sense of the uncanny, due to Kirk Douglas’s close resemblance to Van Gogh in his self portraits, set against the familiar, live action backdrops of his landscape paintings. Similarly, Mr. Turner can be described as uncanny when the colours and settings of the film perfectly align with the artwork of J.M.W. Turner. Related to the uncanny, another phenomenon of the artist biopic is reflexivity. As stated by Tashiro, “A narrative film cannot become a painting without putting the story in pause” (“When History” 20). He believes that there is an unavoidable halt, which occurs when an audience recognizes the artwork in the

of cinema from its earliest days: ‘I have again turned the camera round on ourselves, we who try to be artists,’ he states, ‘with all the struggles our calling demands’” (78). Just as the artwork of the artists featured in the biopics is examined, so too is the film itself, as the audience is given time to reflect during the moments of pause. Of this process, Tashiro writes, “Even a small-scale image such as Van Gogh’s bedroom cannot be literally recreated on camera without calling attention to the process at work, as obvious visual design makes us aware that the movie has been staged” (“When History” 29). As directors who have created films about artists, both Minnelli and Leigh bring awareness to their own creative backgrounds and their craft as art. Tashiro believes that the more the audience experiences pauses of reflexivity when watching an artist biopic, the

…there is an unavoidable halt, which occurs when an audience recognizes the artwork in the mise-en-scène of a film. mise-en-scène of a film. Tashiro goes on to explain: As the dynamic forces within the frame come together to find that privileged instant evoking a canvas, the actors, camera, and décor cease to move to the logic of forward movement and seek, rather, a point of static fixity. This selfconsciousness is the measure of success; the moment of spectacle pushes the viewer outside to savor the image and temporarily forget the narrative to refer to a commodity beyond itself, crowing the story with a public image. (20) The awareness that comes about through the identification of artwork redirects the audience’s attention away from the forward momentum of the film, and instead, reflexively, to the specific moment in which they noted the resemblance between the two works and the filmmakers themselves. Nead states that in Mr. Turner, “Leigh evokes the centuryold struggle between art and film that has been part

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

more successful that film is in conveying the story and aesthetic of the artist subject. However, the reflexivity of an artist biopic is “dependent on the viewer’s double sophistication: recognition of the point of reference and of the productive forces at work necessary to stylize the film image” (29). Therefore, the success of an artist biopic when measured by reflexivity is conditional to the audience’s knowledge of history and art, and their ability to recognize the artist’s work on screen. Most importantly, biopics that recreate the characteristics of an artist’s paintings give the audience a chance to see from that artist’s point of view. Jacobs states: By emphasising visual correspondences between the artists’ works and the world around them, such biopics imply that these artists represent the world as they are perceiving it. The

The Adaptation of Artwork

artist’s vision may be distorted but his art remains firmly based on his perception of the world and is not presented as the result of an artificial construction. (14) In addition to being a historical reference in the conception of a biopic, artwork produced by the subject can be used to design a representation of what the artist saw when looking at the world, by recreating the same aesthetic characteristics in the mise-en-scène of the film. Through this presentation, the filmmakers are able to provide context to the creation of the artists’ work from the subject’s perspective. By developing this understanding, the audience is able to engage with both the artist and the artwork on a more in-depth level, resulting in a greater appreciation for the life and work of the featured subject. In summary, director Vincente Minnelli’s education in the arts and signature as an auteur made him the ideal candidate to direct the artist biopic Lust for Life about Vincent Van Gogh. In order to replicate the setting of the paintings as authentically as possible, the crew filmed on location in Europe and designed sets of scenes straight out of his paintings. Kirk Douglas cut and dyed his hair red to resemble Van Gogh’s self-portraits as closely as possible. Minnelli chose to film in Cinemascope on Metrocolor so that the elongated frame of the screen would align with the oblong canvases Van Gogh used, and to represent the vibrant colours of his paints as clearly as possible. The colour yellow and crows were used prominently in one of the final scenes, which depicts Wheatfield with Crows. This was done in direct reference to the imagery of the painting, and also as a metaphor for Van Gogh’s descent into madness. Minnelli uses the technique of fading the film set to a photograph of the real painting upon which that scene was based, in order to connect what is seen on screen to Van Gogh’s art. All of these creative decisions were influenced by Van Gogh’s aesthetics and work to bring paintings to life on screen.

Mike Leigh was exposed to the work of J.M.W. Turner while in school for the arts and later directed the biopic Mr. Turner. Inspired by Turner’s belief in embracing the new, Leigh recorded the film using the latest digital technology, which gave him greater ability to recreate Turner’s aesthetics in postproduction. In order to replicate Turner’s aesthetics as closely as possible, Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope worked from Turner’s colour palette of blue and yellow, and constructed lighting schemes to capture the golden light that appears in his paintings. They also recreated the scenes in Turner’s artwork, by filming on site or designing sets to match, in addition to using the camera as a lens to reflect exactly what Turner saw while immersed in different landscapes and settings. By mirroring the location, colour and light of Turner’s art in the biopic, Leigh is able to convey Turner’s vision. Film adaptation that draws on the visual aesthetics of the subject’s art has three outcomes. First, it can evoke a sense of the uncanny when an audience sees the familiar aesthetics of a well-known painting on screen. Second, the film becomes selfreflexive by drawing attention to itself as an art and to the filmmakers as artists. Third, the film presents a vision of the world from the perspective of the artists, which gives context to the creation of the artists’ work. When making biographical films about artists, filmmakers must draw inspiration from all aspects of the artists’ lives, including their artwork, because paintings are an artist’s depiction of their worldview. A successful artist biopic will incorporate the aesthetics of the subject’s work in the mise-en-scène of the film, giving the audience unique insight to the inner consciousness of the subject and allowing them to develop a greater understanding of the life and work of the featured artist.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Rachel Walisko

Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, Rutgers, 2000, pp. 28-37. B., Benjamin. “Eloquence through Art.” American Cinematographer, vol. 96, no. 1, 2015, pp. 66-75. Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, Rutgers, 2000, pp. 19-27. Cipriani, Casey. “How ‘Mr. Turner’ Cinematographer Dick Pope Made the Film Look Like a J.M.W. Turner Painting.” IndieWire, 6 Oct. 2014, www.indiewire.com/2014/10/how-mr-turner-cinematographer-dick-pope-made-the-film-look-like-a-j-mw-turner-painting-69340. Accessed 7 Jul. 2016. Edvard Munch. Directed by Peter Watkins, Norsk Film, 1974. Freud, Sigmund. An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Translated by James Strachey. Hogarth Press, 1955.

Stone, Irving. Lust for Life. Grosset & Dunlap, 1934. Tashiro, Charles. Pretty Pictures. University of Texas Press, 1998. ---. “When History Films (Try To) Become Paintings.” Cinema Journal vol. 35, no. 3, 1996, pp. 19-33. Turner, J.M.W. The Artists and His Admirers. 1827, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, Tate, London. ---. The Fighting Temeraire. 1838, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Vacche, Angela Dalle. Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film. University of Texas Press, 1996.

Harvey, Stephen. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Museum of Modern Art; Harper & Row, 1989.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Auvers Town Hall. 1890, oil on canvas, private collection, Spain.

Hext, Kate. “Minnelli’s Yellows: Illusion, Delusion And The Impression On Film.” Wide Screen, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-18, widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/8. Accessed 7 Jul. 2016.

---. Self-Portrait with Straw Hat. 1887, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation).

Hubert, Craig. “Mad Genius.” Modern Painters, vol. 26, no. 11, 2014, p. 45. Jacobs, Steven. Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2011. Lust for Life. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, performance by Kirk Douglas, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956. Macaulay, Scott. “Digital Tableaux: Cinematographer Dick Pope on Mr. Turner.” Filmmaker Magazine, 20 Oct. 2014. filmmakermagazine.com/87951-digital-tableaux-cinematographer-dick-pope-on-mrturner/#.V5PH5lcRX4F. Accessed 7 Jul. 2016. Mr. Turner. Directed by Mike Leigh, performance by Timothy Spall, Film4, 2014. Nead, Lynda. “Screening Genius.” Apollo, vol. 180, no. 624, October 2014, pp. 74-78. Parker, Tyler. “Lust for Lifelikeness.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 1957, pp. 131-136. Quart, Leonard. “The Mundane and the Sublime J.M.W. Turner: An Interview with Mike Leigh.” Cineaste vol. 40, no. 1, 2014, pp. 34-37.

Shattuck, Kathryn. “As if the Artist Put His Brush to Each Take: Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’ Aims for Visual Accuracy.” The New York Times, 4 Dec. 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/movies/ mike-leighs-mr-turner-aims-for-visual-accuracy.html. Accessed 7 Jul. 2016.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

---. Wheatfield with Crows. 1890, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation). Walker, John A. Art and Artists on Screen. Manchester University Press, 1993.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Reification and Alienated Form in A Clockwork Orange James Driscoll DePaul University Abstract: This article argues that Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) produces for its viewers an abstracted sense of alienation with which they emotionally identify. To illustrate this claim, the narrative and formal presence of reification is traced in two key scenes, those in which the state performs experimental aversion therapy on Alexander DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) and publicly demonstrates its results. In particular, the demonstration scene invites the viewer to detect in its unfolding an operative distinction between theatrical and filmic reality impressions, in order to simultaneously (a) render visible the mystification present in the story world and (b) encourage the viewer to emotionally affirm and enjoy the very presence of that mystification. Whereas the mise-en-scène makes it clear to the viewer that both the treatment and the authority that produces it rely on the opacity of appearance, the scene raises this insight only to deem its exposure useless for the comprehension of reality. In turn, the scene emotionally flatters a social consciousness that regards external reality with cynicism and resentment.

n his 1976 essay on the ideological function of popular cinema, Thomas Elsaesser argues that A Clockwork Orange unconsciously reproduces for its viewers the negative emotions that structure their daily lives: In the film’s cynicism the spectator recognizes the negative experiences, the failures and disappointments of his own everyday life; a hostile impulse is allowed to avenge itself on a hated and incomprehensible world. On the other hand, the sentimentality enshrines and reinstates those feelings, hopes and wish-fulfilling dreams whose impossibility and failure the cynicism confirms. This in itself is a vicious circle, but one that gives pleasure because of the way it validates the spectator’s personal experience (‘yes, I know, that’s how it is’)—a validation that functions as an important criterion of realism in the cinema: it ‘feels’ true to life (i.e. to one’s negative response). (195)

Although the audience and political urgency of Elsaesser’s critique are both long gone, this type of

social relation he posits between the film and its audience remains a fruitful point of departure for miseen-scène analysis. Attending to the correlations between filmic meaning and social consciousness helps the critic more concretely situate a film’s formal and ideological elements, which reciprocally enriches the comprehension of both the film and the social totality in which it appears. With this approach in mind, I believe that if we take up Elsaesser’s symptomatic reading and expand upon its terms, we may better apprehend both the emotional negativity Elsaesser references and its formal presence within the film. I propose that we begin approaching this negativity with the general term, alienation. Two axioms of Elsaesser’s reading justify our use of this term in both social and formal registers: (1) that popular film participates in a socially dynamic “emotional structure” that displaces the contradictions of consumer society and “allows an alienated subjectivity to experience itself vicariously as an object” (172-173); and (2) that the form of A Clockwork Orange “has sealed MISE-EN-SCÈNE

James Driscoll

itself off from contact [with the spectator] by an emphatic construction of symmetry and order” and “gives itself the formal appearance of objectivity, autonomy, and the pure aesthetic perfection of closure” (197). In the first case, popular narrative film participates in a social field characterized by self-alienation; in the second case, the specific form of A Clockwork Orange expresses and participates in that alienation. Both these axioms and their insistence on autonomous objectivity bring to mind a specific type of social alienation called reification. Reification is a socio-historical state of being in which humanity collectively experiences the world as excessively objective. This state results from the extension of the commodity form to all corners of human life. In commodity production, the total mental and physical efforts of producing individuals are negated and transformed into quantitative objects that automatically and mysteriously claim existential independence. Upon their appearance both at the end of production and in the marketplace, commodified objects acquire in the eyes of producers and consumers what Georg Lukács, following Marx, calls a “phantom objectivity,” phantom in that their laws of exchange are experientially divorced from the material reality of their production (83). Although commodities originate in this material reality (comprised of workers, managers, labour, wages, etc.), they are experienced by individuals as consumptive ends whose origins remain inexplicable. When commodities become the primary means by which human society produces and sustains itself, material production becomes structurally alienated from the objects it produces.

that humanity can transcend the concrete particularity of production and master external reality in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, since the founding alienation between production and commodity remains operative in this extension, the proliferation of forms produced to anticipate and master reality actually intensifies the independence of the object enacted by the commodity form. Humanity is able to better anticipate and calculate reality precisely because its productive activity renders the world as something requiring anticipation and calculation. By consequence, it becomes impossible for individuals or institutions to truly comprehend the genesis of phenomena, since the world appears more and more to “come from” itself. A reified world appears to humans as entirely self-motored, or, in the words of Lukács, as “impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system” (89).

…the way the world appears obscures the social reality that produces that appearance.

Now, a positive outcome of the extension of the commodity form to all industry and culture is

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

For the purposes of this study, we may more simply define reification as a social alienation between appearance and reality: the way the world appears obscures the social reality that produces that appearance. Practically speaking, this alienation entails that the mechanical/technological, scientific, and cultural operations that facilitate our daily lives retain in their very appearance as operations a visible yet mystified independence from the world in which they operate. That is, the way things look while they function precludes our ability to fully comprehend their ontological and ethical position in social life. We see a clear example of this alienation between appearance and reality during the scene that depicts Alex undergoing for the first time the “Ludovico technique,” or a state-sponsored aversion therapy that combines subcutaneous injection with negative visual association. In this scene, Alex is

Reification and Alienated Form

strapped to a chair and forced to watch a series of violent films while his eyes are held open by metal clamps. As the films increase in gratuity, he begins to feel desperately ill, which the observing Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering) (Fig. 1) explains is the aim of the treatment; quantitative repetition will yield lasting negative association. In following Brodsky, the state is wagering that this experimental treatment will lead Alex to automatically reject violent behaviour upon his release, which will in turn verify that both the treatment, and the incumbent government sanctioning its use, can adequately regulate crime. Although the scene could easily be read as an allegory for post-war film spectatorship (a reading Elsaesser himself provides), what is of particular interest is the way the scene presents the technique as without any real origin, or as reified (Elsaesser 178).

of film is integral to the scene, for it leads the spectator to recognize in this relation an emotional truth. When Alex muses that “it’s funny how the colours of the world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen,” the viewer is presented with a riddle that feels insightful, yet simultaneously separates him or her from the wisdom lurking behind the words (Kubrick, ACWO). Thus the technique is successful, in narrative and spectatorial terms, precisely because its actuality (the relations between the representations and their scientific/authoritarian use) remains hidden by its very presentation as a technique. A later scene depicting Alex’s public debut as a cured subject offers a more complicated example of the reified alienation between appearance and reality. In this scene, an audience of caricatured authority

Alex’s public debut as a cured subject offers a more complicated example of the reified alienation between appearance and reality. Narratively, this presentation takes form in Dr. Branom’s (Madge Ryan) nefariously evasive responses to Alex’s inquiries about the treatment: “We’re just going to show you some films… Something like that…” (Kubrick, ACWO). Compositionally, however, the frame makes it clear that even if Branom does know something worth hiding, the treatment actually seems to work of its own accord. In particular, the plumes of camera light and smoke that emanate from behind the doctors (Fig. 1), which recall both Plato’s cave and Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory, impart a mystical connotation to the technique by signifying the familiar notion that the power of film cannot be rationally ascertained; “people have always loved stories” is one of the sterile phrases one thinks of here. This mystified relation of the treatment to the already-mystified cultural status

figures observes two staged confrontations between Alex and two actors. Given the theatrical nature of the demonstration, we might divide the scene into three “acts.” In the first act, a male actor insults and assaults Alex, who recoils in agonizing nausea at his impulse to strike back. In the second act, a half-nude actress appears and moves towards Alex in a seductive, aristocratic pose, which causes in him the same retreat seen in Act One. After it is satisfactorily observed that Alex is repelled from his natural instincts, the third act depicts the prison chaplain (Godfrey Quigley) and Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp) engaging in a debate concerning the morality of the treatment. Before attending to the form of the scene, it is important to emphasize that, narratively speaking, the demonstration possesses a pretense of non-mediation. The desired effect of the treatment,

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

James Driscoll

Fig. 1: A cast of doctors observe the initial treatment.

that Alex should become ill at the compulsion to violence and sex, is offered to the audience as self-evident call-and-response: Alex wishes to strike the offending actor and becomes sick; Alex desires to have sex with the actress and becomes sick. Since these responses do indeed take place, the display offers an undeniably immediate effect; it not only appears to work, it really does work. However, that the treatment works in appearance does nothing to help the audience or the spectator comprehend its reality. The search for this more total reality primarily begins in the form of questions: What is lost in the shift from qualitative person to quantitative subject? What sorts of connections were discovered and tested that led to the efficacy of this treatment? What do these connections, and the questions that led to them, say about the society in which this treatment occurs? What does it mean when appearance retains its relative independence from the reality it nonetheless affects? These questions regarding the ontology of the treatment are instantly nullified as pressing questions of social and institutional motivation. In the arena of 52

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

appearance, things are simpler: as the audience can plainly see, medical science, ambiguously administered through the penal system and the state, nonetheless produces a reduction in crime. As the Minister puts it at the end of his debate with the more qualitatively-minded chaplain, “the point is that it works!” (Kubrick, ACWO). As with all reified appearance, the demonstration offers the visible efficacy of the treatment as a seemingly independent appearance, the mystified independence of which prevents the audience from grasping the true reality of the treatment. Formally, this scene constructs the treatment as just such an independent appearance by rendering it an ironic theatrical production intended to captivate and mystify its audience. The third shot of the scene (Fig. 2) foregrounds the independence of the treatment’s appearance by introducing the spotlight as an autonomous element regulating the apparent immediacy between the demonstration and its audience. By placing the general spectator position behind the Minister and thus “inside” the display, the film em-

Reification and Alienated Form

Fig. 2: Reflexive camera placement addresses the viewer.

phasizes right away that the demonstration will influence the audience primarily through formal convention. The familiar pretenses essential to official demonstrations are exposed as dependent upon stylization. In the prior shot, Alex and the Minister are set within stable positions of authority, test subject, and audience. The naturalistic lighting and observational spatiality are familiar enough so as to settle the viewer into the position of the audience. However, in this third shot the spotlight is introduced as possessing its own line of sight and connotative force, which divides the general viewer from both the audience and the proceedings, and thus alienates the latter two within both frame and narrative. With mention of the general viewer position, it is crucial to pause and emphasize that this shot circumscribes the space in which the viewer experiences and participates in the remainder of the scene. By foregrounding the fact that the spotlight is largely responsible for establishing and maintaining the conventional relationship between the demonstration and its audience, the film guides the viewer to simultaneously share the experience of the audience

and perceive that experience as a mystified production. With his or her perception thus determined as a participatory act of negation, the viewer is led to actually construct the reification of the treatment within the diegesis. To grasp the process of this construction, it is useful to reference the distinction Christian Metz has raised between theatrical and filmic reality impressions. In keeping with the terminology of this study, this distinction is essentially a difference in alienated relations between spectator and medium: theatre spectators are alienated from the fiction onstage because they sit in the concrete presence of its production, while film spectators are immersed in filmic fiction because they sit alienated from its concrete production (Metz 13). While theatre spectators must engage with the “too real” movement of the players to get to the fiction, film allows its spectators to experience movement in refined form, localized on the screen, which lifts the “too real” mediation between spectator and fiction that hampers theatrical mimesis (8-9, 13). If we put these laborious reversals into our own terms, we could say that film makes reality itself MISE-EN-SCÈNE

James Driscoll

Fig. 3: Breaking the fourth wall to build diegetic mystification.

into an independent appearance, one whose psychological purchase on non-filmic reality is actually strengthened by that independence. Building upon the viewer-oriented reflexivity of the third shot (Fig. 2), Act One utilizes these differing reality impressions to begin developing the diegetic reification of the treatment. The actor (John Clive) appears from behind the curtain as Terry Tucker’s “Overture to the Sun” plays on the score. His wired demeanor combines with the music to evoke a caricatured image of thespianism. The musical lift in the actor’s intonation as he greets Alex with an insult (“Hello, heap of dirt”) strengthens this sense of parody, distancing the performance to the point of ridiculousness and prompting Alex to amusedly look out into the audience (Fig. 3). “Pooh, you don’t wash much, do you,” the actor continues, “judging by horrible smell…” (Kubrick, ACWO). While completing this line, the actor gives a playful, knowing glance to the audience (Fig. 3), and a cut suddenly places the camera behind the actors. In this shot (Fig. 4), the vantage of which repeats in various shots throughout the scene, Kubrick reproduces the 54

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

description of the spotlight Alex gives in the novel, that of “like one big pool” (Burgess 124). The point of view of the diegetic audience is now reversed: the “big pool” of light, flowing from the spotlight set above and between the heads of the two figures, encompasses the figures and sets them apart from the stage and the audience, which now resides in the background. Whereas the previous shot is seen from the side of the audience, and thus evokes a familiar sense of shared social reality, this perspective sits with the appearance of the demonstration. Keeping in mind the Metzian distinction between theatrical and filmic reality, we can see how the cut in question transforms the demonstration from an immediate theatrical reality into a more distanced cinematic appearance. In the shot prior to the actor’s entrance, the Minister’s line of sight follows and combines with the spotlight to imply point-ofview towards the stage (Fig. 5). Audience members throughout the scene are shown in a similar medium close-up, suggesting reciprocity between stage and diegetic audience. However, with these outward

Reification and Alienated Form

Fig. 4: “Like one big pool…”

looks by Alex and the actor (Fig. 3), the film compromises that concretely present relationship between stage and audience and withdraws behind the players (Fig. 4). As a result, the perception of the general viewer, who cannot but notice these differences in vantage and form, divides the display into theatrical and cinematic spaces, each of which retain a sense of their opposite; the stark theatrical reality of the players becomes its own negative filmic image. In the movement between these two shots, the inherent live uncertainty of the theatre is raised, negated, and combined with sublime formal stasis. Since this reverse vantage repeats throughout the scene as a structural principle of the frame, we are justified in considering its combination of theatrical and cinematic realities as integral to how the general spectator understands the remainder of the scene. Henceforth, the real movement implicit to Metz’s theatrical reality, which is employed here to lend a live and unmediated credibility to a legal and scientific determination, retains rhetorical spontaneity while commencing securely atop formal inertia. Keeping equally in mind the presence of the general viewer, whose perception serves as a lever between these two realities, we are able to see that the diegetic audience watches actual, present reality as though it were a performance. Thus, by introducing, separating, and retaining these two reality impressions within the same diegetic space, the film renders the treatment a “phantom objectivity,” or an

independent appearance that (a) takes place in reality, (b) influences reality, yet (c) retains its independence from reality in a way that cannot be readily comprehended. The theatrical nature of the display absorbs the narrative/diegetic requirement that the demonstration be a live and immediate occurrence, while the cinematic glimpse into the mechanics of that occurrence betrays for the general viewer its status as theatrical, or, in the language of this study, as an independent appearance obscuring for the diegetic audience the actuality of the treatment. Now, as I have already emphasized, the divisions these shots (Fig. 2, Fig. 4) enact between the diegetic audience and the demonstration are only meaningful if oriented towards and noticed by the general viewer. But what exactly is their meaning? What exactly does the viewer notice, other than the discrepancy between appearance and reality? If we admit that this film is likely more than a didactic endeavour, it is equally likely that the presence of reification in these scenes serves a deeper purpose than the analogic critique of concepts. Here we return to Elsaesser’s strategy of treating the film and its form as social phenomena. On the one hand, the film offers this foregrounded separation between audience and demonstration as an exposure of the falsity of reified appearance. The spectator could thus very well productively comprehend this exposure as a modest political awakening. On the other hand, however, the film may simply offer this exposure to the general viewer as a negative knowledge, as an exposure with no purpose beyond itself. Such negative exposure would then encourage in the viewer an emotional fixation on the very fact of this separation. I argue that the formal production of this fixation is indeed the function of the present scene. To better understand this fixation, we might briefly touch upon the emotional experience of independent appearances in a reified world. In everyday reified life, the inability to comprehend the difference between appearance and reality does not produce MISE-EN-SCÈNE

James Driscoll

Fig. 5: Shots of audience vantage anchor a sense of live theatre spectatorship.

