Mise-en-scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (Issue 3.1, Spring 2018)

The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

Vol. 03 No.01 I Spring 2018

CONTENTS Vol. 03, No. 01 | Spring 2018

ii About MSJ iii Letter from the Editor Greg Chan

iv Contributors

ARTICLES 03

Organizing the ZOO: Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts Michael Johnston

14

Film Degree Zero: Antonioni's The Passenger

Warwick Mules

26

Self-Presentation, Kitsch, Irony: German Sound Film around 1930 Selina Hangartner

39

Between frontiers of dictatorship and democracy: Voicing Otherness in the Spanish Historical TV fiction Remember When Zaya Rustamova

52

Above Image | Courtesy of Peter Greenway, A Zed & Two Noughts (1985).

FEATURETTES 69

Searching for the Female Spectator in Broken Blossoms Derek Dubois

73

To Be Felt: Examining Textility in Spike Jonze's Her Christina Parker-Flynn

REVIEWS 79

Applying Suspense to Archetypal Superheroes: Hitchcockian Ambiguity in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

“The Challenges in Archiving Film History”: David A. Cook’s A History of Narrative Film (Fifth Edition)

Ian Boucher

Mina Radovic

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ABOUT MSJ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

LAYOUT EDITOR

Greg Chan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada

Patrick Tambogon, KPU, Canada

ADVISORY BOARD

WEBMASTER

Richard L. Edwards, Ball State University, United States

Janik Andreas, UBC, Canada

Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago, United States David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, United States

INTERNS

Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, United States

Neil Bassan, University of British Columbia, Canada

Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Prabhjot Kaur Bhamra, Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Emma Jane Wilson, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada

Michael C.K. Ma, KPU, Canada

Monica Zandi, Hunter College, United States

Janice Morris, KPU, Canada Miguel Mota, University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada

The views and opinions of all signed texts, including editorials

Paul Risker, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

and regular columns, are those of the authors

Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

and do not necessarily represent or reflect those of the editors,

Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

the editorial board or the advisory board.

REVIEWERS

Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada

is published by Simon Fraser University, Canada

Franics Grant Kwesi Gbormittah, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana

WEBSITE

Jennifer Susan Griffiths, University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy

www.kpu.ca/MESjournal

Phillip Grayson, St John's University, United States Jack Patrick Hayes, KPU/UBC, Canada

FRONT COVER IMAGE

Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, United States

Courtesy of Peter Greenway, A Zed & Two Noughts (1985).

Dan Lett, KPU, Canada Kent Lewis, Capilano University, Canada

BACK COVER IMAGE

Osakue Stevenson Omoera, Ambrose Alli University,

Courtesy of Jake Hills on Unsplash

Ekpoma, Nigeria Carolina Mariana Rocha, Southern Illinois University,

SPONSORS

Edwardsvillle, United States

Faculty of Arts, KPU, Canada

Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada

KDocs Documentary Film Festival, Canada

Andrea Meador Smith, Shenandoah University, United States Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

CONTACT

Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

MSJ@kpu.ca

Fiona Whittington-Walsh, KPU, Canada

COPYEDITORS Heather Cyr, KPU, Canada Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada Jennifer Susan Griffiths, University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy

ii Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

ISSN: 2369-5056 (online) ISSN: 2560-7065 (print)

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, Sometimes it feels like we are living in a film noir.

Shadowy atmospherics, corrupt authority figures, and relentless darkness have become all too familiar. In this age of anxiety, why not look directly into noir’s dark mirror for guidance? After all, film noir specializes in “suffering in style” (perfectly coined by Eddie Muller), but also in warning us about the slope towards moral bankruptcy.

Perhaps I am especially attuned to film noir storytelling because I am teaching it in my undergraduate film studies class right now. Immersion in The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil, Strangers on a Train, Laura, and Double Indemnity has had its affect. For a field study project, the class ventured out on a noir-ish rainy day to the Rio Theatre, one of the last independent theatres remaining in Vancouver. The students were taken on a tour of the projection booth, where Ciara, the projectionist, discussed the history of film technology (celluloid to digital) and her evolving role (more operator than technician). Following the tour, the students were treated to a private screening of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which will be the subject of their upcoming research essay on classic Hollywood film. Our post-screening discussion noted how Citizen Kane seems eerily reflective of our times.

Likewise, noir sensibilities and aesthetics have woven their way into Issue 3.1. Let’s assemble the evidence: a featurette focused on Theodore Twombly’s existential angst in Spike Jonze’s Her; a character study of David Locke, the homme fatale in Antonioni’s The Passenger; and an article concerning the doomed twins in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts. As you will see, their collective exploration of darkness never looked so good.

Speaking of good looks, you may have noticed that MSJ has a new, more contemporary format.

I would like to express my gratitude to our incoming layout editor, Patrick Tambogon, who is responsible for our makeover. We hope you enjoy the new layout and how it showcases our contributors’ scholarly work.

Finally, I would like to thank Peter Greenaway, who has generously allowed MSJ to use a still from A Zed and Two Noughts as our cover image. We are honoured to share this striking image with you.

Sincerely,

GREG CHAN | Editor in Chief

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CONTRIBUTORS IAN BOUCHER

MICHAEL JOHNSTON

Ian Boucher earned his Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies and Communication at the University of Pittsburgh and his Master of Library and Information Science at Kent State University. As a librarian, he works to support, prepare, and empower ethical contributors to an informed society, and teaches sessions on emerging technologies and information literacy. He researches the role of superhero media in developing cultural understandings about justice and edited the anthology Humans and Paragons: Essays on Super-Hero Justice. The author thanks Dr. Jason Buel, Dr. Keely Mohon-Doyle, Dr. Jonathan Sarris, and Ryan Krumm for their invaluable feedback.

Michael Johnston received his MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. His short fi lms A Man Full of Trouble and Irina have screened at international fi lms festivals, including Virginia Film Festival, LA Shorts Film Festival, Indie Street, and Kew Gardens Festival of Cinema. Michael teaches in the Department of Cinema, Television and Media Production at Kutztown University.

DEREK DUBOIS Derek Dubois is an award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter and an adjunct professor of Film Studies at Rhode Island College and Clark University. He holds an MA in Media Studies from Rhode Island College and an MBA from Bryant University. His academic work - primarily focused on fi lm narratives, formal aesthetics, and feminist fi lm theory - has most recently been published in the peer-reviewed journals Film International, Short Film Studies, Supernatural Studies, Senses of Cinema, and Mise-en-Scene.

SELINA HANGARTNER Selina Hangartner is an assistant researcher, lecturer and PhD student in the Department of Film Studies at University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is interested in early sound cinema, and irony and reflexivity in fi lm.

More specifi cally, her work examines turning points in fi lm history that evoke new forms of presentation and cause a turn towards self-portrayal in fi lm. With Prof. Joerg Schweinitz, she is co-editor of a book on irony in fi lm which will be published in 2017. She was a Visiting Student Researcher at UC Berkeley from January to October 2017.

iv Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

WARWICK MULES Warwick Mules is Adjunct Associate Professor in Environmental Humanities in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University. He is the author of With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Nancy, co-author of Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: a Semiotic Approach, as well as numerous articles on film, art, and visual culture, including articles on the films of Malick, A. Mann, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky. His work is informed by deconstructive poetics, textual f iguration, and materialist reading practices. In particular, he is concerned with opening up existing cultural forms to new pathways in responding to challenges facing us today regarding the exhaustion of meaning, the limits of nature and the possibilities of sense. His current work focuses on a re-examination of classical and modernist fi lm in light of ecological questions concerning the place of the nonhuman in cinema technologies.

CHRISTINA PARKER-FLYNN

ZAYA RUSTAMOVA

Christina Parker-Flynn is Assistant Professor of Film and Literature in the English Department at Florida State University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University, where she began teaching fi lm in their Film Studies Department. At FSU, she teaches courses such as “Hitchcock: Allegories for Seeing (Cinematically)” and “Cinematic Species: Gender, Modernity, and Filmic Re-production.” Her research focuses on a visual imperative in nineteenth-century French literature that anticipates film theory and representation in the twentieth-century. Recent publications appear in Gender Forum and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Dr. Rustamova is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kennesaw State University since 2017. In over 17 years of language instruction, she has taught a broad variety of courses in Spanish language and literature. Her interdisciplinary research interests encompass Modern and Contemporary Spanish Peninsular Literature and Cultural Studies, as well as Brazilian Literature, with an emphasis on popular culture and media studies.

She specializes in topics related to memory construction and its ideological dimensions, representations of identity, race, ethnicity, and gender in aesthetic-cultural productions of the Hispanic world. Dr. Rustamova has published on tensions between dominant and peripheral cultures in Spanish Romantic prose and contemporary televisual discourse.

MINA RADOVIC Mina Radovic has a Master of Arts in Film Studies and German Language, Literature and Linguistics from the University of St Andrews. He is a fi lmmaker and also writes regularly for international fi lm and academic journals. Mina runs the Liberating Cinema Project, bringing newly-restored masterworks of world cinema to the UK. His research interests are in archiving and preservation, fi lm history, and historiography, Yugoslav cinema, world cinema and, in particular, the links between voyeurism and spectatorship in the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

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vi Photo Vol.03,courtesy No.01 |ofSpring Jeremy2018 Yap on Unsplash

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Organizing the ZOO:

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts

BY MICHAEL JOHNSTON | Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT Peter Greenaway’s fi lm, A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), examines the process of death and decay and how the cinematographic process can document the human experience. The fi lm centres on Oswald and Oliver Deuce, grieving twin-brother zoologists, and their affair with Alba Bewick, a beautiful woman whose body is decomposing as a result of a series of amputations. She is also the woman responsible for the death of the twins’ wives. In order to process their wives’ deaths, Oliver and Oswald undertake a series of pre-cinema-esque studies: photographing the decomposition of the zoo animals in their care. Like all Greenaway fi lms, Z&OO subverts traditional narrative fi lmmaking. Greenaway’s fi lms employ a visual organizing principle as cinematic structure rather than traditional movies motivated by story and plot. A Zed and Two Noughts derives its organization from Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century locomotion studies, Animals in Motion. Muybridge’s pre-cinema photographic studies of human and animal figures in the 1880s were meticulously organized, meticulously edited, and near pornographic. Greenaway has explained that his fascination with Muybridge’s work lies not only in the visual organization, but more in the peculiarity and perversion of the human activities documented in the studies. It can be argued that Muybridge’s work bridges the gap between art and science. It can also be argued that Muybridge’s work existed solely for the amusement of its maker. Greenaway’s use of Muybridge suggests both – art and science and the amusement of the maker. Th is article examines Muybridge’s organizing principles for his motion studies and how those same peculiar principles serve as the process for Oliver and Oswald Deuce to grapple with death in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts.

P

eter greenaway’s 1985 film, A Zed and Two Noughts (Z&OO), tells the story of Oliver and Oswald Deuce, Siamese- twin zoologists separated (cut into individual bodies) at birth. The twin brothers lose their wives in a freak car accident when a swan crashes into the windshield of the wives’ car, killing the brothers’ wives and injuring their driver, Alba Bewick, who as a result has one leg amputated.

The brothers mourn their wives and seek to understand their unexplainable deaths. That is the clearest narrative this author can provide for the fi lm; a clear narrative is neither Greenaway’s intention nor is it part of the fi lm’s structure. Since his fi rst short fi lms in the late 60s to his most recent “bio-pics” about Rembrandt, Hendrick Goltzius, and Sergei Eisenstien, Greenaway’s fi lms evidence the fi lmmaker’s desire to organize things and his

attempt to find order in chaos (Pally 108). Greenaway’s films subvert traditional narratives and are structured by what Greenaway refers to as an organizing principle (109).

A Zed and Two Noughts is no exception.

Greenaway’s fi rst feature fi lm, Th e Falls (1980), is composed of 92 biographies in which each character’s last name begins with the letters F-A-L-L. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) is centred around 12 drawings on a country estate. Drowning By Numbers (1988) is a fi lm simply numbered 1-100. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) employs colour-coded rooms and daily restaurant menus. The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003/4), is a trilogy centreed on the contents of 92 suitcases. Greenaway’s last three feature films are organized around an artist’s specific biographical episode and their defining artistic technique:

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Organizing the ZOO

Rembrandt and Nightwatching (2007), Hendrick Goltzius and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), and Sergei Eisenstein and Eisenstein in Gaunajuato (2015). Greenaway is continuing these hybrid biographical-fictional-essay fi lms with Eisenstein in Hollywood (2018) and Walking to Paris (2018), his film about Constantin Brancusi.

Greenaway’s cinematic experiments with numerical systems, alphabetical sequencing, and colour-coding have all been attempts to dislodge the apparently unquestioned presumption that narrative is necessary and essential for cinema (Pascoe 10). Greenaway states: If a numerical, alphabetical or colour-coding system is employed it is done deliberately as a device, a construct, to counteract, dilute, augment or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in plot, in narrative, in the ‘I’m now going to tell you a story’ school of film-making, which nine times out of ten begins life as literature, an origin with very different concerns, ambitions and characteristics from those of the cinema (9-10).

surface more repeatedly than in the film and media work of Peter Greenaway. Reproductions and recreations of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion are evident in A TV Dante: The Inferno – Cantos 1-8 (1989), Prospero’s Books (1991), Th e Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy (2003/4) and Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway (2008).

Greenaway views Muybridge’s locomotion studies as “a project that mocks human effort…It’s as an unfinished and unfinishable catalogue of anecdotal ephemera that I like it best” (Pascoe 111). Perhaps Greenaway’s most compelling use of Muybridge’s locomotion studies is A Zed & Two Noughts (Z&OO), which uses Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies as its organizing principle.

Muybridge’s locomotion studies are “organized,” if nothing else, from conception to presentation. Each motion study consisted of a sequence of still images (photographic plates) of a movement, often shot from 3 different angles, which sought to isolate individual human and animal movements and freeze time. Muybridge’s system operated via a series of still cameras stationed side-by-side

Exactly one hundred years before Z&OO, at the pre-dawn of cinema, Eadweard Muybridge captured, organized, and catalogued chaos – the chaos of the sensation of movement – that until that time had never been photographed successfully. From 1884-1887, Muybridge photographed human movement at the University of Pennsylvania and animal movement at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden. The work, Animal Locomotion, consists of 781 photographs containing nearly 20,000 individual images (Braun 7). The opening images of Z&OO offer the viewer Greenaway’s cinematic version of Muybridge’s locomotion work and Greenaway’s vision of Muybridge at work (Figures 1 & 2). Greenaway begins his fi lm with a reference to the beginning of cinema.

Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies have influenced generations of artists and filmmakers. His work has been referenced and recreated in live sports broadcasts and television commercials, music videos like U2’s Lemon, in the artworks of Francis Bacon and Sol LeWitt, and in the fi lms of Hollis Frampton, Ken McMullen, and the Wachowski Brothers. Nowhere do Muybridge’s studies

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Figs.1 & 2 | A Zed and Two Noughts begins with twin brothers Oliver and Oswald Deuce photographing animals in motion, like pseudo-Muybridges, moments before their wives’ deaths.

Michael Johnston

that captured the movement of the figure as it passed his camera bank. The result of such a photographic sequence is the sensation of successive, continuous movement.

Greenaway’s later fi lm and television work employs multi-layered and simultaneous imagery on the two-dimensional screen, Th e Tulse Luper Suitcases being the most excessive. Those images are often presented in a Muybridgian-fashion, providing the viewer with multiple angles of the same exact moment. The technology necessary for Greenaway’s Tulse Luper style was not available at the time of Z&OO’s making. Rather than attempt a cheap triptych in Z&OO, Greenaway edits together shots from a scene that would suggest Muybridge’s simultaneous mulit-camera perspective (Figures 3 & 4). Greenaway does what Muybridge could not; he turns Muybridge’s still-motion photographs into moving images.

Scientist Etienne-Jules Marey was working on similar motion studies in France slightly before and during Muybridge’s time. What set the two photographers apart, aside from their photographic subject matter, was their photographic technique/system. Marey captured each stage of human movement by using a single camera with a single lens that remained open while a rotating slotted-disk shutter alternately exposed and masked the plate behind it (Braun 185). The result was a blurred, overlapping sensation of movement within a single frame. It is believed that Muybridge made some pictures with Marey’s system, but those photos do not exist (185). Marey’s method was preferred by Philadelphia painter, Thomas Eakins, who worked with Muybridge at the University of Pennsylvania.

Muybridge and Eakins parted ways due to a disagreement over technique; Muybridge had no interest in adapting Marey’s wheel-system. Instead of stages of movement on a single plate, Muybridge preferred one isolated movement per photographic plate. By separating each movement by plate, Muybridge, unlike Marey, afforded himself the opportunity to edit and re-arrange his motion sequences.

Viewing Muybridge’s work outside the printed page gives the viewer the impression that Muybridge’s photographs were projected, thereby qualifying his work as the earliest form of moving pictures or cinema. However,

Figs.3 & 4 | A Muybridgian perspective of the Deuce brothers. The shots appear to be the same time from different angles. A Zed and Two Noughts.

Muybridge’s work was not projected; it was printed in a book. Each page contained one complete locomotion study in which all the movements and photographs (including varying angles) were presented to the viewer at once, each eff acing the other (Rohdie 5). As many as 36 photographs could appear on a single page. An explanation of his process reads: Muybridge used up to 36 lenses with 12 to 24 cameras, placed at 30-, 60-, and 90-degree angles to his subjects. The two cameras placed at 30- and 60-degrees were able to hold up to 12 lenses each. The 90-degree angle was known as the lateral, or parallel, view, while the others Muybridge referred to as the front and rear foreshortenings. With this set-up, a successful session could result in as many as 36 negatives (From Proof to Print par. 3).

As a result, Muybridge’s images could be ordered and read vertically and diagonally, in addition to being

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Organizing the ZOO

Fig.5 | Greenaway ironically using the Muybridge grid, Animals “Not” in Motion, in A Zed and Two Noughts.

read horizontally. Reading the images vertically does not offer a linear unfolding of time sensation, but rather a rapid front-to-back visual pattern. If one photograph suffered from a mechanical or aesthetic malfunction, Muybridge removed the defective photograph and simply repeated an earlier photographic plate in the sequence. Further examination leads the viewer to notice repetitions in a single photographic sequence. Here the viewer witnesses Muybridge editing his work. “Muybridge would sometimes cheat accuracy to ensure the integrity of the naturalness (of the series) to overcome the inherent discontinuity of his images” (Rohdie 5). In essence, Muybridge was editing movies before editing movies was possible. For this reason, Sam Rohdie considers Muybridge the earliest pioneer of montage editing. I contend, however, that Muybridge was creating the illusion of movement via a “database” approach rather than a rational or linear approach.

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Writing about the database logic in new media artwork, Lev Manovich discusses “Database Cinema” and identifies Dziga Vertov and Peter Greenaway as two major database filmmakers. Manovich states: For cinema already exists right in the intersection between database and narrative. We can think of all the material accumulated during shooting forming a database, especially since the shooting schedule usually does not follow the narrative of the film but is determined by production logistics. During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed. From this perspective, every filmmaker engages with the database-narrative problem in every film, although only a few have done this self-consciously (208).

Michael Johnston

In the Zoo human life interferes with animal life: at L’Escargot animal life interferes with human life.

If Muybridge’s work was intended to give the illusion of sequential, continuous movement, why did he insist on photographing a single movement per photographic plate as opposed to Thomas Eakins and E.J. Marey’s system of capturing one entire motion at various stages on a single plate? Muybridge insisted on using his own organizing system: an organizing system that resulted in obvious gaps in the recording of motion and time; a system where each photograph was numbered and ordered (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…), even though specific photographs depicting one stage of motion were not chronologically edited or systematized.

Muybridge’s studies are not continuous; they include gaps between movements that provoke the viewer to ask what happened in between those two opposing photographs. Studying Muybridge’s edited motion studies on the printed page as database, the

observer can apply Lev Manovich’s words, “[s]o the only way to create a pure database is to spatialise it, distributing the elements in space” (209), which is exactly what Muybridge did. As is the case with all instantaneous photography, Muybridge did not know what he was going to get when he photographed his models. Yet, he took his results and made them into a coherent whole (Prodger 220). It was a coherent whole that was created artificially, not naturally. Muybridge’s system permitted fictions within non-fictions; Marey’s and Eakins system did not. Muybridge was not necessarily photographing movement, but photographing, editing, and presenting the process of the illusion of movement.

Peter Greenaway’s statement that Muybridge is a precineaste appears apt.

In A Zed and Two Noughts, following their wives’ deaths, Oliver and Oswald Deuce begin studying death

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Organizing the ZOO

and decay through a series of time-lapse motion studies of decomposing animals (Figure 5). The brothers also screen David Attenborough’s Life on Earth documentary series, free animals from the zoo where they work, and begin a three-way sexual relationship with Alba, who eventually has her other leg amputated. At the end of the film Alba gives birth to twins; it is uncertain which brother fathered the babies. In their final attempt to document decay and understand death, the twin brothers lie naked on a gridded, Muybridgian slab at L’Escargot (Alba’s country home), inject themselves with poison, and commit suicide, all the while recording time-lapse footage of their demise and decay (Figure 6).

Just seconds after their deaths, instantaneous like Muybridge’s photographs, their photographic-system fails when thousands of snails overrun their fi lm equipment and create an electrical outage. The twins’ photographic time-lapse studies go unfinished, and Greenaway’s snails spinning round and round on the record player and 16mm camera lenses are presented as nothing more than a mockery of the Deuce brothers’ efforts.

For all their logic, their planning, their knowledge, and their experimentation, they are reduced to nothing; not by suicide, but by a “primitive form of life,” to quote Oswald Deuce. In the zoo, human life interferes with animal life: at L’Escargot animal life interferes with human life (Figure 7). Th is final mockery of the Deuce brothers’ efforts enables Greenaway to end on yet another Muybridgian note. Z&OO opens with visual referents to Muybridge, and the film ends with Greenaway’s personal Muybridgian insight and aesthetic reasoning: a project mocking human effort (Pascoe 111).

Z&OO’s narrative, while accessible, is not necessarily reliable. It is convoluted at best. Z&OO is among Greenaway’s most challenging works, placing before its viewers a lush, often puzzling assortment of allusions, puns, visual clues, bizarre images, taxonomies, and self-referential musings. “The fi lm’s encyclopedic sprawl and interpretive ‘red herrings’ threaten a precocious hermeticism, yet its overt self-consciousness and insistent references to seventeenth-century allegorical painter Jan

8 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Greenaway’s use of nudity is not intended as eroticism but to inform the viewer that this is the actor/model without costume and therefore without context.