straw dupes awash in mystification, but instead leads individuals to emotionally register and resent the very presence of the distinction. “It doesn’t matter” could very well be the mantra of a reified mind. Thus when Elsaesser writes that the spectator of A Clockwork Orange rails in unconscious enjoyment against “a hated and incomprehensible world,” he points to the notion shared by reified individuals that external reality, because of its dependence on the real but insoluble distinction between appearance and reality, is ultimately inexplicable and indifferent to comprehension. It is on this level that we must approach the real meaning of this scene. The “pure aesthetic perfection of closure” particular to the film’s form functions to reactivate for its viewers this emotional experience of a hostilely independent world (Elsaesser 197). With this connection between form and reified consciousness in mind, I posit that these formal operations found in Act One prepare the spectator to experience the alienation between appearance and reality as an emotional truth. In order to grasp how this experience operates in the remainder of the 56

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

scene, it is important to clarify how the experience of the general spectator helps produce the diegetic reification presently developing. In the first place, the diegetic audience experiences the real and present demonstration of a real technique from an estranged, contemplative position. They are given the demonstration of an authoritarian-scientific process by actors bathed in spotlight. The reality of the treatment, its scientific and social basis, is thus reified by the appearance of its display, which the diegetic audience in fact understands as the reality of the treatment. Now, again, the experience of the spectator actually provides the audience with its own reified experience. For the spectator, the representation includes (a) the appearance, (b) its mystificatory nature, and (c) the understanding that the mystification is nonetheless reality for the audience. Here we must emphasize how the necessities of narrative spectatorship help transform the diegetic alienation of the scene into an emotional abstraction for the spectator. Whereas the diegetic audience does not reflexively experience the demonstration as a bizarre independent appearance, the

Reification and Alienated Form

general spectator does experience it as such and, as a narrative spectator, must still heed its pretenses for the sake of narrative. Since the spectator recognizes the display as an alienated discrepancy but is barred by the irreversibility of narrative time from using that knowledge, the alienation itself decouples from the diegesis/narrative and becomes an abstracted feeling from which the spectator may derive pleasure. Act Two further develops this emotional abstraction by pairing the intrusion of the actress (Virginia Wetherell) with the equally intrusive return of Wendy (credited as Walter) Carlos’ electronic treatment of “Funeral for Queen Mary.” Despite Peter J. Rabinowitz’s passing but suggestive remark that “Funeral” “launches the film and returns, in a variety of guises, as a leitmotif throughout,” little attention has been paid to Kubrick’s use of this song (112). In addition to producing the alienating sense of awe central to the film’s opening moments, each repetition of the theme accompanies a narrative turning point rooted in confrontation: the conclusion of the attack on Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee) and Mrs. Alexander (Adrienne Corri); Alex’s menacing reproach of Dim (Warren Clarke) in the Korova; Act Two of the present scene; and Alex’s fateful, dramatically ironic run-in with Dim and Georgie (James Marcus) on the waterfront. Each repetition relegates the general spectator to an alienated position of awe that requires a not-knowing, or an affective aliena-

Fig. 6: An intrusion of awe.

tion that insists on conflict as intellectually irreducible. In the terms of our narrative/emotion tandem, “Funeral” both launches conflicts for the sake of narrative movement and abstracts the particularities of those conflicts into a singular emotional state. The invading figure of the actress formalizes this mystified state and lends it an abstract figurative credibility. As the actress moves towards Alex, the circle of spotlight that follows her eventually vacates the frame, leaving her figure shadowed against a stark black background (Fig. 6). Her movement is consequently abstracted and held in the perception of the viewer. Since, as Metz points out, spectators always experience movement as real—that is, intentional, meaningful—the static motion of the actress functions as the figurative embodiment of the emotional alienation being produced by the scene (8-9). The elsewhere or without “Funeral” evokes condenses onto a figure that is simply moving, which in turn renders the alienating and sublime connotations of music and visual form as simply real. That is, through this play of movement and high-relief, the awe and alienation connoted by the intruding actress can themselves intrude as enigmatically self-evident emotions. This sense of enigma and the separation it maintains are further connoted by shots which place Alex and the actress in a kind of transparent relief against the source of the spotlight (Fig. 7), causing its peripheral rays to shroud them from the diegetic world. Act Three provides the climactic experience of this abstracted alienation by conflating a narrative confrontation between the Minister and chaplain with a thematic confrontation between appearance and reality. As the Minister pedantically explains to the audience what they have just seen, the chaplain emerges from the audience and stands on the right of the frame with his hand on Alex’s left shoulder. He argues that Alex “has no real choice” in the matter and that this “self-abasement” is nothing more

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

James Driscoll

than an over-quantified intervention in the ambiguous struggles of personal morality (Kubrick, ACWO). The chaplain concludes that by acting good out of programmed compulsion, Alex “ceases to be a creature capable of moral choice” (Kubrick, ACWO). In the terms of this study, the chaplain argues that although Alex will appear to be good, to really be good means grasping and occupying a deeper reality. During the chaplain’s appeal, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Alex (Fig. 8), a structure that will serve as the compositional anchor for the rest of the scene. Given the dual inclusion of the chaplain’s hand and the implied off-screen figure of the Minister, this shot stages the colloquial battle between devil and angel, with visual advantage afforded to the chaplain. Alex is visibly disconcerted, perhaps even irritated, at the chaplain’s remarks, and looks to the implied off-screen space of the Minister for assurance. As the Minister counters the chaplain’s appeal to the virtue of choice by dismissing ethical “subtleties” and emphasizing qualitative gain as its own virtue, Alex begins to smile with familiar satisfaction at the force of this ready-made answer. The diegetic audience responds with candid applause and Alex, smiling even wider, looks out at their off-screen presence, which is located in the next shot behind the glare of the spotlight, reproducing a vantage of the spectacle similar to that seen in Fig. 4.

Fig. 7: “She came towards me…”

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Up until this point, the chaplain’s hand has remained on Alex’s left shoulder, and the Minister now counters the gesture by placing his own hand on Alex’s right shoulder. The medium close-up returns (Fig. 9), with visible changes in prominence afforded to the implied figures and thematic functions of the two men. The arm of the Minister now extends from Alex’s shoulder into off-screen space, while the chaplain’s hand has receded to the right edge of the frame. Alex’s line of sight follows the angle of the Minister’s arm, and the Minister gives Alex’s shoulder a number of squeezes as his monologue increases in passion. That the Minister can with impunity denote this new Alex as a “true Christian” and proclaim “reclamation, joy before the angels of God” attests to the power of stolid speech in such an over-quantitative, reified society: never mind the qualitative contradictions, “the point is that it works!” (Kubrick, ACWO). Rapturous warmth surges into Alex’s smile (Fig. 10), a glowing recognition that the certainty of the Minister (and the state force behind him) will ensure that “the very next day, your friend and humble narrator was a free man” (Kubrick, ACWO). We have now arrived at the climax of our posited emotional identification. In order to fully grasp the consequences of this brutally calculated sequence, let us focus on the relationship it threads between identification and composition. To begin

Fig. 8: The chaplain objects.

Reification and Alienated Form

Fig. 9: The Minister retorts.

with, I contend that the function of this final act is to have the general spectator identify with the Minister’s words through the figure of Alex. This thesis requires that we look below the surface of obvious character identification and grasp what Alex abstractly represents within these present frames. Elsaesser argues that through his specific function as narrator, Alex encourages “a subtle degree of jovial complicity that overtly appears to acknowledge his dependence on the audience’s approval, while also efficiently ensuring the reverse, namely their desire to be led in their responses by his judgments and values” (179). In the case of this sequence, the desire in question is a desire of the spectator to be led like Alex into a “jovial” consent to reified authority. The minimalism of these medium close-ups (Figs. 8-10) fosters and gratifies this desire by reducing the conflict between the chaplain and Minister to disembodied speech and its visible effect on a privileged narrative figure. The capacity for the voice to activate an emotional flourish is employed to funnel a negative affirmation into the figure of Alex, which in turn leads the spectator to identify with Alex in two mutually reinforcing senses: (1) as a figure who has beaten the system by cynically playing along with it, and (2) as a figure who consents to a system that will turn out to be profoundly bad for him, as is coldly foreshadowed by the Minister removing his hand from Alex’s shoulder and vacating the frame as the diegetic audience is roused to hysteria (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10: “… a free man…”

In the first case, the spectator sees in Alex’s smile a powerful and, most importantly, free assertion of his or her own impotent cynicism; in the second case, the Minister’s outburst, “the point is that it works!” leads the spectator to delight in the fact that his or her humble narrator has now entered into an inescapable fate. In both cases, identification with Alex is a gleeful recognition that the lies of appearance always win. Facilitated by this formal abstraction, the spectator thus experiences in these concluding moments the emotional verification of an experiential truth: in a world run by independent appearances, appearance is reality. The chaplain may have a point, but what the Minister says goes. This equivocation is of course one of bad faith; it is not that appearance actually is reality, but that it might as well be. Here we recall that our general spectator is not a mystified dupe, but one who likes how badly reification feels. “It doesn’t matter” is in this sequence not a concession, but a perverse affirmation fused with libidinal electricity. The tragic dimension of this experience, if we understand tragedy as the staging of a foregone conclusion, is that the very condition of narrative film as an irreversible duration has led us here. As I have argued above, the nature of narrative time, that one has no control over it, has largely helped this appearance/reality alienation take on its emotional charge

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

James Driscoll

of inevitability. Hence the tragedy: where the general spectator position affirms the Ludovico technique as a simple narrative turn, so too is alienation pleasurably avowed. We need only posit two registers to which the Minister’s declaration might belong to grasp this inextricable relation between narrative duration and ideological function. On the one hand, the narrative itself only requires that the spectator understand the success of the treatment; “The point is that works!” is for the narrative merely an emphatic determination needed to keep the story moving. On the other hand, in the register of the surplus enjoyment we have proposed, “The point is that it works!” is a layered testimony to the pleasure of determinacy itself; the emotional determinism produced by the scene is experientially verified by real

ideological certainty. Implicit to this captivation, the stakes of which are expressed here by the “rooting” of the spectator, is a desire to experience a world beyond intervention. A Clockwork Orange, both as a film text and in its historical British reception analyzed by Elsaesser and Charles Barr, reflects Baudry’s theory of a desire to experience the unfolding of representations from the position in which one experiences temporally irreversible reality (Baudry 121). Dawson notes the presence and satiety of this desire when describing A Clockwork Orange in terms of Kubrick’s talent for creating “closed universes” (qtd. in Chapman 135). She attributes the power of the film to the way “it so devastatingly reduces the audience to the level of the characters, all of them perfectly adapted to the cynical system which contains them” (qtd. in

A Clockwork Orange conflates the intuitive sense of historically present time with a specific, selfcontained, and alienated world. narrative time. Thus, with his remarkably impenetrable phrase, the Minister produces a climactic reification of abstract feeling and narrative duration, providing the spectator with an emotional and experiential affirmation of a world “impervious to human intervention.” Before concluding, I want to briefly provide and contextualize an historical verification of my thesis that A Clockwork Orange offers viewers a way to pleasurably experience the alienation they encounter in daily reality. We note a critical-historical experience of this type in British critic Jan Dawson’s observation, contemporary with the film’s release, that “by the time Alex regains consciousness in his hospital bed, Kubrick has us rooting for him to resume his thuggery” (qtd. in Barr 31). What Dawson expresses here, through her use of the phrase “by the time,” is an experience of captivation imbued with

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Chapman 136). In other words, A Clockwork Orange conflates the intuitive sense of historically present time with a specific, self-contained, and alienated world. It provides the opportunity for aesthetic abandon to a distant present. With this historical example of British criticism, it becomes clear that the attention to the movement of mise-en-scène in A Clockwork Orange helps to better comprehend not only its formal operations or ideological functions, but also its place in cultural history. Therefore, I want to conclude by dwelling on the problem of method in mise-en-scène analysis. Elsaesser’s work is instructive here. Elsaesser proceeds by situating A Clockwork Orange within a concrete social totality to which equally belong the film, its viewers, and the complexes that form and surround their interaction. This delineation importantly entails that filmic form does not reflect but rather

Reification and Alienated Form

participates in the social field. Throughout his treatment of the film’s form, Elsaesser shows a clear understanding of this distinction and consistently portrays the film and its mise-en-scène as socially dynamic processes. There is not a single trace of forced analogic exegesis in his analysis of the frame. This study strives to walk the same line Elsaesser threads between conceptual application and authentic comprehension. One of the foundational antinomies of mise-en-scène analysis, which harkens back to problems inherent to the New Criticism of literature, is summed up by the following question: Do meanings ascertained by close textual analysis exist in the art object, or are they forced onto the object by the critic? I do not believe this question can be adequately answered, but then I am not convinced it needs to be. In fact, I suspect that this contradiction is precisely what animates the practice of

close analysis. But I do insist that what makes this contradiction methodologically tenable is the critical decision to place the object at the level of totality, to denote it explicitly as an object taking part in the formal, temporal, and ideological exchanges that comprise the paradoxical infinity of a monist social world. This assumption affords the critic a view that is as inclusive as it is incisive, since it only asks that the critic consider in all theoretical decisions the humanist category of the for. Totality critique is a critique for humanity. Skeptics of my suggestion will be surprised at the extent to which this orientation helps film scholarship generally avoid regressing into theoretical exegesis, inductive analogy, or positivistic sociology. It is my modest hope that the study of mise-en-scène might be further explored in this key.

Works Cited Barr, Charles. “Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and the Critics.” Screen, vol. 13, no. 2, 1972, pp. 17-31. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Apparatus.” Translated by Jean Andrews and Betrand Augst. Camera Obscura, vol. 1, 1976, pp. 104-126.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. “‘A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal’: Music in A Clockwork Orange.” Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, edited by Stuart Y. McDougal, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 109-130.

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. Norton, 1962. Carlos, Walter. “Title Music From A Clockwork Orange.” A Clockwork Orange: Music From the Soundtrack. Warner Bros., 1972. Chapman, James. “‘A bit of the old ultra-violence’: A Clockwork Orange.” British Science Fiction Cinema, edited by I.Q. Hunter, Routledge, 1999, pp. 128-137. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Screen Violence: Emotional Structure and Ideological Function in ‘A Clockwork Orange.’” Approaches to Popular Culture, edited by Christopher Bigsby, Hodder & Stoughton, 1976, pp. 171-200. Kubrick, Stanley, director. A Clockwork Orange. Warner Bros., 1971. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, 1971. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor, University of Chicago Press, 1974.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration From the Shadows: Nosferatu and the German Expressionist Aesthetic William F. Burns Brookdale Community College Abstract: Nearly a century removed from its genesis, German expressionist filmmaking is still discussed extensively today by scholars and critics. The expressionist aesthetic is perhaps the era’s most enduring legacy. Examining what influenced directors like Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang, and F.W. Murnau can identify the factors that helped shape the expressionist “look.” Expressionism in German film began after World War I amid a struggling economy. However, the expressionist movement in Germany predates the war and can be traced to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the brush strokes of Edvard Munch, and the sketches of Alfred Kubin. All three, who have their own rich legacies, represent the confluence of philosophy and art. On screen, it is how existentialism becomes cinematic expressionism. Of the numerous films made during this era, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is one of the more enduring. This examination of the film demonstrates how Murnau’s work was influenced by a philosopher, a painter, and an illustrator. Murnau would craft a world of shadows that is still horrifying today. His movies in Germany would touch many of the filmmakers who would leave for America to tell their stories in Hollywood.

hroughout history, the symbolism and metaphor of the shadow has long been a part of cultures and discourse. In Plato’s Republic, Book VII contains the Allegory of the Cave where two men sit chained in a cavern. Outside, the movement of their captors is illuminated by a fire, which casts shadows on the cave wall. The men perceive the shadows and the echoes of the voices of their abductors as reality (Plato 514a-517c). Plato reveals that these shadows are not reality, and the men, like all of us, have an “imperfect perception of the universe, of the reality that transcends the sensible world of appearances” (Franklin 177). Plato’s symbolic cave would be transformed over time by artisans and philosophers who would recognize the metaphor and meaning that can be hidden in the darkness. In Germany, between the World Wars, filmmakers imbued with disillusionment and fueled

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

by a revolution in thought would push the boundaries of their relatively new medium and create a style that is still influential today: expressionism. At the core of the German Expressionist movement is the existential philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose effect on art and those who created the films of this era cannot be understated. On the screen, many films exemplify the melding of art and philosophy, but the shadows found in director F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) are an example worthy of further examination. When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra confronts his shadow, at first he states, “What do I care about my shadow! Let it chase after me! I run away and escape from it” (Nietzsche 385). However, Nietzsche eventually comes to grip with the fact that the human spirit must not run away from its shadow, but must accept it. Nietzsche makes the shadow a symbol of

From the Shadows

wisdom (Franklin 179). The power of the metaphorical shadow is strengthened in these contexts. In the hands of an expressionist director, who is versed in existentialism, the power of the shadow as a cinematic device begins to take shape. To comprehend the essence of expressionist filmmaking, one must explore the influence of existentialism on the German psyche. To understand the effect German Expressionism would have on the art of filmmaking worldwide, it is critical to examine the origins and legacy of the movement. Cast from the rubble of the First World War with films such as Nosferatu at the umbra, German Expressionism used shadow as both a metaphor and as an artistic element. Just like a shadow, German Expressionism would begin with a ray of light. Referring to light as the “First Aesthetic Field” in his book Sight, Sound, Motion, Herbert Zettl states that light is not only essential for life, but is essential for film. He refers to film as a “pure light show.” Zettl contrasts how the “materia” of theatre is people and objects, and how the “materia” of film is light. He further states, “lighting…the deliberate manipulation of light and shadows for a specific communication purpose, [is] paramount to the aesthetic of television and film” (Zettl 19). Zettl adds that the function of light depends on the control of shadows and that properly controlling shadows does as much to create a mood in a scene as does music (32). This belief takes on even more significance when one recalls that the expressionist era was a silent one. In reality, music did play an important part in the exhibition and, in some cases, the filming of a silent picture. The mood created by the manipulation of light in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Metropolis (1927) and Nosferatu was only one of the shadows which were cast upon the set. Understanding the dire economic realities of this time will provide context and perhaps a greater appreciation for the mise-enscène of Nosferatu and other films of the era. The

other shadow, looming outside the studio walls, was more ominous than a vampire. Germany has been said to have “discovered” cinema during the war. The German government was the first to grasp the impact that film can have on an audience. Films portrayed the German soldier as a friend of the occupied civilian, or helped recruit Poles to fight the Czar’s army in the East (Cinema Europe). A new unit of the Army was organized to make films. This unit captured the events on the battlefield and in the skies with great precision and innovation. The Kaiser and German General Eric Ludendorff were concerned they could lose the propaganda war, especially against the likes of Chaplin. As a result, Ludendorff created a new company, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (known as “UFA”), to control the propaganda message. This company had the backing of bankers and the interest of filmmakers. UFA was able to take control of the distribution established by the faltering Danish Nordisk company (UFA/Company History). Though they never created the propaganda films Ludendorff wanted, they did create the escapism the German people craved as the tide of war turned against them. In addition, the creation of UFA would help establish a business model that not only would ensure the company’s survival after the war, but also would put it in position to compete on an international scale. Once the guns fell silent, the German film community no longer looked to Europe as a source of competition, or even a market to make money (Cook 90). The European film industry was in shambles and it would take years before it would recover. The economies of both victor and vanquished were also in ruins. It was in this anguish that the existentialists, who had learned from Nietzsche to question the foundations of their society, found an outlet in film. The Germany that existed after November 11, 1918 was a very different country than the one that went to war in August 1914. The minimum estimate of dead has been placed at over 1,800,000, which is MISE-EN-SCÈNE

William F. Burns

equivalent of 12% of the German pre-war population. This number does not include civilian deaths (Gilbert 541). The impact of this loss of population is magnified when coupled with the loss of materials which could have led to a quick post-war recovery. For example, 48% of German iron production and 16% of coal production were lost, as were all pre-war colonies around the world that had provided the nation with natural resources and trade (80). The effect of this loss was devastating to the German nation. Versailles cut those wounds even deeper. As the cracks were forming in the new Weimar government, the people of Germany were faced with cultural upheaval as well. The expressionist art of the pre-war era was popular only with a small minority of the population and during the war these artists were subject to the Kaiser’s anti-culture censorship (Luft 375). After the war, censorship was greatly scaled back and for a period of about eighteen months, films about prostitution, drug addiction and images of nudity were prevalent in the cinema (Cinema Europe). This removal of boundaries also led to an increase in experimentation, artistic freedom and a redefinition of the role of art in a culture. As a result, the avant-garde became acceptable by the government through their inaction (Evans 122). All around Germany and in various forms, art was mimicking the unrest and uncertainty of the people. Art, along with theatrical productions, jazz music, and literature, were now becoming outlets for creativity and frustrations. Art was rebelling – and the cinema was the next logical place for artists to express their discontent with society (Cinema Europe). Economic necessity and an infusion of existential theories helped created the expressionist aesthetic in Post-War Germany. German sets and shadows helped to create what was known a “Stimmung,” or “mood,” achieved through the use of “chiaroscuro” lighting (Cook 94). This technique,

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

which emphasizes high contrast lighting, has its origins in post-Renaissance art of 1530-1610. The Italian term means “light and dark,” and due to his exceptional use of the style is also referred to as “Rembrandt lighting” (Zettl 44). The technique utilizes strong contrasts with deep graduations and subtle variations of light and dark (Barsam 100). This description sounds very much like the shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s Cave. Rembrandt’s painting, Old Woman Reading (1655), is an example of chiaroscuro. The light illuminating the face of the old woman seems to be coming from the book she is holding. Shadows are present in the lines of her face and the farther the eye travels from her brightly lit nose, the darker the image becomes. She is wearing a shroud over her head and the outline of the dark cloth is still visible, but the intensity of the light fades for her image has a fast gradation from light to darkness (Zettl 44). Embracing this use of lighting, Director F.W. Murnau would use the power of the shadow to create the world of his vampire. Like other works of the era, including the influential masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu would have a connection to expressionist art that was influenced by the existentialist philosophy of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s revolution in thought caused many to question the purpose of one’s life (Kellner 10). Existentialism also allowed many to come to the realization that political, religious and governmental institutions were corrupt, leading to the belief that much of what people accepted as truth was, in fact, false. Nietzsche empowered his followers, who ascribed to his notion that “God is dead” and only man, the so-called Übermensch, is to give one’s life meaning (Solomon 67). Nietzsche believed art was empowering and that, “Art is to supplant religion” (Flynn 41), and humanity is to be empowered. With this type of powerful rhetoric fueling their passions, it is easy to see how,

From the Shadows

Fig. 1: Count Orlok’s animal-like features. Still images from Nosferatu (1922), the non-restored version, which is in the public domain.!

from the shadows of war, such creativity would emerge. Nosferatu is essentially an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, yet with some noticeable differences. The antagonist is Count Orlok, not Dracula, and his demise does not come at the end of a stake like Dracula; instead, he vaporizes in the sun. The reasons for these and other changes are not artistic. Stoker’s widow, Florence, refused to give her permission for the film’s producers to make Dracula and Murnau needed to make changes to avoid a lawsuit. After the release of Nosferatu, Florence sued and won. She was able to get most of the copies of the film destroyed (Papapetros 32). Fortunately, prints did survive to give the audience a chilling tale that is the archetype for all cinematic vampires to follow: Bella Lugosi, Christopher Lee, The Lost Boys (1987) and “Edward Cullen” from Twilight (2008) all, at some level, are connected to Murnau’s vampire. Nosferatu is meticulously crafted; each captured image is carefully constructed. In his 1995 book, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, author Leon Barsacq states the one word that could be used to describe all expressionist directors is “premeditation.” He notes that Murnau left nothing to chance; “every aspect of nature, every house front, every view of the castle (all seen at a certain angle), is calculated to evoke anguish and terror” (31). The shadows on the screen that would tell the story of the

cinema’s first vampire are perhaps so terrifying because of what shadows mean to the human mind. The film stars Gustav von Wangenheim as Hutter, the protagonist. Gretta Schroder plays Nina, his young bride, and Max Schreck is the Count. The screenplay is written by Henrik Galeen. At its heart, Nosferatu is many things. It is a visual example of the melding of expressionist art influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s existentialism. It is an allegory about humanity’s fear of death (Catania 233). It is also a metaphor for a Germany stuck between two realities. Orlok is the past; he represents a system that fed off of its subjects. The Count has a title, land, wealth, and even servants to blindly do his bidding. He lives in a world that is crumbling around him, and the scenery adds to this feeling. He needs to feed; his current surroundings are no longer adequate, and he must change. Ultimately, this change brings about his demise, but not before the innocent is sacrificed. This powerful message was not lost on the German people, who, like all of us, not only fear death but fear the unknown. The uncertainty of the Weimar Republic, and the decay of the society and culture that had been part of their existence for generations were frightening thoughts. Would their journey parallel Nina’s which would lead to their ultimate sacrifice? Alternatively, would they be like Hutter – lost and alone with even more uncertainty ahead? The shadows in Nosferatu are like another

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

William F. Burns

character. Hidden in the darkness, alongside the vampire, lurks the paralyzing fear of disorder, uncertainty upheaval, and the unknown. The film is perhaps one of the more wellknown expressionist efforts. Even though most contemporary filmgoers may have never seen it in its entirety, they have seen some of the more memorable images it contains. Much of the terror is due to the work of Art Director Albin Grau. The claws, rodent teeth, and bat-like ears of Count Orlok are the creation of Grau (Fig. 1). The eerie and unsettling quality of the scenery has been attributed to Grau’s friendship with one of the founders of the German art group Der Blaue Reiter, Alfred Kubin (Elsaesser 80). The features of Count Dracula in the original novel were not animal-like. Why then would Grau create a “creature?” Perhaps his inspiration for Orlok’s look came from his connection to Kubin. The Austrian writer and illustrator had a tendency to create the grotesque in his works. He was influenced heavily by Nietzsche and shared an anguish-filled childhood, similar to expressionist painter Edvard Munch. The Norwegian’s work touched many artisans in Germany, some of whom would craft the mise-en-scène of the expressionist movement, most notably the painted sets of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Barsacq 25). In examining the art of Munch and Kubin, it is no wonder the two artists found solace in the philosopher’s writings, which also resonated with the German people who, themselves were trying to emerge from the shadows of war. Kubin would frequently have animals as a central element of his writing and distorted figures with ghastly and sometimes animal-like qualities in his artwork. Kubin created an anti-utopian world of his own for his book, The Other Side (1909). In the story, animals take over his fictional town when people are unable to overcome pestilence as well as “moral and pathological epidemics” (Gosetti-Ferencei 50). The animals represent devo-

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Fig. 2: Examples of the anthropomorphic creatures of Alfred Kubin’s illustrations: The Egg (1902), Danger (1901), Every Night We Are Haunted by a Dream (1902-03).