Vermeer constantly invite us to read it” (Petrolle 160). The glue that holds the fi lm’s structure together is the fi lmmaker’s attempt to organize and catalogue the bizarre and useless actions of the fi lm’s characters. Here, Greenaway is working on the problem of reconciling database and narrative forms. He is working to undermine a linear narrative by using a different system to order his film. No longer having to conform to the linear medium of film, the elements of a database are spatialized within a museum, in this case a zoo: Muybridge’s zoo. This move can be read as the desire to create a database at its most pure form: the set of elements not ordered in any way. If the elements exist in one dimension (time of a film, list on a page), they will be inevitably ordered (Manovich 208-209).

Z&OO opens with a cross-cutting of double Muybridgian imagery. Oliver Deuce records the number of times a tiger paces back and forth in its cage at the zoo. Similarly, Muybridge analyzed the movements of animals and used his photographs to demonstrate that quadrupeds employ, on the surface of the ground, eight diff erent regular systems of progressive motion: walk,

Fig.6 | The Deuce brothers’ final photographic series in A Zed and Two Noughts.

Michael Johnston

Fig.7 | The Deuce brothers’ experiment ends in a mockery of human eff ort in Z&OO.

amble, trot, rack (or pace), canter, transverse-gallop, rotatory-gallop, and ricochet (Muybridge 26). In a separate shot, Oswald sits outside a gorilla’s cage (the gorilla is missing one leg) photographing the animal’s movement. The number of photographs slowly wind on the camera – the fi nal number Greenaway leaves us with is 12. Many of Muybridge’s animal sequences were composed of twelve photographs – twelve from two different angles. Muybridge never published a photograph of a one-legged gorilla, but he did publish a series of photographs of human figures with physical abnormalities; some missing one or both legs.

In this opening sequence, Greenaway recreates Muybridge’s studies and re-imagines the Muybridgian studies as pure cinema; Muybridge is no longer relegated to pre-cinema, hence the 12 still frames captured by twenty-four moving frames per second.

Not only is the zoo a direct visual reference to Muybridge’s photographic studies, but the zoo is the architectural representation of the “organization of

chaos.” A barred and gridded, created system, in essence a database, of wild animal life spatialized with the intent to communicate the narrative of animalia – which is nothing more than “an unfi nished and unfi nishable catalogue” (Pascoe 111) as new species are discovered and others become extinct. The zoo is non-linear – it is organized by space. Greenaway emphasizes this zoodatabase idea with a riddle in Z&OO: do you think a zebra is a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes? Greenaway, with his tonguein-cheek humor, chooses to mock human effort, like the efforts of the Deuce brothers, to study and understand animalia in a simple, linear storytelling fashion. The riddle is never answered.

Z&OO’s zoo serves a third purpose: it performs multilaterally like Muybridge’s photographs. Z&OO moves forwards and backwards simultaneously. Th e fi lm’s narrative moves forward in time – from start to fi nish. However, in order for the Deuce brothers to understand their wives’ random deaths, they work backwards

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Organizing the ZOO

Fig.8 | Oswald’s repetitive Muybridgian x-axis walk rots his wallpaper and leaves a trail of ooze in A Zed in Two Noughts.

Peter Greenaway’s films are nothing more than the filmmaker’s desire to organize things and his attempt to find some sense of order in chaos.

– gathering clues and pieces of information (and broken glass from the crash) in order to reconstruct the car accident and change its cause from random to logical.

The Deuce brothers’ physical and intellectual quest moves backward in time. Th is leads the once Siamese twins to reconnect themselves physically as they were at birth. At the start of the fi lm, Greenaway introduces each brother in his own film frame and in his own space conducting his own animal experiment. At the end of the fi lm, the brothers don a Siamese suit (two suits stitched together as one) and eventually strip naked, connect the scars of their

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bodies that indicate where they were originally attached at birth, and die simultaneously while conducting a shared experiment.

Greenaway also spells this frontwards/backwards out simply and clearly with the word ZOO. The opening image of the fi lm depicts two children dragging a Dalmatian toward the big, blue letters: ZOO. The end of the film shows Venus de Milo opening the zebra cage and walking toward the big, blue letters: OOZ. Greenaway has inverted the reading of space and the use of the space just as he inverted Muybridge’s photography of life in motion to a photography of death/decay in motion. Just after Greenaway presents the viewer with OOZ, the Deuce brothers fail in their final experiment as they are overrun and covered by the ooz(e) of the snails.

Neither Muybridge nor Greenaway views wild animals as the only example of chaos in need of structure and superficial ordering. Human chaos (that of actors

Michael Johnston

and models) also requires organization. In Z&OO, action is a matter of going through the motions. In their grief Oliver and Oswald represent Muybridgian characters for Greenaway’s camera. “There are no purposes, only functions. Every step of a movement is made to look as significant or insignificant as every other step” (Pascoe 110-111), and every step is photographed by Muybridge and fi lmed by Greenaway along one of three axes.

Muybridge’s three camera banks enabled him to photograph his subjects from three distinct angles: 30-, 60-, and 90-degrees. Every camera was stationary and recorded the model’s full body in motion and the distance between model and camera was never altered.

The distance was standardized. Muybridge did not use or attempt to create fi lm vocabulary: no medium shots or close-ups. In Z&OO, Greenaway only moves the camera in 3 distinct directions: side to side, front to back, or on a forty-five degree angle. The actors, for the majority of the fi lm, are fi lmed in wide-angle long shots. The camera is never hand-held or on a Steadicam and never operates in a purely physical manner, in that a camera operator never moves the camera around the actor in a subjective or physical way. Greenaway presents his actors full-bodied from an objective distance so that all aspects of their movement are visible. It is not until the end of the fi lm that Greenaway breaks with Muybridge’s visual motif and moves the camera off his previously designated pattern. As the brothers inject themselves with poison on the angled grid, the camera, via a crane, moves in an arc pattern up, over, and around the dying brothers. Th is change in camera suggests that Greenaway is moving beyond Muybridge and beyond pre-cinema.

In Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, models appear in five different stages of undress, revealing the particularities of sex, race, disabilities, and body type. There is an erotic aspect to the work but it is never prurient; the mechanical facts of Muybridge’s models are visible.

Within the confines of the artificial space Muybridge creates, a certain pathos manifests itself. The figures appear lonely. Their behaviours are disjointed. Their actions are ineffective. We are shown the unglamorous side of existence. The simple facts of behaviour are made

plain, stripped of motivation, and emotion and context (Prodger 218-220). Nudity is a recurring theme here and in Z&OO; Greenaway chooses not to depict any sexual acts, yet he chooses to display his models naked a great number of times. Greenaway’s use of nudity is not intended as eroticism, but to inform the viewer that this is the actor/model without costume and therefore without context. Greenaway shows his nude actors cry, sit on the floor spread-eagled, descend a staircase while singing, cover their naked bodies with snails, and dress and undress.

Mourning their wives and contemplating the value of zoo-structures, zoologist-widows Oliver and Oswald are also stripped of motivation, emotion, and context;

Z&OO is not a film constructed with a narrative. The narrative emerges through Greenaway’s systematized arrangement of visual data recorded by the camera.

Fig.8 | A rotting apple projected beyond rotting wallpaper and the recreation of a Muybridgian semi-nude model in A Zed in Two Noughts.

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Organizing the ZOO

No longer having to conform to the linear medium of film, the elements of a database are spatialised within a museum, in this case a zoo – Muybridge’s zoo.

Fig.10 | Siamese-twins, Oliver and Oswald, suggest cinematic Siamese-twins Peter Greenaway and Eadweard Muybridge, watching a blank movie screen: the purpose of not serving a purpose in A Zed in Two Noughts.

their “simple facts of behaviour” are made evident.

They are not glamorous. Oliver stops bathing and in an early attempt to kill himself, sits nude on his bathroom floor drinking a glass of red wine spiked with pieces of broken glass from his wife’s car crash. Oswald takes to walking against the wall of his apartment until the wallpaper shreds and deteriorates (Figure 8). The wallpaper slowly peels away like flesh of the decaying apples and prawns in the fi lms he projects in his apartment (Figure 9). Both brothers sleep with the same prostitute and the same double-amputee.

Greenaway depicts the brothers as emotional in the start of the film; however, that quickly changes, and their emotions and their actions lose context as they walk and jog in Muybridgian fashion toward their suicide. Their actions do not appear linear but scattered and can be read by the

12 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

viewer horizontally, vertically, and diagonally as they perform nude and semi-nude in the film frame. Greenaway’s Deuce brothers only function is to procreate and die; all their actions in between those two functions are arbitrary and peculiar. In one scene Oswald is forced to look at a woman’s underwear in a public restroom upon her request.

Immediately after flashing her underwear, she slaps Oswald in the face and he falls to the floor. Oswald’s action and reaction serve no functional purpose to the film’s narrative line or Oswald’s character arc. It is not erotic. It is not purposeful. It is peculiar. As Greenaway states, “It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one” (Morgan 17).

Animal Locomotion and Z&OO organize the chaos of Muybridge and Greenaway. The sexual undertones of the images, the masters’ hands altering successive motion

Michael Johnston

for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, and both Muybridge’s unfinished catalogue that ends on the arbitrary number 781 and Greenaway’s unfi nished time-lapse fi lm of the Deuce brothers’ suicide, provide the viewer with a narrative beyond “I am going to tell you a story.” Each motion study contains its own unique narrative – all 781 motion studies compiled in a book creates a different narrative

of disjointed and unreliable imagery. Greenaway stands twin brothers before us and fi lms them at a distance so that the viewer must study their movement, dress, nude bodies, and actions in order to properly identify them.

Z&OO is not a fi lm constructed with a narrative. Rather, the narrative emerges through Greenaway’s systematized arrangement of visual data recorded by the camera. 

WORKS CITED A TV Dante: The Inferno – Cantos 1-8. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by John Gielgud and Bob Peck.

KGP Production, 1989.

A Zed & Two Noughts. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Andrea Ferreol, Brian Deacon, Eric Deacon. British Film Institute, 1985.

Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images.

Reaktion Books, 1997.

Pally, Marcia. “Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter Greenaway.” Peter Greenaway Interviews.

University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Petrolle, Jean. “Z is for Zebra, Zoo, Zed, and Zygote, or is

Braun, Marta. Eadweard Muybridge. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

it Possible to Live with Ambivalence?”Peter Greeaway’s

Drowning by Numbers. Directed by Peter Greenaway,

Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema. Ed. Alemany-

Performances by Bernard Hill and Joan Plowright. Film Four International, 1988.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Elmer Back and Luis Alberti. Submarine, 2015.

“From Proof to Print.” Freeze Frame: Eadweard Muybridge’s

Galway, Mary & Williquet-Maricondi, Paula. Lanham, MD, The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2008. pp. 159-176.

Prodger, Phillip. Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Prospero’s Books. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by

Photography of Motion. National Museum of American

John Gielgud, Michael Clark, and Isabelle Pasco. Allarts,

History, 2001. americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/htm/

Cinea, Camera One, Penta Film, 1991.

htm_sec3/sec3.htm Goltzius and the Pelican Company. Directed by Peter

Rohdie, Sam. Montage. Manchester University Press, 2006.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Directed by Peter

Greenaway, Performances by F. Murray Abraham and

Greenaway, Performances by Helen Mirren and Michael

Lars Eidinger. Head Gear Films, 2012.

Gambon. Allarts Enterprises, Erato Films, 1989.

Greenaway, Peter. Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway. 2008, video installation, Park Avenue Armory, New York.

Life on Earth. Directed by Sir David Attenborough, BBC, 1979.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2002.

Morgan, Stuart. “Breaking the Contract: A Conversation with

The Draughtsman’s Contract. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Anthony Higgins and Janet Suzman.

British Film Institute, 1982.

The Falls. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances by Colin Cantlie and Hilarie Thompson. British Film Institute, 1980.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases Trilogy. Directed by Peter Greenaway,

Peter Greenaway.” Peter Greenaway Interviews. University

Performances by JJ Field, Raymond J. Berry, and

Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Valentina Cervi. ABS Production, Delux Productions,

Muybridge, Eadweard. Animals in Motion. Dover Publications, Inc, 1957.

Nightwatching. Directed by Peter Greenaway, Performances

Focus Film Kft., Gam Films, Intuit Pictures, Kasander Film Company, NET Entertainment, Studio 12-A, 2003-2004.

by Martin Freeman and Emily Holmes. Kasander Film Company, 2007.

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13

Film Degree Zero:

Antonioni’s The Passenger

BY WARWICK MULES | Southern Cross University

ABSTRACT Th is article examines Michelangelo Antonioni’s Th e Passenger (1975) as an experiment in radical desubjectification, releasing the objectified fi lm image into the image flux as it moves towards degree zero. Roland Barthes describes degree zero as “negative momentum”: the negentropic resistance found in modernist literature and fi lm as self-neutralising. My examination picks up on Barthes’s concept of degree zero, together with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the look of fi lm as seeing and nothing more, applying them to an analysis of Antonioni’s fi lm. The look of the fi lm is accessed in the space opened up at degree zero – a constellation of images posing sphinx-like questions requiring a response for the fi lm to “go on.” Detailed analysis of the mise-en-scène reveals how the fi lm goes on through an in situ praxis of image sketching – in the negentropic movement of the fi lm as it moves towards degree zero.

INTRODUCTION

I

n his essay entitled “Writing Degree Zero,” Roland Barthes identifies a tendency within the novels of mid-twentieth century French authors towards “neutral modes of writing … [where] we can easily discern a negative momentum, and an inability to maintain it within time’s f low” (5).1 Writing degree zero is the tendency in modern literature towards negentropic withdrawal from exhausted classical forms into a “neutral ... mode of writing” approaching silence (77), where “the problematics of mankind is uncovered and presented without elaboration” (78).

Barthes’s concept of writing degree zero is not confined to literature, but finds its way into his essays on film and photography, for instance in his concept of signifiance as “the founding act of the filmic itself ” (“Third Meaning” 65), as well as the concept of the “neutral” in the photographic image, as a “body which signifies nothing” (Camera Lucida 12). For Barthes, writing degree zero searches for a self-neutralising mode

of expression resistive to the dead-letter forms and styles of classicism, and “which might at least achieve innocence” (“Writing Degree Zero” 67). Picking up on these ideas, my concern in this article will be with accessing Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Passenger (1975) at degree zero through the look of the camera as an immanent mode of seeing, freeing itself from complicity in the subjective life of the film. From the perspective of degree zero, film analysis concerns the materiality of film in its potential as “work-to-be-made” (Souriau 220), the “as yet unmade work [that] imposes itself as an existential urgency … as having a claim on us” (223). Etienne Souriau’s filmology is invoked here to provide a sense of the incompleteness of any film encountered in its phenomenal life as work-to-bemade: the task of a co-becoming between the film as a para-object seeking sufficient ground to justify its existence, and the viewer who is challenged to live up to the call that the film makes on her in its incompletion, to

1 The authors Barthes has in mind include Camus, Blanchot and Robbe-Grillet.

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“go on” (Beckett 134) in the viewing. Work-to-be-made calls for the shaping of a not-yet-visible form through the material residue of fi lm in its “negative momentum.”

Antonioni’s films exemplify film degree zero by opening their frameworks into the void (the non-being of cinema) his fi lms are forever seeking. They set out to show us this void, not in itself, but in its felt existence, exposing fi lm as it approaches degree zero. In so doing, they open up a world of potential meaning as the workto-be-made in the demand that life must “go on.”2 Th is opening up of the fi lm approaching degree zero is the negentropic counter-movement against “time’s f low” (against the narrative drive propelling the fi lm forward to its end), allowing the fi lm to go on in the sense of always having to be; of always having to affi rm itself as fi lm and nothing more.

From the perspective of degree zero, film analysis concerns the materiality of film in its potential as 'work-to-be-made' beginning with the nullity of form.

THE PROSTHETIC EYE Th e Passenger is one of Antonioni’s later fi lms and completes that director’s exploration into the ontology of fi lm as openness to the void.3 In Th e Passenger, Antonioni shows us the void as the very becoming of the fi lm itself; how it goes on as work-to-be-made. In Antonioni’s films, characters are reduced to figural potentials, waiting for a promised mode of being that fails to arrive. To achieve this sense of ontological anticipation, the director employs techniques of camera work

and figure placement in the mise-en-scène – techniques that objectify the look of the fi lm. The terms “to look” and “to see” are used in this article in two distinct ways: “to look” means to egress – to come out or emerge – in what is seen, whereas “to see” means the opposite: to regress – to withdraw – in what is seen. Seeing is passive; looking is active. Looking becomes objective in the view as what is seen – an immanent mode of appearing. In an interview about the making of The Passenger, Antonioni had said that what he wanted to achieve was a certain “objectivity” (Antonioni 335): a look that sees with the camera, released from bondage to the subject, and free to explore cinematic space on its own terms. Objectifying the look of the camera suspends the fi lm in its own seeing, thereby withdrawing the subject as an agent of the look.

Everything in the fi lm begins in the objectivity of looks: “In The Passenger I have not tampered with reality.

I look at it with the same eye with which the hero, a reporter, looks at the events he is reporting. Objectivity is one of the main themes of the fi lm” (Antonioni 335).

By looking at reality with “the same eye,” Antonioni is saying that the fi lm does not see the world subjectively through a character’s look, but objectively through what the camera sees – a view composed of discrete images: What I try to do is provoke them [the actors], put them in the right mood. And then I watch them through the camera and at that moment tell them to do this or that. But not before. I have to have my shot, and they are an element of the image – and not always the most important element. (Antonioni 337, my emphasis) Antonioni’s control of the fi lm-making process is limited to the way he sees “not before” the camera sees, but as the camera sees: a prosthetic seeing-with the camera in which actors are placed as an “element of the image.”

To “go on” is the existential demand of life, exemplified by the Beckettian voice at the end of The Unnameable: “I can’t go on/ I’ll go on” (Beckett 134). To go on is not to move forward but to stand in resistance to the entropy of the flow of time.

3 Other films include the “modernist” trilogy – L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962) – as well as Blow Up (1966). In an explicit sense, all of these films are concerned with revelatory power – film’s capacity to make us see.

2

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Film Degree Zero

What they (the actors and the director) see is what the camera sees, but the camera can always see more (views cut off by the frame or outside its current optical range).

Antonioni’s method is thus stochastic – responding to variables of fi lm-making with negentropic feedback: by embedding his prosthetic eye in the fi lm-making process, the director allows the exigency of the shoot to guide decisions made in what is shot and how it is shot, so that the fi lm comes into existence as work-to-be-made.

Antonioni’s fi lm-making practice can be understood as a praxis of image sketching (tentative, preparatory, searching for a way), guided by the demands of a “questioning situation” (Souriau 232) that includes the prosthetic eye of the camera whose look is continually opening into new views demanded by the sphinx-like presence of the fi lm in its incompleteness.

Antonioni's films exemplify film degree zero by opening their frameworks into the void (the non-being of cinema) his films are forever seeking.

We encounter Antonioni’s prosthetic eye in the opening sequence of The Passenger, through a long take of an Arab village somewhere in north Africa. A Land Rover enters a communal space from a narrow street and moves towards its centre where it stops, as three heavily veiled women and some children move towards it (Fig. 1). The driver (David Locke, played by Jack Nicholson) alights from the vehicle and asks one of the women a question which we cannot hear, and then walks around the front of the vehicle to ask more questions of another woman standing beside a nearby house. As he does so, the camera moves to the left, causing Locke, his vehicle and the group of people to disappear, while revealing two teenage boys running into the square. Here, the camera objectifies the scene by taking control of what we see relative to its position in the mise-en-scène. By refusing to provide a subjective viewpoint from which to anchor the image in a character’s perspective – for instance by cutting to a shot-reverse-shot sequence of 16 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Locke’s conversations with the women – the camera frees itself to roam about the scene, searching for other entries and exits that may or may not be consequential for future action.

The primacy of the visual gesture over the voice in this opening scene serves to demotivate the image from subjective viewpoints, allowing the shot to linger in suspended objectivity. In what follows, we see the vehicle entering another common area of the village where it comes to a halt in centre frame. As Locke alights, the camera pans to the left, causing him once again to disappear, while revealing a man seated in the shade of a house as a woman approaches from the background.

Locke then reappears, entering the frame from the right as he moves to address the man (Fig. 2). At this point the man gestures for a cigarette, which Locke offers to him, only to realise that the man is not going to provide him with any information. On this, he quickly turns away to return to his vehicle, where he finds one of the teenage boys from the previous sequence now seated in the passenger seat. Here we see Antonioni’s prosthetic eye working to full effect: Locke’s movements are strictly controlled by what the camera sees, to the point where he can only “go on” – advance in diegetic space – when the camera beckons him into the frame.

What we see is what the camera sees – always more than what Locke can see – as possibilities opened up in the freedom of the camera to look awry – to see otherwise – in this instance allowing the boy into the scene literally behind Locke’s back. These few examples are evidence of Antonioni’s objectivising techniques, in which the director’s prosthetic eye sees the world through images interfaced with what they bring forth; where characters become figures synchronised with the look of the camera in its efforts to respond to the questioning situation arising in the work-to-be-made of the film in its ongoing incompleteness.

THE LOOK OF FILM What is a look? In his essay on the fi lms of the Iranian fi lmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Luc Nancy

Warwick Mules

Fig.1 | Long take of entry of Land Rover into communal space of Arab village. Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

Fig.2 | Locke enters the frame after having been left behind by the camera panning left to the seated man. Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

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has argued that all fi lms produce a look that carries the fi lm’s gaze – its way of seeing. In this look there is no room for reflexivity or for speculation on looking at images. We are dealing neither with formalistic (let us say, tentatively “symbolic”) nor with narcissistic (let us say “imaginary”) vision. We are not dealing with sight – seeing or voyeuristic, fantasizing or hallucination, ideative or intuitive – but solely with looking. It is a matter of opening the seeing to something real, toward which the look carries itself and which in turn, the look allows to be carried back to itself. What is evident imposes itself as the setting up of the look. (18) The look is not that of a subject (a spectator or character) but the fi lm’s capacity to “carr[y] back to itself ” what it reaches out to see as “something real.” The look of fi lm is thus a praxis – a self-constituting act that grounds itself in its own seeing: “cinema is becoming this art of looking made possible and required by a world that refers only to itself and what is real in it” (18). So, we begin with a self-neutralising look – “a shot devoid of [subjective] reflexivity” (16) – where, for instance, all we see is a “door left ajar in close up” (14), opening up a view to be seen.

Here the look carries something away, not the seeing of a subject perceiving objects in a world already disposed to receive its (the subject’s) look, but the seeing of the fi lm itself, in its opening up of a “world viewed” – a world that includes views cut off by the current view – views not yet seen (Cavell 24). Nancy’s analysis of Kiarostami’s fi lm-making practice suggests that the look of fi lm produces a certain kind of cinematic realism – a realism of the fi lmworld “that refers only to itself and what is real in it.” By seeing with what is seen, the camera releases itself into the void of what comes next as the work-to-be-made of a cinematic realism grounded in its own look.