From the Shadows

lution of humanity, much in the same way the animal-like appearance of Nosferatu is representative of our primeval connections. Orlok is a parasite feeding to quench an insatiable need for blood. To the German people, he is the necrotic dissolution of the status quo. The symbolism is apparent, similar to what has been described as a “Dionysian insatiability that is revealed to operate beneath the apparent order” in the works of Alfred Kubin (51). The reference to the “Dionysian” is yet another way the expressionists link to existentialism. Nietzsche believed creativity came as result of the tension that existed between the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” forces that exist in the world. Named after the Greek gods, whose traits are characterized in drama and tragedy, “The Apollonian…stresses the gentle reign of reason and intellect, pushing life to a somewhat unnatural ordering. The Dionysian is its exact opposite–it is governed by emotions and particularly passions, sometimes whipped to a self-destructive frenzy of excess” (“Nietzsche – The Dionysian Impulse”). Nietzsche called the Apollonian and Dionysian dynamic “art forces of nature” (Clegg 433). This tension would give rise to the aesthetic that would characterize Nosferatu and the other expressionist films of the era. A number of Kubin’s drawings are the melding of people with animal qualities. Perhaps the illustrator’s friendship with The Metamorphosis author Franz Kafka may be at the root of this tendency: “Kubin’s figures of animals incongruously coupled with human figures …the gesture and physical arrangements of torture, the alignment of violence, fear and senselessness with the visible estrangement of the individual, are familiar to the readers of Kafka” (49). Many of Kubin’s illustrations are black and white with deep shadows and contrasts or have muted tones. The Egg (1902), Danger (1901), Every Night We Are Haunted by a Dream (1902-03), Murder Scene (unknown), The Woman in White (1902), Dance with Death (1903), and Self Observation (1901) are just a small sample of the

hundreds of drawings that either anthropomorphize creatures, are a scathing satire of society, are grotesque, disturbing or, in some cases, are humorous (Fig. 2). Kubin’s work has been referred to as, “part of the ‘mental furniture’ of Berlin’s pioneer filmmakers” (Adlmann 121). For the artist, creating shadows and negative space are essential in these types of drawings. Kubin was no stranger to film; he was under consideration to design the sets for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Eisner The Haunted Screen 18). Kubin had also been hired to design the sets for another groundbreaking German film, The Golem (1920) (Adlmann 121). However, Kubin never finished the project and quit when delay after delay in production wore down his patience. The preliminary drawings he created for the film would be used in The Other Side (Papapetros 11). Some of the images in the book would resemble the film’s scenery, and several scenes in Nosferatu seem to resemble Kubin’s illustrations. One scene of note is when Hutter is making his way through the forest into Orlok’s domain. Travelling in a carriage, Hutter is told by the driver he will not go further because they are near the land of the phantoms. Hutter, scoffing, walks on and crosses a bridge. Shortly thereafter, he is met by another carriage: this one with a mysterious driver who orders him to get in. Using trick photography, Murnau speeds up the pace of the carriage, to Hutter’s dismay. As the carriage makes its way into a wooded area, the film image is shown in negative, with the carriage appearing dark in a brightly lit wood. The scene has been referred to as “Murnau’s unsettling journey into the darkest of existential luminal territories” (234). Critics note that Hutter’s crossing scene “provides a possible reference to Alfred Kubin’s fantastic pictures of coaches traveling through the forest…that creates the chaos of light and shadow in which Kubin excels…Murnau’s source could be Kubin’s The Road to Zwickledt” (234). In addition to the visual reference, the use of special visual MISE-EN-SCÈNE

William F. Burns

effects is an example of how the cinematic image can make allusion without dialogue. The motif of jerky, fast movement and the negative image into woods make the viewer aware that the ruler of the land of the phantoms has great power. This technique is an example of how, in a very short time, expressionist filmmaking evolved. This evolution can be further illustrated in how “Caligari’s expressionism was mainly graphic, Nosferatu’s is almost purely cinematic, relying upon camera angles, lighting and editing rather than production design” (Cook 101). This is not to say that the production design is unimportant to the film. Nosferatu, though a fantasy/horror film, has what author David A. Cook calls a “naturalness.” He adds that the composition of shots and the integrating of the characters and the landscape are part of the reason for this “feeling” (101). Before he made films, Murnau studied art (Petrie 72). There is little doubt that Murnau was well aware of the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. In fact, Munch and Murnau shared similar themes. As the viewer examines a Munch painting or watches Nosferatu, a strong sense of voyeurism is present on the canvas and on the screen. “Given Murnau’s training as an art historian, this linking could well have been stimulated by Edvard Munch’s famous trompe l’oeil painting The Vampire, in which what at first sight is seen to be a consoling caress is seen

at second sight to be the attack of a vampire” (Franklin 181). Munch created several versions of The Vampire, as he often did with his work. Some are painted with darker pigments than others, but each makes the vampire’s act almost romantic and erotic. Murnau, in addition to Grau, also had cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner behind the camera. This collaboration is significant because Wagner had the ability to shoot films with “realistic” feel. He utilized chiaroscuro lighting, but his palette had a subtle, wider range of greys than many of his contemporaries (100). As noted, the use of shadow is pivotal in the film and is what makes it so terrifying. Though the chiaroscuro lighting dominates most of the film, the climactic end epitomizes how Murnau utilized the shadow as a storytelling and symbolic device. In the climax, Count Orlok is living in Bremen across from Hutter and Nina. It is late and Hutter has fallen asleep on a chair. Nina, pacing, looks out the window – she sees Orlok watching her through a multi-paned window. Framing Orlok in such a way is symbolic; the panes appear to be bars representing the un-dead prison Nosferatu is trapped in for eternity. Though frightened, Nina sends Hutter to get help, setting her trap. Orlok makes his move. He ascends the stairs to Nina’s bed, but he is seen in shadow only (Fig. 3). His features are elongated in shadow and, if possible, he is even more frightening.

Fig. 3: The silhouette of Nosferatu moves towards his victim, but it is the shadow of The Count’s hand that clutches her heart. Still images from Nosferatu (1922), the non-restored version, which is in the public domain.!

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

From the Shadows

Nina waits, terrified. Orlok’s shadow stops by her door, but he does not open it; there is no need. His shadow moves through the cracks in the door frame and as Nina sits in fear on her bed, a shadow appears on her bright white nightgown. It moves slowly, fingers open upward until his shadow grasps her heart. Her face contorts – is she in pain? Or is it pleasure on her face as her body slumps on the bed and she willingly submits. The Count now possesses her symbolically and, soon, literally. Much like the image thrown on the cave wall in The Republic, we don’t see the reality of Orlok’s movement, just the shadows on the wall and are left to interpret what it means. This scene is so powerful and such a cinematic achievement it is recreated almost shot for shot in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Dracula with Gary Oldman playing the Count and Winona Ryder as Mina. Shadows again play a role in the end of the scene of Nosferatu. The buildings seen out the window brighten as the sun rises and the darkness disappears. Trapped, the Count tries to escape, but the “light” overcomes the “dark.” Evil is defeated as he fades away into a puff of smoke. As a result of this film, “the shadow has been transformed from a mere mood setting ornament” (Franklin 181). As if to emphasize the importance of the shadow as a storytelling device, the final title card of the movie tells the audience, “the shadow of the vampire vanished” (Nosferatu: Symphony of Terror). This phrase is used in a 2000 film called Shadow of the Vampire, which takes a unique look at the filming of Nosferatu. John Malkovich stars as Murnau and Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck. In the film, it is discovered that Schreck is really a vampire, which results in the deaths of Grau, Wagner, and various other cast and crew members at the hands of the Count. In the end, the Count is deceived into exposing himself to daylight on film. The reocurring use of shadows is also apparent in the 1979 remake of Nosferatu directed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski as the Count. Though not

a shot for shot re-make, the essence of the original 1922 Nosferatu is evident with the Count’s shadow seeming to cast a spell over his victim. Although Nosferatu is a frightening figure, his Kubin-esque features and illumination are not the only ways he is able to strike fear in the hearts of the viewer. An additional facet is how he is photographed. Herbert Zettl explains that where the camera is placed in relation to the subject can have an impact on the meaning of the shot. The camera can be subjective and, with it, a competent director knows how to manipulate his or her audience. A subject that is photographed upward, from below eye level, looks dynamic and powerful. A character that is in a high position in the frame, likewise, looks superior and in a position of authority and control. An audience literally “looks up” to a person when they are in a position of power on the screen (Zettl 218-219). Though he only appears on the screen for a total of nine of the film’s 94 minutes, Nosferatu is “frequently photographed from an extremely low angle which renders him gigantic and monstrously sinister on the screen” (Cook 101 [Fig. 4]). The cinematography of the film also creates a great illusion of depth. These techniques would influence some of the most important Hollywood films for decades to come. It is noteworthy that many films of this era contain a favourite motif of the expressionist screenwriter: the madman. The reoccurrence of the lunatic in these films has, like the characters themselves, a dual purpose. Count Orlok, much like the narrator and the Doctor in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, are all manifestations of their time. They both live in their own distorted world that seems very normal to them and are both representative of 1920s Germany. However, noted in the book Passion and Rebellion: the Expressionist Heritage, “the political implications of much of expressionist works were almost lost amid the finely crafted stage-sets and lighting patterns

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

William F. Burns

multiple locations, the photography becomes more complicated with Nosferatu. It was shot on several locations near the studio lot and even in a ruined castle. This freedom from the studio setting allowed Murnau to create “[e]xpressionist stylization through careful shot composition and lighting rather than distorted sets” (Worland 48). However, a careful examination of the sets reveals a distortion that is similar to the artwork of Kubin and Edvard Munch. Fig. 4: Note how the angle of the camera enhances the dominance and fear factor of Murnau’s vampire. Still image from Nosferatu (1922), the non-restored version, which is in the public domain.

which earned universal acclaim, but there were occasional links to real authority and actual monarchs, if not to social types prevalent in Weimar Germany” (Rubenstein 367). The audience may not have been aware of symbolism of the characters, but it is very likely their inclusion in the film had both expressionist and existential roots. For example, the image of the madman is also present in several Munch works in his “Murder Series” and in Alfred Kubin’s The Alley (1905), where “a madman glides barefoot among cloaked passers-by, evoking more familiar figures of Munch” (Gosetti-Ferencei 49). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s madman told a stunned crowd that God is dead by our hands. The lunatic tells us what we believe does not really exist; it has all been a lie, much like the empire that dissolved in 1918. Perhaps it is ironic that the political subtexts of films like Nosferatu were lost on viewers. They were like the audience listening to Nietzsche’s mad man who laments that he has “come too soon” (Nietzsche 96). Both audiences, those in the darkened German theatre, and the one imagined by Nietzsche, simply do not see the reality that the madman is presenting them. Another expressionist connection between Nosferatu and Caligari is the sets. Compared to Nosferatu, from a photographic standpoint, the shooting of Caligari was simple. The size of the set was the same from shot to shot, which is significant because the area that remains in focus never changes. With its 70

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

The home that Count Orlok occupies in Bremen is actually an abandoned salt warehouse in Lubeck, Germany, built in the beginning of the eighteenth century. This location has a connection to Edvard Munch that links him to Murnau; “While living in Lubeck in 1903, Edvard Munch produced an ink drawing of the warehouse that the ex-art history student Murnau might have seen” (Papapetros 10). The buildings also resemble the structures in some of Kubin’s drawings, some of which seem askew, much like the set piece built to resemble Orlok’s home across from Hutter and Nina that is seen through the window and illuminated by the sun in the film’s climax (Fig. 5). Abandoned mansions and a studio built castle complete the look of the film (Rubenstein 367). This weathered look to the scenery, based on Murnau’s attention to detail, may have been intentional. By the time Nosferatu was on the screen, the motion picture had become as powerful a tool for social commentary as the world had ever seen. The collaborative nature of filmmaking parallels the confluence of ideas that was a part of expressionism. These films were entertainment that challenged people to examine their own perspectives. In his essay in the book, Passion and Rebellion, Mark Siberman believes this evolution of film not only moved the creative aspect of the medium forward, it affected the audience:

From the Shadows

Fig. 5: Alfred Kubin’s Albania (created before 1923) and a screen shot of Nosferatu’s view in Bremen. Note the similar slant to the buildings.

The visual dimension of film offered to the expressionist a particularly fruitful means for subverting bourgeois codes of representation. The notion of objectivity and laws of reality defined by bourgeois standards could only limit imagination. Thus stylized architecture of the Caligari sets, the blurred distinctions between the real and metaphorical in Nosferatu…manifest a refusal to acknowledge the hegemony of “normal” perspective. (p. 379) In other words, the film was layered with a multiplicity of stylistic elements, and it was also rich in symbolism and sedition presented with a strong expressionist perspective. The metaphorical shadow on the screen, meant to symbolize the changes in the postwar era was replaced by a new, more sinister shadow beginning to loom over Germany. This shadow would make some filmmakers run for the daylight of America. The migration of Germans to Hollywood began with famed actor, director and mentor to Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, in 1922. By the mid-1920s, the migration to Hollywood became a flood. Directors Murnau and Fritz Lang joined many other directors including Billy Wilder and Casablanca director Michael Curtiz, producer Erich Pommer, writer Carl Mayer, and actor Conrad Veidt (Cook 106). However, the visual link between German Expressionism and cinematic style that would impact Hollywood was cinematographer Karl Freund. With Murnau directing, Freund shot The Last Laugh (1924) which

helped usher in the “unabashedly nihilistic realism” of the Kammerspeilfilm, Germany’s 180–degree reaction to expressionism (Cook 92). The Last Laugh was a world-wide sensation; the story of the down on his luck and hapless doorman who strikes it rich connected with audiences and “it was the almost universal decision of Hollywood that it was the greatest picture ever made” (105). Freund’s influence can be directly traced from the origins of expressionism to the films now deemed “classics” of Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” Many other German filmmakers would leave Berlin to work with or influence nonGerman filmmakers in America. There were hundreds of others in Germany who were not courted by Hollywood, and many suffered a variety of fates. Some, like scenic pioneer Eugene Schufftan, would escape to England (Barsacq 187). Others, like actor and director Leni Riefenstahl would stay in Germany and would make films for the Reich (Cinema Europe). Still others would fall victim to hatred, like Nosferatu’s Art Director Albin Grau who died at Buchenwald in 1942 (Jacobson 9). In 1926, Murnau was one of the first who had expressionist roots to come to America (Eisner Murnau 167). His first film, Sunrise was released in 1927. The story was written by Carl Mayer; Edgar Ulmar was on the art design team, and the film was released by Fox (Murnau Sunrise). The film is about a woman from the city who tempts a married farmer and tries MISE-EN-SCÈNE

William F. Burns

to convince him to drown his wife. It is rich in symbolism and has expressionist tendencies. For example, one scene in the film has a strong erotic feel where the rhythmic moment of a temptress’ body “yields in almost an expressionistic manner in the man’s embrace” (Eisner Murnau 181). Murnau would make three more pictures in America, all working with Edgar Ulmer. His next movie, 4 Devils (1928), reunited Ulmer with Caligari and The Last Laugh scenic designer Walter Rohrig (Murnau 1928). One critic would say of 4 Devils, that Murnau “returned to the sort of Kammerspeilfilm, harsh and heavy which he presented with all his visual genius” (Eisner Murnau 200). Not living to see its release, Murnau’s first sound film would be his last; Tabu (1931) is also filled with strong symbolism and lacks the Hollywood happy ending. Though a familiar city versus country story, it is set in the South Pacific and tends to focus on the pristine natural work of the island dwellers corrupted by the white settlers. Images of “death ships” and close-ups of distorted faces remind the viewer of Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, respectively (Petrie 105-107). A week before the film’s release, Murnau died in a tragic car accident (Eisner Murnau 223). Murnau had proven that Expressionist and Kammerspeilfilm techniques would work in America, and the wave upon wave of German filmmakers to follow was just beginning. With so many creative people emigrating, the expressionist era came to an end in Germany. In her book The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner writes that the birth of expressionism followed the Germanic tradition where great poetry was born of times of National hardship and that part of expressionism’s legacy is tragedy and despair (310). Echoing this sentiment, Siegfried Kraucer states that expressionist films were about the struggle to control one self, yet this struggle was lost on the audience. The German people felt increasingly insecure and a need for authoritarian control began to seep into the masses. The Weimer Republic constricted this need of the 72

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

people. Kraucer’s belief is that the cinema became a part of the German society and its messages created a void that was filled by National Socialism. He notes that this is just one of many factors that led to the rise of Hitler (Cook 111). The impact of Nosferatu’s mise-en-scène and that of the expressionist filmmakers is just as significant today as it was during the time between the World Wars. Like the captives in Plato’s cave, the shadows still hold our fear, can alter our understanding of reality and allow our minds a chance to run wild. The legacy of Murnau and his contemporaries can be seen in film noir, in horror movies, slasher films, thrillers or any time we let our imagination get the better of us, on film or in real life.

From the Shadows

Works Cited 4 Devils. Directed by F.W. Murnau, Fox Films, 1928. Adlmann, Jan Ernst. “Mirror to a world Gone Awry.” Art in America, February 2009, pp. 117-121. Barsacq, Léon. Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, edited by Elliott Stein, Paris, 1970. Barsam, Richard. Looking at Movies. W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Catania, Saviour. "Absent in Liminal Places: Murnau’s “Nosferatu" and the Otherworld of Stoker’s Dracula.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 32, no.3, 2004, pp. 229-236. Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood. Directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Image Entertainment, 1995. Clegg, Jerry S. “Nietzsche's Gods in the Birth of Tragedy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 4, 1972, pp. 431-438. Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film. 4th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. Der Golem. Directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, UFA, 1920. Dracula. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, performances by Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, Columbia Pictures, 1992. Eisner, Lotte. Murnau. University of California Press, 1973. —. The Haunted Screen. University of California Pres, 1965. Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, edited by Noah Isenberg, Columbia University Press, 2009. Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. The Penguin Group, 2003. Flynn, Thomas R. Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2006. Franklin, James C. “Metamorphosis of a Metaphor: Shadow in Early German Cinema.” German Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 2, 1980, pp. 176-188. Gilbert, Martin. The First World War. Henry Holt & Company, 1994.

Jacobson, Mark. The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans. Simon & Schuster, 2010. Kellner, Douglas. Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner, Universe Press, 1983. Luft, Herbert G. “Notes on the World and Work of Carl Mayer.” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, vol. 8, no. 4, 1954, pp. 375-392. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufman, Penguin Books, 1976. Nosferatu, Symphony of Terror. Directed by W.F. Murnau, Prana-Film GmbH, 1922. Nosferatu the Vampyre. Directed by Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1978. Papapetros, Spyros. “Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film: From Méliès to Murnau.” The Grey Room, no. 20, 2005, pp. 6-37. Petrie, Graham. Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922-1931. Wayne State University Press, 2001. Plato. Republic. Oxford University Press, 1998. Rubenstein, Lenny. Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner, Universe Press, 1983. Shadow of the Vampire. Directed by E. Elias Merhige, Lions Gate Films, 2000. Silberman, Marc. Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner, Universe Press, 1983. Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. Oxford University Press, 2005. “UFA/Company History.” UFA Film &TV Produktion GmbH. www.ufa.de/company/historie/index_ html?view=eng. Accessed November 5, 2015. Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Zettl, Herbert. Sight, Sound, Motion. Wadsworth, 1990.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Foreshadowing of the Kafkaesque in Alfred Kubin’s Drawings.” Hyperion vol. 3, no. 4, 2008, pp. 47-52.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration View from the Road: Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny Michael Johnston Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Abstract: Vincent Gallo’s film, The Brown Bunny (2003), examines the transcontinental landscape through a bug-splattered windshield. The protagonist’s journey begins after a motorcycle race in New Hampshire and concludes at a California motel. Gallo uses the road trip to parallel his character’s unstable mind. The repetition of rest stops, fast-food signs, motels, and gas station logos amplifies the protagonist’s mental state. The film ends in a Los Angeles motel room – over-lit, standardized, and redundant. Vincent Gallo has only released two of the four films he has directed. Both find resolve in an anonymous motel room and both are studies in Americana, car-culture, and the architecture of familiar environments. Interviews with the filmmaker further support his interest in this anonymous roadside architecture and its relation to the contemporary landscape. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour conceptualized this anonymous architecture in Learning From Las Vegas. In this study, the architects catalogue pluralism, historical motifs, and vernacular elements of roadside architecture. In The Brown Bunny, this boring, ordinary, and anonymous roadside has morphed into the American Landscape. This article also examines The Brown Bunny within the context of Venturi and Scott Brown’s theories to illustrate how architectural catalogue is at the heart of Vincent Gallo’s cinematic aesthetic.

I like boring things… – Andy Warhol – I looked and photographed. I documented the “view from the road” on foot and by car, and shot The Strip from a raised eye level through the front window of the early morning bus that took workers to the casinos.

– Denise Scott Brown –

incent Gallo’s, The Brown Bunny, premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. It was an immediate sensation for two reasons. The first was its graphic, unsimulated oral sex scene performed on writer/director/actor Vincent Gallo by Oscar nominated actress Chloë Sevigny. The second reason was that Roger Ebert deemed The Brown Bunny “the worst film in the 74

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

history of the festival” (“Gallo’s”). Ebert’s May 22, 2003 Chicago Sun-Times review reads: Imagine 90 tedious minutes of a man driving across America in a van. Imagine long shots through a windshield as it collects bug splats. Imagine not one but two scenes in which he stops for gas. Imagine a long shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats where he races his motorcycle until it disappears as a speck in the distance, followed by another shot in which a speck in the distance becomes his motorcycle. Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause. (“Gallo’s”) Other critics and reviewers deemed Gallo’s film tiresome, boring, and utterly banal and pointless. Indiewire called The Brown Bunny one of the most profoundly egomaniacal and obnoxious films in the history of American independent cinema while The Hollywood Reporter judged it a film of “crude technique

View from the Road

and thundering banality” (O’Brien). A small number of other reviews proclaimed The Brown Bunny a success. “The Brown Bunny is, in its Bruno Dumontmeets-Matthew Barney sort of way, a cry from the wilderness of a time when independent cinema wasn’t a studio’s boutique indulgence, when independent films weren’t just mainstream plots…or, most importantly, when independent films were art instead of try-outs for Hollywood blockbuster assignments” (Chaw, “FFC”). “Gallo’s second feature turns out to be a gentle, lyrical road movie – the sort of picture American indie cinema was supposed to nurture and support” (Taylor). Roger Ebert would review the re-edited version, twenty-six minutes shorter, of The Brown Bunny over a year later, and claim that the editing was the movie’s salvation, and that the new edit is an entirely different film, specifically citing an improved Bonneville Salt Flats scene. Ebert’s review of the infamous pornographic ending is that it is many things, but erotic is not one of them. He ends his second review with, “Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo’s editing has set free the good film inside. I will always be grateful I saw the movie at Cannes; you can’t understand where Gallo has arrived unless you know where he started” (“Brown”).

American roadside architecture and car-oriented cinematography as The Brown Bunny’s1 visual design and narrative device. By analyzing and reframing the film’s criticism through postmodern architectural theory and design, specifically that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, new meanings and possibilities within the film emerge. Understanding the filmmaker’s decision to construct the mise-en-scène through the windshield of the character’s van for the entirety of the film offers the audience a cinematic perspective rarely seen. This article aims to analyze Vincent Gallo’s production design as an outgrowth of urban design. In a 2014 interview, Denise Scott Brown stated: “Traveling from our house to our office I like to watch a sequence of views no architect could have designed. None could achieve that variegated vitality and to try would force it. But many won’t look at it because they’re sure it’s ugly” (Salomon and Kroeter). The Brown Bunny is designed around a similar “sequence of views.” Perhaps it was the audience’s overfamiliarity with highway gas stations and rest stop vending machines that made The Brown Bunny

The Brown Bunny is a simple story. After losing a race, professional motorcycle racer, Bud Clay, must drive from New Hampshire to California to meet his girlfriend, Daisy. On his cross-country drive, Bud attempts to connect with three different women, Violet, Lilly, and Rose, but fails. Like Jay Gatsby, Daisy is always in his mind. Gallo leads us to Los Angeles, only for the viewer to discover that Daisy is dead. The aim of this article is not to defend The Brown Bunny and its maker, Vincent Gallo, nor is it to criticize Roger Ebert’s and other critics’ reviews of the film. This article analyzes Vincent Gallo’s use of

Fig. 1: Bud Clay buys a Coke at a rest stop in The Brown Bunny.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Michael Johnston

appear tiresome, boring, and banal upon its release (Fig. 1). In their seminal 1972 work, Learning From Las Vegas,2 authors Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour open with “learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary…to question how we look at things…Las Vegas is analyzed here only as a phenomenon of architectural communication” (5-6). The book was intended as a criticism of late Modern architecture – that of the 1960s rather than of early Modern architecture prior to World War II. In their comparison of their Guild House and Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor, both early ‘60s apartment complexes, the authors explain that We shall emphasize image – image over process or form – in asserting that architecture depends in its perception and creation on past experience and emotional association and that these symbolic and representational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure, and program with which they combine in the same building (87).

Fig. 2: Billy Brown and Layla pull into Denny's in Buffalo '66.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

It is important to analyze The Brown Bunny from Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s theoretical context. The film, like its maker, is a contradiction; a filmmaker not influenced by the medium of film, but rather by painting, architecture, and 1970s fashion photography (Chaw, “FFC”); a filmmaker in constant search for new breakthroughs in his work (Pride), and a filmmaker with an appreciation for the significance of parking lots identical to that of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour. The Brown Bunny is not a scene-by-scene narrative, yet we recognize a story. The film lacks a traditional structure and plot, yet it has an inherent pacing and visual repetition that grounds the viewer in the environment and the protagonist’s pathos. And, like Gallo’s first film, Buffalo ‘66 (1998), The Brown Bunny is a car-culture, car-oriented film that finds resolution in a motel room – unassuming, anonymous architecture visible during the day and lit up at night. In both his released films,3 Gallo uses the familiar environment (Fig. 2) – bowling alleys, Denny’s,

View from the Road

rest stops, gas stations, bus stations, and motels. This is not kitsch; this is not irony. It is ugly and ordinary and all around; it is vernacular. It is perception and creation on past experience and emotional association. Vincent Gallo is not Werner Herzog, the dreamer and explorer travelling to unknown, unseen lands in search of something new. Vincent Gallo is not Wes Anderson, a filmmaker devising magical, whimsical, overly-saturated worlds, probing the complexities of adolescence. Vincent Gallo’s “Best Western Motel” is not Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel.” Vincent Gallo’s characters must return to the familiarity of their homes and hometowns in order to communicate their loneliness and isolation. Gallo must use hardcore, pornographic imagery to visualize guilt, anger, and self-loathing. In both films, characters attempt to return home, only there is no home. Parents reject their only son in Buffalo ‘66 and previously occupied homes are now empty in The Brown Bunny. The motel becomes home. Gallo employs the unheroic to generate progressive work. It is an aesthetic shared by Venturi and Brown: “Modernism did not adapt to the existing and changing landscape…it became ‘irresponsible’ in that it did not communicate with how society lived and perceived the world. Modernism became an expressive architecture where its expression was the symbol. The heroic modernism was progressive and anti-traditional, while the ordinary and conventional was evolutionary, using historical precedent” (Venturi et

al. 102). Venturi and Brown were generating architecture and an architectural discourse for a changing process: The heroism implied in this approach is generally false: in this context conscious heroes are pathetic weaklings. Ironically you are more likely to turn out heroic in your role as antihero. To be truly visionary is to be truly humble…focus on the realities of now and the potentials in the realities…with perception (273274). Gallo, discussing his collaboration with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas on his Los-Angeles condominium, states: I wanted to do something extremely progressive, conceptual, and very thought out. Modernism is not things that look like sleek designs from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Something truly modern and progressive is far away from the thinking and lifestyle of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The work of the real architects from the ‘50s and ‘60s does not relate to contemporary life or the real state of things. My understanding of a home of today, the way that I would interact with that home, sleep, entertain, have sex and perform my work functions in that home, are all quite contrary to what even the most modern architects were thinking in the past. I have owned three houses by John Lautner, one of the better residential architects of the 20th century. When the houses were for sale, I could not resist purchasing them as I was so drawn to the aesthetics and sensibility of those homes. However, soon after moving in, I would feel that the lifestyle and mood required to live in those homes was far from my own and stuck in the past. Even with all of Lautner’s creativity, intelligence, and problem solving abilities, he was still creating architecture for an old way of living. (Gallo)

…Gallo’s characters must return to the familiarity of their homes and home towns in order to communicate their loneliness and isolation. MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Michael Johnston

Fig. 3: Billy Brown struggles with love and intimacy at the end of Buffalo ‘66.

Like Billy Brown in Buffalo ‘66 (Fig. 3), The Brown Bunny’s Bud Clay finds resolution in a motel room where he must operate within fantasy and reality, between past and present, and anger and guilt. Gallo’s characters challenge love and honesty in rented spaces. That Gallo chooses the motel as final destination for his characters is telling. What can be made of this aesthetic and narrative choice? Is it mere coincidence or does Gallo possess a fascination with the psychology, history, and design of the American motel and car-culture? “Motel” is simply the shortened form of motor-hotel. After the Second World War when America became a car-oriented culture, American motels grew in popularity. Large, luxurious hotels with endless amenities were largely found near railroad stations in the centres of towns; the car-oriented motels with few to no guest amenities were found close to highways and featured parking lots. The growth of the motel reflected America’s interest in tailfin cars and “the new shape of motion” (Hine 87), a moment in time when “America found a way of turning out fantasy on an assembly line” (5), a fantasy consumed by new modes of consumption and futuristic gadg-

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

ets. Like the bunny for sale in the film, simply changing its diet and taste will not prolong the bunny’s life; the fantasy was short- lived. Similarly, the unique American roadside motel (like those along Route 66) did not last. Chain motels began sprouting up and the individually-owned and operated places began their decay. The overall design of the singular motel gave way to the chain-motel where signage and electronic iconography trumped architecture in order to attract the passing driver. No longer a glamorous roadside stop for the American family on its westward travel, the motel, in reality and in cinema, is a dingy, dirty place where criminals hide out, or the down-and-out loners go to waste away and die. This altering of the Route 66 landscape was captured by artist Ed Ruscha with his first photographic book in 1963, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. “Seen together, the gas stations offer a range of American utilitarian architecture” (Wolf 112). Ruscha only made one exposure for each gas station and the images appear as if taken from a moving car (120). Bud Clay is always going to the Best Western in Los Angeles.4 Bud’s life, and mind, are car and mo-

View from the Road

tion-oriented. He is a motorcycle racer by profession. When he finishes his race, he packs his motorcycle in his van and drives to the next race in the next town. He possesses motion trapped in motion. Bud’s mind, like his motorcycle and van, is never at rest. Bud meditates on his past and views the world passing by through the windshield of his moving van. How does the motel room affect the communication of cinematic language and symbol? Watching the infamous final scene of The Brown Bunny, the viewer is overpowered by specific elements: the whiteness of the motel room and the graphic oral sex. The room is completely antiseptic and resembles an institution more than an anonymous space. The reunion of Bud and Daisy is pornographic. It does not climax with Bud’s ejaculation, but rather with his emotional and mental breakdown.

In the middle of the desert, heading homeward towards LA, I’ll often sacrifice the experience of a National Park to instead pass by a nuclear power plant or a factory. Anonymous architecture… Egoless, yes, which is most important. Ego leads to self-glorification, which leads to compromised function. It prevents the work from being better than the people who make it (Gallo). This cry for the egoless offers an interesting counterpoint in that The Brown Bunny is anything but an egoless cinematic product. The opening titles clearly state: “A Vincent Gallo Production. Written, Directed, Edited and Produced by Vincent Gallo.” This is not anonymous filmmaking. Yet, it parallels Robert Venturi, who is not speaking of anonymous architecture when he demands a break from the heroic modern. Gallo and Venturi construct their work from contradictory and pluralistic elements (high and low, beautiful and ugly, ordinary and extraordi-

… the motel, in reality and in cinema, is a dingy, dirty place where criminals hide out, or the downand-out loners go to waste away and die. To Bud, the motel room is home and therapist office; for Gallo the filmmaker, the motel room is design and “decorated shed.” It is not a symbolic setting, but rather a setting that symbolizes and represents unity, balance, and predictability – it is two lamps on each side of the bed. It is a plastic-wrapped plastic cup on the dresser and a phone on the nightstand. It is two white pillows and four white walls, all photographed from a distance. It is transient and car-oriented. It is anonymous. It is a pre-fabricated movie set that perfectly suits Gallo’s aesthetic. The transient room does not symbolize alienation, fear, horror, or suspense as it does in Lost in Translation (2003), The Shining (1980), or Psycho (1960). The ordinary motel room epitomizes the contradictions of Bud’s mental state and Gallo’s aesthetic taste. He states:

nary, innocent and pornographic), while being endless self-promoters. Both view the mainstream products and the marginalized mainstream products of their fields with the same attitude – the products are irrelevant and irresponsible because the films and buildings are using the same tired language (Venturi et al. 101). Gallo answers the riddle best: “If you allow people who are coming from ego to put something in an empty space, they can’t help themselves to do so without self-glorification. If you ask the same group of egomaniacs to pull things out of a cluttered space, it’s much more difficult for that gesture to be part of self-glorification.” Gallo’s Best Western has no architect; it has no architecture. This is why Gallo never reveals hallways, Bud’s entry into the room, or any close-ups of

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Michael Johnston

room details. These details are irrelevant. It is the bold Best Western icon read from the road as Bud drives by that is important. The icon through the windshield is the detail. The sign is more hotel than the building. The Best Western reflects industrial, Fordist design – fast and efficient – and the American chain-store industry where one store is indecipherable from the next. Destinations are only recognizable by their roadside sign/symbol – that which is visible during the day and lights up at night. The Best Western reflects minimalism – the walls are completely blank, sans any cheap, mass-produced store-bought print often found in motel rooms (Fig. 4). Daisy is the motel room’s only applied ornament.

Fig. 4: Bud Clay waits for Daisy to come home to their ordinary motel room.

Gallo’s use of the glaring white motel room at the end of The Brown Bunny incorporates Venturi and Brown’s famous “duck” and “decorated shed” theories of structure and symbol. The “duck” building is “where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form.” The “decorated shed” is “where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of the program…The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols” (Venturi et al. 87). Venturi and Brown’s theories are bound by “automobile-oriented commercial architecture” (87-

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

88). Architecture as viewed and comprehended at high speeds (Vinegar 24) where the unity of the whole is insignificant. The decorated shed has applied ornament to the front and a plain back, while the duck is consistent on all sides. Just as Bud drives throughout the film, internalizing road signs, skylines, and national monuments, Daisy’s presence in the motel room is a symbol of his car-oriented vision and his deepest emotion. Daisy is an applied symbolic ornament to a plain white motel room. In Bud’s narrow field of vision, Daisy is a passing vision and decorated shed (dressed in brown) just as the motel is a “decorated shed.” Both Daisy and motel are meaning, not expression; both are contradictions (dead and present, home and rented space), not consistent and unified. Both are evocative, not innovative (Venturi et al. 102). Both are at the service of Gallo’s filmmaking vision and Bud’s roadside-vision. The viewer understands Bud’s vision of the world through seeing all that passes by his “bug-splattered” windshield. Bud’s vision remains the same in the stillness of the motel room. Daisy is another splattered bug, and the motel is the only space in which Bud appears to function. Bud has been driving to this destination the entire film. He has attempted and failed interactions with three women, each systematically appearing like McDonald’s and Gulf’s iconography. Each woman reads big and bold: Bud’s Impotence. Bud has stayed in one previous motel room (an innocuous beige space with striped wallpaper and a mass-produced print on the wall) and left a note for Daisy at their vacant house in Los Angeles. The motel room is bright, yet the mood is dark. The room is not only clean; it is beaming white as if it has been bleached through and through. Bud’s motel room has been bleached to mask others’ past transgressions because that is the nature of the space, and Bud is not the only guilty individual in this familiar environment. Bud’s mind is racing round and

View from the Road

round, unable to comprehend time, place, and space. He is a victim of the road and the glowing lights of chain retail store signs. Bud sees Mobil, Sunoco, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s over and over again. They are chain-linked and systematically proportioned electronic icons placed in a naturally diverse environment. These signs keep him awake; they disorient him and make his unstable mind more unstable. They are the only objects communicating with him, compelling him to continue to the motel in California. Gallo challenges the audience with his shot compositions and lighting throughout the entire film. The filmmaker pushes his Super-16mm film stock and lenses to their limits. Scenes shot inside the van in the dead of night are so grainy and the focus so soft that the viewer is forced to recognize the shape of Bud’s facial features outlined by the road signs outside the window. Bud’s face finds form in front of McDonald’s golden arches. Close-ups on Bud in profile trim and cut the front half of his nose from the frame. The motel room offers a similar visual challenge: medium-shots of Bud with half his

body outside the frame. These are not rare, over-aestheticized split-body medium-shots shots like those found in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (2015). Bud and Daisy are characters obscured by car window frames: visual information perceived from a moving vehicle. Like the road signs on the highway, Daisy appears in the motel room. She does not walk into the room but silently appears as shown in Fig. 5. Bud’s deepest emotions, his guilt, sorrow, and hate, surface. Daisy stands as if caught in the headlights of Bud’s van. The first shot of Daisy in the motel room is of her standing against the door with a bright light striking her, casting a large, and by traditional Hollywood cinematography standards, “ugly” shadow. Such a shadow would never be visible in a Coen Brothers or Alexander Payne film. Gallo is destroying cinematic rules and practice to adhere to his system – a system derived from perception and not vision. In Gallo’s system, Daisy is no more than a shadow, no more than a ghost, while Bud’s view of the world is no more than that which ghostly appears on the highway and racetrack. Here Gallo keeps with the car-oriented motif of the film. He brings the car

Fig. 5: Daisy is caught in Bud’s headlights as soon as she appears the motel room.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Michael Johnston

Fig. 6: Bud attempts to maintain control in the film’s infamous scene.

into the motel room (not the camera) – motion within motion – motorcycle within van. The car is the visual and narrative design of the film and Bud’s real and fantastic vision of the world. Where the viewer was placed in Bud’s black van for the majority of the film, the viewer is now placed in the whiteness of Bud’s motor-hotel room for the conclusion. Bud and Daisy sit on the bed. The back of Bud’s head is out of focus, as is Daisy’s face. The focus is pushed to the background of the image – the ugly mirror on the wall and the two identical lights on each side of the mirror. Gallo focuses on the mirror and lights that resemble the front of a car approaching – windshield and headlights. The room is blown out white, washed out, not only to the viewer, but to the film’s characters. Daisy asks, “It’s so bright in here. I feel so shy…Can I turn off the lights? Please?” Bud does not turn out the lights; he undresses her. This leads to the controversial fellatio scene. Viewing this scene through the windshield of the van is simple enough. Again, Gallo blasts light 82

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

into the lens of the camera so that the image is soaked with lens flare – much like the blinding glare of headlights on a highway at night. Much like the road sign icons of gasoline stations and fast food eateries. And, like his hands on the steering wheel, Bud keeps one hand on the base of his penis and the other on Daisy’s head – controlling, manipulating, and driving (Fig. 6). Bud has not left the driver’s seat. The graphic nature of the fellatio scene makes it extraordinary, and pushed Gallo’s film to an X-rating. But reviews have overlooked the ordinary nature of the scene, and the fact that the scene is an illusion. “Criticism of Gallo’s film has so far failed to address this combination of pornography and narrative cinema” (Léger 89). The infamous fellatio scene is in actuality Bud’s self-abusive, tortured masturbation viewed through the windshield of the van. In an interview, Gallo remarked: “If you deregulate pornography, take away the rules, you’ll have anal, double anal, triple anal, bukkake, American bukkake, bukkake with 10 year olds, bukkake with newborns. Eventually porn would be two people

View from the Road

Fig. 7: Bud’s breakdown.

hugging…I describe it as an evolution or part of the process.” The fellatio scene does not climax with Bud’s ejaculation, but with Bud weeping on the bed (Fig. 7). This scene is about the result. The Brown Bunny goes from hardcore pornography to pathos: two people hugging on the bed. Gallo is attempting to film that evolution as Bud and Daisy lie hugging on the bed. While the fellatio scene is long and graphic, it is immediately undercut. Gallo does not give the viewer time to process the pornography because the scene immediately devolves into Bud’s tremendous breakdown where his speaking through tears is as inaudible as Daisy speaking with Bud’s penis in her mouth. Both choke on guilt. The viewer has been driving with Bud the entire film waiting to hear his confession, not to witness his ejaculation. Gallo’s fellatio scene is a road sign informing the audience that the destination is only “x” miles away. The viewer discovers afterward that Daisy is dead. One must analyze either the necrophiliac nature of the scene or the fantasy – that Bud is either being fellated by a dead woman or is masturbating in

the middle of the room while talking to his dead girlfriend – berating her. Most criticism has only discussed exactly what is depicted, the literal image and therefore has failed to recognize Gallo’s pluralistic and contradictory nature and the trompe l’oeil effect of the imagery. Sex in movies is simulated for the camera and for the audience and presented to both as “real” in order to serve the narrative. This fake sex is a narrative act, not a thematic act. In the case of rare films like Last Tango in Paris (1972), 9 Songs (2004), and Intimacy (2001), the sex is unsimulated on camera, in order to appear even more real and authentic to the audience. None, however, uses pornographic imagery and action, both in content and aesthetic, as thematic representation. If Gallo had simply filmed the reality of the sex as it is with Daisy in the scene and not as Bud’s fantasy, the scene would have been extraordinary and not ordinary. But the scene is ordinary, because, albeit graphic, it is an ordinary act that occurs between two lovers, and often in motel rooms between lovers and

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Michael Johnston

paying customers, an ordinary act elevated to extraordinary cinema not because of its graphic nature, but because of its visual depiction – as through the windshield of the van – keeping with Gallo’s program and aesthetic system. It is like reading “St. Louis” while viewing the Gateway Arch earlier in the film, reading “Chicago” and seeing the city’s skyline, reading “Bonneville Salt Flats” and seeing the salt flats, reading “Blowjob” in big electric letters and seeing a blowjob. It is the balance and difference between word as object and image as language. Is the oral sex really happening? Yes and no. Is it ordinary? Yes and no. Is it communicating the same message as “Welcome to Ohio?” Yes and no. “Stripped of its meaning the word becomes a typographical shell that has been driven from its linguistic context into a silent landscape” (Wilmes). It is internal and external. It is representation and perception. Could Bud’s breakdown have come without the graphic depiction of oral sex? No. The scene depicts Gallo’s evolutionary process, not antitraditional cinema. Physically, Bud gives nothing back to Daisy. He does not offer Daisy sexual pleasure in return because the scene is not about sexual pleasure and eroticism. The scene is about Bud’s pain, loneliness and guilt at having not saved Daisy that plays as pornographic, sexual fantasy. Like one of the many road signs, the sexual act passes, and Bud, Daisy, and the viewer immediately move on to the next moment. The characters do not discuss the sexual act; it is never mentioned. They discuss Bud’s guilt and Daisy’s death. Bud must confess his guilt at having not saved her, and for having misread Daisy’s rape as an ordinary sexual act with other men. In back-to-back scenes, Vincent Gallo frames the shell of a sexual act – first the oral sex for the viewer, then the flashbacks of Daisy’s rape for Bud. Both acts are stripped of their meanings – pleasure and eroticism – and re-contextualized through Gallo’s mise-enscène as Bud’s guilt and loneliness.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Vincent Gallo does not use the existing landscape as background – instead he foregrounds the dead Populuxe-era fantasy landscape through the windshield, just as he foregrounds the white walls of the Best Western when he is on the bed with Daisy. The viewer witnesses one of the most original presentations of the American landscape in film history. “It’s all so familiar it feels as if the images have been plucked from your brain, and yet I can’t recall any movie that has gotten the look of America that this one has. When Bud drives down the Vegas strip (Fig. 8), instead of the usual overhead montage of gaudy neon movies usually give us to denote Vegas, Gallo shoots the scene in broad daylight from a driver's perspective” (Taylor).

Fig. 8: The Vegas Strip viewed through Bud Clay’s windshield.

The viewer internalizes every road sign with Bud. Throughout the entirely silent cross-country drive (Bud neither listens to the radio nor flips stations), the road sign text becomes cinematic dialogue for the viewer: Dialogue and Object. Gallo forces and screens a pluralistic nature of text throughout the film that is inherent to the existing landscape, but constructed by him for specific communicative functions in the film. We have the systematized placement of U.S. road signs with Gallo’s systematic film editing. “For artist Ed Ruscha, the landscape is a distinctly American one: drive anywhere in the United States, and the signs and billboards are as much a part of the scenery as the deserts, mountains, plains…These signs do much more than locate us in

View from the Road

our external world, we internalize them; they become part of who we are” (Weston). From the opening image of the film, Bud has internalized the American road and its iconography. Gallo’s thoughtful cinematography conveys Bud’s internalizing every passing sign, structure, and landscape. “Words become objects: and as objects, there is little doubt that they are lifted from that environment in which all words compete for maximum impact, which is that of the driver looking at roadsigns…What is glimpsed through the windshield is quickly forgotten, only to reappear, perhaps in a predictable way, elsewhere” (Berggruen and Weston ii). Throughout the cross country drive, Gallo chooses to focus the camera on the background of the image rather than on Bud’s face. Gallo does not want the viewer to see Bud. Studying Bud’s face does not provide the viewer any visual information or psychology. By focusing the camera on the background of the image through the film mountain ranges, gas stations, fast food restaurants – the viewer is forced into Bud’s perspective. Gallo’s cinematographic selections become psychology. The repetition of Bud’s drive never appears to get him any closer to his destination. The road signs, acting as dialogue, only communicate to Bud and the viewer just how far away the Best Western is. As Ebert stated, “you can’t understand where Gallo has arrived unless you know where he started” (“Brown”).

Bud as the main character. Bud is not the visual epicentre of the film. Bud is part of a system that combines actor, story, theory, postmodern architecture, pornography, and, most importantly, a car-oriented visual motif. Like Populuxe-era products, transportation was the chief formal influence (Hine 76). Bud driving the van is a cinematic device used to present the grand design of the landscape. If Gallo views Bud as he does himself driving across the landscape, then the viewer would understand Bud differently from the reviews:

Bud is part of a system that combines actor, story, theory, postmodern architecture, pornography, and most importantly a car-oriented visual motif.

The Brown Bunny is a “gentle, lyrical road movie” and a complex architecture of cinema based on existing forms and new cinematic vocabulary. Describing how the film was shot cannot be easily communicated. The camera, while static, is not presenting

Around Four Corners...I started noticing shapes and forms that I’d seen a hundred times. I’ve done the trip a hundred times. The energy and the lifespan of those objects, of those forms, of those things are so much bigger and broader than my understanding of them. Bigger than my interpretation, judgment, response, and emotions. So much more. And I suddenly remembered my insignificance… The perception of the same thing can change. So in fact, perception is what’s changing most (Gallo).