The look of fi lm includes its own blind spot: the view left out of the look in what it sees. A blind spot occurs through the camera’s inability to see everything without shifting or adding another camera – a supplementary, unseen camera as “the one working now” (Cavell 126).

18 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

All cameras are supplementary insofar their seeing infers many possible views from which the one working now must withdraw in order to see this way rather than any other. By looking this way, all other ways remain “blind,” yet possible; to experience blindness is to stare into the abyssal nothing of the other view blocked from being seen. In Peretz’s terms, the experience of blindness in perception (i.e. a “blind spot”) is “a call to the activation of blindness – to open up that which blindness itself and it alone can reveal, blindness understood not as a deprivation of perception to be overcome but as holding a mystery of its own” (12). Blindness is not the simple negation of sight but, something that holds a “mystery of its own” in the concealment of that which is not currently revealed. In Nancy’s terms, the blind spot works both negatively and positively, as the mark of death (fi nitude) that “opens up the looking” (18). Death refers to the contraction of fi lmic life into the materiality of the image flux – a regression towards degree zero. Here we are dealing with life as “nothing more” – the failure to “see” oneself in the abyssal otherness revealed. The blind spot is the place unseen in the seeing – the place of death.

In The Passenger, we see the main character, the journalist Locke, inhabiting the identity of Robertson (Ian Hendry), a gunrunner supplying weapons to resistance fighters in north Africa. Having failed to meet with the resistance fi ghters in the opening sequence of the fi lm, Locke seizes the chance to make contact with them by pretending to be Robertson who has suff ered a fatal heart attack. Locke’s attempts to follow what Robertson would have been required to do in supplying guns to the guerrillas always falls short – on making Robertson’s appointments he has no idea why he should be there in the first place. As Robertson’s figural appearance, Locke can only act out Robertson’s life as empty gestures. Locke’s life thus allegorises the narrative that would otherwise have been, had Robertson not died and been able to fulfi l his contract to supply arms to the guerrillas. Locke’s failure to inhabit Robertson’s subjectivity makes him excessive to the narrative; stripped of the means of self-recognition (expressed in his indifference to those who were once close to him), his existence poses the question: how to go on?

Locke can only respond by following what the camera

Warwick Mules

FILM DEGREE ZERO

The Passenger is one of Antonioni's later films and completes that director's exploration into the ontology of film as openness to the void.

sees in the view opening up just ahead of him – through “the door left ajar” (to borrow from Nancy’s description of Kiarostami’s mise-en–scène) to other spaces and times in the unfolding of fi lm images.

The look of the fi lm becomes blind when we see past the figure of Locke to the character Locke-as-Robertson, as if they were two separate identities. However, this blindness becomes visible in its blindness (in the possibilities opened up but not yet shown) when we shift perspective to see that their identities are not separate but entangled in the gap – the “falling short” – between what Robertson was to have done, and what Locke must now do in the fi lm’s negative momentum. In many ways, the look of the fi lm is what it cannot show: the negative momentum regressing towards degree zero as looking and nothing more. Near the end of the fi lm, Locke meditates on this condition by asking: “what can you see” to his female companion (Maria Schneider) – the “girl” as she is known – as she looks out of the window.

What follows is a Nietzschean meditation on seeing and blindness. Seeing is a blindness to the possibilities of what could be. In knowing this, one wishes not to see, to be blind to the dirt and ugliness of the world. To wish for blindness is to wish for a kind of death, but in the death of blindness a seeing otherwise takes place. We discover that Locke’s journey has been a quest to see as a blind man sees; to see the other possibilities in what is given to be seen; to see with the camera in showing us what is not seen in the seeing. By the end of the fi lm we are able to see as the camera sees. We see with the look of fi lm at degree zero.

4

As a film approaches degree zero, the camera is liberated from subjective views and narrative drive so that it becomes a “first-person narrator that records and documents without judging. The angle from which reality is exposed allows the perceiver to arrive at the truth by putting all the pieces together” (Ramsey 65). The “angle from which reality is exposed” allows the camera to look “without judging”; that is, to look objectively in the gap exposed at the figural register as work-to-be-made in “putting all the pieces together.” Antonioni himself had described this freeing up of the camera as a view without a subject (Brunette 176). The Passenger is a fi lm approaching degree zero – hollowed out from within and constantly withdrawing itself from subjectivity. The fi lm shows us this withdrawal through the figure, bereft of agency, and captive to the look of the camera. In the rest of this article, I will examine how the fi lm releases the look of the camera from serving the subject, exposing the reality of a fi lmworld “put together” by gestures, signs and images whereby figures appear and disappear on the screen. By releasing the camera, the fi lm escapes the limitations of frame coherence, blending time and space into a complex whole – a whole recapitulating itself through negentropic feedback – with no unifying subsistence (cognition, consciousness, essence, coherence).

In a complex whole, each of its parts exceeds and hence disorganises the sufficiency of the whole to itself (simple whole), setting in train negentropic feedback in “an ongoing exchange of matter-energy and information between them” (Wilden 203).4 As a complex whole, the fi lmworld of The Passenger ceases to be sufficient to itself and becomes incomplete – the parts exceeding the whole to which they might otherwise belong.

The excess of the camera’s seeing takes place in every part of the fi lm, but is particularly apparent in an early scene where Locke discovers Robertson’s dead body in the hotel room of an Arab village in north Africa and sets about exchanging identity with him. Peter Brunette

In film theory, the concept of a complex whole has been used to analyse nonlinear film narratives (Buckland).

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Film Degree Zero

has discussed this scene in some detail, remarking that the fi lm here “raises for the fi rst time the question of subjectivity versus objectivity that will preoccupy it” (131).

Throughout Brunette’s analysis, there is a sense that what is at stake is a hidden subject (an inner core to Locke) obscured by the elliptical style of the fi lm. However, I argue that there is no hidden subject, no inner core; rather, what we see are possibilities of “becoming subject” not fulfi lled. As a complex whole, the fi lm is all appearing without appearance; no stabilising image through which the self-recognition required of a subject to “be” might take place. Some close-quarter analysis of the sequencing of shots in this scene will bear this out.

Fig.3 | Locke plays with Robertson hair while staring into his dead eyes Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

Fig.4 | Locke looks away as if distracted by something to his left. As he looks away he nods his head, as if acknowledging the presence of someone else in the room. The camera then pans slowly across to show a balcony leading off the room, where we then see Robertson entering the balcony followed by Locke, both from outside the room. Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

At one point in the scene, Locke moves close to Robertson’s dead body lying on the bed, and for a while the camera lingers on Locke looking deeply into Robertson’s open but dead eyes (Fig. 3). Locke gently plays with a wisp of Robertson’s hair as if he were playing with his own hair, suggesting a superposition of one identity on the other. The scene then shifts through elisions of time (signalled by shots of a rotating ceiling fan) showing Locke pondering how to go on, and then settles on a shot of Locke sitting shirtless at a table looking at his and Robertson’s passports (from the prior images we infer that, having decided to take on Robertson’s identity, Locke is now preparing to cut and paste Robertson’s passport photo into his own passport). A knock at the door is heard followed by Locke saying “come in.” However, the knock at the door and Locke’s voice do not equate: the knock is in the real time of the shot (it has the full sonorous sound of the immediate presence of the voice), while the voice is recorded (it has the scratchy sound of a tape recorded voice at some time in the past). It is as if the knock in the present were being answered by a voice from the past.

What follows is a recorded conversation between Locke and Robertson the previous day, played over the image of Locke removing and exchanging his passport photograph for Robertson’s. The camera then pans across to a nearby chair where the source of the recorded voice is revealed to be a tape recorder.

All of the activities and gestures described above are presented in what at first appears to be a seamless flow of images, as if they were happening in a coherent spacetime setting. However, close inspection of the visual and sonorous texture of the shots in relation to their temporal ordering (undertaken above) indicates that the fi lm is working across temporal registers blended together in a metaleptic breaching of the unities of time and space.5 Th is is confi rmed later in the scene when Locke, still listening to the tape recording, looks out towards the window with a slight nod of his head, as if acknowledging the presence of person unseen to us (Fig. 4). In further

Genette defines metalepsis as the “transition from one narrative level to another” (234), especially in terms of the intrusion of a “voice” belonging to one level into another.

5

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developments of appearing/disappearing figures triggered by the movement of the camera (discussed previously in this article), the camera then pans to the open window where the now dead Robertson and then Locke enter from the right, standing together with their backs to the camera while leaning on a wall looking out into the desert (Fig. 5).

At this point, the tape stops, and Robertson and Locke’s conversation is heard in real time. Robertson makes some comments on the view: “It’s beautiful, don’t you think so? So still, a kind of … waiting.” Locke doesn’t grasp the prophetic meaning of Robertson’s words – that it is Locke himself who will be waiting for death to come – and dismisses them as too poetic for a businessman. Later he will be asked the same question by the girl. At this point they enter the room and continue their conversation.

The camera then pans back across the room where we see Locke still removing and replacing the photographs in the passports.

The sequence of shots I have just described blends different temporal registers into a seemingly coherent scene through a metalepsis that renders it incoherent at the same time. In this “disjunctive synthesis” of images, events from the past are re-introduced retroactively into the present by the trigger gesture of Locke’s nod, as if they were happening for the first time, causing the edifice of the film to crack open. As Locke goes to leave the room, he is shifted marginally by a jump cut (Figs.

6 and 7), effecting what Bersoni and Dutoit, in their analysis of Godard’s Hélas pour moi (Woe is Me), call a “non-transitional displacement,” whereby a female character “disappears and reoccurs to the side of herself ” (4). The jump cut that shifts Locke to the side of himself in The Passenger is accompanied by a sharp mechanical sound, as if the action of the cut were simultaneously connecting the shots together – an ontological shifting of Locke so that he is both “held together” and “kept apart” in the same place. In this ontologically divided

Fig.5 | Robertson and Locke conversing on the balcony. This shot follows seamlessly from the shot of Locke looking to the left in Figure 4.

Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

state, Locke’s appearance cannot be guaranteed in advance, but rather poses the question: “how to go on?” in the void of what comes next.

In a later scene in London, we see Locke walking out of a modern apartment block and into a large open square (paralleling his entries into the communal areas of the north African village at the start of the film). Like the film’s opening sequence, we have no indication just why he was in the apartment block in the first place and no sense of where he might be headed.6 Immediately prior to this we have just heard a voice on television praising Locke for his “detachment and … great talent for observation.” It is as if the film is telling us that what comes next will be Locke exercising these very qualities. As he descends a set of stairs, Locke notices a young woman – the girl – sitting on a bench reading a book. The unnamed woman briefly looks up to see him looking at her and then returns to reading the book while Locke walks away. This brief exchange of looks, although insignificant here, will make sense later in the film when Locke comes across the young woman again, in a church in Barcelona in an equivalent position, sitting on a bench reading a book. At this point Locke and the woman form an alliance in his aimless quest. Locke’s “great talent for observation” turns out to be a device for linking

In an interview on his film-making practices, Antonioni is asked why his characters “appear full-blown in a particular situation.” He replies: “I think it is a different way of looking at the world. … This is the modern way of looking at people.

Today, everyone has less background than in the past” (Antonioni 341). Here the director indicates how his craft practices relate to the realities of modern life by synchronising the mise-en-scène with the “look” of being modern.

6

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Film Degree Zero

Fig.6 | Jump Cut: immediately before the cut. Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

random encounters into something significant. Here the film is riveting itself together from disparate events that, although meaningless in themselves, start to take on meaning when combined into an image montage.

One of the effects of Antonioni’s image sketching techniques is to break the realist connection between the viewer and the fi lm – a connection that calls for narrative causality to explain the succession of events. Through this break, a screen space is opened up in which the connection between events produces image realism – a realism grounded in image contiguity alone. For instance, a scene in a church in Munich where Locke meets the agents of the resistance movement suddenly cuts to Locke burning something in his front yard in London followed by a cut to his wife staring down at the empty space where the fire had been. These images are not flashbacks but fragments of a story constellation – a set of image fragments brought together through random re-alignments in narrative logic – the causality of which remains undecided.7 Here we have the work-to-be-made of a complex fi lmworld in

7

which space-time relations correspond to an “exorbitant logic” (Sallis 95-125) released from narrative eschatology; where characters are stripped of their subjectivity and set free in a world immersed in the image flux. These effects are achieved cinematically by releasing the camera from faithfully recording what the subject does and says (as if to explain the whole of which these events are a part), and instead allowing it to see this act, this gesture, this event as part an incomplete seeing in the going-on of the fi lm.

The figure of Locke responds only to his place in the frame. Th is is told to us in a number of ways, for instance when Locke’s wife Rachael and his boss Martin view video tape of Locke interviewing an African witchdoctor.

Rachael asks “what happened,” referring to Martin’s recent trip to find out about Locke. In reply, Martin says “he disappeared,” referring to Robertson but obliquely to Locke as well. At this very moment, the image of Locke disappears off screen as he rises to leave, triggering a retroaction between the past event of Robertson’s disappearance and the present event of Locke’s image

Walter Benjamin’s concept of the constellation as retroactivated memory traces is apposite here (“Doctrine of the Similar”).

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Fig.7 | Jump cut: immediately after the cut. Note that Locke and Robertson are now seen in each other’s shirts. Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

appearing and disappearing on the screen. In another scene when Locke meets the girl for the second time, in a church in Barcelona, she says “people are disappearing all the time” and in reply Locke says “even when they leave the room,” a metaleptic reference to the condition of the fi lm fi gure as a fi nite appearance in the frame.

Later in the fi lm when Locke and the girl travel out of Barcelona in a rented convertible, the girl asks him: “what are you running away from?” In reply, Locke says “Turn your back to the front seat.” She then turns around, so that what we see is what she sees: the view of the road disappearing behind her/us as the car speeds ahead. What Locke is running from is precisely what the camera sees: the past as a receding landscape regressing into the abyss of the image flux. Later when the girl and Locke, now on the run from the police, stop on the side of the road in a small village, the camera shows us a man walking a bicycle along a rocky side road leading up a mountainside.

Locke momentarily looks over to the road as if considering

an escape route, but the moment passes. Here the fi lm is offering alternatives, as if to say “but these are barred to you.” At this point Locke accepts his fate. He tells the girl to leave and waits for what happens next, passing the time in futile gestures such as squashing a bug on a whitewashed wall. Like the dog we see tethered to a post, Locke is tethered to the place where he is to meet his death – an isolated village somewhere in the Spanish hinterland. The red blood of the squashed bug splattered on the wall foretells the death of Locke at the hands of assassins. It is as if, by his very actions, Locke is calling forth his own death.8 In the fi nal scene of the fi lm, a mobile shot lasting some seven minutes begins with the camera moving effortlessly through the bars of the window of a hotel room in the Spanish village, where we see Locke lying on a bed awaiting death. It then moves out into a courtyard where we see people coming and going, including the

In another prescient image occurring just prior to this scene, we see Locke lying under an apple tree resting, while the girl stands beside him looking down. This image is an echo of the image of the enigmatic dead body lying in a London park in Antonioni’s earlier film Blow Up (1966).

8

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Film Degree Zero

Antonioni's instaurative techniques catalyse negative momentum by slowing the film to degree zero, where characters are emptied of desire and left with nothing by the drive to go on. girl and Locke’s wife, both of whom have made their way to the town to warn Locke, or perhaps to bear witness to his death (we are not explicitly told). What is not shown is what goes on behind the camera – in the scene’s blind spot. As the camera moves slowly through the courtyard, we hear a muff led explosion mingled with other sounds as people and vehicles continue to come and go. Later we realise that this is the sound of the gunshot that kills Locke. Still moving slowly, the camera circles back on its path, returning to the room, where we now see Locke’s dead body lying on the bed surrounded by officials as well as Locke’s wife and the girl (Fig. 8). However,

the camera’s re-entry into the room is blocked by the bars of the security grill through which it had passed with ease at the beginning of the shot. By not passing through the bars, the camera demonstrates its own limit in not being able to see all (a limit it must constantly try to breach for the film to go on).

From hereon in, there can be no further looking, no more views to be had. Death has been reached but it cannot be shown. By not showing us Locke’s death, the director remains true to the immanent mode of seeing that controls the look of the film throughout, presenting us in this final scene with the thing revealed in its concealment: in order to present Locke’s death, the film must show that it is concealed.

At this point the f ilm stops, having reached an absolute limit.

CONCLUSION One of the issues emerging in this analysis of The Passenger is the shift from narrative realism to image realism through Antonioni’s desubjectifying procedures

Fig.8 | The camera circles back, only to be barred from re-entering Locke’s room. Source: The Passenger. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

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of image sketching. Image realism is effected through a change in perspective, when the film draws back from its diegetic content to reveal the connectedness between contiguously related images whose causality has yet to be decided. Image realism relates to the camera’s failure to efface itself in the seeing that it makes possible: there is always an unseen camera, “the one working now” (Cavell 126), whose presence is felt in what cannot be shown – in the work-to-be-made for the

film to “go on.” By drawing attention to this fact of film making, Antonioni’s films open up cinematic space to an anticipatory mode of seeing that waits on the future as something shown in its nullity – as void. Antonioni’s films are incomplete works-to-be-made, exploring the possibility of an image realism experienced as the void of the non-cinematic Real – the future in its inchoate otherness – felt to exist in potentia in the film’s negative momentum approaching degree zero. 

WORKS CITED Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, edited by Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi. Translated by various, Chicago UP, 1996.

Barthes, Roland. “The Third Meaning.” Image, Music, Text.

Translated by Stephen Heath, Flamingo, 1977, pp. 52-68.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard, Vintage, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Hill and Wang, 1967.

Beckett, Samuel. The Unnameable. Faber and Faber, 2010.

Benjamin, Walter. “Doctrine of the Similar.” Translated by

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged edition, Harvard UP, 1979.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Basil Blackwell, 1980.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami.

Translated by Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley, Yves Gevaert, 2001.

Peretz, Eyal. Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses. Stanford UP, 2008.

Ramsey, Cynthia. “Koyaanisqatsi: Godfrey Reggio’s Filmic Definition of the Hopi Concept of ‘Life Out of Balance.’’’

Rodney Livingstone, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.

The Kingdom of Dreams in Literature and Film, edited by

2, Part 2, 1931-1934, edited by Marcus Bullock, Howard

Douglas Fowler, Florida UP, 1985, pp. 62-78.

Eiland and Gary Smith, Belknap, 1999, pp. 695-702.

Bersoni, Leo and Ulysses Dutoit. Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. BFI Publishing, 2004.

Blow Up. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, performances

by David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, and Sarah Miles, MGM, 1966.

Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge UP, 1998.

Buckland, Warren. “Introduction: Puzzle Plots.” Puzzle Films:

Sallis, John. Logic of Imagination: the Expanse of the Elemental.

Indiana UP, 2012.

Souriau, Étienne. The Different Modes of Existence. Translated by Erik Beranek and Tim Howles, Univocal, 2015.

The Passenger. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, performances

by Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff, and Jenny Runacre, Compagnia, 1975.

Wilden, Anthony. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd ed., Tavistock, 1972.

Complex Story Telling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 1-12.

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Self-Presentation, Kitsch, Irony: German Sound Film around 1930

BY SELINA HANGARTNER | University of Zurich, Switzerland

ABSTRACT Around 1930, the shift toward sound fi lm led German fi lmmakers back to the medium itself even as they moved in new aesthetic directions. Adopting a new self-reflexive attitude, they shifted the filmic apparatus onto the image, engaging narrative form to consider cinema’s value in popular culture. Th is article investigates how sound fi lms reflected their new audiovisual mode through aesthetic self-referentiality, particularly in operetta films. Often considered escapist and ideologically suspect by contemporary critics, these films reflected the kitsch and Americanized aesthetic for which they were criticized with playful, ironic self-awareness.

SELF-REPRESENTATION IN SOUND FILM “

L

et’s create something,” Carl Jöken tells his colleagues Max Hansen and Paul Morgan in the opening scene of Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari (The Cabinet of Dr. Larifari, Robert Wohlmuth, DE 1930).1 The three characters (Jöken, the German tenor; Hansen, the cabaret artist/opera singer; and Morgan, the Austrian comedian) are playing “themselves,” sitting in a sparsely-furnished Berlin coffeehouse and trying to decide on a money-making venture: “It would have to be something where we could make some quick cash.” The poster hanging behind them proclaims “100% Sprechund Tonfi lm: Das blonde Donaukind vom Rhein (100% Talking and Sound Film: The Blond DanubeChild from the Rhine)” and inspiration strikes: they’ll establish a sound-fi lm company. “That’s the way to make a million!” Hansen proclaims. Although none of them seems to have the budget for this venture, Morgan comments decisively: “Nothing stands between us and our fi lm company!” In a seemingly surrealist comedy such as Larifari, it appears entirely possible to found fi lm companies without the financial means to do so—after

1 My thanks to the translator of this paper, Dinah Lensing-Sharp.

26 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

a montage sequence reminiscent of avant-garde fi lms of the 1920s, the three have become managing directors of the fictional “Trio-Film” company, complete with secretary, office, and an enviable location in an impressive high-rise building.

In contrast with the United States, where Th e Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, USA) had heralded the start of the sound fi lm wera in 1927 to great fi nancial success, the German transition to sound began only in 1929.

Around 1930—the year in which Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari appeared and sound fi lm entered the theater of industrial exploitability (Wedel 309)—new structures, cultural practices, and forms of interaction with other media such as radio and phonograph developed around the fi lm industry. The effects of synchronous playback also marked a significant shift in the audience’s cinematic experience: instrumental accompaniment, which had once imparted a sense of live performance to silent fi lm screenings, was replaced with the aesthetically novel experience of pre-recorded sound and image.

Selina Hangartner

Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari follows the founders of the Trio-Film company through a series of unsuccessful endeavors to create a viable cinematic product, depicting each abortive idea in the form of short, cabaret-style comic interludes. The fi lm’s format thus reflects the multilateral transition process taking place in the German fi lm industry around 1930. The fi lm focuses on the medium’s formal qualities, on other genre fi lms, as well as public discourse concerning sound fi lm. The brief scene described above engages for example with numerous myths about early sound fi lm and thus undertakes a form of self-presentation. The three protagonists—in taking an affirmative stance regarding sound fi lm—agree not only that the new technology is the future, but also that it will make them rich. However, the fi lm does not always

With its complex historical circumstances in mind, the omnipresent self-referentiality in early sound film appears to be an expression of the urgent desire for legitimacy. portray their dealings in the new medium in a positive light, but rather ironizes its own media praxis. The fi lm poster in the scene at the beginning of Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari evidences this attitude in its advertisement of “Das blonde Donaukind vom Rhein,” which satirizes the huge number of musical fi lms set on the Rhine River or by the Danube in Vienna (Müller 358). The title’s absurd evocation of both romanticized rivers ironically recalls the indiscriminate use of such stereotypical settings in fi lms of the period.