It is the use of existing forms that Gallo employs: road signs, motels, and pornography. Bud does not impact those forms; they impact him because they continually change while remaining the same. Viewing Daisy as a form, an apparition, not a human, but a ghost, impacts Bud. Daisy affects Bud more in her death than she does in life. In the flashback scenes during Bud’s post-ejaculate breakdown, Gallo shows Daisy being gang-raped at a party while Bud watches. Bud does not know she is being raped. Bud believes she is cheating on him with other men. Bud turns and walks away. By doing so, Bud lets Daisy die. He does not save her. Does Bud cry while Daisy is being raped? No. Does he break down like he does in the motel room? No, because Bud only communicates with passing signs MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Michael Johnston

from the inside of a vehicle: transient and temporary spaces and symbols with electronic icons and signs that speak boldly and simply, with images that possess an immediate future and immediate past – never a present, signs recognized at 70mph that when read together over the course of the drive read like “a single long dada phrase or as small, interlinked sections of an epic poem” (Codrescu 5). Signs overpower the architecture to the point where the buildings are made smaller and the signs larger in order to communicate with the traveller. It is a moving encounter between driver and environment. Venturi and Scott Brown wrote “on the highway the landscape becomes a series of events, more or less insistent, which swim into the driver’s ken and rapidly out again to be succeeded by the next” (Venturi and Brown 12). Those series of events are the system of The Brown Bunny on the highway and in the motel room. For Bud, they are fantasies which “swim into the driver’s ken” which explains why he returns to impotent encounters with three women and why he jumps so quickly from oral sex to mental breakdown, because there are more oral sex fantasies and mental breakdowns in the future. “There is a system, with alterations within an otherwise ordered field, that produces steady yet rhythmic repetition and synco-

pated alternation of identical forms, enabling the coexistent and contradictory effects of distraction and attention” (Vinegar 113). The Brown Bunny frames a narrative through the bug-splattered windshield of a fantastical, yet boring, cross-country journey. For Gallo, the motel provides the perfect transient space where the cinematic process of resolution can begin. But Gallo views cinematic resolution as part and the start of a process, and not a definite end. As a result, the final freeze frame of The Brown Bunny (Fig. 9) evidences that Bud has found no closure, that Bud will see Daisy again and again in motels in Los Angeles. Gallo’s film ends, but has no conclusion.

Fig. 9: The final frame of The Brown Bunny.

Notes 1. This article analyzes the theatrical and DVD release. The Cannes version was never released. 2. While this article references Learning From Las Vegas 1972, it actually quotes the 1977 Revised Edition which was created by the authors as a cheaper and more portable version with fewer pictures. The 1972 First Edition is used to emphasize the impact of the text at the time of publication.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

3. Gallo has directed two other feature films, Promises Written in Water (2010) and April (2013). Neither has been released. 4. It must be noted that the Best Western in Los Angeles is actually a hotel not a motel. However, that particular hotel evidences design and characteristics appropriate to the “motor-hotel.” Also, The Brown Bunny DVD case refers to it as a motel.

View from the Road

Works Cited Berggruen, Olivier, and Alannah Weston. Ed Ruscha: The Drawn Word. Windsor Press. 2003. Chaw, Walter. “The Brown Bunny (2004) [Superbit] – DVD.” Film Freak Central, 3 Jan. 2013, www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2013/01/the-brownbunny.html. Accessed 29 Jun. 2015. ---. “Gallo’s Humor: FFC Interviews Vincent Gallo.” Film Freak Central, 3 Jan. 2013, www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2013/01/gallos-humor-ffc-interviews-vincent-gallo.html Accessed 29 Jun. 2015. Codrescu, Andrei. Walker Evans: Signs. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998. Dargis, Manohla. “Film Review: The Narcissist And His Lover.” New York Times, 27 Aug. 2004, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B07E1D6133 EF934A1575BC0A9629C8B6310. Accessed Apr. 2010. Ebert, Roger. “Gallo’s ‘Bunny’ hops to the top of ‘alltime worst’ list.” RogerEbert.com, 22 May 2003, http://www.rogerebert.com/festivals-andawards/gallos-bunny-hops-to-the-top-of-all-timeworst-list. Accessed 5 Apr. 2011.

Salomon, Stephanie, and Steve Kroeter. “Still Learning From Denise Scott Brown: 45 Years of Learning from Las Vegas.” Designers & Books, 7 Jan. 2014, www.designersandbooks.com/blog/still-learningfrom-denise-scott-brown. Accessed 31 May 2016. Schager, Nick. “The Brown Bunny.” Slant Magazine, 16 Aug. 2004, www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-brown-bunny. Accessed 9 Apr. 2011. Schwartz, Alexandra, editor. Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages. MIT Press, 2002. Taylor, Chris. “The Brown Bunny.” Salon, 17 Sep. 2004, http://www.salon.com/2004/09/17/brown_ bunny. Accessed 10 Apr. 2011. The Brown Bunny. Directed by Vincent Gallo, performances by Vincent Gallo, Chloë Sevigny, Sony Pictures, 2005. Venturi, Robert. Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture. MIT Press, 1996. Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. The Highway. Institute of Contemporary Art, 1970.

---. “‘The Brown Bunny.’” RogerEbert.com, 3 September 2004, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-brownbunny-2004. Accessed 5 Apr. 2011.

Venturi, Robert, et al. Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. 2nd ed., MIT Press, 1977.

Gallo, Vincent. “Conversation with Vincent Gallo, Benjamin Bratton and Jeffrey Inaba.” Volume #13: Ambition, 19 October 2007, www.c-lab.columbia.edu/0029.html. Accessed 9 April 2011.

Vinegar, Aron, and Michael Golec, editors. Relearning from Las Vegas. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Hine, Thomas. Populuxe. Overlook Press, 1986. Léger, Marc James. “Sad Bunny: Vincent Gallo and The Melancholia of Gender.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne D’Études Cinématographiques, vol. 16, no. 2, Fall 2007, pp. 82-98.

Wilmes, Ulrich. “Once upon a time in the present.” Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting. Contributions by James Ellroy et al., Hayward, 2010. Wolf, Sylvia. Ed Ruscha and Photography. Whitney Museum of Art, 2004.

Morris, Gary. L’Avventura: DVD Review, 11 Feb. 2001, www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/reviews/avventura/. Accessed 21 April 2011. O’Brien, Glenn. “The Devil in Vincent Gallo.” Papermag, 31 Jul. 2004, www.papermag.com/the-devil-invincent-gallo-1425172142.html. Accessed 11 Apr. 2011. Pride, Ray. “MCN Interview: Vincent Gallo.” Movie City News. 3 September, 2004, moviecitynews.com/category/interviews/. Accessed 9 Apr. 2011.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland Discusses her Life in Film Paul Risker

ith great pleasure, Mise-en-scène is proud to launch the first in a hopefully long line of interviews with filmmakers. In any scholarly or critical sense, the interview is a vital means of expanding the discussion of film to create a legitimate understanding of the art form. What lies beneath the mise-en-scène of a film can only be understood by combining a scholarly and critical perspective with the point of view of the practitioners. Compared to the subjective form of the film review, feature article or essay, the interview fosters a more robust understanding of an individual film, and allows us to better appreciate the communal language of cinema.

Polish born writer/director Agnieszka Holland cannot be discussed without citing her work across film and television, and in particular, her work with David Simon on the seminal series The Wire and Treme. Holland’s career began when television was often berated as the less artful of the two media, and yet, she has become emblematic of filmmakers who have embraced the long form drama. “Eclectic” is the context in which she perceives her filmography, the aforementioned television dramas bolstered by her historical miniseries Burning Bush that together are indicative of Holland’s precision at creating a narrative variation on the screen. From the contemporary exploration of the American urban to the oppressive days of Czechoslovakia under Communist rule, her cinematic and television works capture a snapshot of a filmmaker who uses geography and time to create an intriguing collection of stories for the screen. A filmmaker’s work helps define his or her identity as an artist, but such definitions are subjective and liable to change. In speaking with Holland, one immediately senses the intricate perspective of the mind behind her cinema – film as mystical and contradictory in its nature and the need to construct a dialogue with the audience through their experience of the film. In this interview, Holland reflects on her own evolution as a filmmaker, as well as the evolution of cinema itself. It is a conversation in which she avoids reflecting exclusively on her individual films, instead choosing to discuss filmmaking, storytelling, and the cinematic medium with a broader focus. PR: Why a career in filmmaking? Was there an inspirational or defining moment? AH: Well, it was a long time ago. I was fifteen when I decided that I wanted to be a film director. I wanted to be a painter before, but then I realized that it was not completely me – I needed more things to

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

express myself, my visual creativity, but also the storytelling, and also some kind of power. I felt that I needed to tell people what to do. And it was in the mid-sixties when the cinema had been an extremely exciting medium – very artistic, very independent, very personal – so I thought it was the best thing to do in the world. I was watching the movies and I

Interview: Agnieszka Holland

Fig. 1: Agnieszka Holland embraces the social encounter and the need to be a leader on Game Count, which she identifies as being a part of her personality.

loved a lot of the movies of the different directors, the different countries and the different styles, and I decided to go to film school. Then I decided to go to film school in Prague for many reasons that were political, but also quite personal. I realized that this kind of moviemaking the Czech New Wave were doing, Milos Forman and others, it was something that was very exciting, and so I wanted to explore it. PR: I’ve read that you illustrated and wrote plays when you were a child. How do you view the way in which those early pursuits set the stage for a career in filmmaking, and how have they since influenced your approach? AH: It’s difficult to analyze it after years, but I think a lot of people that have the creative gene and at the same time were not talented enough to be a painter, writer or something decided to be in the cinema, which is some kind of conglomerate. And you can be ignorant and still be a great filmmaker. So probably if my other talents had have been stronger, I would have not been going in this direction. But as

I told you, also the social encounter, the need to be a leader, was something that was certainly a part of my personality (Fig. 1). So this mix of different selfexpressions pushed me to filmmaking. PR: Looking back over your career, are there any conscious inclinations that have propelled you towards the stories you have chosen to tell as a filmmaker? AH: When I analyze why some stories attract me as a director and others don’t, it can sometimes be very difficult to grasp. It is some kind of a call; some kind of a mystery inside of the story, something that I don’t know how to resolve in different ways, other than to explore it by trying to reconstruct it for the screen. So if I understand all the elements of the story, if it is easy for me to say it in several words, then I am not attracted to it. I am attracted only if I feel there is some kind of a secret inside of the story – in this magic box – and by doing it I am approaching this secret, which is a kind of explora-

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Paul Risker

tion. Curiosity is the reason for many of my decisions. It’s why my films seem to be eclectic. They tell very different stories – period, contemporary, historical or psychological dramas, political films. So it is not that I have one subject. And if I must choose one, it would probably be a very existential subject of identity – what we are doing on this planet and who we are. Of course this is some kind of ontological or philosophical quest, which does not necessarily translate to the story itself in a simple way. PR: The prominence of the past in your cinema is apparent, as well as characters living under and trying to survive oppression. AH: Well the past is not the past to me, and what happened is a part of the present. Most of my historical films are as relevant as the contemporary ones – sometimes more relevant. Sometimes you need this distance from the current events to see the deeper truth. And I am not making these films about the distant past, I am making the films about human nature, and I don’t think this changes too much – it goes by waves. We can see now for example that the events from the thirties or the events from before the First World War have become very relevant. Everybody feels that there is some sort of a repetition and the same dangers we lived through in the twentieth century are rising again. So it is not only to remind people and to educate people about the past, it is to show what from the past is still present. And for me the Second World War never ended. What we are living now is a second stage of the Second World War, or maybe even the First World War. The main subject of humanity is the struggle inside of human nature. Humanity can be cruel and hateful, is easily self-destructive and the culture tries to fight those elements so deeply present inside human nature. It is some kind of eternal struggle between good

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Fig. 2: The “eternal struggle between good and evil” that Holland says “happens inside of man” is externalized in Burning Bush (2013).

and evil, and this struggle happens inside of man. It never ends (Fig. 2). PR: Over the course of your career, how has your perspective on the craft of filmmaking and storytelling itself changed? AH: I did change a bit, but also the perception of the cinema changed and the expectations about complexity of the storytelling did as well. When I started, the cinema was more open, experimental, and ambitious, freer in some way. The search for the new language, for the new narrative tools had been wider than today, and the audience responded largely. Today we practically have two quite opposite branches. One is commercial, following conventional rules and another is made more for the festivals than for the wider audience. The films of the middle, the kind of cinema which is allowed to touch complicated issues in an attractive and accessible way, practically disappeared. And it was the kind of cinema where I felt at home. So cinema changed, but one thing didn’t change for me. I am always doing my films thinking about the audience. I want to make some impact on the people and I need their feedback.

Interview: Agnieszka Holland

PR: Considering your need for feedback, do you perceive the audience to be the ones that complete the film, and does this translate to a transfer of ownership? AH: Yeah, it is the case, I think, because the cinema is a very special medium. Before it was celluloid tape closed in the metal boxes, and now it is in the hard drive with some content inside. But they’re only useless objects, before people see this content on the screen. So the audience is this last magical chain in the process of moviemaking. Without them a film doesn’t exist, really. Different filmmakers have different ambitions, different expectations. I am – for example – not interested in making movies for everybody. I can imagine a quite limited audience for my movie and I never was thinking of reaching, every time, millions and millions of people. I feel satisfaction if I see that at least some amount of people is responding to what I am telling. But that is my perspective as a filmmaker – the perspective of the producer and the distributor must be different. I always tried, when making the movies, to keep them limited in terms of the budget spending to have the maximal amount of freedom. PR: A film, when it plays for its contemporary audience, will differ for each individual, and then the social angsts and preoccupations of the future audience will potentially redefine it further. Could we assert that a film is not permanent and unchangeable? AH: It is, of course, dynamic. Today – with the Internet – we have endless ways to distribute films. But we don’t have this religious respect for film history that we did before. So the films that do not immediately make a point disappear in this enormous quantity of content. And the film that doesn’t have some immediate success when released rarely can reappear as some kind of later discovery. It happens, but it is rare, and it’s why there is such a fight to reach the audience in this very moment, just after the movie is ready. Fortunately, we still have different

Fig. 3: Pawe! Pawlikowski’s Ida.

audiences that have different sensibilities and a different perspective. I will give you an example. Pawe! Pawlikowski’s Ida, which was released first in Poland and had very limited success, was some months later released in France (Fig. 3). And even without a huge promotion, it found five times the audience [in that country] than in its native Poland. So practically at the same time, different audiences can be hungry for different kinds of movies. There is fortunately something extremely capricious and dynamic in the reception of a film because if not, the formula would be even stronger and everything would be made according to the numbers. And because the release of every movie is some kind of Russian Roulette, we can still try things that are different and risky. PR: Across the decades, the feel of film has changed. For example, the American gangster film of the 1940s has a different feel to the gangster film of the 1970s onwards. Do you believe this shift is caused by more than technological developments, and may reflect a changing aesthetic? AH: I think it is something that is more mystical – a mystery that is included in the particular film, and which doesn’t age. The technology of course ages, but not so much. And it means when you are watching the films from the sixties or seventies, even from the thirties and forties, you don’t see the technological barrier, which doesn’t impede you from following the storytelling in a satisfactory way. Of course, some films age and some films don’t. It has happened that the films considered in their time as

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Paul Risker

minor films have come back after years as very powerful. And of course you have the films that have the momentum at the time of release and watched after few years, lost their attraction. The reasons why it happens are – in my opinion – present in the tissue of the moviemaking – in this mix of artistic honesty and the mystery. It is also is why I am so frustrated when I am a member of the jury at festivals. I’ll sometimes accept it because it’s the game we have to play in order to promote the films. But several times it happened to me that I was watching a film and I wasn’t too impressed by it. And afterwards, I watched it another time and I still didn’t like it. Then one day I watched it for the third time and I found it to suddenly be extremely moving and powerful. So even my own perspective can change depending on the moment in my life or the moment of the day, and how I feel. Of course, I can judge some exterior quality of the storytelling, construction and the acting – it is a part of the craft and I can judge the craft. But when judging the inner quality of film, I can be very mistaken. PR: I watched a film recently and came away with a certain impression, and upon speaking with the filmmaker discovered we shared the same thoughts. But on a repeat viewing my perspective changed, which led me to ask the question as to whether we truly ever understand a film, or whether any understanding is only a momentary one? Is one of the intriguing aspects of film and art more broadly that it is volatile and we lack a true understanding of the experience on an emotional, sensual, or even mystical level? AH: In this sense every viewer is completing the film in his own way. Film is not like a novel which you can read, put down, and afterwards reread. Film you mostly watch in real time, and so your feelings are in real time. There are a lot of physiological things that can change your perception – you feel tired, you feel nauseous or you want to pee. And I

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

remember this experience with Angry Harvest, my first film after I left Poland (Fig. 4). It was a very low budget film shot in West Berlin with a lot of difficulties. Afterwards it made it to the Montreal and New York Film Festivals, and then it was nominated for an Oscar. So the film unexpectedly helped my career and it helped my international career to some extent. When we were shooting the film we had a problem with the main actress who had been discouraged by the producer, who had not found her to be attractive enough. We only had twenty days to shoot, and for the first half of this period, she was extremely

Fig. 4: Leading actress Elisabeth Trissenaar as Rosa Eckart in Holland’s Angry Harvest (1985).

stressed. So when I was cutting the film I wasn’t sure if her performance was strong enough, and if she had done everything she could to make this character lively and powerful. And at the premiere in Montreal, I was there watching the film with the main actor in the huge screening theatre with two thousand people. I was afraid that this chamber movie would disappear on such a big screen. Anyway, we’d been watching it and suddenly I had this very strong impression that the actress was just fantastic. I told the fellow actor I had the impression that she was acting very well today, and he answered that it was also his impression. So even such a change in perception of the elements of the film can change the perception, depending, for example, on the audience in the screening room. PR: Is the fascination with the creation of film, art or music due to the fact that artists must learn a language which never fully reveals its secrets to us, but the artist can’t help but pursue these secrets?

Interview: Agnieszka Holland

Fig. 5: Holland contemplates film production while on set.

AH: Film language on one level is complicated because it’s multi-functional, and you are using very different tools. The technical issues are very important and the human issue is even more important – what other people, the writers, actors, crew, and audience bring to the film (Fig. 5). But at the same time it is quite a simple medium, in that you have to play some kind of game with the viewers, and this game is also to build the curiosity and keep the attention. And the tools you are using to play this game are quite primitive in some way. So the most exciting thing is if you can forget those primitive tools and find some kind of freedom, go against the rules. PR: Your use of music is striking and it recalls film director Terrence Davies’ remark to me: “Great music does not tell you what to feel; it merely prepares you for it, and that’s what’s really difficult. And when that is done, it’s just magic.” Would you agree?

Do you approach music as a means to create emotion, to tell people how to feel? Or are you trying to use it in a subtler way? AH: I certainly don’t like the use of the music when you tell people what to feel or what to expect. It means it is illustrative music, which for me is quite boring and counterproductive. If you need the music to tell the story, why are you telling the story on film in the first place? Music is a part of storytelling, another voice in the fabric of narration, and reinforces the emotions for sure. It means that, even if it is not melodramatic, music, especially sentimental, emotional, or sweet music – whatever kind of music it is – the combination of the sound and image creates an emotional conclusion. If you don’t need emotions then maybe you don’t need the music. For me the cinema is the creation of emotions, and again I am not speaking in terms of sentimentality or melo-

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Paul Risker

Fig. 6: Holland using her intuition to construct and balance her tools on the set of Game Count.

drama, but about creating some kind of strong experience. This experience is created by the different elements of the storytelling, of the filmmaking. And the music is a part of that. Sometimes you need it and sometimes you don’t. I like it if the use of the music is as spare as possible because I think that the overusing of the music actually kills the emotion. The music present all the time is irritating to me, but this is, of course, a question of my personal taste. PR: There can also be value in cutting the dialogue and sound momentarily, as silence offers the audience interludes to contemplate what they have seen. This permits an engagement with the film without information being directed at them through dialogue. AH: Yes, but I don’t think that you have to make that opposition of silence against sound, silence against music, or silence against dialogue. The filmmaking/storytelling is to construct and balance the tools that you have to create something in which the composition is as powerful as possible. Some filmmakers don’t need music at all, and some don’t 94

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

need the dialogue, and others need the dialogue all the time. It doesn’t mean that one cinema is better than another – it just means that we have different styles. I am not a director making statements about what cinema is and what it is not. This is not something that interests me and I like the diversity of voices. PR: Is it the job of critics, academics, and scholars to state the meaning of a film, to interpret the work of filmmakers and to say what cinema is? AH: I think that if I start following critics’ expectations I could make films that would be interesting for you, but at the same time, I am afraid that they would in some way be born dead. You need a certain amount of spontaneity and intuition to do something that is alive... I don’t like conceptual art (Fig. 6). PR: There is a belief amongst filmmakers that three versions of the script exist – the script that is written, the script that is shot and the script that is edited. Is this a belief you would share? Does the

Interview: Agnieszka Holland

script evolve – the completed film being the final stage of that evolutionary journey?

Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the creative process?

AH: Yeah, it is always a bit like with a sculpture. It’s like the famous sentence of Michelangelo when he said he had the piece of marble and the sculpture is inside and he has just to find it. So the filmmaking process is also a search for the form appropriate for this particular story, but we don’t know it completely before starting, of course. We have some intuitions, we have some vague concepts, we are making some decisions from the very beginning, but till the end, we don’t know the emotional impact of the film. Now I am finishing the editing of my last film and we are changing things every day, which changes the rhythm of the film and some of the emotional balance. I still feel that we didn’t achieve the ideal form for this particular story and we are still in search. If you don’t have exterior restrictions (deadline, money, etc.) you can go forever.

AH: Yeah, it is like a life experience making a film. It means there is a contest against yourself as well as positioning yourself against the rock of impossibilities and failures. And at the same time you can penetrate some subject much deeper than you can in real life. There are a lot of things happening during the film and it needs an incredible amount of energy from you. And this energy is sometimes spent on nothing, meaning that it is not coming back, and so you don’t receive the feedback, which fully charges your batteries again. So it can cost you a big chunk of life, which you are losing in the film, and it is something that is afterwards floating outside of yourself. So every film is a real experience and a real change, and a real vital risk.

PR: Is it in the editing that you find the film? And looking back over your career, are you content with your body of work? Or have you had to embrace compromise – accepting the final release as being as close to what you wanted as possible? AH: Mostly, when I am looking back, I don’t regret. If I am watching my films, after years, which I rarely am doing, but it sometimes happens for some reason, I am looking at them like one looks at their grown up children. Some are more beautiful than others, some are maybe ugly, but they are still my children. And so I don’t feel that I have to interfere with them. Most of them are aging pretty well, which is maybe because they have pretty classical storytelling. Most of my films I can watch after years. Of course they are not perfect. And I see their mistakes, but it’s the part of the journey.

Works Cited Holland, Agnieszka, director. Angry Harvest. Admiral, Central Cinema Company Film (CCC), 1985. ---. Burning Bush. HBO Europe, 2013. Pawlikowski, Paweł, director. Ida. Opus Film, Phoenix Film Investment, 2013. Risker, Paul. Interview with Christoph Behl. FrightFest Gore in the Store, 24 Apr. 2015. ---. “The Struggle Toward Beauty: Terence Davies on the Road to Sunset Song.” Film International, 18 May 2016, filmint.nu/?p=18327. Accessed 15 Jul. 2016.

PR: German filmmaker Christoph Behl remarked to me, “You are evolving, and after the film, you are not the same person as you were before.”

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The Sight of Unseen Things: Cinephilic Privileging and the Movement of Wind in The Eclipse by David Scott Diffrient Colorado State University

n award-winning high-water mark of European art cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film The Eclipse (L’Eclisse) was theatrically released at a time when the Italian auteur’s international prestige was increasing, following screenings of L’Avventura (The Adventure, 1960) and La Notte (The Night, 1961) at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, respectively. It was also a time when stateside cinephilia was entering a stage of maturation and reflection, thanks in part to the efforts of Andrew Sarris, who that same year published “Notes on the Auteur Theory” in a winter issue of Film Culture (Mast and Cohen 660). For many fledgling cinephiles who first encountered The Eclipse upon its original run in art-house venues such as New York’s Little Carnegie Theatre only to return to it, fetishistically, in subsequent years, the film’s celebrated payoff occurs at the very end, during an extended, wordless dénouement that paradoxically withholds an anticipated narrative event: the meeting between the drifting protagonist Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and her new lover, a handsome stockbroker named Piero (Alain Delon). Visually pivoting on the various details of an empty street corner in the heart of the Esposizione Universale Roma (a residential and business district simply known as the EUR), this slowly unfolding montage, comprised of forty-four shots, epitomizes Antonioni’s aesthetic preoccupations and perhaps lends credence to Sarris’s description of the Italian master’s work as “Antoniennui.” That which is experienced by some audiences as a prolonged inducement of tedium and banality registers as something quite extraordinary in the minds of

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

more sympathetic viewers, who see this final scene’s evocation of absence and presence, alienation and community, engagement and disinterest, mystery and melancholia, as a sign of the artist’s sensitivity to the modern cityscape’s many contradictions. In the span of seven dialogue-free minutes, the camera pans, tilts, and tracks to reveal often overlooked aspects of everyday life: quotidian spaces sparsely populated by real-life inhabitants of the EUR, but noticeably devoid of the two people whose planned rendezvous has been conspicuously withheld. Such withholding on Antonioni’s part — his decision not to show Vittoria and Piero converging like magnets at the end (each one part of a dyad of mutual attraction and romantic longing) — might at first frustrate viewer expectations. However, as suggested by the many critics who have already lavished attention on this final sequence, it ultimately contributes to the cinephilic pleasure experienced by those audiences who are attuned to the rhythms of the city and to the lives of its anonymous pedestrians. Spectatorial fascination is thus ironically linked to the inconclusiveness of this conclusion, which strangely satisfies by virtue of its empty density, its capacity to signify fullness in a virtual void. Described by the director in interviews as a “decomposition of things” (Samuels), this contemplative coda “possesses an ordered, descriptive logic, the order of disestablishment,” according to Seymour Chatman, one of the many theorists to have examined The Eclipse as an example of high-modernist cinema (82). In Chatman’s and other writers’ assessments of the film, an inordinate amount of attention is given to its final scene, comprised of “peripheral synecdoches,” including a pile of bricks and other building materials at a construction site, straw mats draped over partially exposed scaffolding, a leaking barrel of water at the corner of a wooden fence, a sprinkler system, and an assembly of beckoning trees, their branches swaying in the breeze.