German Sound Film in Film Historiography As evidenced by Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari, around 1930 German cinema was struck by a “wave of truly auto-thematic [autothematische] or self-reflexive works” (Schweinitz 375), both aesthetically and in terms of content. Films created during this period engaged in a form of self-presentation by centering sound fi lm

technology and making fi lmmaking techniques visible to the audience. In particular, operettas and musical fi lms consolidated their new position at the center of sound fi lm by constantly referencing their newly audio-visual form. Plots often revolved around musical numbers, which transformed actors into singing, dancing stars of the silver screen. Eric Rentschler writes of these fi lms: In the process, the fi lm shows us the mediation of a self-conscious mass culture as well as revealing its illusory and false constitution, a dream machinery that openly acknowledges the spurious quality of its productions–‘zu schön, um wahr zu sein.’ (104) These self-reflexive and, occasionally, self-critical moments in early sound fi lm—that are, according to Rentschler, ‘too beautiful to be true’—remained mostly unrecognized by contemporary critics. In sweeping criticisms of the apparent decline in aesthetic value between sound fi lm and silent fi lm, many feared that the advent of sound would allow a new, unartistic realism to replace the fantastic, poetic, and dreamlike qualities that still characterized silent fi lm, especially Expressionist fi lm. By 1932, it had become clear that sound fi lm had a permanent place in German cinemas, prompting fi lm theorist and critic Rudolf Arnheim to comment pessimistically: We met the arrival of sound fi lm with distrust.

It seemed, after all, that it would have to destroy all the exceptional qualities of silent fi lm that we had loved. Then, we became more hopeful, because we admitted that sound fi lm would be able to replace the attractions that it destroyed with new ones of its own.

Since then, it has become apparent that sound fi lm desires to make as little use of these new possibilities as possible. It has destroyed, but without replacing anything. (42) In addition to aesthetic condemnations, certain critics expressed ideological concerns in their opposition toward sound fi lm. Operettas and comedy fi lms were

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Self-Presentation, Kitsch, Irony

criticized particularly harshly for their tendency toward naïveté and escapist themes, especially in an era of economic and political precarity. Siegfried Kracauer typifies this view in his remarks on sound fi lm in his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, published in American exile in 1947. In Kracauer’s view, an aesthetic tendency toward totalitarianism can retrospectively be read in the German cinema in the interwar period. Pursuing “Kracauer’s reflex” (Hagener and Hans 7) many years later, some fi lm historiographers have asserted a teleological trajectory from early German cinematic works to the National Socialist takeover of the fi lm industry after 1933. For the most part, the only fi lms from this period to attain canonical status came from “auteur” directors such as Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls, or Robert Siodmak. By contrast, many historiographers found it difficult to reconcile the popularity of sound fi lm comedies, which struggled for decades to shake their historical association with fascism.

Since the 1990s, a new historiographic methodology has gained traction among fi lm scholars. Important critics include Thomas Elsaesser, Anton Kaes, Corinna Müller, Karl Prümm, and Jörg Schweintz. They propose a new way of viewing interwar cinema in which early sound fi lm is not lacking in creativity or innovation; rather, it bears witness to an inventive, imaginative way of dealing with new possibilities for media. Th is pertains especially to genre fi lms, including comedies and operettas (Bordwell and Thompson 219).

In keeping with insights offered by these critics, in this essay I would like to investigate the multifaceted aesthetic self-referentiality of German cinema around 1930. To this end, I will locate the terms “self-presentation” and “irony,” as well as contemporary watchwords such as “kitsch” and “Americanization,” within the framework of this complex historical period.

These terms will guide my analyses in case studies of Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (The Shot in the Talker Studio, Alfred Zeiser, DE 1930) and Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht (I by Day, You by Night, Ludwig Berger, DE 1932).

28 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

In 1930, “kitsch” was effectively already a byword that quickly became an expression of distaste, and, as Norbert Elias wrote in 1935, for the “uneducated tastes of capitalist society,” (qtd. in Dettmar and Küpper 157) which, according to sound fi lm’s detractors, brought audiences to the cinema in droves. Today, however, the term is often used in postmodern cultural analysis and may denote a conscious engagement with mass culture.

My readings of fi lms from this period are influenced by the fact that this enlightened, media-savvy mode of viewing (and hearing) arose as early as the 1930s.

Much like kitsch, discussions of “irony” as a methodological tool appeared very little in fi lm studies or fi lm historiography until James MacDowell’s 2016 study on “Irony in Film,” in which he conceives of the term systematically and renders it applicable to the study of fi lm. In my historical analysis, I consider it a sign that audiences (as well as fi lmmakers) were not naïve spectators, but very much informed about innovations in the cinematic medium. Furthermore, I understand irony not only as a tool of marginalized but of mainstream cinema as well, an aesthetic and narrative device attuned to the tastes of a media-literate public in a moment of historic transformation in fi lm technology.

Around 1930, we can see the groundwork being laid for a form of cinematic self-deprecation through play with new equipment and innovative design media, the foregrounding of its own artificiality, and the ostentatious exaggeration of kitsch. Depictions of irony in this historical confi guration may be regarded as not (only) a subversion of but also a playful engagement with cinematic conventions. Films maintain a certain distance from their own aesthetics and construct a “strategy of complicity” (160) between fi lmmakers and audience, as Elsaesser writes, because “such pleasurable playfulness prepares a media technology for the market place and for mass-consumption” (158).

The Transition to Sound Film in Germany Film historiographers generally consider Germany one of the few fi lm markets able to hold its own against the dominance of Hollywood exports in the 1920s:

Selina Hangartner

Hollywood never won the control in Germany which it wielded almost everywhere else. At no time did American feature film imports constitute a clear majority of German market offerings (Saunders 5).

In 1929, the first American sound fi lms successfully debuted in German cinemas, leading German fi lm producers to fear an American incursion on their national market. The accrued box-office earnings from Hollywood fi lms such as The Singing Fool (Lloyd Bacon, USA 1928), first shown in Berlin in 1929, made fi lm production companies and cinema owners more eager to invest in sound fi lm (Mühl-Benninghaus 127). Ufa, the largest production company in Germany at the time, decided that same year to transition to the new technology and planned to begin producing exclusively sound fi lms.

Cinemas quickly followed suit: by February 1931, less than two years after the earliest reviews of sound fi lm, the majority of German cinemas had been outfitted with sound fi lm projectors (Müller 25).

The rapid rise of sound film presented structural problems for German cinema. Legal conf licts with Hollywood regarding sound film patents (a situation which led to the dissolution of the “sound film peace accord” [“Tonfilmfrieden”] of 1930) (Müller 31) and fundamental changes to working conditions in the industry were only two sources of particular uncertainty for filmmakers in the transition away from silent film. The worldwide financial crisis further complicated the already-expensive process of retrofitting equipment and converting film studios; at the same time, filmmakers were forced into a state of constant creative output in order to fill the financial gaps left by a lack of new imports. Certain veteran directors voiced aesthetic concerns—many of them would simply have to come to terms with the novel situation if they wished to remain active in the industry. As I have already suggested, German intellectuals and critics of the medium only developed a taste for sound film with some difficulty. Ufa’s first sound-film team, an object of special scrutiny for critics, received overwhelmingly negative reviews. This led to a “crisis of confidence

between film and criticism [Vertrauenskrise zwischen Film und Kritik]” (“Fünf Kritiker nehmen das Wort”), whereby the situation worsened to such an extent that talks between the lead organization of the film industry [Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft] and the professional association of the German press [Standesvertretung der deutschen Presse] had to take place (Müller 39-40).

Film historiographers also attributed disputes about the value of sound fi lm to the audience itself. To that end, an audience poll was conducted at the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s fi lm Blackmail (GB 1929) which supposedly proved the audience’s preference for silent fi lm. Both silent and sound versions of the fi lm were shown to German viewers, and according to a subsequent survey, only 40% favored the sound version (Mühl-Benninghaus 223). It is impossible to assess this complex historical situation in its entirety; however, early (American) sound fi lms’ box office earnings along with increasing numbers of spectators at sound fi lm showings in Germany (Mühl-Benninghaus 106) defi nitively spurred the industry-wide choice to transition to sound fi lm (Mühl-Benninghaus 356). At the very least, German audiences’ alleged lack of listening habits must be put into perspective with Germany’s rapidly-expanding media landscape. Innovative connections arising between vinyl records, sound fi lm, and radio (as well as brand-new possibilities for cross-media advertising) around 1930 are a testament to the existence of a media-savvy public enthusiastic about new forms of technology.

Self-preservation then becomes a playful or even mystifying narrative component - a variant of the self-advertisement which announces its capability of creating and shattering an illusion all at once.

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Self-Presentation, Kitsch, Irony

Media Transition and Self-Presentation In moments of transition, media forms become increasingly self-referential, as David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins note in “Rethinking Media Change”: … a deep and even consuming self-consciousness is often a central aspect of emerging media themselves. Aware of their novelty, they engage in a process of self-discovery that seeks to define and foreground the apparently unique attributes that distinguish them from existing media forms. (4) With its complex historical circumstances in mind, the omnipresent self-referentiality in early sound fi lm appears to be an expression of the urgent desire for legitimacy (Prümm 279). Sabine Hake points out similar mechanisms in her study of fi lm around 1913, in which she writes of the first feature-length fi lms that the instances of self-referentiality serve largely affirmative functions; they belong to a new industry promoting its products. The hallucinations of cinema, whether in form of narrative structures or special effects, represent a form of advertisement, a showcase for technical accomplishments as well as the technological imagination. […] As ‘transitional objects,’ so to speak, these films show audiences how to appreciate the cinema and its increasingly sophisticated products, how to deal with feelings of astonishment and disbelief, and how to gain satisfaction from the playful awareness of the apparatus and the simultaneous denial of its presence. (37-38) However, according to Robert Stam’s study “Reflexivity in Film and Literature,” this specific form of self-reflexivity (as it appears in media transitions) does not always lead to a radical breaking of the illusion or resemble a more fundamental problematization of the narrative. Films created around 1930, just like early feature-length films, present the strongest evidence that reflexive strategies may also be used when presenting to a broader audience.

30 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Self-presentation then becomes a playful or even mystifying narrative component—a variant of the self-advertisement which announces its capability of creating and shattering an illusion all at once. If the story takes place on a film set, then filming equipment can literally be shifted into focus and be presented to a wider audience as a technological marvel. Along similar lines, Elsaesser writes regarding early sound film: “The auto-reflexive gestus, usually considered a sign of the literary avant-garde and artistic modernism here shows itself at home among popular stereotypes and frankly commercial intentions” (157-158).

Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier Alfred Zeisler’s Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (DE 1930) is a rich example of a sound film centered on the capabilities of the new technology. With a script by Curt Siodmak, this crime thriller—produced by film company Ufa—unfolds in Ufa’s very own sound-film studio.

Even before the eponymous shot in the sound-film studio is fired, killing an actress, the film simulates its own interpretation in the opening sequence: a couple share an intimate kiss, and suddenly a loud ringing can be heard. After the tone has rung a few times, a close-up of a clock fills the screen, revealing the source of the sound. This reminds the young woman (Berthe Ostyn) that she must leave. Suddenly, the doorbell rings, and she disappears behind a curtain as the young man’s fiancée (Gerda Maurus) enters the sitting room. A struggle ensues between the man (Harry Frank) and his fiancée—she suspects his betrayal. After the woman is seen holding what appears to be a pistol, we hear a voice offstage shouting “cut!” and we understand that this is a film within a film. The entire film crew and equipment can now be seen—what appeared to be a sitting room just moments before is now exposed as mere backdrop.

The revelation of the film crew functions to tip off the audience that the film’s ostensible plot takes place within the diegetic frame of the film-within-a-film, recalling the

Selina Hangartner

auto-thematic tendencies of early sound film which I have already mentioned. In addition, this sequence creates a hierarchy between sound and image which will hold true throughout the film: several central plot elements (the clock, the doorbell, the shot, the director’s voice offstage) can be heard before they appear onscreen. Using this device, Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier argues its “merits” against silent film, as Jürgen Kasten summarizes: More complex exterior elements such as internal incidents and plots, when articulated linguistically, could be integrated more quickly and less complicatedly into the narrative construction. […] Altogether, a faster-paced story and an expanded narrative scope may be achieved, which conveyed the story more concisely and made it comprehensible. Within the limited scope of a 90-minute feature film, greater possibilities for narrative economy as well as for excess and editing (in the visual realm as well as in sound) opened up, since a tighter plot development had become possible. (53) In Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier, the pool of images is unbound; sound film signifies the new means of incorporating the cinematic “offstage.” With the bright, clear striking of the hour, the steps on the parquet floor, and the ring of the doorbell, Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier also indicates an entirely different, new quality which— isolated from the narrative economy—represents the acoustic charm of the medium: “For the first time, in the all-singing all-talking pictures […] all kinds of noises are suddenly present: what smoke and the leaves were for early cinema were the random noise and sound-effects for the movies” (Elsaesser 163). In this way, early sound films self-consciously thrust ordinary acoustic phenomena

into the foreground and turned them into an audible sensation. The eponymous shot is initially discernible as a purely acoustic phenomenon before the consequences become obviously visible after some delay.

A shot is, in fact, fired in Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier, since the actress playing the lover hiding behind the curtain is soon found by the crew, dead from a gunshot wound. They immediately call lead detective Möller (Alfred Beierle) and the police chief (Ernst StahlNachbaur) to the scene of the crime. These men take a tour of the fi lm studio, demonstrating to the spectator—apparently “à propos of nothing”—what the sound fi lm cross in Babelsberg had to offer in technological sophistication. In this way, they learn that the shot could not have been fired from the actress’ pistol because she is found holding a prop gun in her hand, since “only a primed shot achieves the same quality of sound as a real one.” The huge amount of insider information (often fiction and not always state-of-the-art) seems to lend an aura of authenticity or documentary to the fi lm’s self-presentation, and the new medium becomes sensationalized through its uniqueness.

Film equipment appears as a frequent visual motif throughout Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (Fig. 1). The fi lm celebrates the machine as the embodiment of modernity—with an attitude reminiscent of New Objectivity2 —in its ability to record reality neutrally.

By the end of the fi lm, the apotheosis of this cinematic self-presentation seems obvious: the sound-camera reveals recorded evidence of a conversation between murderer and victim in the dark, which the image-only camera could not capture. The detectives confront the murderer in the studio’s screening room with his own recording and force him to confess his crime.

2 “Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) denotes an artistic style in Germany from the interwar period. The meaning of the term ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ has shifted over time as it became associated with different art movements. Interpreted as an aesthetic value, however, it always signifies an orientation toward realism at the same time as a turning away from Expressionism. An interest in facts, facticity, attention to ‘the thing itself,’ and objectivity typifies New Objective works. As an aesthetic manifesto, for instance in photography, this means an enthusiasm for motifs such as ‘city,’ machinery, or modern architecture. On a theatrical level, New Objectivity comes to terms with unvarnished depictions of the world; it considers itself obliged to a certain realism and attempts to present life ‘as it is.’” (Kappelhoff 120).

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Fig.1 | Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (The Shot in the Talker Studio, Alfred Zeiser, DE 1930), from the Collection of the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.

This is the final evidence of sound film’s victory, only hinted at in the first scene through the striking of the clock, the doorbell, and the director’s voice calling off-screen. These elements establish a hierarchy between audio and visual means of conveying information, fi nally made explicit in sound fi lm’s resolution of the whodunit.

“Kitschoperetten” Nearly all early sound fi lms relied on musical interludes to demonstrate the impressive benefits of the new medium. The genres that adhered to this principle most

32 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

consistently were musical fi lms and operettas. Along the same lines as the auto-thematic comedy Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari and the self-reflexive crime thriller Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier, the worlds depicted by these fi lms resisted diegetic boundaries, instead demonstrating their new technological capabilities for self-reflexivity: Th is kind of cinema relies less on the closed subject, psychological motivation, and the creation of sense in narrative structures and more on episodic highlights and action—but above all on an audience familiar with typical narrative strategies and patterns. The audience

Selina Hangartner

must be able to appreciate the ingenuity of choosing to either adhere to or break with genre conventions, as well as derive some part of their enjoyment from the plot’s predictability. (Hagener and Hans 11) Many critics considered operettas a symptom of sound fi lm’s less promising qualities, particularly due to the new medium’s prevalence in the genre.

Cinematic operettas developed a reputation for insufficiently ref lecting the serious changes which political, economic, and social life were undergoing at the time. Additionally, many critics accused such films of portraying social ills too glamorously, essentially promoting a kind of propaganda for an uncritical, unpolitical, pro-consumerist lifestyle.

Theatre critic Herbert Jhering agreed with the critical canon and, in his text “Der erste Tonfilm” from June 1929, appointed the “mendaciousness of the dying kitsch operettas” and the “melodiously sentimental music” (572) of same as a sign of their escapist tendencies. One popular motif in many operettas was considered particularly problematic and often led to the predictability of the plots in such productions—narratives usually followed the “backstage” lives of popular figures or traced their ascension to fame, with many characters originating in poor or working-class families before successfully breaking through to become theater or film stars. For a large part of the population, however, the financial crisis precluded any real hope of social mobility or economic prosperity. Such stories were widely popular at the time because they expressed the new technology’s potential as no other genre could.

The sensational new song-and-dance interludes instantly pulled spectators into the story. Talented performers from various other kinds of entertainment, such as variété and cabaret, performed as characters in the worlds of these films—a strategy utilized in Holly wood (with Al Jolson, for instance) as well as in German cinema.

In the same text from 1929, Jhering additionally notes: “Certainly, kitsch is immortal” (572), marking the importance of kitsch as a symptom of its time.

Kitsch is named again and again throughout contemporary criticism, linking the public debates surrounding sound fi lm to more general ideas about the industrial mass production of aesthetic goods. In Ernst Bloch’s writings of the period, as well as in those of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and Norbert Elias, kitsch and its associated constructs appear as keywords and represent—often tacitly—a concept running counter to classical notions of art. For instance, we may consider Kant’s idea of disinterested pleasure as diametrically opposed to kitsch. To Kant, pleasure in true beauty has to be undisturbed, for art shouldn’t evoke any desire for the object itself; instead it should intellectually engage the subject. Kitsch, on the other hand, encompasses the idea of aesthetic products that are only pleasant, sentimental, touching, or escapist—but do not inspire engrossment of any kind, as Ute Dettmar and Thomas Küpper note: “It was certainly significant for the interwar period that kitsch be understood as a sign of the general cultural decay: the prevalence of kitsch and of popular culture altogether can be considered a symptom of a rapidly-spreading societal disease” (157).

It was particularly the “mass entry of images and reproductions into the (petit-) bourgeois household” (94) and the still-new mass culture which were governed by such an aesthetic and horrified critics at the beginning of the 20th century. Film, cheap books, adventure novels, and “Backfischliteratur”3 were shaped in these conversations around kitsch into constellations of endlessly-debated terms. Cinema and sound fi lm had thereby become the chief representatives of the new mass culture.

“Americanization” in the Interwar Period It is interesting that the contemporary conception of kitsch was so closely linked to the idea of an “Americanizing” tendency in German popular culture.

3 “Backfischliteratur” means literature targeted specifically at adolescent girls (Dettmar and Küpper 112).

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Debates about the Americanization of German film production began around the mid-1920s and strongly characterized critical thought about film in the interwar period.

Beginning in 1924 Germany experienced a cultural invasion without parallel since the age of Napoleon. In the wake of the Dawes Plan and other American loans Germans encountered a wave of what they styled Amerikanismus, the cultural essence of a nation which worshiped technology, efficiency, and commercial success (Saunders 117).

Cinema, like kitsch, became one of the main representatives of this alleged cultural invasion: “for the broad mass of Europeans the main agent of Americanization was the moving picture” (1). This Hollywood “occupation” of German film came about not only in the form of imported films—and the American way of life they advertised—but also through economic and systematic associations [Verbandelungen] in the national film industries. Financial mergers, in particular, opened the door to American influence: as Ufa neared bankruptcy in 1925 due to a number of failed investments, Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer helped it to escape financial crisis.

In return, Hollywood studios added certain conditions to their contracts and, as a result, won a great deal of influence over day-to-day business operations at Ufa. Under the management of American manager Sam Rachmann, film premières at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo transformed into ostentatious events complete with jazz concerts (Wedel 309). Furthermore, Hollywood and Germany began an active replacement of personnel, which led German filmmakers on frequent research trips to the United States. Erich Pommer, one of Ufa’s most significant film producers, had worked for some time in Hollywood before he began producing operetta films in Germany. Owing to Hollywood’s leading role in sound film production, the American “encroachment” on the Germany film market around 1930 was felt particularly acutely.

Typical criticisms of sound film—its superficiality, its apparent function as an economically productive but

34 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

aesthetically impoverished product on the market— appeared in discourses about “Americanized” cinema in Germany around 1925. This coincided with the increase in significance of American imports, personnel replacement, and American investors for the German film market and for German mass culture after World War I. In this context, Thomas J. Saunders write in his study about “Hollywood in Berlin”: Hollywood became the principal villain in accounts of domestic film woes. However, stigmatization of Hollywood to explain German setbacks did not originate with mid-decade stagnation. It was rooted in earlier perceptions of the American challenge. At the end of the war film experts approached the problem of America’s global dominance with sharp antinomies. The dichotomies of ‘we’ and ‘they’ prevalent in wartime elevation of German Kultur carried over into postwar film debates (53).

A good five years later, these impressions characterized discussions of sound film, inasmuch as it was understood as a product saturated with American spirit.

Thanks to American sound film’s prime position in the international film market, German producers—in spite of criticism—attempted to follow the same path to success, but not without some additional effort to invest it with a certain “German character.” The general director of Ufa, Ludwig Klitzsch, apparently confirmed as much after a research trip to Broadway, announcing that he wished to create a German or Austrian variant of the American musical film that would be an international hit, relying on local color such as Viennese operetta music to sell the story (Kreimeier 43).

Thus it seemed that what critics experienced as “American” and even “kitschy” in sound film had, in fact, successfully won its way into the ambiance of German productions. Films around 1930 incorporated these characteristics into their aesthetic and created a German variation on the genre (Saunders 238-239). German musical film productions presented themselves in an affected, and kitschy manner, including musical numbers

Selina Hangartner

which foreclosed any possibility of a realistic approach to storytelling: “Next to them the much despised American features of the 1920s appeared almost down-to-earth” (Saunders 239). Along the example of Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht, I’d like to argue that German sound films did indeed incorporate the Americanized and kitschy aesthetic—but in a ironically ostentatious manner, creating distance to their own aesthetic output and engaging playfully with the stereotypes only recently set up by the new genre.

Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht The screen still black, the film opens with a simple call: “Begin!” The picture fades in on a film projector being set in motion. The camera swivels to show the equipment fully, then leads us from the projection room into the theater’s auditorium, where it swivels again to follow the beam of light to the big screen. The beginning of Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht is simultaneously the beginning of a film-within-afilm. Later we learn that the projectionist Helmut (Friedrich Gnaß), who turned on the projector in the first scene, is friends with the protagonist Hans (Willy Fritsch). The two of them discuss Hans’ problems in the projection room: he is frustrated that he cannot seem to make ends meet on his paltry wages as a busboy. The contrast between his proletarian lifestyle and the lifestyle promoted in the ostentatious operettas in the next room could not be greater. “Th is fairytale-reality truly proves that once one of us has his

The huge amount of insider information (often fiction and not always state-of-theart) seems to lend an aura of authenticity or documentary to the film's self-preservation, and the new medium becomes sensationalized through its uniqueness.

moment of luck, dreams of happiness will bloom and tap gently on your windowpane,” Helmut reads aloud from the new sound fi lms’ playbill. “Nonsense, it’s all a scam,” Hans mutters in response. He is convinced that nothing in his life could take a turn for the better “like it does in the movies.”

The irony here is that Hans is, indeed, a film character, and the audience’s expectations for Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht modulate everything that the two men say about the false reality of operetta films. The definition of irony undertaken by James MacDowell in his study of cinematic irony applies this situation well: Ironic expression of all kinds involves juxtapositions between (what are offered as) limited and less limited point of view. In the case of communicative irony, this juxtaposition is achieved by feigning to possess precisely the limited point of view that is being ironized (59-60).

The aforementioned accusations of kitsch and extravagant Americanized productions leveled at German sound fi lm around 1930, as well as the characteristic relationship of public criticism to the sound fi lm genre, can be read in Hans’ attitude toward cinema—the fi lm-within-a-fi lm, shown in excerpts throughout Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht (and titled, revealingly, All Th is is Yours! [Dies alles ist dein!]), confi rms and elevates stereotypes about early sound fi lm. Apparently a love story, the fi lm takes place in grand, palatial rooms outfitted in marble and overflowing with roses. The absurd elevation of every gesture recalls kitsch—the sequined outfits and delicate negligées must have reminded contemporary critics of the perceived American invasion in their national cinema.

On the diegetic level, we experience these discourses through Hans’ cynical perspective: he thinks it’s all “nonsense.” Thus, Kracauer’s criticism of operetta fi lms in 1930 echoes in the depiction of this fi lm-within-afi lm once again: “The more expensive the production, the cheaper the taste. Hopefully we shall soon see the three-penny sound fi lm” (“Die neue Tonfi lmoperette”).

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Irony in Film Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht demonstrates that it knows its way around cinematic tendencies toward escapism through its “strategy of complicity” (Elsaesser 160) and its particular form of self-reflexivity, which strongly differentiates it from the occasionally melodramatic Ein Schuss im Tonfilmatelier. The fi lm-withina-fi lm creates ironic contrasts between its scenes and comments on them intradiegetically. For instance, a tenor in the fictional operetta fi lm sings a hit song entitled “When You’re Not There, the Roses Bloom in Vain [Wenn du nicht kommst, dann haben die Rosen umsonst geblüht]” surrounded by a huge number of roses, while a separate montage shows Hans—always underscored by the music from the fi lm-within-a-fi lm—waiting for his date with a humble little bouquet.

Schlegel. In this context, irony’s first usage elevated it above its purely rhetorical, operative meaning, and it was formulated as a more fundamental relationship between author and text: “The relationship of an author to his work, his ‘emergence’ from the literary structures of fiction, his breakthrough and transcendence of fiction which indicates a problematization of literary communication, were viewed as the true characteristics of irony” (Behler 8). Ernst Behler concludes that, as a result of this praxis, the “ironic counterpointing of illusory fiction and empirical reality” (52)—in romantic literature, irony becomes an “expression permeated with reflection and self-criticism” (67), a gesture that, at least in certain moments, recalls Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht.

According to James MacDowell, irony in fi lm can be interpreted as a form of dissemblance. Thomas Koebner’s formulation is prominent within Germanlanguage fi lm theory: “Irony, a device in which one seems to take a particular attitude in earnest, is a form of intelligent dissemblance and often elegant pretense that one is performing some ritual sincerely” (Koebner 327). Rituals in fi lm might include narrative formulas, a standardized mode of speech, or certain expectations modeled in “conventional” narrative sequences for a particular genre. When an ironic dissemblance functions to comment on what it depicts, it simultaneously produces a distancing effect from the diegetic narrative.

Th is ultimately links the concept of cinematic irony-as-dissemblance with historical conceptions of irony and, more precisely, to the idea of German romantic irony as formulated in the 18th century by Friedrich

Talkies as Social Narcotic The ironic “‘I know that you know that I know’ gesture” (Elsaesser 160) in Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht did not escape contemporary critics’ attention. One reviewer in Film-Kurier from November 29, 1932 wrote: Th is is also a pointed, biting irony about the pure pageantry of the talkie operetta. Well, have a look! We see a talkie with a certain heroic tenor set against two miserable, honest people, with a blaring, false Gitta Alpar, with innumerable pageboys, young maids, and liveried servants. The poor little room the two people share in a fi lthy rear house contrasts with the gilded halls built by Otto Hunte and the bedchambers and marble staircases in a ‘fi lm

4 “Dazu kommt eine Fingerspitze Pfeffer-Ironie über den eitlen Kintopp-Operettenprunk. Ei, sieh’ da! Den beiden ärmlichen, aber braven Menschen wird entgegengestellt ein Kintoppfilm mit Heldentenor, mit einer schmetternden falschen Gitta Alpar, mit unzähligen Pagen, Zofen und galonierten Dienern. Das ärmliche Stübchen der beiden guten im schmutzigen Hinterhaus kontrastiert mit den von Otto Hunte gebauten goldprunkenden Sälen und Schlafgemächern und marmornen Freitreppen in einem «Film im Film». Der Kintopp als soziales Narkotikum tritt gewissermaßen in Figura auf. […] Eine außerordentlich gute Idee. Sie zu fassen zeugt von sozialem Gewissen. Ihre Ausführung aber zeugt von geschäftlicher Begabung. Denn das anspruchsvolle Publikum wird die soziale Ironie merken und sich an ihr freuen: das anspruchslose wird sie nicht merken und sich an der Kintopp-Pracht freuen” (“Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier”).

36 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Selina Hangartner

within a fi lm.’ The cinema certainly appears in its role as a social narcotic in these examples. […] An exceptionally good idea. Conceiving it is a testament to social conscience. Executing it, however, is a testament to business acumen: for the sophisticated audience will note the social irony and be glad of it, whereas the humble audience will not and will delight in the grandeur of the talkies (“Der Schuss im Tonfi lmatelier”).4 Such accusations of ambiguity, of a simultaneously deconstructive and affirmative attitude toward the subject of the review (“a testament to social conscience”/”a testament to business acumen”) have been levied against cinematic irony many times in the postmodern era. Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht is ambiguously designed since, contrasting the critiques of operetta-kitsch—which manifest in the ambiguous relationship between the protagonist Hans and the fi lm-within-a-fi lm—the main character still gets to have his happy ending. At the end of the fi lm, after a series of misunderstandings

and mix-ups, Hans finds his true love Grete (Käthe von Nagy), deciding to seek happiness with her in spite of his low socio-economic status.

This ambiguity enables certain moments of irony which integrate the audience into the story by allowing spectators to observe a fi lm on multiple levels. Some may have no deep understanding of such ironic moments, whereas others may enjoy it with a sophisticated, knowing eye. Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht can be read as both a glorification and a criticism of cinema—it functions equally effectively as “pure entertainment” in which the fi lm both theorizes and activates typical operetta plot structures.

This ambiguity makes irony especially significant in this moment of upheaval in German cinema around 1930, and not only as a popular entertainment device. It also managed to “sell” the new medium’s operetta-style fi lms with all their musical, intoxicating qualities, while still serving those audiences who could interpret and enjoy multiple levels of cinematic meaning. 

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WORKS CITED “Fünf Kritiker nehmen das Wort. Zur Vertrauenskrise zwischen Film und Kritik.” Die Weltbühne, 1 January 1930.

Arnheim, Rudolf. “Sound Film Gone Astray (1932).” Film Essays and Criticism, edited by Rudolf Arnheim, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, pp. 42-44.

Behler, Ernst. Ironie und literarische Moderne. Schöningh, 1997.

Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film History: An Introduction. McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Dettmar, Ute, and Küpper, Thomas. Kitsch. Texte und Theorien.

Reclam, 2007.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Going ‘Live’. Body and Voice in Some Early German Sound Films.” Le son en perspective: nouvelles recherches = New perspectives in sound studies, edited by Dominique Nasta and Didier Huvelle. P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 155-168.

Elsaesser, Thomas. Das Weimarer Kino—aufgeklärt und doppelbödig, Vorwerk 8, 1999.

Hagener, Malte, and Hans, Jan. “Musikfilm und Modernisierung.” Als die Filme singen lernten. Innovation

Kasten, Jürgen. “Vom visuellen und akustischen Sprechen.”

Sprache im Film, edited by Gustav Ernst. Wespennest, 1994, pp. 41-55.

Koebner, Thomas. “Ironie/Satire.” Reclams Sachlexikon des Films. Reclam, 2011 Kreimeier, Klaus. “Von Henny Porten zu Zarah Leander.

Filmgenres und Genrefilm in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus.” montage/av, vol. 3, no. 2, 1994.

MacDowell, James. Irony in Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Mühl-Benninghaus, Wolfgang. Das Ringen um den Tonfilm.

Strategien der Elektro- und der Filmindustrie in den 20er und 30er Jahren. Droste, 1999.

Müller, Corinna. Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm. Wilhelm Fink, 2003.

Prümm, Karl. “Der frühe Tonfilm als intermediale Konfiguration. Zur Genese des Audiovisuellen.” Jahrbuch zur Literatur der Weimarer Republik. Volume 1. Röhring Universitätsverlag, 1995, pp. 278-290.

Rentschler, Eric. “The Situation is Hopeless, but not Desperate.”

und Tradition im Musikfilm 1928-1938, Edition Text +

Generic Histories of German Cinema. Genre and Its

Kritik, 1999, pp. 7-22.

Deviations, edited by Jaimey Fisher, Camden House, 2013,

Hake, Sabine. “Self-Referentiality in Early German Cinema.”

Cinema Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 1992, pp. 37-55.

Hays, Will H., See and Hear: A Brief History of Motion Pictures and the Development of Sound. New York, 1929.

J., W. “Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier.” Film-Kurier, 29 November 1932.

Jhering, Herbert. Von Reinhardt bis Brecht. Vier Jahrzehnte Theater und Film. 1924-1929. Aufbau, 1961.

Kaes, Anton. “Filmgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte. Reflexionen zum Kino der Weimarer Republik.” Filmkultur zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik, edited by Uli Jung and Walter Schatzenberg, Saur, 1992, pp. 54-64.

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Suhrkamp, 2014 Kappelhoff, Hermann. “Eine neue Gegenständlichkeit. Die

pp. 91-107.

Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin. American Cinema and Weimar Germany. University of California Press, 1994.

Schweinitz, Jörg. “‘Wie im Kino!’: Die autothematische Welle im frühen Tonfilm.” Diesseits der “Dämonischen Leinwand,” edited by Thomas Koebner, Edition Text + Kritik, 2003, pp. 373-392.

Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature. From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. Columbia University Press, 1992.

Thorburn, David, and Jenkins, Henry. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. MIT Press, 2003.

Wedel, Michael. “Risse im ‘Erlebnis-System’. Tonfilm, Synchronisation, Audiovision um 1930.” Kulturtechniken

Bildidee der Neuen Sachlichkeit und der Film.” Diesseits

der Synchronisation, edited by Christian Kassung and

der “Dämonischen Leinwand,” edited by Thomas Koebner.

Thomas Macho, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013, pp. 309-336.

Edition Text + Kritik, 2003, pp. 119-138.

38 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Between Frontiers of Dictatorship and Democracy:

Voicing Otherness in the Spanish Historical TV Fiction Remember When

BY ZAYA RUSTAMOVA | Kennesaw State University

ABSTRACT In 2001, Spanish public television started to broadcast the longest-running drama series in its history: Remember When (Cuéntame cómo pasó). Through the lens of the daily life experiences of a middle-class Spanish family, the Alcántaras, narrated by their youngest son as an adult, this highly successful cultural production rewrites the history of Spain from the last years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship to the consequent transition to democracy. The construction of the televisual discourse in Remember When reveals a tension between a centralist and a peripheral vision of the history of democratization in Spain from the 1970s to 1980s. Employing Geoffrey Bennington’s concept of existential frontiers, this article analyzes how the defiance of cultural and political hegemony prompted marginalization and consequently shaped the self-discovery process of the younger generation of protagonists, the so-called Children of the Transition, epitomized in the series by the oldest son of the Alcántara family.

S

ince 2001, Spanish public television has been broadcasting the longest-running drama series in its history: Remember When (Cuéntame cómo pasó). Th rough the lens of the daily life experiences of a middle-class Spanish family, narrated by their youngest son as an adult, this highly successful cultural production rewrites national history from the last years of Francisco

known as the “Transition.” In an attempt to promote a sense of national reconciliation, the main protagonists of the Transition suppressed the memory of the Spanish Civil war and postwar repressions. Such suppression, often referred to as the pact of silence or the pact of forgetting, fomented an intellectual and existential debate for many families on historical memory that initiated in Spain in

Franco’s dictatorship to the consequent transition to democracy.i After the death of Franco in November 1975, Spain undertook a process of democratization, commonly

the 1990s.ii Remember When resonates with this debate as the production team of the series centres the narrative on the experiences of four generations of protagonists from

i

In 1936 General Franco led the Nationalist troops in an uprising against the democratically elected Spanish government of the Second Republic.

Th is rebellion turned into a bloody civil war, which lasted three years and resulted in 540 000 deaths. To this number, one must add some 450 000 forced into exile. After the war, Franco established a dictatorial regime commonly referred to as Franquismo. Among other drastic consequences, this regime buried the memory of the Republicans fallen during the war and discriminated against their families. ii

To this date, thousands of families victimized by the Franco regime have neither received reparations nor an opportunity to bury their dead. In

2007 the debate led to the Historical Memory Act, passed under the Socialist government of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The object of this law was to rescue the historical memory of Franco’s reprisals and crimes during and after the Civil War, thus breaking the so-called pact of silence promoted during the Spanish democratic Transition.

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Between Frontiers of Dictatorship and Democracy

1969 to the 1980s. Th rough a detailed depiction of the daily life experiences of the Alcántara family, composed of grandmother Herminia (María Galiana), parents Antonio (Imanol Arias) and Mercedes (Ana Duato), children Inés (Irene Visedo), Toni (Pablo Rivero), Carlos (Ricardo Gómez), and Maria (Paula Gallego), and later, grandchildren Oriol (Javier Lorenzo) and Santiago (Víctor Garrido), we observe the shaping of a new democracy with its flaws and setbacks. By virtue of the diversity of its characters and their experiences, this TV series offers heterogeneous versions of the historical memory of the Spanish democratization process and demystifies the official narrative of an exemplary consensus-led transition.

The defiance of the Francoist regime and its legacy within the non-conformist population is exemplified by the Alcántara children and echoes the emergence of new social patterns as a reflection of the ideological and cultural pluralism of the people of Spain. As illustrated through the traumatic experiences of Toni Alcántara that result from his overtly political subversion, the rejection of the dominant order and transgression of its rules prompt systematic violence and victimization of a dissentient citizenry. Th is institutionalized violence was not only customary during Franco’s rule, but accompanied the Spanish transition to democracy as well.iii The immediate contact with political repression in the beginning of the narrative positions the future trajectory of eighteen-yearold Toni outside of the boundaries and conventions of the established societal norms during the last years of Francoism and into the newly democratic Spain. Thus, while employing the televisual signs that articulate strong emotions caused by the country’s liberation from dictatorship, the series Remember When also brings to the surface latent traumatic memories of underrepresented social groups, such as political dissidents, women, and ethnic

iii

minorities. In this article I explore how textual references to political and police corruption, violence, and conflict between social classes reveal, in Stuart Hall’s words, “the repressed content of [... the] culture” (“Television” 11) before, during, and after Spain’s democratization. I offer a discussion on the construction of Toni Alcántara’s character as an agent of social, cultural, and political transformation, marked by a series of new experiences precipitated by his exposure to the above-mentioned problems. These innately dangerous experiences leave traces in the molding of his identity, provoking a series of existential interrogatives which not only leads the character on a continuous search for authenticity, but also results in the affirmation of his Otherness.iv Th is discussion, informed by Geoff rey Bennington’s concept of frontiers, offers a critical reflection on Toni Alcántara’s identity construction that stems from a series of traumatic events; specifically, his incarceration for suspicion of political dissidence. Toni’s imprisonment in Remember When represents what Bennington denominates “the experience of the frontier” (“Frontiers” n.p.), which inevitably leads to character transformation and marginalization. Due to the intrinsically dangerous nature of such experiences, defi ned by a contact with something “unknown on or beyond a frontier,” and in which “there is something of the order of politics,” a subject starts to question all previously accumulated experience. Thus, his “identity opens up to an alterity” since one is not really himself in the moment of such fear, anxiety, and/ or violence (Bennington n.p.). Toni’s evolution as an agent and receiver of the process of social and cultural restructuring is defi ned by crossing a frontier between incarceration and liberation. Upon his arrest, the threat of lengthy imprisonment allows him to maintain “alive [his] identity by making it different” (Bennington n.p.).

For a detailed account of the use of violence during the Transition, see Sánchez Soler, Mariano. La transición sangrienta: una historia violenta del

proceso democrático en España (1975-1983), Ediciones Península, 2010. iv

Scholars such as Isabel Estrada and Ana Corbalán, among others, have made valuable contributions to the study of Remember When shedding light,

respectively, on the revisionist nature of the series and the role the nostalgic/reflexive perception its audience plays in reconstructing Spain’s historical memory. However, the above-mentioned authors limited their analyses to the fi rst two seasons of the series without focusing on the trajectory of specific characters.

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His previously unseen trepidation shifts to audacity, thus reinforcing his political beliefs as a driving force behind his personal and professional development as a young man who embodies nonconformist Spanish youth during this important period of transformation for Spain.

The frontier as a tool of analysis for Toni Alcántara’s identity construction within the public and private realms is justified in this reading due to the nature of his experiences in spaces between symbolic and physical frontiers. These bordering spaces represent points of transition between the present and the past, where non-conformity in the shape of ideological and legal transgressions promotes an emergence of new cultural and social patterns, which in turn dictate a re-definition of this young protagonist’s identity.v The experience of youth citizenry between the frontiers of dictatorship and democracy is determined by this contestation embedded in undertaking a change from the institutionalized oppression to the establishment of a democratic regime in Spain. In the storyline of the series, the character of this protagonist caught between the frontiers of old and new political, social, and cultural paradigms is impacted by his experiences on the margin of the hegemonic order, which leads to instability in his career path and personal relationships. Consequently, we observe how during the last years of Francoism, the Transition, and fi nally during the first years of consolidated democracy, a young citizen confronts what Cristina Moreiras calls “certain alienation,” due to the “impossibility […] to intervene efficiently in the logic of the absolute hegemony” and thus becoming “expelled from centrality” (273).vi From the late 1960s, Spanish youth aspiring to live in a democratic Spain forms a “source of an emergent

v

cultural practice” (Williams 124) as it occupies peripheral spaces within the dominant culture and places itself directly against the authoritarian regime. Consequently, during the process of identity shaping, Toni Alcántara as a citizen of a country in transition continues to defy conventional practices, even when the celebratory spirit of the late 1970s hegemonizes the citizenry as the country consolidates its new-born democratic state.

Due to political activism and subsequent investigative journalism—central elements in the universe of Toni’s individual expression—he becomes marginalized and excluded from the hegemonic order, which, in turn, reinforces his identification with subversive social elements.

Moreover, these endeavors repeatedly endanger his life as he faces powerful enemies such as members of the Social Investigation Brigade—an influential group of secret police within Franco’s General Security Directorate known for corruption and inhumane treatment of detainees. The inclusion of these dramatis personae based on historical characters who maintained their positions and influence within the police corps during and after the Transition—such as Antonio González Pacheco, known as Billy the Kid—reveals failed eradication of Francoist elements from the major governmental institutions, and calls into question the authenticity of the democratic spirit among Spain’s political elite.

In accord with Bennington’s proposal that “an experience of life as life on the edge” is ultimately one of a frontier, in Remember When we observe how the traumatic experiences of Toni Alcántara on the edge of losing his freedom (however limited during Franco’s rule) and his life demarcate new limits in the evolution of his identity and force him to seek new forms of self-expression and fulfi llment (n.p.). Toni’s imprisonment for suspicion

I also consider the process of the political transition itself as a frontier between the dictatorship and democracy since it manifests traits emphasized by

Bennignton as paradigmatic of a frontier, such as a junction between the end of one experience and the beginning of another, lack of its own identity, uncertainty, threat, violence and risk. Without a doubt, Spain’s democratization became a frontier experience for both the political elite and the people.

It was accompanied by the risk of failure to enter the European community of democratic nations, violence between police forces and street protesters, exchange of threats between the ultra-right and the radical left, and the uncertainty of provoking another massive bloodshed as seen during the Spanish Civil War some forty years earlier. (See Sánchez Soler, Mariano). vi

All translation from Spanish sources belongs to the author of this article.

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of political dissidence in the spring of 1969 (Season 1) exemplifies another frontier experience that provokes thaumazein,vii in Heidegger’s terms, which promotes characters’ questioning, reevaluating, and consequently re-affirming ethical/moral principles. Once at a frontier where “life reaches a limit, [and] identities tremble” (Bennington n.p.), Toni’s state of being undergoes transformation and opens the path for various dimensions of his identity to metamorphose, demonstrating an inner strength of which he has not yet been aware. Toni’s arrest represents an experience where life as he knew it comes to an end, and fear makes his core shudder only to place him once again at the frontline of the resistance movement. Parting from Bennington’s imagining of the “frontiers as point of contact as well as separation, a space in between that implies risk and is difficult or impossible to cross” (“Frontiers” n.p), I view the experience of Toni’s incarceration as a displacement from his familiar environment, and therefore as a point of contact with new surroundings within the prison walls. Upon crossing that frontier, the protagonist encounters himself in a space where his authentic self seeks revelation through a series of questions, the answers to which will affect his future as well as the future of the entire family. Due to a violent and threatening separation from his habitual setting, the oldest son of the Alcántara family experiences a turning point in the evolution of his identity and a bolstering of his dissent. Such inflexion will determine his personal and professional future, perpetuating his exclusion from the hegemonic structures for having made decisions guided by his ethical principles.