Featurette: The Sight of Unseen Things

These synecdochal objects, Chatman states, “invite us to look for the central components” (82), the two missing characters who are there but not there, presently absent. However, this privileging of what is assumed to be the most profound and disquieting section of The Eclipse has peripheralized — or pushed to the margins — other, earlier moments that are equally deserving of our attention. Indeed, the underlying enigma of the film, related to its ambiguous title (which points “everywhere and nowhere at once,” according to Peter Brunette [166n1]), is lent additional shadings when those other, less fetishized scenes are revealed to have been “eclipsed” in the minds of cinephiles by the final seven minutes. Although Brunette informs us that the film’s title refers to an actual solar eclipse “that Antonioni went to Florence to film” (166) but ultimately left out of the finished work, several critics have grappled with its various connotations in light of The Eclipse’s thematic emphasis on the concealment of real emotions, the dissolution of the Italian bourgeoisie, and the disintegration of meaning as well as personal relationships in spaces that are festooned with American commodities and driven by mechanized routines (Kovács 96-98; Arrowsmith). If we accept the general definition of the term “eclipse” as an astronomical event that involves the temporary concealment of a celestial object which has passed into the shadow of another heavenly body, then perhaps we can expand its metaphorical suggestiveness as a marker of the way that the critical privileging of one particular scene in a motion picture necessarily entails a kind of convenient “covering up” or suppression of other scenes. Briefly, I wish to further expand this notion of an eclipse, construing it as a “natural event” that is something of an anomaly; an outof-the-ordinary occurrence that is accounted for in nature and which can be explained through scientific discourse, but which disturbs the normal state of affairs and momentarily alters the world, thrusting us into an enlightening darkness. Specifically, I shift the

critical focus to two other scenes in The Eclipse in which Antonioni’s predilection for combining abstract and concrete forms is on view. Those scenes, besides demonstrating the filmmaker’s synthesizing tendencies, further highlight some of the ontological characteristics of the motion picture medium, which even at its most “still” is riddled with movement; in particular, the movement of the wind — an omnipresent but oft-ignored part of the cinematic image. As a filmmaker with a background in documentary but predisposed to a compositionally expressionistic, rigorous ordering of the world, Antonioni understood the challenges involved in lending nature an unnatural form, in placing the unpredictable rhythms and unplanned movements of daily life into a meticulously conceived mise-en-scène — one that, to some viewers, might appear airless or even lifeless. “Airless,” however, is not a word that I would use to describe The Eclipse, a film in which the wind actively participates, like an invisible yet palpably felt protagonist, no less present (or absent) than Vittoria or Piero. Indeed, the two scenes that I wish to point toward — the two epiphanic moments that precede the film’s coda and anticipate its uncanny juxtapositions — each revolve around the flow of air, a circulatory current that is at once contained yet unconstrained in its capacity to register the motion picture medium’s unique attributes. If, as Alex C. Purves has stated, the motion picture camera has a “special ability to reveal things that were previously unremarkable to the human eye” (325), then the presence of wind in these moments suggests that there is more to mise-en-scène than meets the eye. The first moment occurs during the film’s opening scene, a lengthy, early-morning encounter between two people whose relationship is not immediately discernible upon initial viewing. Running twelve minutes, this introduction to Vittoria and her soon-to-be-ex-lover, Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), plays out entirely indoors, within the latter’s claustrophobic apartment looking out onto a mushroomMISE-EN-SCÈNE

David Scott Diffrient

shaped water tower and other EUR buildings. It begins with what Gilberto Perez refers to as “a kind of still life, nicely composed and held for a few moments” (371). However, the stillness of the first shot, showing a white shape nestled among a row of books, a lamp, and other small objects, soon gives way to movement, a physical stirring prompted by the left-to-right panning of the camera. The mysterious white shape, splayed across five of the seven tattered books, stirs slightly and is revealed to be the sleeved arm of a man seated at a desk, his forlorn gaze scanning the room in a deliberate manner that emulates the camera’s pan (Fig. 1). This is Riccardo, disconsolate over his lover’s decision to leave him. The couple’s incompatibility is registered in the juxtaposed image of a solid black marble obelisk that is placed conspicuously on his desk and the ensuing shot of Vittoria standing before a backdrop of soft, closed curtains. She avoids Riccardo’s look and instead focuses her attention on another collection of objects, including a dish filled with cigarette butts, a small metallic sculpture, and a white vase. Vittoria runs her fingers delicately around the opening of the vase, an

object that evokes both female and male genitalia (one of Antonioni’s less-subtle uses of mise-enscène to “speak” the unspeakable). Joined to a reaction shot of Riccardo suddenly snapping out of his numbed state with a renewed sense of hope and desire, this image hints at each character’s yearnings (his for sexual union, hers for escape) as well as the underlying dramatic tensions of the scene. What is unusual about this arrangement of the cigarette dish, the sculpture, and the white vase, revealed in this opening scene’s third shot, is the presence of a picture frame, which the woman holds in front of the objects (i.e. between those items and the camera). This frame-within-the-frame literally foregrounds the prominent role that Antonioni gives to mise-enscène — to the positioning, lighting, and composition of objects, figures, and settings — more generally within his oeuvre. In the absence of an establishing shot or some other prefatory signpost that might provide information about these characters and the artifact-littered space that they inhabit, the viewer is required to piece together the puzzle of their relationship

Fig. 1: The first shot of Antonioni’s The Eclipse, showing Riccardo surrounded by a collection of objects, including an oscillating fan whose movement mimics the lateral panning of the camera.

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Featurette: The Sight of Unseen Things

from their elliptical dialogue and Antonioni’s staging of the scene, which breaks free from the convention of eyeline matching and makes maximum use of material objects (including framed artworks, such as the painting of a beach scene that momentarily attracts Vittoria’s roving gaze) as associative triggers. Carefully arranged though they may be, these objects, like the director’s disjointed blocking of the scene, “establish a mood of disarray,” according to Mitchell Schwarzer, who argues that the reason for the couple’s dissolution can be found in the things that surround them: “the paintings, vases, trinkets, razors, and manuscripts that pull people apart from each other and from themselves” (210). One object in particular — an oscillating electric fan — is prominently featured throughout the scene, its right-toleft, left-to-right movements being indicative of the film’s structural alternations and anticipating the female protagonist’s internal fluctuations over the course of the narrative. The fan furthermore suggests that there is something “mechanical” about these people’s behaviours, demeanors, and conversation, which drips from frowning lips like perfunctory asides lacking real human emotion (one of the hallmarks of 1960s European art cinema in general

and Antonioni’s oeuvre in particular). The wind that it generates, both invisible yet perceivable in its physical effects on objects and figures, suggests that absence is a defining facet of these characters’ lives (Fig. 2). What I find remarkable about these first dozen minutes of the film, besides the scene’s in medias res invitation to the audience to intuit the cause of the couple’s collapse, is the way that a seemingly suffocating space of “opaque silences and sighs” is opened up or perforated by the presence of wind, which has been invisibly circulating within the supposed stillness of the opening shots (Brunette 73). Much like the way that Vittoria attempts to imaginatively escape the confines of Riccardo’s apartment by parting the curtains and peering out of the inviting windows (thresholds to the outside world that merely exacerbate her feeling of figurative imprisonment), so too has Antonioni introduced an element that tightens the film’s grip on its audience by paradoxically making the cage-like space seem slightly less stifling. In that sense, the scene is similar to an equally suffocating yet airy moment in Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence (Tystnaden), when a terminally ill woman named Ester (Ingrid Thulin) receives

Fig. 2: The electric fan spreads a breeze throughout the otherwise stifling environment in which Vittoria is first shown during the opening scene of The Eclipse.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

David Scott Diffrient

Fig. 3: An oscillating fan spreads a delicate sigh across the bedridden body of Ester, the terminally ill protagonist in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963).

temporary relief from the clammy conditions of her hotel room, where an oscillating fan is perched on a nearby nightstand, spreading a delicate sigh across her bedridden body (Fig. 3). In a manner that recalls the slowly rotating blades of the fan in Bergman’s black-and-white chamber drama, a device that promises to lower the woman’s temperature but whose persistent, metronome-like clicking serves to remind her of her “mortal predicament” (Grunes), the repetitive movements of the persistently humming fan in The Eclipse stir up the air and Vittoria’s emotions along with it.

Artificially generated and contained though it may be, the wind in this scene makes a swooshy dance of the woman’s hair, which gently lifts and lowers as if she were standing before an open window (Fig. 4). Significantly, Antonioni includes a reverse-angle long shot of her standing before the panoramic window, its curtains parted to reveal a group of trees whose limbs sway in the breeze. In the foreground, on the bottom left-hand side of the frame, is the electric fan, and for a moment it seems as if the interior and exterior spaces — each vying for Vittoria’s attention — are metaphysically connected, the tree

Fig. 4: Standing in front of a window looking out onto the Esposizione Universale Roma, Vittoria is simultaneously imprisoned inside Riccardo’s apartment and emancipated by the invisible presence of the wind, which—despite being generated by an indoor fan—evokes the outside world that beckons throughout this opening scene of The Eclipse.

100

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Featurette: The Sight of Unseen Things

leaves moving in accordance with the mechanical object’s to-and-fro oscillations. Besides anticipating a later encounter in the film, in which Piero gives a fellow stockbroker a small, battery-run fan (which will prove useless once the disastrous day of trading ends), this air-filled scene sets the stage for another moment when the wind makes itself felt and seen, this time transpiring in an open courtyard outside the Olympic stadium (Fig. 5). Having left Riccardo, Vittoria has now given herself over to a series of small pleasures, and her nighttime journey beyond the confines of her own stuffy apartment culminates with a scene that encapsulates the filmmaker’s seemingly contradictory aesthetic tendencies — his penchant for abstract compositions (Affron 140; Forgacs 101) as well as concrete objects and physical structures that, in the words of Dudley Andrew, “become the driving force” against which Antonioni’s characters stand (41). Walking alongside a line of flagless flagpoles, she stops to listen to the sound of the wind; or, rather, to the eerily unnatural reverberation of the steel poles as they sway in the breeze (Fig. 6). She is pensive yet alert, alone but joined in her solitude by a kind of celestial presence. The fascination elicited by this everyday spectacle, her capacity for experiencing the kind of sensorial wonderment that comes from the most mundane things, could be said to represent the cinephilic pleasure felt by some audiences, who

Fig. 5: As if to remind audiences of the importance of wind throughout his film, Antonioni includes a brief encounter between Piero and a fellow stockbroker who is intrigued by the young man’s battery-run fan.

might likewise be transported by the mere movement of the poles (Fig. 7). When she steps back, behind an Olympic statue, Antonioni cuts to a reverseangle shot, the camera peering up to illustrate the contrast between the static fixity of the stone figure and the leafy elasticity of the surrounding trees, which likewise move to-and-fro to the accompaniment of the wind’s whispered incantation. Such magnifying of seemingly minute details reveals a level of sensitivity that is akin to the wonderment displayed by Delphine (Marie Rivière), the precocious heroine of Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (Le rayon vert, 1986), whose tear ducts are suddenly unloosened by the rustling of hedgerows and the unexpected vision of trees bending in the wind. Hers is a fascination born of the epiphanic instant, the fluttering, familiar otherness of the breeze, similar to Vittoria’s uncanny encounter with nature in the

Fig. 6 and Fig 7: Wandering the streets alone at night, Vittoria is momentarily transfixed by the sight of flagless flag poles swaying in the breeze. Her look of wonderment suggests a kind of cinephilic spectatorship, evoking the adoration that many audiences have for The Eclipse.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

101

David Scott Diffrient

aforementioned scene from The Eclipse, when she is held spellbound by the swirling currents of air that make flagpoles appear as spindly reeds, their unnatural sound a result of the wind’s felicitous intrusion into a largely unpeopled place. It is the kind of embodied euphoria that leads critics, perhaps initially speechless and equally spellbound, to wax effusive about the most “banal” or aleatory moments in film, as illustrated in theorist Gilberto Perez’s cinephilic aside that, “Nowhere in cinema are trees more beautiful than in the Roman suburb pictured in The

Eclipse” (374). Cinema’s unique capacity to record movement, to deliver the subtle fluctuations of the natural world to audiences who might similarly be “moved” by such scenes, is effectively highlighted in the aforementioned moment. Actually, it is one of several evocative moments in the film, one that — while “eclipsed” in the minds of some cinephiles by the film’s more famous final scene, set in a nearly empty yet wind-filled piazza — demonstrates with beauty and subtlety the need to see the invisible things in a motion picture’s mise-en-scène.

Works Cited

Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 650-665. Originally published in Film Culture, no. 27, Winter 1962-63. pp. 1-8.

Affron, Mirella Jona. “Text and Memory in Eclipse.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3, 1981, pp. 139151. Andrew, Dudley. “The Stature of Objects in Antonioni’s Films.” TriQuarterly, vol. 11, Winter 1968, pp. 4059. Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. Oxford University Press, 1995. Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World. University of California Press, 1985. Forgacs, David. “Antonioni: Space, Place, Sexuality.” Spaces in European Cinema, edited by Myrto Konstantarakos, Intellect, 2000, pp. 101-111. Grunes, Dennis. “The Silence.” Dennis Grunes, 30 July 30, 2007, grunes.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/ the-silence-ingmar-bergman-1963. Kovács, András Bálint. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Perez, Gilberto. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. John Hopkins University Press, 1998. Purves, Alex C. “Wind and Time in Homeric Epic.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol. 140, no. 2, Autumn 2010, pp. 323-50. Samuels, Charles Thomas. “Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni in Rome, July 29, 1969.” Cinephilia & Beyond. www.cinephiliabeyond.org/blow-importance-influence-michelangelo-antonionis-stylish-thought-provoking-mystery/.

102

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Schwarzer, Mitchell. “The Consuming Landscape: Architecture in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni.” Architecture and Film, edited by Mark Lamster, Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.

Perambulation, or the Real Miracle of Morgan’s Creek by Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

o walk is to do that which cannot be done in a darkened movie theatre. Or, to put it differently, despite the fact that what defines human bodies is their ability to perambulate, we go to the cinema to exercise that other part of ourselves: our minds. But while we can dream of things that our bodies cannot do, isn’t it more than a bit odd that our cinematic fantasies are so often about the banal, about things like walking?

The visual design of the cinematic image, long ago described by a mysterious French term, mise-enscène, sadly fading from our critical language, is grounded in the representation of movement, of both the camera and the characters. When characters walk, or cameras relocate their position via the walking of crewmembers, the cinema becomes an art form of moving images. This is why the discourse of art history, the composition of the two-dimensional image, fails to encapsulate the cinema. The discipline of film studies needed to turn to theatre to capture the time-based, three-dimensional status of the cinematic image. The great studies of mise-en-scène were produced in the 1970s, establishing a formalist language for understanding the cinema. In the wake of these sophisticated studies of the visual design of the image, critical theory methods displaced the solitary attention to formal design. However, with the bathwater, out went the baby. What can be done about this lamentable situation? The mise-en-scène critics of the 1970s formalist school attended almost exclusively to masterpieces. Vlada Petric’s “From Miseen-scène to Mise-en-shot” analyzes Jean Renoir’s 103

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

The Rules of the Game (1939); Brian Henderson’s “The Long Take” compares the visual design of films by F.W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, and Kenji Mizoguchi. I would advocate something more populist. This essay intervenes by using a traditional mise-en-scène analysis of a Classical Hollywood film comedy, where zany antics purportedly trump studied, masterful image construction. This essay offers an aesthetic study of walking in Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), in which Trudy (Betty Hutton) gets drunk and impregnated by an unremembered soldier (“ratzky-watzky”) on leave from World War II, only to have the governor declare at film’s end that her devoted, schlemiel boyfriend, Norval (Eddie Bracken) has always been the true father of the sextuplets to whom she gives birth. The film relies on four long take walking sequences to narrate its story of Norval’s love for Trudy. Early on the film establishes that Norval and Trudy’s walk from screen right to screen left involves leaving her home and heading toward the dangerous downtown. Late in its second act, the film violates its established aesthetic rules. In the fourth and last walking sequence, Trudy and Norval’s walk screen right to screen left circumvents the downtown and brings them unexpectedly to her house, thus showing ideologically that no matter what direction Trudy may walk in, the film will ultimately lead her back home. My pedagogical encounter with The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is perhaps as good as any place with which to begin this analysis. One of the things that fascinates me about academic study is how much of what we do is a set of “bequeathed” tools from those who trained us. In the early 1990s, I served as a teaching assistant for Thomas Schatz’s introductory film aesthetics course, “Narrative Strategies” at the University of Texas at Austin. In the course, Professor Schatz performed a three-week reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), demonstrating that the

Walter Metz

Fig. 1: During the first walking sequence in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944), the camera frames Norval (Eddie Bracken) and Trudy (Betty Hutton) without clutter.

film is an aesthetic ballet of editing, moving from “the park bench” scene with virtually no editing, to the “key scene” consisting of dozens of short shots, to the “party scene” full of dizzying shifts between long shots and close-ups. For many years as a graduate student, I stole this analysis (well, delivered it with attribution), but after a few iterations in my own classroom as an assistant professor, the guilt utterly overcame me. I set out on a mad quest to find a replacement that would serve the same purpose of demonstrating how a Hollywood film, in the hands of a great visual and narrative stylist, could modulate its aesthetic practices across its structure to create a meaningful encounter with the social world. After literally watching hundreds of films— both canonical and virtually unknown—about which I had absolutely nothing interesting to say about aesthetics, I stumbled upon The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, my Notorious. The film redeems Trudy after she is impregnated and abandoned by a soldier on leave, marrying her off to Norval, who has long been in love with her. Early in the first act, Trudy convinces Norval to let her borrow his car so that she may go to a party with the soldiers, against her father’s wishes. During a three-minute walk downtown, the mise-en-scène of the shots features noth-

104

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Fig. 2: At the end of the first walk, Trudy must cry on cue to manipulate Norval into letting her borrow his car.

ing between camera and characters, and relatively deserted streets at night (Fig. 1). Sturges shoots the entire scene in one take. The shot establishes the film’s geographical rules, that the characters walking from screen right to screen left involves a journey from Trudy’s residential neighborhood to downtown (Fig. 2). Then, in the first moments of Act II, after she has discovered she is pregnant and unable to locate the father, Trudy and her sister walk back home from the doctor’s and lawyer’s offices downtown. The mise-en-scène suddenly features a tremendous amount of clutter between camera and characters, a bustling street in broad daylight, including soldiers in

Fig. 3: During the second walk, the camera frames Trudy and her sister, Emmy (Diana Lynn) behind a military jeep.

Featurette: Perambulation

a jeep drinking wantonly in the bright light of the morning (Fig. 3). Again, the short scene of one minute is shot in one take. While the characters are now walking screen left to right, this reinforces the Act I operating rules, as Trudy and her sister are walking from downtown back home. In the third walking sequence, in the middle of Act II, Trudy tells Norval that she is pregnant. This is a reprise of the first walking sequence, as Trudy stumbles over telling Norval the truth, in the same way she stumbled over conniving him out of his car earlier in the film. Again, they are walking screen right to left, heading away from Trudy’s home toward the downtown. While the mise-en-scène generally replicates the first walking sequence, with little between camera and characters, the streets are noticeably less deserted this night. Potential small-town busybodies populate the porches of the homes they pass, capable of overhearing Trudy’s secret at any moment. At one moment, Trudy is almost run over by a horse and buggy, demonstrating that it is not merely the modernity of the borrowed car that has led Trudy to ruin, but traditional small-town life itself (Fig. 4). Suddenly, in the midst of this one take sequence built on the same aesthetic foundation as the first walking sequence, Sturges cuts to an insert shot, a close-up of Trudy’s face (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4: During the third walk, a horse and carriage almost run Trudy and Norval down while they are crossing the street.

Was this cut forced by an inability to film the long take during production? Almost certainly, yet it is equally certain that the shattering of the film’s aesthetic rules is a stroke of genius. As Norval discovers Trudy’s secret as they arrive downtown, the film’s stylistic practices spiral into chaos. When Norval reels backwards, realizing that Trudy’s father, Constable Kockenlocker (William Demarest) will think that he has defiled his daughter, the camera stops its inexorable movement left, to instead follow Norval’s fall back screen right. Thus, the direction of character and camera movement still maintains its rulebased deployment of space, but now with significant disruption in the inexorable flow from home to downtown (Fig. 6). Finally, during the last moments of Act II, Trudy and Norval try to solve her problem together. Trudy suggests suicide, but Norval, remarking that one is not supposed to use one’s tires during wartime for such frivolousness, suggests marrying her. The mise-en-scène has reverted to the Act I sparseness, nothing between camera and characters. The town’s streets are now deserted in broad daylight, indicating that Norval and Trudy are on their own; the community will not intervene to help them out of their mess. The editing of this fourth walking sequence is full of insert shots and close-ups; the orderliness of

Fig. 5: An insert shot of Trudy during the third walk breaks the two-shot, long take pattern of the film’s representation of walking established by the first two sequences.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

105

Walter Metz

Fig. 6: At the end of the third walk, Norval sits down when he figures out that Constable Kockenlocker (William Demarest) will assume he is the father of Trudy’s baby.

Fig. 7: At the end of the fourth walk, Trudy and Norval greet Constable Kockenlocker on his porch, interrupting the cleaning of his service revolver.

the one take walking sequences from earlier in the film has been completely decimated.

move along with them to capture the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological implications of their mobility, both physical and psychological.

Finally, the direction of character movement tricks us: the characters are walking screen right to left, proposing a journey downtown, but the sequence comes to a shocking conclusion when Constable Kockenlocher brandishes his gun from his front porch at Norval’s line, “What’s the matter with bigamy?” (Fig. 7). The ideological point of the film is finally expressed, that all roads lead back to Trudy’s house; the home is the place wherein one’s problems will be solved. Act III will merely involve a mopping up, as Trudy delivers the litter of potential new soldiers, and the governor decrees with the force of law that the children have all along been Norval’s. In as frenzied a comedy as ever produced in the Hollywood studio system, mise-en-scène analysis reveals that, as with the studied compositions of the films of the great masters—Bergman, Mizoguchi, Welles—the language of cinema is a mobile one. When people walk in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, things happen, and Preston Sturges’s cinema must

106

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Works Cited Henderson, Brian. “The Long Take.” Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, vol. 1, U of California Press, 1976, pp. 314-324. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Directed by Preston Sturges, Paramount Pictures, 1944. Petric, Vlada. “From Mise-En-Scène to Mise-En-Shot: Analysis of a Sequence.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 1982, pp. 263-291.

Featurette: Unseen Voices

Unseen Voices in Abbas Kiarostami’s

The Wind Will Carry Us by Kenta McGrath Curtin University

ne of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest strengths and idiosyncrasies as a filmmaker was his commitment to offscreen space: the unseen reality existing outside the parameters of the image. What remains on or off the screen is largely determined by a filmmaker’s mise-en-scène choices. To organize the mise-en-scène is also to organize what is not to be seen, a process of selection and arrangement as much as a process of reduction and omission. In Kiarostami’s films, which always involve a complex interplay between sound and image, the mise-en-scène often emphasizes an absence, where what is missing takes on equal or greater importance to what is shown.!!

Consider the opening sequence of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). It begins with a series of extreme long shots – what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the “cosmic long shot,” a signature he identifies in many of the director’s films – to show a four-wheel drive containing a TV crew of three men as it winds through the countryside of Iranian Kurdistan (Fig. 1). If the sound were to be recorded from the position of the camera, we would perhaps hear little more than the distant hum of the motor and the natural sounds of the landscape. Instead, Kiarostami foregrounds the voices from inside the car; the men are trying to find a village. The practice of foregrounding distant sounds in films is not unusual, but in fact, entirely conventional. For example, it would be typical for a conversation within a crowd to be recorded separately and raised in the mix, so that it can be heard comfortably above the ambience (films do not simply overhear conversations; they create an impression of overhearing them). More generally, a filmmaker may use sound to draw attention to a section of the image so

Fig. 1: The opening shot of The Wind Will Carry Us.!