Non-conformity as the character’s distinctive identity trait gradually arises in the storyline during the historical context of Francoism when, according to Alejandro Ruiz Huerta-Carbonell, a critic of the Transition,viii “the social movements, professional colleges and key institutions

vii

like the university, artists, and including many sectors related to the Catholic church, continued to demonstrate their rejection of Francoism, and not only of its political structure, still with fascist overtones, but also its thirst for repression and for degradation of human life” (56).

Throughout various seasons of Remember When, the individual act of subversion, that is, political activism, disobedience of fatherly authority, and protest against social injustice, transports Toni to a universe of risk and tension within the dominant order. The open contestation of the established norms limits Toni Alcántara to a space between the frontiers of imprisonment and liberation, danger and security, family obligations and individual aspirations.

The beginning of Toni Alcántara’s university career, occurring in the show’s first season, represents a decisive moment for the identity development of the character.

From that moment, the young man starts to define his own stance against Franco’s dictatorial rule and to articulate his criticism of the regime through his struggle for justice and liberty. By January of 1969, he becomes involved in underground political activism, influenced by his classmates at the university, especially Marta Altamira (Anna Allen), the daughter of the Vice-minister of Agriculture. Soon Toni becomes romantically involved with Marta, which will challenge his view of traditional gender roles and the dynamics of romantic relations.

The university environment as a frame of reference gains relevance within the diegesis to mirror the historical context in which, from 1962, the agitation of the student population and police presence on all university campuses become a constant reminder of the ideological crisis in the country (Preston 14). Therefore, the university as “an instrumental platform for anti-Franco struggle” (Maravall 117) opens way for an intense political mobilization of

In Basic Questions of Philosophy, Heidegger defines thaumazein as a “basic disposition – one that transports [us] into the beginning of genuine

thinking and thoroughly determines it” (3). Cited by Brad Elliot Stone in “Curiosity as the Thief of Wonder: An Essay on Heidegger’s Critique of the Ordinary Conception of Time.” viii

Ruiz Huerta-Carbonell was also one of the employment attorneys wounded during the terrorist attack on Atocha Street in Madrid on January

24, 1977, by a group of ultra-right fascists against a law office of employment attorneys known for their activism in the Spanish Communist Party.

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the character and his fellow students. Among the victims of political repressions were children of Franco’s high-ranking officials and young people of other influential families (Preston 14), exemplified in Remember When by the character of Marta Altamira. In its attempt to create a verisimilar version of the past, the narrative strives to emphasize the heterogeneous nature of the social sectors involved in resistance against Francoism and the ideological division among social classes and generations of Spaniards.

Toni’s politicization and anti-Franco militancy start to create generational confl icts between the young man and the paterfamilias, and ultimately threaten to destabilize the family equilibrium. For instance, in Episode 15 of the 1st season, “Pretérito Imperfecto” (“Preterit imperfect”), upon arrival to the family lunch, Toni is indignant towards the news of the state of emergency in the country and the suspension of classes at the university,ix as well as towards the conformity of the older generations of the family to the status quo, and thus starts an argument with his father, Antonio. Toni’s mother, Mercedes Fernández, represents the Spanish population’s obedience to the authoritarian order and their acquiescence to the lack of civil liberties. Mercedes chooses not to intervene directly in confrontations between the father and the son even though she, the grandmother Herminia, and the older sister Inés share the father’s concern about Toni’s political radicalization. Regardless of domestic pressure, the young man’s impetus for political protest continues to intensify after he learns about his grandfather’s death at the hand of Francoist troops in 1936. “Madres no hay más que muchas” (“There are not but many Mothers” Season 1,

ix

Episode 23), is set in the spring of 1969; in it, we witness a culmination of this subplot as Toni and Marta become arrested incommunicado by the General Security Directorate until Marta’s influential father manages to have them released due to his political connections.x The filming and montage of the introductory shots of “Una larga espera” (“A Long Wait” Season 1, Episode 24) as a sequence of flashes concretizes an impactful introduction of the protagonist within a liminal threshold between incarceration and liberation. Each image registers the young man’s symbolic entrance into a new existential order of risk and instability. Therefore, the experience of a frontier with the Francoist law is transformed into an acute memory for the protagonist, as well as for the audience, and marks a new stage of the young man’s social and political defi ance of the hegemonic order.

The character is forcefully placed within the margins of violence and fear, with “an impressive array of control mechanisms,” such as heavy locks, metal gated doors, a police dog, and Franco’s portraits as a “display of national identity and power” (Bennington n.p.), all of which aim to compromise the detainees’ integrity. The sonic and audio regimes of the introductory scenes of episode 24 intensify Toni’s trauma as he crosses the threshold between fear and oscillation within the physical confines of the General Security Directorate. The combination of these cinematographic resources and the narration of the detention scenes—Toni’s arrest, booking, and his seclusion in the solitary cell—manages to capture a moment of anxiety and anticipation of a new frontier. The montage of this sequence enhances the sensation of danger as we see a chain of second-long frames accompanied by the

According to the historian José Maravall, by the 1970s university campuses had acquired a status of “political and cultural ghetto” due to interminable

student protests and police brutality (114). x

Following his daughter’s arrest, Luis Altamira feels obligated to renounce his position at the Ministry of Agriculture. It should be noted that this

introduction of an upper-middle class family into the world of a working class Alcántara family lays out a premise for the criticism of the hierarchical structure of social classes and the paternalism of the bourgeoisie towards the lower class. The contrast between the social positions of both families, as well as Toni’s and Marta’s idealism and their parents’ pragmatism, alludes to the tension in the intergenerational and social dynamic, and lays out the impossibility to reconcile the differences. The text also underscores the differential treatment of the Alcántaras and the Altamiras by the police, who serve as guardians of Francoism who leave chaos in the home of the former after a violent search, while showing consideration and respect for the household of the latter.

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piercing sounds of a typing machine, the opening and closing of prison doors, and the distorted echoes of the guards’ voices (Fig. 1).

With the creation of Toni Alcántara’s fi le in the General Security Directorate database, the protagonist is projected towards a marginal space, the elements of which register the tragic atmosphere of the lockup. The props in the shape of objects and symbols with defined borders placed within the frames—the height measurement, the edges of the keyboard of the typewriter, the young man’s photo placed on the square-shaped fi le card—cross the screen space vertically and horizontally, and function as a leitmotif in this televisual text, symbolizing life experiences between frontiers and their impact on the future of the protagonist (Figs. 2, 3). The organization of the mise-en-scène elements related to the registration of Toni’s datum, specifically his imposing proximity to the camera lens, the immobility of which also allows to manipulate the sensation of tight space within the frame, reinforces the somber tone of this segment (Fig. 4). By using such visual resources as vintage esthetics and digital insertion of archived images —for example, those of a finger printing process for new fi les or a close-up shot of a prison hallway, —the creators of the show enrich the discursive authority of the televisual re-writing of Spain’s recent history (Fig. 5).

The initial frame of the sequence centres on the image of the typewriter leaving traces of the printed letters that compose Toni Alcántara’s data fi le in black ink over the white page (Fig. 6). With the introduction of each element of the form—the personal information, the picture, and the fi ngerprints—the process of fi ling metaphorically unfolds as a profound remnant of the character’s identity formation and his demarcation within social and political realms. The sonic space of the screen, dominated by the sharp sounds of typewriter keys and some indistinguishable echoes, intensifies the air of tension. The character’s gaze at the camera fi lmed in a close-up and followed

by Toni’s photo on the fi le document accentuates the expression of fear that the character experiences on the frontier with the legal system where torture presents as a real possibility (Fig. 7).

44 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Fig.1 | Processing of Toni Alcántara. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

Fig.2 | Processing of Toni Alcántara. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

Fig.3 | Fingerprinting of Toni Alcántara. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

Zaya Rustamova

The stamping of the official government seal over the picture on his file symbolizes the unmistakable entrance of the protagonist into the subversive order from which Toni Alcántara will continue his resistance to Francoism…

Fig.4 | Processing of Toni Alcántara. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

Fig.5 | Fingerprinting of Toni Alcántara. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

The setting of the following scene emphasizes Toni’s confrontation with Francoism by the frontal positioning of the camera towards the General Security Directorate’s photographer—the regime’s accomplice and facilitator of the legal detention process whose menacing gaze penetrates through the screen space. The placement of the close-up shot of the photographer’s face over the medium shot of the young man’s profile highlights the regime’s omnipotence within the prison walls (Fig. 8). The low-key illumination in these sequences perpetuates the sensation of a somber and dangerous environment. The introduction of a strong light coming from the camera flash directs the audience’s attention to the expressivity of actor Pablo Rivero as Toni Alcántara, while also creating a sharp contrast between the edges of the protagonist’s image and the shadow of his surroundings. To further emphasize non-diegetically the thematic of terror and insecurity the character feels as he is about to be confined to a solitary cell, a yellowish color filter is placed over his image. The stamping of the official government seal over the picture on his fi le symbolizes the unmistakable entrance of the protagonist into the subversive order from which Toni Alcántara will continue his resistance to Francoism, and later its residuals in the first democratic institutions of Spain (Fig. 9).

Fig.6 | Creation of a police file of Toni Alcántara. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

The gloomy tone of the episode also dominates the scene of Toni’s confi nement in a solitary cell, which is fi lmed from a medium distance by a tracking shot moving towards the character, and thus centers the fi lmic frame on his image and foregrounds his emotional state.

The sound of male and female prisoners’ desperate cries off-screen takes a form of another threatening element, as

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it alludes to the brutal treatment of the detainees known to be a common practice in Francoist prisons. Cornered between the walls of the cell, Toni is shaking from shock, cold, fear, and repugnance, which metaphorically reflects his trepidation in the face of a new frontier. From a direct angle, the camera captures the protagonist in a moment of anticipation, inseparable from any experience of a frontier where anything eerie can happen, and for Toni Alcántara both violent interrogation and torture are conceivable outcomes during his imprisonment (Fig.10).

Restricted by the limits of his immediate surroundings, the protagonist experiences yet another dimension of a frontier elaborated by Bennington: a point of simultaneous contact and separation. Upon being violently separated from his private environment, the young man comes in contact with representatives of the public order’s control system, one of whom will become his nemesis and reinforce Toni’s positioning at a threshold with the legal system.xi The separation of the protagonist from his milieu during his late adolescence sets forth an existential reflection, and thus enables the re-affirmation of his personal affinities and political aspirations. These in turn are later manifested in his struggle for democratic principles and practices; that is, for social justice and liberty in Spain. In addition, the interaction between the General Security Directorate representatives and the Alcántaras in this subplot of the tele-narrative allow yet another interpretation of Toni’s incarceration as an experience of a frontier. As Bennington suggests, “over the frontier comes someone who perhaps brings the law, but if he does, we have no way of recognizing it for certain- for the legislator by definition always speaks a foreign language, or at least a language foreign to the language and law we understand: and so, the supposed legislator is always perhaps only a charlatan” (“Frontiers” n.p.). In this episode, the police are representative of legislators and choose not to communicate efficiently with the Alcántaras, refusing to offer any coherent information about the motives for their son’s detention.

xi

In an attempt to discover the reasons of Toni’s arrest, the Alcántaras face a combination of dry answers and silence, which results in misunderstanding and despair.

The representatives of Francoist security services fail to present charges against Toni Alcántara since the motives for his detainment lack firm grounds. His release due to the intervention of Marta’s father and the lack of evidence of his guilt demonstrates the fraudulent nature of the arrest committed by the guardians of Franco’s regime.

From the very beginning of this frontier experience, the ambivalent fi gure of the law bearer continues to render antagonism in Toni’s storyline. As the narrative progresses, the initial allusion to the fraudulent nature of the police forces during Francoism transforms into an explicit denotation of its corruption, which Toni’s journalistic investigations expose. Th rough the development of future subplots linked to Toni’s investigative work, the series continues to expose the traces of Franco’s regime in the principles of Spain as a democratic state. As Carbonell points out, the “defeat of anti-Francoism in the transition, has conditioned the survival of authoritarian vices in Spanish reality” (376). Th is “defeat” due to the lack of unity among the political left facilitated the impossibility of rupture with the old regime, which manifested itself strikingly in the State’s repressive and violent treatment of Spain’s dissenting sectors until 1980s.

At the end of the episode “Una larga espera” (“A Long Wait”) the sonic regime concludes the thematic unity around Franco’s repressions with a reflection in the narrator’s voice about “many others, democrats and freedom fighters [who] spent many long years far away from their loved ones for the only crime of thinking differently.”xii The track “Libre” (“Free” 1972), performed by Spanish singer Nino Bravos, reinforces the closing. The lyrics allude to a frontier experience of a dissident, who spent several years imprisoned by the Francoist regime. Like the protagonist of Remember When, this “almost twenty-year-old” detainee re-conceives his sense of self and refuses to renounce his

The introduction of Inspector Dávila represents one of the numerous so-called “point[s] of inflexion,” (Kristin Thompson 55), and facilitates the

creation of secondary traumas that benefit the serial format of the narrative. xii

After the dictator’s death, those who survived years of incarceration had to wait until the Amnesty Law of 1977 to return to their families.

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In the case of Toni Alcántara, it becomes apparent that behind the prison bars he establishes his agency and gains impetus for social and political engagement.

Fig.7 | On the frontier with the legal system. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

claim on freedom. “[T]he wire” which separates both characters from their “home, [… their] world, and [… their] city,” is “just a piece of metal […] unable to detain [… their] yearning to fly” (“Free”). Thus, the themes of anti-Franco resistance and political reprisals converge here both on diegetic and non-diegetic levels.

Fig.8 | The General Security Directorate photographer. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

Fig.9 | Toni’s official entrance into the subversive order. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

In the case of Toni Alcántara, it becomes apparent that behind the prison bars he establishes his agency and gains impetus for social and political engagement. Upon crossing once again the frontier of his world in the working-class neighbourhood of San Genaro, Madrid, after his arrest, Toni enters into a new order of identification imposed by the public sphere. Perceived as the Other, he now faces new challenges both in personal and professional arenas. The voiceover of the narrator reaffirms the marginalization of the Alcántara family due to the ideological affi nities of their oldest son: “[i]n 1969, to have a communist in the family was the same as being infected by typhus. All of a sudden, many of those who until now had been your friends, had a sudden allergy attack which prevented them from approaching you” (Season 1, Episode 24). As a result of Toni’s arrest, the neighbourhood’s conservative sectors identify Toni as a member of the Communist Party, vilified for decades by the official discourse and thus imprinted in the collective imagination as the epitome of evil. Such identification subjugates all the Alcántaras to discriminatory treatment, which impacts the parents and the siblings more than the protagonist himself as he maintains indifferent to public opinion.

Nevertheless, the sense of responsibility for his family and his preoccupation for their well-being motivate the character to develop new strategies for survival, imperative

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for the realization of his underground activism and the preservation of equilibrium in the family structure. Toni manages to remain within the margins of security and learns to navigate the turbulences of counter-establishment movements as a member of various political parties. In September of 1973 (Season 7), he joins the Revolutionary Communist League of Trotskyist ideology.

He later distances himself due to his disagreement with its radical stance and disposition to violence, and becomes a member of the Communist Party. By 1976, the awareness of the impossibility of rupture with Francoism during the years of the Transition leads to disenchantment with the democratization process on the part of younger generations of Spaniards, as exemplified by Toni Alcántara’s political disaffi liation.

The protagonist’s yearning for political activism extends as well towards social injustice and becomes omnipresent throughout the narrative units of the drama. In the 5th season of the series, correspondent to the historical year of 1971, Toni becomes a low-wage worker at a construction site due to the fi nancial predicaments of his family. The company owners, as representatives of the Spanish elite, exploit their workers and foster life-threatening labour conditions which result in a fatal accident. For Toni Alcántara, witnessing the death of this co-worker becomes an experience of yet another frontier, which Bennington describes as a “new experience that always comes to surprise and defy all [… the] previously accumulated” ones (“Frontiers” n.p.). Th is “experience [which] is intrinsically perilous in that as such it exposes to something still unknown” (n.p.), prompts a questioning and the re-evaluation of all Toni’s previous idealism. At this frontier, he has to apply his law degree and theoretical knowledge of Marxist ideology and to a real-life situation. With Toni’s introduction into the world of the low-working class, the narrative converges two major

xiii

forces of political dissidence within the historical context of Franco’s Spain: workers and students. According to Maravall, in 1969 the regime intensifies repression against the members of both student and worker’s anti-government movements (11). Th is escalation of state control exacerbates fear among some members of the oppressed class, which is reflected in the diegesis by the resistance of unskilled construction workers, Toni’s co-workers, of any propagation of class struggle.

Toni’s apprenticeship as a day laborer symbolizes his entrance into a frontier realm of the living reality of the underprivileged class, which establishes a stark contrast with his immediate surroundings. The daily exploitation of the wage-earning workers becomes a point of contention between the young man and the management of the construction company. Th is new frontier experience, during which Toni is accompanied by the parish priest and personal friend Father Eugenio,xiii culminates in the death of Jacinto, one of Toni’s friends at work. Th is fatality triggers a direct confrontation between the young man and the company, which is archetypal of the ruling class and a pillar of Francoism whose economic and political power were perpetuated during the democratic transition.

Toni’s life is endangered via his formal complaint against the construction company and his role as the main witness. In the last episode of the 5th season, “La tormenta del verano” (“Th e Summer Torment”), the young man’s determination to give his testimony in front of a judge turns him into a victim of violence. A day before his appearance in court, Toni is followed by thugs hired by the owners of the construction company to threaten him. Later, Toni admits to being “really scared,” but at this frontier with death his mental determination dominates his sensible side, and his consciousness presents him with no other option than to

Father Eugenio, a representative of an ecclesiastic sector denominated “priests-workers,” stands out for his progressive stances and high social and

political consciousness, which motivates him to live experiences of the underserved communities of the Spanish society. As we are reminded by the historian Javier Tusell, by the beginning of 1960s an “invigorating, critical and reformist element that diffused the principles of pluralism, equal participation and democracy” emerged and distinguished itself within the Church. Therefore, suggests Tusell, the democratic “transition of the Church anteceded the political one and facilitated it” (216).

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Idealism, as the young man’s most striking identity trait, determines his choice of a career that entails risk and instability but satisfies his longing to contribute to the country’s democratization…

Fig.9 | Toni Alcántara in anticipation of interrogation. Remember When, Season 1, Episode 24 “Una larga espera.”

officially denounce the company, holding it responsible for the violation of security norms at a workplace, and ultimately for Jacinto’s death. Alvaro, his friend from military service, tries to provide Toni with the service of bodyguards, but the young man refuses the off er and also dismisses Eugenio’s suggestion to involve the police as they fail to inspire confidence. The same night, Eugenio fi nds Toni bleeding on the stairs of the church, but the physical traumas do not debilitate the young man’s will; rather, they reinforce his sense of moral obligation to discredit the corrupted order and its agents.

Following the crossing of the frontier of “violence and lawlessness” (Bennington n.p.), we witness a culmination in the subversive nature of Toni Alcantara’s identity and his uncompromising commitment to justice. Thereby, the risk of violence and the physical threat against him (and his family) turn into a leitmotif through all the seasons of the narrative, which continues to expose the inefficiency of the public order agencies before, during, and after the Transition. The zeal to contribute to the dissolution of Francoism and the establishment of an

authentically democratic regime pushes the character to once and again cross new frontiers, both internal and bilateral (or physical).

According to Bennington, the crossing of internal frontiers between an individual’s “profound affi rmation and sincere convictions” on the one hand, and a false stance, or a “façade,” on the other, forms a fundamental part of professions related to asserting the truth (n. p.). As far as the trajectory of Toni Alcantara’s character, during the 7th season (corresponding to events in September 1973), the beginning of his journalistic career in the Pueblo magazine— distinguished in the historical context of late years of Franco’s rule for its “relative boldness,” “spirit of criticism,” and “leftism” (Barrera 67)—places the character on the threshold of an internal frontier. Th is is due to existing press censorship as a stumbling block for professing his beliefs. From then on, the young man learns to profess by codifying his reports in a way that the state’s machines of ideological control would not detect his criticism of the regime,

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The re-construction and re-invention of Toni Alcántara’s identity on the margins of the dominant order are molded by his experiences of clandestine activism and legality, repression and liberty, tradition and modernity.

while more agile readers could de-codify the subversive tone of his messages. Consequently, Toni exercises his journalistic pursuit between the façade of compliance with the regime’s mandates and the articulation of his convictions as an extension of his ideological struggle.

Idealism, as the young man’s most striking identity trait, determines his career choice; it entails risk and instability, but also satisfies his longing to contribute to the country’s democratization and promotes the emergence of a new culture of ideals in Spanish society.

Undoubtedly, in Remember When, Toni’s formative process is rooted in the so-called “bilateral frontiers” experience, or the crossroads “from one country to another” (Bennington n.p.). Bennington conceives the experience of traveling abroad as a moment of “revelation” as the traveler encounters “something else to be found outside,” beyond the country’s physical frontiers.

In Toni Alcántara’s numerous professional trips abroad, including his impactful reporting on the Carnation Revolution of 1974 in Lisbon against Portugal’s dictatorship, the protagonist acquires a fi rst-hand experience of freedom and the power of organized protest. These experiences of “bilateral frontiers” further motivate Toni’s non-conformity with the hegemonic order and a better-defi ned opposition to its structures. Thereby, the displacement of the character towards a dramatic space between frontiers delineates new dimensions in his identity development.

The re-construction and re-invention of Toni Alcántara’s identity on the margins of the dominant order are molded by his experiences of clandestine

50 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

activism and legality, repression and liberty, tradition and modernity. Due to his coherent objection to hegemony, this protagonist continuously negotiates a sense of belonging within a new social, cultural, and political “normativity.” The quest for self- affi rmation undertaken by Toni Alcántara in the broader context of instability and uncertainty in Spain during the late years of Franco’s rule and its aftermath reveals a resistance to hegemonic structures and its social paradigms. We observe how in identity genesis within a society oppressive towards all minority groups, the limitations of the marginalized subject provoke higher resistance of the authoritarian system. The changing nature of identity, embodied in the evolution of Toni Alcántara’s character, perpetuates the protagonist’s identification with emerging cultural values foregrounded by subversive sectors of Spanish society during the last phase of Franco’s dictatorship, the Transition to democracy, and the fi rst years of Spain as a democratic state. Therefore, the depiction of both dominant and counter-establishment social and cultural practices during a critical period of recent Spanish history responds to the dramaturgic necessity to explore the concept of change that permeates main plots and sub-plots of the historicist narrative of Remember When.

In this televisual drama, the young subject forges his identity in a repressive society whose rigid control mechanisms intend to perpetuate the victimization of marginalized groups. Thus, the narrative structure of the series projects Toni Alcántara’s character into a dramatic space between subjective idiosyncrasy and social control during Franco’s rule, and a new democratic culture with the residuals of the old regime. Via themes of violence, corruption, and class struggle, the series problematizes the triumphalist discourse of the Transition as this approach to story-telling addresses the interests of less represented social groups. By articulating memories and social realities marginalized by the official narrative of a general consensus between the political elite and the people during the country’s democratization, Remember When reveals a number of issues unresolved during the Transition, which to this day continue to challenge the political and social structure of Spain. 

Zaya Rustamova

WORKS CITED Barrera Del Barrio, Carlos. El periodismo y franquismo: de la censura a la apertura. [Journalism and Francoism: From Censorship to Opening], Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, 1995.

Bennington, Geoffrey. “Frontiers: of Literature and Philosophy.”

Maravall, José María. Dictatorship and Political Dissent: Workers and Students in Franco’s Spain, St. Martin’s Press, 1978.

Moreiras Menor, Cristina. Cultura herida: literatura y cine en la España democrática [Wounded Culture: Literature and Film in the Democratic Spain], Ediciones Libertarias, 2002.

Culture Machine, vol.2. 2000, www.culturemachine.net/

Preston, Paul. The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, Methuen, 1986.

index.php/cm/rt/printerFriendly/305/290. Accessed 17 Feb

Stone, Brad Elliot. “Curiosity as the Thief of Wonder: An Essay on

2016.

Carbonell, Alejandro R.H. Los ángulos ciegos: Una perspectiva crítica de la transición española, 1976-1979 [The Blind Angles: A Critical Perspective on the Spanish transition, 1976-1979], Biblioteca Nueva, Fundación Ortega y Gasset, 2009.

Corbalán, Ana. “Reconstrucción del pasado histórico: nostalgia reflexiva en Cuéntame cómo pasó.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 2009, pp. 341-357.

Cuéntame cómo pasó [Remember When]. Created by Miguel Ángel

Heidegger’s Critique of the Ordinary Conception of Time.”

KronoScope, vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, pp. 205–229.

Thompson, Kristen. Storytelling in Film and Television, Harvard UP, 2003.

Tusell Goméz, Javier. Dictadura franquista y democracia: 1939-2004 [Francoist Dictatorship and Democracy: 1939-2004], Crítica, 2005.

Williams, Raymond. “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent.”

Marxism and Literature, Oxford UP, 1977.

Bernardeau, performance by Imanol Arias, Ana Duato, Ricardo Gómez. Grupo Ganga. TVE, 2001 – present.

Estrada, Isabel. “Cuéntame cómo pasó o la revisión televisiva de la

All the images are a courtesy of Grupo Ganga and TVE (Televisión española).

historia española reciente.” Hispanic Review, vol. 72, no. 4, 2004, pp. 547-564. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3247146.

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Applying Suspense to Archetypal Superheroes: Hitchcockian Ambiguity in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

BY IAN BOUCHER | North Carolina Wesleyan College

ABSTRACT In recent years, the superhero genre has grown to account for a significant amount of studio profits. However, superhero films are largely presented as action films, and critics simultaneously tire of and hope for the genre’s simplicity. Nevertheless, superheroes are not merely disposable entertainment, but an important part of how society understands justice. Their cinematic association with simplicity propagates a detrimental focus on capture or death that obscures the complexities of justice and reduces society’s ability to overcome crime. This is reinforced by the predetermination of heroes and villains by their iconic identities, which are built over the course of their respective histories. While Logan (2017) was lauded for its Western influence, Wonder Woman (2017) for its Superman (1978) influence, and Thor: Ragnarok (2017) for its myriad of other influences, the influences of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) have largely been ignored.

Despite its action-oriented title, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice warrants analysis as a particularly ambitious development within the evolving superhero genre. It applies a remarkable amount of the Hitchcockian thrills present in Hollywood’s foundations to a story pitting two protagonists against one another, unfolding within a villain’s conspiracy in order to create the first live-action Hitchcockian superhero thriller featuring branded, culturally established characters. By displacing its protagonists from their inherently justified positions, it creates a critical moral ambiguity that directly deconstructs the assumptions at the heart of Western society’s two most archetypal superheroes.

The film’s implications lie in ambiguous themes and techniques that experiment with commercial art to challenge a mass audience to critically engage with society’s assumptions. Reflecting on democracy in a polarized world of manipulated media and xenophobia, it is a nuanced exploration of the complex concept of justice, and is thus a film worth critical consideration. In this essay, the themes and techniques of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and The Birds (1963) will be analyzed, as well as how they, along with a crucial element of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), are utilized in the original theatrical cut of Batman v Superman.

INTRODUCTION

K

nown as the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock has been credited as “one of the founding fathers of the cinematic art… help[ing] define its visual language”; he remains “a figure of ever-renewed popular and academic interest, even as critics remain divided over the meaning of his art” (Lewis 458, 464). His work utilized every dimension of cinema in broadly entertaining ways that drove the industry forward, from visual exposition to dolly zooms, with box office and critical successes that integrated studio assets (Allen; Daniel-Richard; Mock;

52 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Truffaut). Whether birds descending upon schoolyards, cars careening down highways, or assailants bursting into showers, Hitchcock has been a central influence on Hollywood thrills.

In recent years, these thrills have largely taken a backseat within the superhero genre, which currently accounts for a significant amount of studio profits (“2017 Worldwide Grosses”). Iron Man (2008) introduced Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in a post-credits scene modeled after a comic book cliff-hanger, heralding a connected

Ian Boucher

Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); many studios have since pursued Marvel’s successful formula of interconnected entertainment (D’Alessandro; Kroll; Siegel). Yet superhero fi lms are largely presented as action fi lms, and critics simultaneously tire of and hope for the genre’s simplicity. For instance, Logan (2017) may have been deemed “good enough that you might forget it’s a comic-book movie,” alluding to a cultural dismissal of the genre’s potential (Dargis), but Wonder Woman (2017) received praise as a “straightforward pleasure” (Orr “With Wonder Woman”), its earnest insouciance recall[ing] the ‘Superman’ movies of the ’70s and ’80s more than the mock-Wagnerian spectacles of our own day, and…gestur[ing] knowingly but reverently back to the jaunty, truth-and-justice spirit of an even older Hollywood tradition. (Scott) Thor: Ragnarok (2017) may have had “more noisy scenes of CGI mass demolition…than its predecessors combined” (Chiang “Thor: Ragnarok”), but it was embraced as “entertaining but profoundly silly superheroism—which, again, may be what we ought to have expected from the beginning, had the likes of Christopher Nolan not come along to implausibly elevate our expectations” (Orr “The Overdue Comedy”). Hollywood’s superhero renaissance reflects a supremacy of simplicity.

Despite its action-oriented title, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice warrants analysis as a particularly ambitious development within the evolving superhero genre.

Superheroes, however, are not merely disposable entertainment, but an important part of how society understands justice. Their cinematic association with simplicity propagates a detrimental focus on capture or death as the ultimate outcome for villains, which

obscures the complexities of justice and reduces society’s ability to overcome crime (Boucher). Th is simplistic binary is reinforced by the predetermination of heroes and villains by the iconic identities they build over the course of their respective histories—superheroes are inherently good. For instance, Batman (1989) explores the troubled origins of the Dark Knight, but is clear that Batman is good and the Joker is evil. Further, the fi lm praises Batman’s murder of the Joker when the Caped Crusader is subsequently adopted by Gotham. Similarly, Hulk (2003) focuses on the trauma of Dr. Bruce Banner, but Banner’s moral role is not in question, and for all the anxiety created by the titular character, the Hulk’s outbursts are depicted as justified and heroic. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), the world is ambiguous and guilty, but Steve Rogers is not. Wonder Woman and Logan were acclaimed for their complex themes, but Logan was celebrated for its intimacy and Wonder Woman for its innocence (Adams; Brody; Chiang, “The Stirring Wonder Woman”; Dargis; Klimek; Morgenstern; Sims).

In essence, superhero fi lms have seldom stepped outside the bounds of inherently justified protagonists who reinforce society’s practices, or at least allow for only so much objectivity. Even amidst Batman’s questionable actions and personal confl ict in The Dark Knight (2008), he is both protagonist and superhero icon.

While Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016) demonstrate the potential of Hitchcockian-thriller ambiguity for the superhero genre, they explore original characters reflecting on superhero themes rather than culturally established characters, and are clear in their morality.

Similarly, Watchmen (2009) is a direct adaptation of characters created to deconstruct superheroes. Logan was lauded for its Western influence, Wonder Woman for its Superman (1978) influence, and Thor: Ragnarok for its myriad of other influences (Burr; Chiang, “Thor: Ragnarok”; Dargis; Darling; Hartlaub; Klimek; O’Sullivan; Scott; Sims; Tobias). However, the influences of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Warner Bros.’ response to Marvel which in turn inspired Captain America: Civil War (2016) (Brzeski), have largely been ignored. Despite its action-oriented title, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice warrants analysis as

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Applying Suspense to Archetypal Superheroes

a particularly ambitious development within the evolving superhero genre. It applies a remarkable amount of Hitchcockian thrills to a story pitting two protagonists against one another within a villain’s conspiracy to create the first live-action Hitchcockian superhero thriller featuring branded, culturally established characters.

By displacing its protagonists from their inherently justified positions, it creates a critical moral ambiguity that directly deconstructs the assumptions at the heart of Western society’s two most archetypal superheroes.

The fi lm’s implications lie in its ambiguous themes and its techniques that experiment with commercial art; these themes and techniques challenge mass audiences to critically engage with society’s assumptions about justice. Reflecting on democracy in a polarized world of manipulated media and xenophobia, it is a more nuanced exploration of the complex concept of justice, and is thus a fi lm worth critical consideration.

In this essay, the themes and techniques of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and The Birds (1963) will be analyzed, as well as how they, along with a crucial element of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), are utilized in the original theatrical cut of Batman v Superman.

HITCHCOCKIAN JUSTICE Th rillers delve into the shadows beyond conventional notions of justice, as Pablo Castrillo and Pablo Echart demonstrate in their proposal of the genre’s five primary characteristics: crime victim as protagonist; states of intense emotion; an “ambiguous” world; a realistic world; and a disorientation in navigating the extraordinary (112). According to Mathieu Deflem, Hitchcock’s thrillers create further ambiguity within the concepts of societal guilt and innocence: Most often in Hitchcock’s fi lms, public guilt implies factual innocence, manifested by the image of the hero who is wrongly accused. By contrast, private guilt occurs when the characters in a story recognize themselves as guilty.

54 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

In Hitchcock’s movies, private guilt is experienced by those who committed the illegal act of which the hero is falsely accused, but also by the hero, albeit…for other reasons. (214) “Strikingly, private guilt applies in Hitchcock’s universe to almost everybody, even and especially those who are victims of circumstances” (213-214). Th is Hitchcockian ambiguity of the personal and the societal is not merely thematic, but also cinematic, as it fuses technique with character to explore societal tensions.

Th is section will summarize by highlighting the following: juxtaposition in The Birds; setting in Rear Window; motif in North by Northwest; linear time in Vertigo; and information in To Catch a Thief.

The Birds contrasts characters within the frame as avian aggressors externalize the turbulent emotions underlying a quaint, sunny American town. As Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets the women who rival her affections for Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), the scenes rise in intensity between long tensions, in which the eye contends with multiple character perspectives distributed throughout the frame, and quick attacks of birds increasingly brought out of the woodwork by those tensions. When Melanie meets cautious matriarch Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy), Lydia gives Melanie a glance from the foreground as Melanie stares at a portrait of the late Brenner patriarch in the background and realizes the family’s pain under the surface (Fig. 1). Th is juxtaposition creates an experience of cinematic confl ict for the eye. As the audience gets to know Mitch’s ex-girlfriend Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), the frame positions Annie’s reflections in the foreground with Melanie in the background, and the scene is punctuated with a dead bird between them as the tensions manifest. At Cathy Brenner’s (Veronica Cartwright) birthday party, Melanie reveals she was abandoned by her mother, and the camera pans to a hurt Annie and disapproving Lydia before a child shouts, “Look, Look!” as the emotions rain down with the first mass bird attack. As the confl ict spreads to the community at the Tides restaurant, the frame fi lls with points of view, including a preaching drunk, an ornithologist, a

Ian Boucher

Fig.1 | Juxtaposition of tensions brings avian aggressors out of the woodwork in The Birds.

waitress, a concerned mother, a fisherman, and a glaring hallway of the town’s women, who blame Melanie for the attack. Annie sacrifices herself to replace the lifeless bird on her porch, Lydia releases her grief, and Melanie confronts the darkness of a bedroom in the Brenner house. As Melanie grasps Lydia’s wrist, the characters drive away, and all that remains are the tensions that surrounded them. As Deflem writes, although the hero at Hitchcock’s conclusions “is cleared of all formal charges and accusations…this cleansing always comes at a price, after a long and intense period of suffering and loss” (216).

While The Birds explores juxtaposition, Rear Window immerses its protagonist L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) in a setting that Jefferies and the audience must cinematically engage with to overcome a murderer in the midst of a disjointed community. Any witty murder mystery featuring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Thelma Ritter would be a hit, but Rear Window, according to Hitchcock, is “a purely cinematic fi lm” (Truffaut Location 3546), in which Jefferies is a voyeur observing “a display of human weaknesses and people in pursuit of happiness” through the windows surrounding his apartment (3680).

He is always at a distance, striving to piece together the puzzle by looking and listening at the right places and times. Th is is reflected immediately upon the fi lm’s opening, in which character and technique are united with panning exposition shots. To succeed, Jefferies and his friends must rise from their front row seats to place themselves amidst the danger of their surroundings.

They go in and out of the courtyard, gasping at what they see. The monster, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), sees Jefferies and comes out of the cinematic action into the real world of Jefferies’ apartment. But Jefferies’ community becomes the audience when neighbours and law enforcement run out with quick cuts as the final truth rises and falls between Jefferies and Thorwald; no longer will neighbours be suspicious, wondering which among them could be a murderer of humans or dogs. The fi lm ends with the effect of its art; Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn) says to Mr. Piano (Ross Bagdasarian), “I can’t tell you what this music has meant to me.”

In North by Northwest, motif accentuates Roger Thornhill’s (Cary Grant) disruption of the Cold War when Soviet villain Vandamm (James Mason) mistakes him for a fictional agent, forcing Thornhill to run

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Applying Suspense to Archetypal Superheroes

Fig.2 | The Cold War defacing the symmetry of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest.

from both Vandamm and the authorities. The fi lm experiences its chaotic society with a repetition of stark crisscrossing lines, from the opening titles, to Route 41, to Thornhill scaling the beams of Vandamm’s house, to the subtle defacing of the steady symmetry of Mount Rushmore (Fig. 2). The visuals are underscored by “the restlessly chromatic and fragmented nature” of the music, creating “an imbalance that is subconsciously felt by the viewer” (referenced by Daniel-Richard 55 from Brown 29). While the audience never learns the full truth about this chaos—“FBI, CIA, ONI, we’re all in the same alphabet soup,” one agent says—Thornhill and his ally, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), inspire a break in the pattern. When the heroes are saved by the open intervention of American authorities, Vandamm replies, “[t]hat wasn’t very sporting, using real bullets.”

Vertigo takes yet another approach to exploring societal tensions, recreating the trauma of its detective by lifting the audience from its linear perception of time. John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is drawn into a scheme that feeds his desire and costs him his sanity, transforming him into the person he is following.

Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) appears to be repeating

56 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

the past, transforming into her late great-grandmother who committed suicide, and when Scottie allows himself to fall in love with her, he plays into the hands of the villain, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), to witness a murder that truly begins to repeat itself.

Ultimately, both Scottie and Judy Barton (also Kim Novak, and the real Madeleine) continually revisit the murder, traumatization, and death. Robin Wood writes that “before the fi lm proper has begun, we are made aware that the vertigo of the title is to be more than a literal fear of heights” (110). The fi lm builds its concept through the emotional disorientation of Scottie, Madeleine, and Judy, opening with a rooftop chase revealed to be both a memory and a dream, not specifying which the audience sees. Vertigo disrupts “our classical conception of time—how we live it, its linearity (or nonlinearity), its ability to make co-present always the past, present, and future…[and] represents one of the first fi lms to portray non-linear concepts of time and space to an audience” (Smith 79, 88).

As Sheri Biesen writes, “[i]n creating suspense…

[Hitchcock] sought to shake viewers beyond ordinary, mundane existence" (2). Th is separation from linear reality encourages audiences to consider both the cause-

Ian Boucher

and-effect foundations of the fi lms they experience and the assumptions that support their understandings of crime, punishment, and individuals.

Finally, To Catch a Thief cinematically puts the audience into the shoes of a reformed criminal one step behind the culprit mimicking his methods. Opening with a cat walking across rooftops and human hands stealing jewels, one might wonder whether the fi lm is about a shapeshifting feline, but the fi lm puts that to rest with a newspaper article about the Cat, the criminal persona of Cary Grant’s former thief John Robie, and both Robie and his cat look up when they hear investigators approaching. As it turns out, the rooftop cat is not the real thief. Shortly after Robie meets H.H. Hughson (John Williams), an insurance man, Robie is chased and escorted away by police. After a fade to black, Robie is suddenly enjoying wine on his porch with Hughson, and the audience must wait to learn that Robie was temporarily released. Another scene fades to the characters discussing, “[h]ow much did he get away with last night?” and musing that “[t]he gems were insured for 35,000…in dollars.” While it at first appears that the characters have been robbed, they are actually discussing a Madame Leroux, who is never seen. The fi lm’s withholding of information cultivates the uncertainty of its ambiguous investigation, and encourages an active role in piecing it together.

directed Zack Snyder’s favourite fi lm, Excalibur (1981).

Th is fi lm was formative for Snyder in the visceral and surreal way it applied psychological turmoil to the heightened reality of the legendary hero King Arthur, as in an early sequence that juxtaposes the violent death of Uther Pendragon’s political rival with the cursed conception of Arthur (Abele n.p.). Another influential fi lm for Snyder was Blue Velvet (1986), a detective story that builds on the voyeurism of Rear Window and the trauma of Vertigo. Snyder was astounded how it pushed the genre forward with its unabashed depiction of the consequences of violence (Cruz et al.).

HITCHCOCKIAN SUPERHEROES

Snyder has said that “[t]he DC characters really represent…that fi rst idea, like what is a superhero?”

(Uniting the World’s Finest), and when he directed Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he attempted to “recapture” the movies that inspired him with “cinematic markers” to explore a superhero story within a realistic, blockbuster context (Doll Maker). Snyder has said that he views superheroes as part of society’s modern mythology (Gods and Men), and Batman v Superman is meant to “challeng[e]” its heroes as “icons” through the “public persecution of Superman…to bring the two of them at each other after these sort of psychological events” (HeyUGuys). Snyder wanted audiences to not only get the fi ght of the title, but also “a lot more” (Tribute Movies). Batman v Superman ambitiously combines superhero action with a remarkable amount of Hitchcockian themes and techniques to create a critical moral ambiguity that actively challenges the assumptions underlying the heart of Western society’s two most archetypal superheroes.

Like Vertigo, its title advertises a simple climactic showdown, but while pitting the philosophies of its two lead icons against one another, it reflects on the foundations of democracy in a polarized world of manipulated media and xenophobia.

Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder’s inspirations reflect Hitchcock’s pervasive influence. Snyder is interested in “bizarre movies” that challenge audiences (Cruz et al.). John Boorman, referenced by Mike Hale as being influenced by Hitchcock in Point Blank (1967),

Like many thrillers, Batman v Superman is driven by a villain, Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who is unaware of superhero conventions as he deconstructs audience expectations. Like Vertigo’s Gavin Elster, The Birds’ Lydia Brenner, and countless other Hitchcockian

Batman v Superman ambitiously combines superhero action with a remarkable amount of Hitchcockian themes and techniques.

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figures, Luthor is focused on preserving the past, leaving his father’s room “just the way it was.” His world is built upon the pain of his father, both oppressed by tyrants in East Germany and the oppressor of Lex. Lex’s view of Superman (Henry Cavill) as an oppressive foreign power and a false, ineffectual god manifests as a resentful xenophobia; Superman might represent the first of other “metahumans.” Luthor sets out to punish his own past by exerting his will on present society through politics and public opinion. A villain with a penchant for puns, he communicates this in euphemisms, as when he substitutes “monsters” with “tyrants,” and “hate” with “security.”

As in North by Northwest, Luthor capitalizes on a polarizing debate already at the forefront of his culture. In the darkness, Batman (Ben Aff leck) brands villains, and in the light, Superman acts unilaterally on an international stage. Police support Batman, Metropolis reveres Superman, and the media debates the implications. As Luthor exploits and pollutes legitimate discourse about these archetypes, he widens the void between them as both they and the audience are confronted by their assumptions. An early sequence revisits Superman’s destructive battle in Metropolis with the Kryptonian General Zod (Michael Shannon) in Man of Steel (2013) from Bruce Wayne’s point of view, destroying the foundations of Superman and replacing them with Bruce’s animosity. From this devastation emerges the presence of Luthor, in the discovery of the iconic green glow of Kryptonite amid the ruins. Soon afterward, although Superman smiles when he rescues Lois Lane (Amy Adams) from General Amajagh (Sammi Rotibi) in Africa (the general himself is an ambiguous ref lection on international politics), mercenaries set Luthor’s plan to incriminate Superman into motion by murdering Amajagh’s soldiers, and the Man of Steel takes Amajagh through a wall. The aftermath is seen through the eyes of society and the audience. As with To Catch a Thief, both society and the audience must feel one step behind and fill in the gaps—society reacts with media speculation, and the audience must speculate about media. Lois, who asks questions from the beginning,

58 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

assists as a mediator in piecing the thriller together.

The audience uncomfortably assumes, like the film’s citizens, that Superman has learned nothing from his murder of Zod in Man of Steel and has killed again, which puts the audience in an uncomfortable position until Clark Kent later insists to Lois that he did not, in fact, kill anyone. Nevertheless, his immediate reaction is, “I don’t care what they’re saying.” Clark supports humanity, but is ambivalent about the complexities of his actions. As a member of the media, he attempts to redirect the conversation by projecting his uncertainties onto Batman.