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

107

Kenta McGrath

Fig. 2: A tall, single tree.!

that it will be noticed and prioritized among the mise-en-scène – a strategy often taken to comical extremes in Jacques Tati’s films, to which Kiarostami’s work has been compared (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 22-23). What is unusual in this sequence is the sheer contrast between aural and visual distance: the clarity and closeness of the conversation, which functions almost like a voice-over, paired with the depth and openness of the landscape image. There is a visual referent for the men’s voices but it is merely a blip on the scenery, obscured and abstracted by distance. The disjunction between sound and image creates a paradox: the shot is simultaneously distant and intimate, realist and noticeably constructed. Additionally, an onscreen image (a car driving through the countryside) is transformed into a quasi-offscreen space (the inside of the car, whose occupants we can hear but not see).! As the men read out directions to their destination, the viewer is prompted to scan the scenery for signposts in the same way as they do. But the seemingly vague directions – they are looking for a “tall, 108

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

single tree,” which is nowhere and everywhere – maintain a comical incongruity between sound and image. Then in a quietly stunning moment, what we see corresponds directly with what we hear. A lone tree atop a hill – far bigger and more magnificent than the others – comes into view from the right of frame. As the camera pans, the lens is just wide enough to capture the car passing at the bottom and the tree passing at the top. Both elements align at approximately the centre of frame, in a rare moment of symmetry (Fig. 2). Until now, the randomness of the landscape and the road’s arbitrary path through it had been stressed, with the camera panning along matter-of-factly to follow the car’s journey. Suddenly the image appears highly aestheticized, the scenery carefully and artificially arranged as part of the miseen-scène. The sequence shifts to a shot from inside the car, looking out of the side window (Fig. 3). It would appear that the image has finally caught up with the sound; the distance between camera and microphone has been bridged, allowing us to see and hear from the same position. Yet Kiarostami still refuses

Featurette: Unseen Voices

Fig. 3: The view from the car.

to reveal the crew, their visual absence becoming all the more pronounced because of their proximity. The sound continues as it has, divorced from the image. The crew stop and ask a woman for directions. Looking up to face the camera, which has assumed briefly the role of a collective point-of-view of the men, she obliges (Fig. 4).

If one pays attention to the images in isolation, it is easy to notice that the sequence has followed a fairly conventional trajectory for a dramatic film opening, with the emphasis shifting from setting to character, and from wider to closer shots, as the narrative develops and characters are introduced. Other mise-en-scène elements are advanced accordingly:

Fig. 4: A woman gives directions.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

109

Kenta McGrath

the colour of the scenery evolves from red to green, the relative stillness of the earlier long shots progresses to the lateral tracking movements from inside the car, and the trees dotting the landscape are replaced by human figures dotting the fields. As the crew stop again to discuss directions, a boy (Farzad Sohrabi) approaches the car, asking, “Hello, why are you late?” He catches the distracted men unaware, but not the camera, which no longer represents their perspective. This shot also follows its own internal, dramatic trajectory. The boy is framed initially in wide shot on the edge of frame, sitting on a mound. As he gets up and walks forward, the lens pulls focus, and he settles into a close-up a few feet from the car (Fig. 5). Finally, a human face, with all the clarity of a close-up, isolated in sharp focus! But why this face and not the faces of the men whose banter we have been privy to for the last four minutes, and who seem to be the protagonists of this film? By refraining from turning the camera around, Kiarostami creates another paradoxical effect: the close-up simultaneously emphasizes what is shown (its conventional function) and, because of its position at the end of a

Fig. 5: The first close-up.!

110

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

chain of images that raises certain narrative and formal expectations (that the protagonists will finally be revealed), emphasizes what is not shown. The closer we get, the more we are made aware of the absence. At first we simply could not see the crew; now it is clear that they are being withheld from us. It is precisely their hiddenness that is emphasized: the crew remain unseen but we know they are there, just as Kiarostami and his crew are there. This reflexive approach is consistent with Kiarostami’s broader use of narrative and visual omission in this film and others. As we will learn later, with the exception of Behzad (Behzad Dourani), the protagonist, we never see the other crew members, although we hear them frequently. A character that Behzad chats to at various points in the film is a labourer digging a hole on a hilltop, whom we also hear but do not see. Similarly, we never glimpse the old woman whose impending death is the reason for the crew’s visit (they intend to record the subsequent mourning rituals). Elsewhere, dialogue scenes are filmed so that a character is partially obscured by lighting or framing, or else left entirely offscreen, to be imagined by the viewer.

Featurette: Unseen Voices

Writing about Kiarostami’s earlier films, Gilberto Perez argues that the director’s celebrated realism is one that “declares its artifice, vividly depicting a reality but not allowing us to forget that we’re watching a film, which a film-maker has put together in this way . . . a representation of life and a reflection on how life is represented on the screen” (18). The Wind Will Carry Us is also a vivid representation of life, in all its grandness and smallness, its mysteries and banalities. But it is also a profound reflection on how this life is represented, and it begins with the opening frames of the film. Come in from the city, meet the locals, film them, and leave when the job is done – this is what the TV crew hope to do, and what Kiarostami did for much of his career. Embedded in and around the narrative of The Wind Will Carry Us is an oblique, parallel commentary of the film’s own making, and a reflection of Kiarostami’s own role and responsibilities as a filmmaker, as one who comes and leaves.

Works Cited Perez, Gilberto. “Where is the director?” Sight & Sound, Vol. 15, no. 5, 2005, pp. 18-22. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Fill in the Blanks.” Chicago Reader, 29 May 1998, www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/07/fill-in-the-blanks. Accessed 15 July 2016. Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Abbas Kiarostami. University of Illinois Press, 2003. The Wind Will Carry Us. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, MK2 Productions, 1999.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

111

The Film Experience: An Introduction Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White th 2015, 4 edition Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's 544 pp., 978-1457663543 (p.b.), CAD$106.99.

Review by Joakim Ake Nilsson Kwantlen Polytechnic University An instructor is faced with several challenges when teaching an introductory film course in the twenty-first century. Most students will come to the class having experienced a variety of narrative films, but will need to acquire the detailed technical vocabulary and develop the analytical skills required to engage critically with a film. Furthermore, apart from the proliferation of social media and the popularity of video games that have made films less popular and influential, students today have a variety of platforms to access a broad range of mainstream, independent, and international films. This means that beyond the latest Star Wars film or popular Disney animation, students will likely share a limited number of commonly watched films an instructor can refer to when providing examples. The instructor’s goal then is to choose films – classics? foreign? popular? documentary? experimental? – that teach students to critically engage with films, not only by building their skills in analyzing the themes and issues addressed in films, but also by presenting terminology and concepts that will give them the means to discuss and write about how the formal and narrative elements of film communicate those themes and issues. In The Film Experience: An Introduction (4th edition), Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White eschew the “Great Films and Directors” approach, and instead make the pedagogical choice to emphasize the role of the spectator/student in the film experience. As they explain in the Introduction,

112

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

While certain approaches in film studies look first at a film’s formal construction or at the historical background of its production, The Film Experience begins with an emphasis on movie spectators and how individuals respond to films. Our different viewing experiences determine how we understand the movies, and, ultimately, how we think about a particular movie—why it excites or disappoints us. (9) While Corrigan and White do well to value audience response to films, they quickly emphasize the importance of spectators being “active viewers” (9). Although film is obviously the subject matter in an introductory course on film studies, it also teaches broader academic skills, particularly critical thinking and effective writing, and connects to educational and social concerns beyond the film studies classroom. The authors feel that students should move beyond subjective responses, reminding them that to think seriously about film and to study it carefully is therefore to take charge of one of the most influential forces in our lives. Expanding our knowledge of the cinema—from its formal grammar to its genres to its historical movements—connects our everyday knowledge to the wider sociocultural patterns and questions that shape our lives. (17) Corrigan and White provide a text that takes a very broad approach to introduce students to the many facets that make up film studies. The chapters are well-organized, and most follow the same structure, which makes the text more user friendly for students. For example, Chapter Three, titled “Cinematography: Framing What We See,” begins with “A Short History of Cinematography” and then discusses “Elements of Cinematography” and then concludes with “Making Sense of Cinematography.” In this last section, students are asked to think about the expressive effects of framing and camera distance, moving from identifying and describing formal elements of cinematography to “defining our relationship to the cinematic image” (122). This struc-

Book Review: The Film Experience

ture, as seen in all chapters, reflects the authors’ emphasis on critical thinking, and how the student should progress from identifying formal elements to discussing how those formal elements work in the film to communicate specific ideas to, and evoke certain feelings in, the audience. In each chapter, the authors provide a large number of brief references to films, each accompanied by a single frame image. These images are drawn from films from a variety of time periods and countries, and provide a broad array of examples that students and instructors can explore in more detail. However, as most of the film references given in the text are very brief, they may not have much meaning to students if they have not seen the film; without the ability to connect the example to the concept being discussed, students may not be able to “see” the concept in action. This approach stands in contrast to a much shorter and less visual text like Ed Sikov’s Film Studies: An Introduction (2009); Sikov instead provides more generic, hypothetical, though more concretely-detailed examples to explain formal and narrative elements. Corrigan and White also provide a few additional detailed examples in the “Form in Action” and “Film in Focus” sections in each chapter, which offer lengthier discussions of films, as well as a link to the LaunchPad Solo website. This is a very valuable resource where students can view over sixty montages and film clips and instructors can find instructional resources, and select and embed videos clips for lectures and assignments. Website access is free for instructors, and can be bundled with the textbook for no additional cost, giving students a six-month subscription to the website. Another valuable feature of the text is that each chapter begins with “Key Objectives,” a point-form list of the main ideas to be covered, and ends with a “Concepts at Work” section. Many introductory film textbooks end each chapter with a detailed summary of the main ideas and concepts presented in

the chapter. Consistent with their focus on critical thinking, Corrigan and White have chosen instead to provide a brief summary, and then present questions and activities that ask students to apply the concepts to specific films: at the end of the Chapter Four, “Editing: Relating Images,” they ask students to “Draw a floor plan of Marlowe’s office based on the spatial cues given in The Big Sleep’s editing” (173). This requires students to apply the principles of film editing in an imaginative way, which is far more valuable than simply asking students to memorize and describe different types of editing. What would be useful at the end of each chapter to both students and instructors is an alphabetical works cited list of all referenced films, given the large number of films included in each chapter. In Part One, “Cultural Contexts: Watching, Studying, and Making Movies,” Corrigan and White discuss the importance of students engaging critically with film. In the Introduction, “Studying Film: Culture and Experience,” they ask students to think more critically about how the viewer’s identity plays a key role in the film experience--how “experiential circumstances” and “experiential histories” (10) shape a viewer’s emotional and/or critical response to a film. In Chapter One, titled “Encountering Film: From Preproduction to Exhibition,” the authors present an overview of the making, marketing, and exhibiting of films, and how culture and technology play a role in the changing ways viewers experience films. Continuing their focus on the role of the viewer in all aspects of film, they begin the chapter by suggesting that students should “think of production and reception as a cycle rather than a oneway process: what goes into making and circulating a film anticipates the moment of viewing, and viewing tastes and habits influence film production and distribution” (20). This overview also provides a valuable context in which students can explore the ex-

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

113

Joakim Ake Nilsson

pressive qualities of the formal and narrative elements of film, which the authors address in the next two parts of the text. In Part Two, “Formal Compositions: Film Scenes, Shots, Cuts, and Sounds,” Corrigan and White examine the formal elements of film in detail, dedicating a chapter each to mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. They clearly define and explain technical terms, using numerous examples and images from a range of national and historical films and film genres, including detailed discussions of mise-en-scène in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), editing in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Battle Potemkin (1925), and the relationship between image and sound in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). In the “Concepts at Work” section that ends the chapter on film sound, the authors again prompt students to think critically about the relationship between sound and other formal and narrative elements of the film. As a suggested “Activity,” they ask students to “select a scene or sequence from a film that uses orchestral music” and then substitute another type of music or a song and reflect on ways in which “the changes redirect our understanding of the scene and its meaning” (209). Part Three, “Organizational Structures: From Stories to Genres,” dedicates one chapter, “Narrative Films: Telling Stories,” to discussing the narrative elements of film. Other chapters follow, focusing on documentary films and “Experimental Film and New Media.” The authors effectively outline each area of film. However, for instructors teaching a one quarter/semester class, it may be enough to discuss narrative film; documentary film has its own history and formal elements, and analyzing experimental film requires a strong knowledge of narrative film that the students are still developing. An important element of narrative film that the authors do not discuss is how stories, whether original or

114

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

adapted, become screenplays, which are then turned into films. Screenwriters are only mentioned in a paragraph in Chapter One, and some instructors may feel that more attention should be paid to how the written word shapes the narrative and non-narrative elements of a film. The final chapter of Part Three addresses the history and elements of genre, and briefly outlines the features of six important genres: comedies, westerns, melodramas, musicals, horror films, and crime films. This is an effective choice, as the variety of genres will give students and instructors the opportunity to explore one or more of these genres in more detail. In discussing each genre, Corrigan and White describe key features and themes, as well as subgenres, such as Psychological versus Physical Horror films. They also challenge students to think more critically about what attracts viewers to a particular genre. They explain that “[c]omedies celebrate the harmony and resiliency of social life. Although many viewers associate comedies with laughs and humor, comedy is more fundamentally about social reconciliation and the triumph of the physical over the intellectual” (322). They describe the appeal of horror films as rooted in social and psychological catharsis: “horror films dramatize our personal and social terrors in their different forms, in effect allowing us to admit them and attempt to deal with them in an imaginary way and as part of a communal experience” (332). The authors provide an effective description of each genre, but also ask students to reflect on how films can cross between genres or can challenge genre conventions. Part Four, “Critical Perspectives: History, Methods, Writing,” will force instructors to make content and pedagogical choices based on the amount of content they think they can effectively ask student to engage with, and on the level of critical thinking skills their students possess. Chapter Ten, “History and Historiography: Hollywood and Beyond,” is a valiant attempt to cover, in forty pages,

Book Review: The Film Experience

the history of Hollywood cinema, International cinema, Independent cinema, and cinema by women, African Americans, and the LGBTQ communities. This broad approach stands in contrast to the choice made by John Belton in American Cinema/ American Culture, 4th edition (2012); taking a cultural studies approach, Belton provides a more detailed exploration of how post-World War Two American cinema reflects the cultural and political changes in American society. Corrigan and White have clearly emphasized inclusivity, and instructors can choose to provide more detail regarding one or more of these areas of film history. In the next chapter, Corrigan and White explore film theory, which many instructors may decide is simply too much to ask of students in a firstyear film class—most instructors will introduce a particular theoretical approach simply by emphasizing political or social issues, such as representations of race or gender, but most universities leave a more detailed exploration of film theory for a second- or third-year course. The last chapter of this section, and the final chapter of the book, “Writing a Film Essay: Observations, Arguments, Research, and Analysis,” is one of the highlights of the book, and one of the best chapters on writing about film that I have encountered. The authors discuss the importance of students moving from personal opinion to critical objectivity, and provide an excellent model of the writing process, by which students work from critically watching a film to establishing a topic to developing a thesis. To help students distinguish between different common writing assignments related to film, the authors provide a sample of a critical film review of Minority Report (2002), and then a sample essay presenting of a more objective analysis of Rashomon (1950). Corrigan and White clearly explain the need for primary and secondary sources, and discuss how to effectively incorporate and correctly cite sources in the unfortunately now-outdated seventh edition of Modern Language Association (MLA) style. To

further assist students in their research, the authors provide a good list of Internet sources related to film studies. They also provide a full-length sample research essay that explores the connection between historical context and violence in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Furthermore, after an extensive Glossary, the authors include a final section entitled “The Next Level: Additional Sources,” which provides a list of secondary sources related to each specific chapter, some of which are mentioned in the particular chapter. Corrigan and White have provided instructors and students with a text that effectively covers most aspects of film studies, and provides an expansive range of examples, both in the text and through the accompanying website. Teaching the text cover to cover may be more appropriate for a course divided over two quarters/semesters, but instructors can choose particular areas of genre, film history, and film theory to suit their needs. The structure of the text is easy to follow, and the outlining of “Key Objectives” at the beginning of each chapter allows students to focus their attention on specific learning outcomes for that chapter. Again, the “Concepts at Work” section that ends each chapter does not focus on summarizing the main concepts addressed in the chapter; instead, it provides questions and activities that help students analyze how the ideas presented inform our understanding of the film experience. The greatest strengths of The Film Experience: An Introduction are the more detailed analyses of films that can be viewed on the LaunchPad Solo website, a valuable resource for students and instructors, and the last chapter, which provides students with all the tools necessary to move from active viewing to critical thinking to organizing their ideas into a clearlystructured and effectively-supported film analysis. This book effectively provides the tools necessary to develop a student’s skills in analyzing, researching, and writing about all aspects of film.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

115

Transforming Gender Director: Marc de Guerre Country/Year: Canada, 2015 Production: Canada Broadcasting Corporation Runtime: 43:12

Review by Gerald Walton Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Lakehead University As I watched Transforming Gender (2015), one of the documentaries featured in the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) documentary series that is evocatively called Firsthand, I was reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi’s 2009 TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” In it, she details how people have a strong tendency, guided by mass media in the form of books, magazines, television, and movies, to perceive people who are not like themselves as representing a single-story, what might otherwise be called a stereotype. She focuses on single-stories that many Westerners hold of Africa, perceived as a homogenous continent despite inter-continental diversity and stories that counter the dominant narrative disseminated through media of poverty and catastrophe. Directed by Marc de Guerre, also responsible for the 2013 documentary, How We Got Gay, Transforming Gender aims to confront the single-story of what it means to be trans, which is that those who identify as trans have had a sense of not fitting in with their gender since early childhood, and that they are suffering and victimized. As Toronto psychotherapist and trans activist Hershel Russell notes in the film, trans stories are multiple, varied, and much more complex than a single-story or, as he puts it, a “simple story,” would suggest. Although not noted in the film, some, but certainly, not all, trans activists and their supporters add an asterisk after “trans” to signify the very diversity among trans* people that defies the single-story. Although a matter of debate 116

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

(see Diamond and Erlick, for instance), I have opted to use the asterisk in this review, even though I suspect that the use of it will disappear in the near future. Approximately three-quarters of an hour in length, the film features a wide spectrum of trans* people, from young children to a woman in her late 80s, although most are white. The diverse occupations of those interviewed, including a former prostitute, a model, a psychotherapist, and a university professor, show the broad reach of the trans* community. Vancouver’s Stephanie Castle makes a notable appearance in the film. She transitioned at the age of 66 and founded the ground-breaking trans* organization, the Zenith Foundation, in 1992 and its publication, the Zenith Digest, which operated until 2002. The interviews mix personal narratives, or stories that build connections between those in the film and the viewers, with what I would call gender theory-lite. Simplified for a mass viewing audience, the director breaks down broad social presumptions about what gender supposedly is, and highlights grey areas instead of reinscribing black and white as separate entities. In other words, the film makes efforts to assail the prevailing notion of gender as a simple, mutually-exclusive binary. Even so, not everyone featured in the film has the background in theory by which to challenge the binary. Instead, they end up reinforcing it, though unwittingly, by depicting themselves, or being depicted as, the ‘opposite’ of their assigned gender. In this way, the film does not shy away from the contradiction that perhaps a preservation of the gender binary does not transcend gender at all, as implied in the term “transgender.” One of the more complex issues that is discussed in the film, but not explored in depth, is the notion of passing, which is to achieve a level of success in gender presentation that does not draw undue attention in public. Passing in the trans* context reinforces the gender binary, the false

Film Review: Transforming Gender

but tenacious idea that only two genders exist, and that one must acknowledge that they are one or the other. Not both. Not neither. Film participant Aaron Devor, a professor, scholar, and Founder and Academic Director of the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, argues that it is high time to move beyond the belief that gender is limited to two mutually-exclusive categories. Historically and crossculturally, gender schemas of more than two varieties have flourished, such as the Hijra people in south Asian countries, and Two Spirit people in some Indigenous North American societies. According to Devor, we need to draw from these histories and societies and learn to count higher than two. Devor also notes that cisgender people tend to be unable to talk to or interact with anyone whose gender is not definitively boy or girl, man or woman. According to Devor, the gender binary is so prevalent and normalized that other people take notice when a person does not definitely appear to be one or the other. In other words, passing in the transgender context involves gender expressions and gender cues that communicate being a normative boy or girl, man or woman. This idea comes across in the treatment of the film title in the opening credits. When they first appear, the word “TRANSFORMING” is pink, out of which emerges the word “GENDER,” which is blue. Each word eventually loses its gendered colour signification and turns white, perhaps representing the shift from restriction to possibility. For some of the trans* people featured in the film, passing as their actual gender is a crucial aspect of their day-to-day lives. The reason is simple: to avoid harassment from passers-by. Who can blame them? Gays and lesbians have known about passing for years as a strategy to avoid harassment but which reinforces cisgender norms and posits being gay or

lesbian as second-class to being straight. And so it goes for trans* people. The choice to pass is perfectly valid. Yet, the personal issue of passing has broader social and political implications. The logic evident in the film, though not made explicit, is contradictory and mirrors contemporary debates about the politics of passing. On one hand, the gender binary, which is magnified and policed through media-driven standards of beauty, needs to be challenged and disrupted. On the other hand, passing reinforces the very binary that positions being trans* as strange, if not freakish. Related to the issue of passing is a compelling debate raised in the film on how to ‘be’ in the social world as trans*. Hershel Russell expresses keen enthusiasm for being out as trans* (“It’s wonderful being trans!”) and does not seem to feel any compulsion to keep his gender identity and history private. He does not seem to be occupied by the burdens of having to pass as cisgender. By contrast, New Yorker and former sex-worker Krystina Elisa Crespo (Fig. 1) says that trans* people are much more acceptable when they are passable, adding, “I don’t think it’s important. I don’t think it’s relevant. If someone were to ask me, I wouldn’t deny it. I’m not ashamed of who I am. I just don’t think it matters.”

Fig. 1: Krystina Elisa Krespo.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

117

Gerald Walton

These two orientations mirror contemporary questions about sexuality, namely, what are the private motivations for being out and known as gay or lesbian? Who gets to decide on being out, or not, and on what basis? What does being out mean in a context where being a sexual or gender minority is a struggle for representation in broader society? How might the “it’s nobody’s business but my own” rationale undermine broader social change?

118

featured in the film, their parents. Indeed, perhaps the most moving and educational aspect of the film are the accounts of parents who unreservedly support their trans* children. Parents who respect their children enough to support their social transitions to identify and express themselves as the gender that feels most natural to them are commendable. Unfortunately, such parents are rare; most pressure their children to conform to their assigned gender, belittle their children’s perceptions about their own gender, or reject them outright. It is mentioned in the film, but not explored in depth, that the percentage of trans* youth who are homeless and suffering from mental health issues are disproportionate to their cisgender counterparts. No wonder. The problem, as Hershel Russell explains, is not being trans* itself, but transphobia that operates widely in society.

Passing and outness are personal decisions that are rooted in social politics. So are bathrooms in what has been dubbed the “transgender bathroom wars” by Politico Magazine. Although the film is not a foray into issues of bathroom usage, Transforming Gender offers a critical voice to counter the ongoing public debates about trans* people’s right to use washrooms that match their gender identity. U.S. politicians and others have employed transphobia with aplomb, arguing that predators in women’s clothing will invade the “wrong” bathrooms and assault women and girls. Such notable politicians include the former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, and the current Governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, among many others who utter the predictable transphobic tedium of the U.S. Republican Party and their socially conservative agenda. It is certainly facepalm-worthy that bathrooms have become a plank in the Republican political platform. Fortunately, Transforming Gender carries weight in its ability to educate against such ignorance and, in doing so, it can certainly be described as political, or at least having political implications. Unfortunately, those who could learn a thing or two about gender will probably never see it. Parents, students, teachers, and scholars who interested in gender and trans* issues will be drawn to the film; I am not so sure about others.

Also problematic is that, although the film is not a feature length documentary, the notion of being genderqueer is entirely absent. Genderqueer is an identity and gender presentation that disavows the gender binary and normative cisgender expectations. It might also incorporate being trans*, but not necessarily. For people who identify as genderqueer, passing isn’t a priority. The film also overlooks passing as an issue of class. Those in the film who find passing important for themselves have acquired the social, financial, and medical resources to undergo a range of hormonal and surgical strategies to enable the transition. Certainly, it is the case that trans* people are varied in what they can and choose to adopt to help them in their process of transition. However, the film fails to represent those trans* people who do not have such resources, and thus are left vulnerable to the daily risks of harassment and violence that inevitably come with gender presentations that do not conform to cisgender norms.

The politics of everyday trans* life aside, Transforming Gender offers a glimpse into challenges faced by trans* people and, in the case of trans* children

The omissions that I have identified are not faults with the film. It is not possible, or even desirable or effective, to address every issue on a complex

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Film Review: Transforming Gender

with the capability of harming trans* children with such judgment. Perhaps they need to find other jobs where they would be less harmful to children. Perhaps intake procedures for bachelor of education programs need to screen teacher candidates more carefully.

Fig. 2: Mat Perrault

topic such as gender. One aspect of the film that I will quibble about, however, is the music soundtrack that felt hypnotic and distracting, much like a lullaby. I would have preferred no soundtrack at all. The film would then have taken on a grittier, realist feel, and would have been appropriate, given the stories shared of pain and also joy. Counter to the slumber-inducing soundtrack, the real strength of the film comes from the drama in stories. In Montreal, Akiko Asano recounts her daughter Mat Perrault’s experiences with bullying, prejudice, and judgment from teachers and adults in the school environment (Fig. 2). Although only a brief remark, the comment is a rather searing indictment of the problems of bullying being perpetuated by adults rather than children and youth. It makes me wonder about the value of teacher education programs if some teacher-candidates enter schools

Fig. 3: Daniel Pullen and Annie Pullen Sansfaçon

Daniel Pullen and Annie Pullen Sansfaçon (Fig. 3), parents of their daughter Olie (Fig. 4), echoed similar feelings about the broader community outside of schools. Daniel pointedly asked, “Do I really want to see my kid attempt suicide just for outside communities to feel good?” Clearly, the answer is “no,” which is why Transforming Gender is such a valuable film for its educational potential. Documentaries should inform and provoke in ways that lead to social change. Shown in teacher education programs, social work programs, and schools, the film certainly answers some of the most basic questions about what it means to be trans* and why it matters to those of us who are not trans*. The Victoria Times-Colonist newspaper referred to the film as “‘Transgender 101.’” Being trans* is not a simple or single story, but it is a series of stories that are varied and diverse. Social politics taking a back seat, Transforming Gender effectively portrays trans* children and adults in ways that are sensitive, insightful, and educational.

Fig. 4: Olie

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

119

Wizard Mode Directors: Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry Country/Year: Canada, 2016 Production: Salazar Films Runtime: 1:22:00

Review by Fiona Whittington-Walsh Kwantlen Polytechnic University Wizard Mode is a Canadian documentary about Pinball World Champion, Robert Gagnon (Fig. 1). The film documents Robert’s rise to fame in the pinball world as well as his day-to-day life in Burnaby, British Columbia (B.C.) where, at 26, he lives in his family home with his parents. Living with one’s parents well into one's adult years is not an unusual phenomenon in B.C. where housing is among the most expensive in the world. However, the focus of the film and why the filmmakers wanted to tell Robert’s story rather than stories of other champions is the fact that Robert is autistic. Through the use of home videos, Robert’s parents tell us that they knew when he was a baby that, despite being “very cute,” he was different. He had tantrums for no apparent reason, was uninterested in toys, choosing to play with light fixtures instead,

and he liked to spin and roll down steep hills. At the age of three, Robert was diagnosed with “autism and mild mental handicap” (Wizard Mode). His parents were informed that their son would most likely never talk, read, or write. With the assistance of a speech therapist, Robert was speaking by the age of seven, and the viewer can clearly see that today he can read and write. The viewer does not see any of the other behaviours other than in home videos leaving them to believe that perhaps Robert no longer has these behaviours.1 When Robert was five, his father introduced him to his first pinball machine, Twilight Zone, in a local burger place. By the age of 10, Robert had his own machine. His mother tells us that Robert playing pinball or other games such as Nintendo, provided relief for the family. They knew that as long as Robert was playing they did not have to worry about him running away. His father informs the audience that a large part of Robert’s success with Pinball is the fact that he “doesn’t like to be a loser. He wants to win” (Wizard Mode). This desire to win also involves studying dozens of pages of rules that accompany some of the machines in order to figure out the game. All of this has paid off for Robert. Robert has been competing in world championships since he

Fig. 1: "I wish I had close friends…I feel like I’m stranded in one place. I have no one else to turn to outside of pinball since I never give myself a chance to socialize outside of it." - Robert Gagnon: Wizard Mode.

120

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

Film Review: Wizard Mode

was 19, won the PAPA Championship in 2016, and is currently ranked seventh in the world (International Pinball Association, 2016). When thinking about a young man with autism who is a pinball champion, it is hard not to conjure up images of the ultimate pinball wizard from The Who’s 1969 rock opera, Tommy.2 Also made into a movie in 1975, Tommy is the story of a young man who is deaf, blind, non-verbal, and a pinball champion. Pete Townsend, lead guitarist for The Who and creator of Tommy, explains in his 2012 autobiography that he always envisioned Tommy as autistic. This idea of people with autism being isolated by their own senses and cut off from social contact is one of the prevailing stereotypes about autism. In fact, most people think about autism by referring to numerous stereotypes that are supported in popular culture including films such as: Being There (1979), Rain Man (1988), Forrest Gump (1994), and Nell (1994); and Sheldon from the TV show, The Big Bang Theory. Some of the stereotypes include the belief that people with autism: •

are incapable of forming close relationships with people and are happier if alone • do not like to be touched • are fixated on physical stimulation such as spinning, swinging, and jumping • have violent aggressive behaviours • are emotionless • are easily over stimulated with noise and lights • are fixated on routine • have remarkable talents due to their fixation tendencies, this is referred to as being a savant • cannot make eye contact • are asexual When I first heard about Wizard Mode, I immediately assumed it would be showcasing many stereotypes, most significantly the savant stereotype. This is the widely perpetuated stereotype of autism. Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man character, Raymond

Babbitt, is a perfect example. While unable to have an emotional connection to people, he is obsessed with routine, including watching The People’s Court, eating pancakes with toothpicks, and having tapioca pudding for dessert with the main meal of fish fingers. Despite these everyday “difficulties,” Raymond is also a savant. He has an uncanny memory; he remembers the address and phone number of a waitress after having read the phone book the night before. His memory skills also make it possible for him to be able to count cards in Vegas and win thousands of dollars. He subsequently rescues his brother both financially and emotionally. Temple Grandin is perhaps the most famous actual person with autism. She is a professor of animal science at Harvard University, author of several books, an internationally known public speaker, and the subject of an Emmy award-winning made-for-TV biopic starring Clare Danes. Her story is received as a triumph and inspiration, and she is recognized by non-autistic audiences around the world as the quintessential autistic savant.3 While the savant stereotype seems as though it is showcasing positive traits, traits that our society highly values, it is none-the-less a negative stereotype for people with autism. Generally, this is the stereotype that is represented so often that it is assumed that all people with autism are savants. If a person with autism does not have remarkable talent, they are assumed to be “low functioning.” Autism, however, is a spectrum and not everyone on the spectrum acts the same way. There is no “high functioning” or “low functioning.” Each person has their own strengths and weakness just like everyone else. While some people on the spectrum do have behaviours that seem stereotypical, it is a spectrum because no two people are exactly the same. Further, using the term “spectrum” means that while there may be some aspects of the person that are typical of someone with autism, they also may be no different than anyone else in other aspects. The spectrum consists MISE-EN-SCÈNE

121

Fiona Whittington-Walsh

of many different ways that the brain processes information and can create some difficulties in everyday life while at the same time creating traits that are useful in everyday life (Burgess 2016). Wizard Mode successfully steers away from representing Robert as a stereotype by highlighting other aspects of his day-to-day life that allow the audience to see him as a whole person. Robert shares his life goals, which include getting a job, living on his own, being a father, getting his driver’s licence, and dating. This helps the audience make a connection with Robert which is central to shattering stereotypes and stigma. Most significantly, directors Jeff Petry and Nathan Drillot allow Robert to explain what his autism means to him: “Autism to me is nothing. It just impairs my words and social cues like body language and facial expressions. Like why is he smiling; why is he waving when it wasn’t needed; what expression is on his or her face” (Wizard Mode). Since 1990 in B.C., children with autism and other developmental and/or intellectual disabilities have been included in their neighbourhood schools. Despite this inclusion, people with disabilities experience high rates of isolation, loneliness, and stigma. For children who display difficult behaviours, seclusion in isolation rooms, closets, and even being expelled have all been documented throughout the province (Inclusion BC and Family Support Institute of B.C. 2013). For the students who remain in school, curriculum is often adapted or students are not given the opportunity to do academic work. For the most part, the few existing post-secondary opportunities are focused on segregated pre-employment based programs that generally fail to lead to viable and meaningful employment opportunities (Turcotte 2014). These lack of opportunities and experiences with stigma and isolation are subtly shown in the film. Robert talks about the difficulty making friends and says that in school he “didn’t fit in with regular

122

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

kids…they will think I’m freaky but I’m not” (Wizard Mode). We also see Robert’s difficulties with finding meaningful and permanent employment. This is demonstrated when Robert is discussing his future with his parents and Amy, his support worker. Amy is reading out a list of potential employment options including a training workshop on being a clown. Despite an interest in gymnastics, Robert firmly states, “I don’t want to be a clown” (Wizard Mode). The first time I watched Wizard Mode was with my film club, The Bodies of Film Club.4 Wizard Mode was the first documentary we watched together. While the members enjoyed the film and Robert’s success with pinball (many of the club members are also avid gamers), they picked up on Robert’s experiences with isolation and stigma. Most significantly, there is a scene during the 2015 PAPA 18 World Championships where Robert is alone and trying to find someone to talk to about a frustratingly bad game. Robert approaches random gamers, desperate to find someone who watched his poor game and with whom he could connect. The club resonated with some of his struggles to find someone to interact with and all said they had similar experiences in their lives. As one club member, Katie, comments on the film and the 2015 World Championship scene: “I have an emotional understanding of Robert. They didn’t edit, they put him in real life scenarios. Some people talked to him, some people didn’t. It’s realistic…I understand the stress…he feels isolated.” Another club member, Emma, also found similarities between Robert’s experiences and her own. When Robert loses at the 2015 Championship and swears loudly, receiving a warning, Emma thought that his reaction was realistic: “I can relate to him. Sometimes when people don’t understand me I get frustrated.” Most significantly, both Robert and his parents dispel the stereotype that his autism gives him an advantage with pinball. His mother tells us that they

Film Review: Wizard Mode

“didn’t make the connection…never once did I think he was good at Nintendo or pinball because of his autism.” Robert furthers this by stating that, rather than autism helping his game, it is pinball that is helping him with his autism: “Pinball has helped me socialize. Pinball has helped me communicate more openly. Pinball has helped me find people that have the same passion as me and I feel we all have a passion we can share with someone. Pinball helps relax me” (Wizard Mode). While the film avoids deliberately representing Robert as a stereotype, it nonetheless reinforces the belief that people with autism or other developmental, intellectual, or physical disabilities have just as many opportunities to reach their full potential as anyone else in society. Robert travels around the world playing at various tournaments and has an incredibly supportive family that appears to be able to financially support many of his dreams. Robert’s struggle to create connections with people and have friends recedes into the background as we watch him travel to New York to hang out with a fan and forge a potential new friendship. We also see him find employment working in an office doing random administrative tasks such as shredding paper and delivering mail. The opportunities that Robert has, however, are very rare for people with disabilities. In fact, many of the dreams that he has for himself, dreams that most of us share, are denied to people with disabilities. With the high rates of unemployment5, many people with disabilities survive on B.C.’s Persons with Disabilities Income Program (PWD), which currently sits at $906.00 per month. People with disabilities are twice as likely to live in poverty

in B.C. than their non-disabled peers (Canada Without Poverty). Rates double if the person is female or aboriginal. Despite being the first province in Canada to close all of its institutions for people with disabilities, institutionalization (in various forms) continues to be a threat in Canada including B.C. Further, people with disabilities are routinely denied rights regarding sexual and reproductive health as well as reproductive planning and choices. Up until the 1970s, B.C. had the Sexual Sterilization Act that authorized the routine sterilization of people with disabilities and other members of marginalized groups including aboriginal people. Today, there are countless stories of children being taken away from their disabled parents (Bellrichard, 2015). According to the National Centre for Disability, the removal rate is 80%. While Canada has few statistics documenting this removal rate, experts maintain it is similar to America’s (Track, 2014). Wizard Mode ends with images of Robert, surrounded by fellow gamers, basking in the glory of inclusion and acceptance. We are left with the belief that everything will be OK for Robert. He will be able to attain all his goals and dreams. Robert Gagnon’s story is a success story and, while this on its own does not make the film a bad film, stories about the successful savant6 are generally the only stories of autism we see in popular culture. Missing from these narratives is the reality that the majority of people with disabilities face. Most people with disabilities will be denied basic rights and freedoms on par with their non-disabled peers. Despite this reality, most film narratives make the audience feel good thinking that all people “like Robert” are looked after and can realize their dreams just like the rest of “us.”

Notes 1. He has one outburst at Pinburg 2015 when he is eliminated from the competition. He swears out loud and receives an official warning. Because we do not see any other outburst from Robert, we

assume this outburst reflects his frustration from being eliminated from the competition and not part of his autistic tendencies; this is not a tantrum for no reason. MISE-EN-SCÈNE

123

Fiona Whittington-Walsh

2. In the song, “Pinball Wizard,” the main character, Tommy, is described as “that deaf, dumb, and blind kid.” During the closing credits to Wizard Mode, “Pinball Wizard” is used as the backdrop to psychedelic images of Robert playing. The song is performed by David Hartley’s band, Nightlands. The descriptor for Tommy is changed to what sounds like a pinball name: “half check whiskey.” David is also a pinball enthusiast and even played at the 2013 Professional and Amateur Pinball Associations (PAPA) world tournament, Pinburg, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. All attempts at trying to find the actual lyric change have not been successful. 3. Grandin has been criticized by some members of the autistic community, including Public Interest Law Scholar at Northeastern University School of Law and disability rights activist Lydia Brown. See Lydia’s blog, Autistic Hoya, and in particular the post, “Critiquing Temple Grandin,” August 10, 2013: http://www.autistichoya.com/

2013/08/critiquing-temple-grandin.html. Accessed September 15, 2016. 4. There are eight members of the club, including five young adults with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. Together, we are researching disability representation in motion pictures and have written a chapter for an International Text on Disability and the Media and have presented at numerous conferences in B.C., Canada, where we live. The club includes Kya Bezanson, Christian Burton, Katie Miller, Jacklyn McKendrick, Emma Sawatzky, and Colton Turner. 5. Currently the unemployment rate for working aged adults with disabilities is 400,000 in Canada. See: Prince (2014). 6. According to the media stereotypes, the “successful savant” is also almost always white and male. Temple Grandin is an exception to this. A full analysis of the intersection of disability, social class, race, and gender is beyond the scope of this review.

Works Cited Bellrichard, Chantelle. “Mother sues B.C. Ministry of Children after baby dies in foster care.” CBC News, March 24, 2015, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ british-columbia/mother-sues-b-c-ministry-of-children-after-baby-dies-in-foster-care-1.3008289. Accessed August 23, 2016. Brown, Lydia. “Critiquing Temple Grandin.” Autistic Hoya, August 10, 2013, www.autistichoya.com/ 2013/08/critiquing-temple-grandin.html. Accessed August 23, 2016. Burgess, Rebecca. “Understanding the Spectrum.” The Oraah, 2016, theoraah.tumblr.com/post/ 142300214156/understanding-the-spectrum. Accessed August 23, 2016. “Canada without Poverty: Just the facts.” Canada Without Poverty, www.cwp-csp.ca/poverty/just-the-facts. Accessed August 23, 2016. Drillot, Nathan, and Jeff Petry, Wizard Mode. Salazar Film Production Company, 2016. Inclusion BC and Family Support Institute of B.C. Stop Hurting Kids: Restraint and Seclusion in B.C. Schools – Survey Results and Recommendations. November 21, 2013, www.inclusionbc.org/sites/default/files/ StopHurtingKids-Report.pdf. Accessed August 23, 2016.

124

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

International Flipper Pinball Association. “World Pinball Player Rankings.” International Flipper Pinball Association, www.ifpapinball.com/rankings/ overall.php. Accessed August 23, 2016. Prince, Michael. “Canadians with Disabilities Need Real Work, Real Pay, Real Leadership.” The Globe and Mail, August 29, 2016, www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/canadians-with-disabilities-need-real-workreal-pay-real-leadership/article31587898/. Accessed September 17, 2016. Track, Laura. Able Mothers: The intersection of parenting, disability, and law. West Coast Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, 2014. Townsend, Pete. Who I Am: A Memoir. HarperCollins, 2012. Turcotte, Martin. Insights on Canadian Society: Persons with disabilities and employment. Statistics Canada, December 3, 2014.

The Viral Image FOR HUMANS ONLY. Sony, 2008. Traileraddict, traileraddict.com/district-9/poster/1.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

Henderson, Brian. “The Long Take.” Film Comment, vol. 7, no. 2, Summer 1971, pp. 6-11. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/43752806.

The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

“In the Jungle: The Making of Cannibal Holocaust.” Directed by Michele De Angelis, Alan Young PicContributors tures, 2003. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New TAYLOR BOULWARE is a doctoral candidate in Media Collide. New York University Press, 2008. English and Cultural Studies at the University of WashJenkins, Henry, al. Spreadable Media: Creating Value ington. Sheetstudies fandom, television, film, andand graphic Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York Univernovels through the lenses of Queer and Marxist theories, sity Rhetorical Press, 2013.Genre Studies. Her first book, Fascination and Frustration: Writing Slash Fanfiction, will beandpublished Kaes,and Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture the by McFarland in 2018. Wounds of War.Press Princeton University Press, 2009. WILLIAM BURNS the Dean of the Inno“TheDR. Legacy.” The BlairF. Witch Project, is blairwitch.com/legvation and Learning Resources Institute at Brookdale acy.html. Community College in Lincroft, N.J. He has been the Robinson, David. Dasand Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. British Dean of the Arts Communication Division and is a Film Institute, 2013. tenured Associate Professor in Brookdale’s Communiholds a B.A. in Rose,cation Frank.Media The ArtDepartment. of Immersion: Dr. HowBurns the Digital GeneraCommunication MaristMadison CollegeAvenue, and a M.A. in Jourtion is Remaking from Hollywood, and the nalism NYU. W.W. He earned hisand Doctor of Letters Way Wefrom Tell Stories. Norton Company, from 2012.Drew University in Madison, N.J. Dr. Burns lives at the Jersey Shore with his wife, Lisa, and three children. Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or What It Means to Live in the DAVID DIFFRIENT is AssociatePress, Professor Network SCOTT Society. University of Minnesota of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Com2003. munication Studies at Colorado State University. His arShields, David. A Manifesto. ticles haveReality been Hunger: published in CinemaKnopf, Journal,2010. Historical Film,Directed Radio, and Television, Journalperforof Film and SoundJournal of My of Voice. by Zal Batmanglij, Video, of Popular Film and Television, Review of mancesJournal by Christopher Denham, NicoleNew Vicius, Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Brit Marling, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2012. and Video, and Velvet Light Trap, as well as in edited collecStahl,tions Erichabout Ludwig Arpke.topics. Du Musst filmand andOtto television He isCaligari the author Werden!. 1919. PosterConnection Inc., posterconnecof Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema and tion.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/the-cabinet-ofMovie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean dr-calilgari-the-posters/. Cinema. Tryon, Chuck.DRISCOLL “Video from received the Void:his Video JAMES M.A.Spectatorin Media and ship, Domestic Film DePaul Cultures, and Contemporary Cinema Studies from University. He studies psyHorror Film.” Journal ofand Filmwrites and Video, no.a Hechoanalysis in Chicago aboutvol. film61, from 3, Fall 2009, perspective. pp. 40-51. JSTOR, jstor.org/stagelian-Marxist ble/20688633. MICHAEL JOHNSTON is an Assistant Professor in Why the So department Serious?. 42 of Entertainment, 2007, at42entertainElectronic Media Kutztown Uniment.com/work/whysoserious. versity of Pennsylvania. He received his M.F.A. in Film MediaDein Arts Vaterland from Temple in 2013. His reZabel,and Lucien. ist inUniversity Gefahr, Melde Dich!. search interests include the aesthetics of 20th Century 1918. Library of Congress, loc.gov/picArchitecture and Design in film and television. As a tures/item/2006680285/. filmmaker, his work has screened at national and internationalJames. film festivals. most film, A Cut: Man Full World.” Jump Zborowski, “District His 9 and its recent A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 52, Summer 2010, ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/zoborowskiDst9/index.html.

of Trouble, won numerous screenplay awards and Best Film at the 2014 Media Film Festival. KENTA MCGRATH is a Japanese/Australian filmmaker and a lecturer in the Department of Screen Arts at Curtin University. He recently completed his Ph.D. on the relationship between cinematic realism and minimalism, and has previously worked as a lecturer for the Japanese Film Festival and Japanese Animation Film Festival in Perth, Australia. His research interests include post-war Japanese cinema, structural film, slow cinema and fiction/documentary hybrids. His films have screened at FIDOCS, Biennale of Sydney, and the Revelation International Film Festival. WALTER METZ is a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he teaches film, television, and literary history, theory, and criticism. He is the author of three books: Engaging Film Criticism (2004), Bewitched (2007), and Gilligan’s Island (2012). Currently, he is drafting Molecular Cinema, a new theoretical exploration of materialism in cinema as a way of rethinking the relationship between science and film. CHLOE ANNA MILLIGAN is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Florida, specializing in the intersections of electronic literature, film and game studies, and media archaeology. She received her B.A. in English from Emmanuel College and her M.A. in English from Clemson University. She is a HASTAC Scholar and a founding member of TRACE, UF's digital humanities initiative housed in the English Department. She has taught courses on film adaptation and electronic literature. This article will be his first publication. JOAKIM NILSSON completed his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. He previously taught at Pierce College and Simon Fraser University, and now teaches in the English department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His teaching and research interests focus on representations of masculinities in American literature and film, and in medieval literature. He recently published an article on homophobia in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE 35 MISE-EN-SCÈNE

125

PAUL RISKER, independent scholar and film critic, holds an M.A. from the University of Wolverhampton in film and regularly contributes to Film International and other academic and popular outlets. He has interviewed Ted Kotcheff and Rolf de Heer, Jack Hill and Gina Leibrecht in Film International 12.3 and 13.1, 13.3 and 14.1 respectively, and is currently starting out research for his first book. He hopes to return to the academic environment to lecture in film. Prior to his freelance writing career, he participated in an initiative to revitalize the creative industries, project managing independent short film productions. He is a MSJ board member and the interviews section editor. RACHEL WALISKO is a recent graduate of the MSc Film Studies program at the University of Edinburgh, where she received distinction on her dissertation “‘Projecting the Past Into the Present’: The Aesthetic Representation of History in 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, and Lincoln as a Catalyst for Political Consciousness.” She received her B.F.A. in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests include aesthetics, adaptation, genre, and female authorship. She will be applying to Ph.D. programs for Film Studies this fall. GERALD WALTON is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University and also teaches in the Department of Educational Studies at KPU. His teaching and research focus on gender, sexu-

126

Vol. 1, No. 1 | Winter 2016

ality, race, and issues of privilege. In particular, he critiques usual ideas about bullying and argues that, unless educators and parents come to understand it as a phenomenon whereby people are excluded, marginalized, and victimized on the basis of their racialized, gendered, sexualized, and religious identities (among others), bullying will remain a significant problem in schools and society. DR. FIONA WHITTINGTON-WALSH has been an instructor at KPU since 2010 and is currently the chair of the Sociology Department. Her areas of research interests include: gender, disability, beauty, film, advertisements, inclusive education, and academic and community research partnerships. In addition to her Bodies of Film Project she is also co-investigator with Teresa Morishita, KPU’s Access Program for Persons with Disabilities, for the Including all Citizens Project. Using the principles of universal design, Dr. Whittington-Walsh is transforming her teaching in order to be fully accessible to all students. The pilot is following five KPU students with intellectual disabilities as they work towards their Faculty of Arts Certificate Degree for credit on par with their peers. She is currently the vicepresident of the board of directors for Inclusion BC, a non-profit organization that advocates for the full inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in all aspects of society.

Mise-en-scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (Issue 1.1, Winter 2016)

Articles inside

Transforming Gender Gerald Walton

Wizard Mode Fiona Whittington Walsh

Perambulation, or the Real Miracle of Morgan’s Creek / Walter Metz

The Sight of Unseen Things: Cinephilic Privileging

Unseen Voices in The Wind Will Carry Us Kenta McGrath

The Film Experience: An Introduction

From the Shadows: Nosferatu and the German Expressionist Aesthetic William F. Burns

View from the Road: Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny Michael Johnston

Reification and Alienated Form in A Clockwork Orange James Driscoll

Articles

Interviews

The Adaptation of Artwork in Lust for Lifeand Mr. Turner Rachel Walisko

The Viral Image: Transmedia Mise en scène in the Fictional Real Chloe Anna Milligan

Contents