Neither hero’s justice is accountable to the society they ostensibly serve, and Lex Luthor uses these uncertainties to transform both into the guilty victim-protagonists of a Hitchcock thriller; subsequently, their core idealism becomes questionable. Like Vertigo’s Elster, Luthor gives them what they want. When Batman chases Lex Luthor’s motorcade, he is being led—the chase is not about Luthor’s crimes, but about obtaining Luthor’s Kryptonite to kill Superman. Lex simultaneously feeds Clark’s projections by anonymously sending him a newspaper clipping about Batman’s crimes, as well as photographs of a bat-branded criminal murdered in prison. Th is causes Superman to end Batman’s motorcade chase while strengthening Batman’s resolve. The typical layers of the superhero chase are subverted, and viewers cannot merely go along for the blockbuster ride. Lex exploits Bruce’s early statement to Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons) that “[w]e’ve always been criminals,” and drives Superman to reveal that the Last Son of Krypton is not supporting humanity altruistically, but “living [his] life the way [his] father saw it. Righting wrongs for a ghost,” and thus not truly connected to the world he protects. Like the avian aggressors in Th e Birds that lack an explicit origin, how Luther ostensibly knows Superman’s identity does not matter. Lex’s purpose is to be the expected villain, externally manifesting the tensions of a society of superheroes.

In his revenge against his father, who did not have access to reliable media, Luthor uses a benefit

Ian Boucher

for the Library of Metropolis as the venue for Clark and Bruce to meet as their citizen selves. It is a central scene that, like Th e Birds, builds the tensions of the intricate personal emotions of a community toward an expected battle. As Hitchcock would say, “‘[d]on’t worry, they’re coming. The birds are on their way!’”

(Truff aut Location 4738). In this scene, six characters converge: Bruce and Alfred, hoping to hack Luthor; Clark, hoping to interview Bruce for his Batman exposé; Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), looking for a photograph; Luthor’s associate Mercy Graves (Tao Okamoto), delaying Bruce; and Luthor, watching his plan play out with feigned ignorance. The song “Night and Day” signals the quintessential relationship between Batman and Superman, and the frame follows Diana as she passes between them in the periphery, not as a bird or Thorwald monster, but as Wonder Woman, the “dawn of justice” who will ultimately externalize not tensions, but a superhero union (Fig. 3). For now, Clark and Bruce accuse one another’s superhero personas: Clark is sanctimonious about vigilantes, and Bruce disparages an “alien.”

Luthor’s plot exploits the Hitchcockian turmoil of the protagonists. The film begins with yet another retelling of the murder of Bruce’s parents, Martha and Thomas Wayne (Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan), which plays out in the present of

young Bruce’s memories in slow motion. The scene at first seems extraneous: why spend so much time on another, and in this case, particularly emphatic, retelling of this iconic sequence? Like the orchestra that plays at the opening of Hitchcock’s own remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, it is the foundation for what comes later, but this time, there are no explanatory titles. When Bruce falls into his iconic cave, the bats lift him impossibly from the ground, carrying him up into a fade to white light, which Bruce reveals not only as the foundational dream of Batman’s ideology, but also as “a beautiful lie” (Fig. 4). The audience glimpses both a memory and a dream: an evolution of the opening rooftop chase of Vertigo, in which Bruce and the audience must immediately confront a central superhero myth that becomes both twisted and revealed over the course of the film. Reality becomes increasingly blurred with Bruce’s delusions. He is a superhero who, like Scottie, lets his pain transform him into a villain. When Bruce next dreams, it is again unclear whether it is actually a dream or a memory alone. As he brings f lowers to his mother’s tomb, the dream is contaminated by the echoes of Zod’s world-poisoning World Engine, conjuring Bruce’s mother’s blood and a bat that, like the birds in Hitchcock’s titular film, bursts from the grave to bite Bruce and turn him further toward hatred.

Fig.3 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Juxtaposition of tensions brings heroism out of the woodwork.

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Applying Suspense to Archetypal Superheroes

In one of the film’s most ambitious sequences, Bruce has a dream that serves a dual purpose of driving forward both the fi lm and its larger universe. Suddenly finding himself in an apocalyptic environment reminiscent of the African desert at the centre of society’s speculation about Superman, Batman looks for Kryptonite. However, he must now contend with flying monsters of DC lore and the judgment of a warped, murderous Superman. Th is dream is layered further when Bruce awakens to the warning of a mysterious red visitor, the Flash (Ezra Miller), who shouts, “[y]ou’ve always been right about him!” Bruce’s fears of Superman are validated, and the flying monsters bear a strong resemblance to the demons in the painting of Luthor’s father, which to Luthor represent Superman.

But was the Flash talking about Superman? And when Bruce wakes up a second time, what does that make the Flash? Th is sequence goes beyond To Catch a Th ief; the audience must wait beyond a scene unfolding for a series of fi lms. The dream directly integrates the Marvel post-credits scene into the story, cinematically combining the current thriller with the future threads of a larger blockbuster journey. The fi lm’s fi nal dream, experienced by Clark, begins to bring the heroes back to reality. After being convinced that Superman was merely “the dream of a farmer from Kansas,” Clark sees his late father Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) at the top of a mountain. Jonathan reminds Clark that,

Fig.4 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Scottie falls down, Bruce falls up.

60 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Batman has become the very thing that made him Batman in the first place—a person who let pain lead him toward murder.

while Superman’s actions will always be more complex than they initially seem, Superman can nevertheless contribute good through the love that binds him to the world. The “dream of a farmer from Kansas” transforms Superman from a thriller protagonist back into a superhero.

Like the dichotomy that Def lem identified in Hitchcock’s work, Luthor’s plot juxtaposes the personal guilt of these heroes with the public guilt of the media-saturated dimensions of contemporary society.

Def lem writes that Hitchcockian “labeling of guilt… includes various public instruments and symbols of condemnation,” and identifies “[t]wo cinematic types of Hitchcockian aff liction” as “the wrong man and the chase” (215), such as Cary Grant’s on-the-run protagonists in To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.

Batman v Superman cinematically chases its protagonists across media. When Alfred announces to Bruce how “[e]verything’s changed,” he contrasts a series of

Ian Boucher

Superman clips on the Bat-Computer with Bruce’s private guilt of compromised uncertainty, fear, and hate toward the otherworldly visitor to America’s shores (Fig. 5). When Superman rescues a girl from a burning building in Mexico, the film does not merely depict the rescue. As Superman brings the girl to her family with his signature smile, solemn voices from society begin to ref lect around the act, and the music transitions from alien, to hopeful, to conf licted. As Zack Snyder has said, the film is concerned with what is happening around Superman in the context of the implications of his actions: The sort of third character in the movie is media, and it’s the third character now in all of our lives…And I think it’s an interesting way to see how Batman perceives Superman ’cause he doesn’t know who Superman is, all he knows is the public face of Superman.

(Gods and Men) As in Rear Window, this sequence could have merely depicted the action of Superman rescuing someone in need. Instead, the solemn voices lead to a montage of media figures asking questions about “a paradigm shift,” “moral constraints,” individuals enacting “statelevel interventions,” humanity’s “horrible track record of following people with great power,” and “our own

sense of priority in the universe.” When the real-life Charlie Rose asks, “[m]ust there be a Superman?,” Clark is listening. The audience does not merely watch Superman—it must confront his world and the real world, both with Superman and at a distance.

Against a backdrop of protestors praising Superman as a god and demonizing him as an alien, Senator June Finch (Holly Hunter), an institutional representation of truth, justice, and the American way, attempts to convince society to work together openly as a democracy to come to a consensus on Superman’s actions in order to move beyond the “superhero” reality of individuals that the audience expects.

Unfortunately, although the senator raises valid questions about Superman, the plot is simultaneously driven by a supervillain eluding scrutiny, and Finch’s speech is interrupted by a jarring imposition by Luthor at her desk: Th is is how a democracy works. We talk to each other. We act by the consent of the governed, sir. I have sat here before to say that shadow interventions will not be tolerated by this committee. Neither will lies. Because today is a day for truth. Because only by speaking—only by working together can we...can we—can we... can...we create a free and a...

Fig.5 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The public guilt of Superman contrasted with the private guilt of Bruce Wayne.

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As in The Birds, the community again converges, this time to witness Lex Luthor’s destruction of civil discourse when he detonates a bomb that kills everyone in the room, shocks the protesters, and intensifies media speculation about Superman. Superman is convinced of his futility as a hero, and blind anger distracts Bruce from his horror at the explosion on television in a Wayne Enterprises boardroom when he opens a note scrawled on a clipping of Man of Steel ’s devastation of Metropolis that reads, “[y]ou let your family die.” Superman says to Lois, “Superman was never real,” and “[m]y world doesn’t exist anymore.”

Batman becomes completely deaf to Superman’s pleas for help at their next meeting, and they are unable to productively communicate in person.

Fig.6 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; The Man Who Knew Too Much. Batman is the instrument of death.

Thus, the rising emotions culminate in superhero action, for as much as Batman v Superman is a Hitchcockian thriller, it is also a superhero fi lm. On one hand, Luthor kidnaps Clark’s mother Martha Kent (Diane Lane) to pressure Superman to kill Batman; on the other, Superman, although unsure of the outcome, intends to alert Batman to Luthor’s plot.

The fi lm’s central contest is more straightforward, with marketable clips of CGI punches, but like the fi nal confrontation of Vertigo, it is made visceral with rich, subdued lighting and colours, utilizing personal, tangible darkness. It is resolved not with a punch, but with an intimate moment. At the end of the fi ght, Batman has beaten Superman. He balances a Kryptonite spear overheard, the instrument Lex had been sharpening for him, snarling, “[y]ou were never a god. You were never even a man.” But Superman appeals, “[y]ou’re letting him—kill Martha…Find him.

Save Martha.”

the first place—a person who let pain lead him toward murder. He is not only Scottie in Vertigo, but is also revealed as the man with the cymbals in the orchestra of The Man Who Knew Too Much; the signal the villains need to complete their plot of assassination. In Hitchcock’s words, “the man is unaware that he is the instrument of death. He doesn’t know it, but in fact, he’s the real killer” (Truffaut Location 3821) (Fig. 6).

As in Rear Window, it is when the protagonists leave their seats in the audience to work to understand and communicate directly with those around them that the tide begins to turn. It is Lois, the reporter, who uncovers Luthor’s conspiracy, tells Batman Martha’s identity, and saves Clark’s life and Bruce’s soul. These are not simply thriller protagonists who watch their lovers fall, but heroes who must work with the society they serve.

From their lowest points, they return stronger, overcoming their pain and redirecting their energy toward making society better.

Bruce then “wakes up.” His dreams rewind from his mother’s grave to her death, bringing him back to the present. He repeats the Wayne murder in his mind, now with new meaning, as both Batman and the audience realize that although Superman is referring to his own mother, history is repeating itself. Batman has become the very thing that made him Batman in

As in The Birds, Batman and Superman must contend with the ultimate fallout of their pain: the monster Doomsday, a personification of the hatred spawned by the fi lm’s building delusions. Doomsday’s attack takes Superman to a Metropolis memorial, where the creature sneers at Superman’s representation and beats the Man of Steel with the names of those he failed. The

62 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Ian Boucher

Fig.7 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Doomsday defacing the symmetry of Superman.

Fig.8 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. A unity externalized.

stakes of Doomsday lie not in desensitized destruction, but in emotion, and societal symmetry is sullied not as a thriller on Mount Rushmore, but with superhero mayhem (Fig. 7). Doomsday overtakes Luthor, the media, the military, and the government, which reacts with systematic disposal by nuclear weapons while knowing that its citizen, Superman, would be a casualty. But violence only makes Doomsday stronger, and reflects back from a red glow within.

Then, Wonder Woman, a hero who “walked away from mankind. From a century of horrors,” joins the fray. After receiving an e-mail from Bruce about

Luthor’s fi les on metahumans—“Where have you been?” it reads—and seeing Doomsday’s destruction, Diana Prince is so affected by the prospect of the existence of others like her that she becomes the fruit of the unity between Batman and Superman.

The frame unites three disparate heroes working together, beyond the characters of The Birds, to face their externalized adversity. Wonder Woman represents the film’s blockbuster goal, but also moderation; a larger purpose that unity in heroic differences can achieve. As executive producer Geoff Johns has remarked, “she’s a bit of both Batman and Superman” (Uniting the World’s Finest). Only when

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Building on the ambiguous themes and techniques that Alfred Hitchcock left to Hollywood, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice creates the first live-action Hitchcockian superhero thriller.

Doomsday is held in place by Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth and Batman’s Kryptonite can Superman’s hope finally overcome Doomsday’s hatred (Fig. 8). At the end of Superman’s crucible, he sacrifices himself to humanity’s embrace (Chitwood).

As a result, the audience gets the validation of a superhero film combined with the questions of a Hitchcockian thriller, in which “the final phase of the ritual performance must end in some tragedy, which in other respects represents liberation” (Def lem 225).

Although Luthor succeeds in killing Superman—in his words, “[d]ing dong, the god is dead”—the Man of Steel is not a fraud, but a beacon. Kal-El receives both a private and public funeral united by “Amazing Grace,” the song of redemption, as society is able to more clearly ref lect on the ideals of hope and self lessness that Superman represents. As a superhero film, Batman v Superman links the hope of the individual to the hope of society. Diana tells Bruce, “[m]an made a world where standing together is impossible.” Bruce responds, “[m]en are still good. We fight. We kill.

We betray one another. But we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to,” as the camera pans across a frame filled with the faces of America, holding candles to the words, “If you seek his monument look around you.”

While Bruce realizes that the Flash was not talking about Superman in his dream, Luthor’s painting is reintroduced, this time with its demons turned toward the sky, and juxtaposed with a tease of a future threat: “[o]ut in the dark, among the stars.” Like

64 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Fig.9 | Vertigo; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

A frame is never fully explored, whether in its questions on morality or its intentions to build a blockbuster universe.

Vertigo revisiting the painting of Madeleine’s greatgrandmother from another angle when Scottie realizes that Madeleine and Judy are the same person, Batman v Superman demonstrates the multiple layers of a frame, whether in its questions on morality or its intentions to build a blockbuster universe (Fig. 9).

Society’s transformation is ref lected in a finale that echoes the visual bookends of Rear Window. The film begins with the coffins of Bruce Wayne’s parents, and Bruce’s narration: “[t]here were perfect things.

Diamond absolutes.” At Clark’s funeral, Lois extends her diamond engagement ring to the foreground and releases earth onto Clark’s coffin. The nature of Bruce’s inspiration changes. History has repeated itself, yet the soil rises back to the surface. The film leaves it up to the survivors to determine what happens next—from Batman, who no longer brands villains but is still a vigilante, to the reeling citizens of Metropolis, to the audience who watches. As with Hitchcock, although society and its “tormented” heroes have been cleansed, there has been “a transference of guilt from one to another, and a universality of various degrees and kinds of guilt among many, possibly even all who are involved in a movie (and its viewing)” (Def lem 203-204, 216).

Ian Boucher

CONCLUSION Building on the themes and techniques that Alfred Hitchcock contributed to Hollywood, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice creates the first live-action Hitchcockian superhero thriller featuring branded, culturally established characters. Reflecting as a thriller on democracy in a polarized world of manipulated media and xenophobia, it

brings more layers to how commercial art and mass audiences analyze their archetypes and engage with the complexity of justice. Further study might pursue this film’s place within Western society’s cycles of questioning and affirmation. 

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FEATURETTE

Searching for the Female Spectator in Broken Blossoms

BY DEREK DUBOIS | Rhode Island College

ABSTRACT By the late-silent era, Classical structures codified fi lm narratives for the male gaze, yet D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) is a curious case-study. Contemporaneous to the turbulent erosion of separate gendered spheres - due to women entering the workplace, the expansion of consumer culture, and the suff ragette movement - Broken Blossoms (as is the case with several other films) emerges, offering novel patterns of identification for a potential female spectator. Th is essay examines the fi lm's narrative and shot design in order to demonstrate how these patterns of looks--both of male characters within the diegesis as well as the gaze of the fi lmmaker's camera--wrestle with the construct of the male gaze in its formal aesthetic choices, while contextualizing Broken Blossoms via overlap with romance novels for female spectatorship.

A

s the vast landscape of feminist fi lm theory argues, cinema came to fruition while catering to an active male gaze. By the late-silent era, Classical structures codified narratives for this male gaze, yet D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) is a curious case-study. Contemporaneous to the turbulent erosion of separate gendered spheres due to women entering the workplace, the expansion of consumer culture, and the suff ragette movement, several fi lms such as Broken Blossoms emerge that offer novel potential patterns of identification for a new female spectator. An examination of the fi lm’s narrative and shot design demonstrates patterns of looks – both of male characters within the diegesis, as well as the gaze of the fi lmmaker’s camera – and wrestles with the construct of the male gaze in its formal aesthetic choices while contextualizing Broken Blossoms via overlap with romance novels for female spectatorship.

Th is period, which coincided with the mid-to-late silent era, saw the evolution of New Women who “tied female modernity to a particular lifestyle. They did not sit at home…they went out to play” (Søland 16). As a fi lmmaker, D.W. Griffith was concerned with reflecting this New Woman. Simmon writes of Griffith that women

“were central to his career-long project… [and that] their rapidly changing roles were both a worry and a dramatic opportunity” (19). Broken Blossoms is no exception. In it, fi fteen-year-old Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish), decidedly not a New Woman, is routinely abused by her father, Battling (Donald Crisp), until she is rescued by Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), an Asian immigrant. Huan falls for the girl as she recuperates in his care. Battling discovers this, believes her and Huan to have engaged in a sexual relationship, and kills Lucy in a wild rage.

As revenge, Huan kills Battling and then himself. It is melodrama of the highest order. In fact, the first title card reads, “[w]e may believe there are no Battling Burrows, striking the helpless and brutal whip…perhaps [this fi lm] may carry a message.” It is clear that Griff th is asserting a message that relates to the ideological preoccupation with a potential need for a new type of cinematic identification for female spectators. Yet, the construction of Lucy’s narrative struggles to provide her the necessary agency to fully develop into an independent female character.

Looking to how Lucy functions within the film’s narrative and formal design requires starting with feminist fi lm theory. As Laura Mulvey famously wrote regarding

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Featurette

Classical narrative construction, “[t]he presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative fi lm, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (837). Considering Broken Blossoms within this framework is where the potentiality of female spectatorship initially emerges. While the image of Lucy does seem designed to function for male pleasure, Broken Blossoms offers a narrative driven specifically by Lucy’s victimization where “the alternating brutalization and idealization of the woman flourishes across the texture of the fi lm” (Flitterman-Lewis 5). As such, Lucy does not interrupt the narrative flow; she is the narrative flow. By situating Lucy in the role of protagonist, her plight becomes the design of the narrative arc.

Consequently, traditional identification with a male protagonist destabilizes. Normally, “attitudes [of ] aggression, power, and control” foster male identification (Neale 11). However, while Battling possesses many of the rugged qualities that defined male heroes of the early 20th century, his actions paint him as a brutal villain, thus hindering narcissistic identification for male spectators.

Virtually by default, Lucy assumes the mantle of protagonist as she displaces male characters from typical power roles. Th is subversion seems to mirror the socio-cultural context of the time, in that many men were now subordinate to others in the workforce, to the assertive New Woman, and to mollycoddling mothers (Studlar 29).

An open question still remains as to whether Lucy, as protagonist, is afforded enough agency to drive a typical cause-and-effect narrative, or whether the choices of the men surrounding her seem to shuttle Lucy through the narrative’s progression.

Despite the film’s implicit move towards identification with Lucy, there are moments where the fi lm’s mise-en-scène underscores more traditional gendered dynamics that work against female spectatorship by consistently presenting Lucy’s female form for an active male gaze. In these instances, Griffith appears to undermine the agency of Lucy’s narrative. Often her body is eroticized in scenes with Battling; her abuse is coded as rape. Rape as a narrative device is so common

70 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

in “American cinema that one cannot fully understand cinema itself without addressing [it]” (Projansky 63). In one key scene, Lucy finds Battling quite angry, scolding.

She responds by fi xing his dinner. When she accidentally spills food, Battling grabs a whip. Lucy shivers with fear and claims she spots dirt on his boots, kneeling to clean them. He drags her beside the home’s singular bed, which frames the background of the shot, and strikes.

It is a powerful moment in the middle of the fi lm – one of brutal violence (male on female; father on daughter) with subtext hinting at incest and abuse of power. Frankly, it is a moment that dramatically represents how cinema has molded and positioned women in front of the camera.

There are moments in the fi lm where traditional objectification of the female form takes place and where Battling both figuratively and literally dominates Lucy within the narrative (Fig. 1 and 2). In the fi rst shot, the panic on Lucy’s wide eyes and her shrinking physicality demonstrate the fear she exudes in her father’s presence. Then, when Lucy bends to clean Battling’s shoes, “the change in composition… connotes the act of fellatio... [and] “we see orgiastic shots of Battling beating her senseless…with the phallus-like whip handle” (Lesage 7); the whipping is severe (Fig. 2).

Lucy is then rescued and cared for by Cheng Huan.

The two sequences juxtapose brutality and tenderness and through this parallel syntagma emerges. “Lucy, as desired object, is the stake in a struggle between two

Fig.1 | Lucy cowering in fear of her father, Battling Burrows.

Derek Dubois

confl icting worlds – two modes of masculine behaviour – and most of its sequences portray her either being beaten or adored” (Fliterman-Lewis 10). Th roughout the Huan sequence, Lucy becomes the object of Huan’s ‘look’ much as she had been the object of her father’s.

“Th e issue of rape [again] emerges. Th e fi lm depicts both working-class and Asian men as rapists, even though the Asian man simultaneously functions as an ineff ectual savior” (Projansky 72). Huan advances on Lucy, lurking towards her with sinister countenance, the intention of assault clear. Th is dominance is on display where Huan is situated centre frame, Lucy relegated to the frame’s edge, cowering and fearful (Fig. 3). Then, inexplicably, Huan stops himself. Interestingly, what seems an unmotivated action has roots in another medium with the potential to subvert the male gaze and provide a more progressive identification for female spectators.

It has been argued that the melodrama fi lm is closely related to the romance novel, both of which emerged during the late silent era. Janice Radway’s extensive research has mined the romance novel to locate female identification and fi nds “the[se] stories…are exercises in the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform with female standards”, and that these transitions are “not structurally explained by the narrative… [they] simply take place” (147). Th is applies well to Broken Blossoms. Th ough Huan has been established as morally weak, succumbing to his vices in the opium den and voyeuristically spying on Lucy, when instilled with Lucy’s love, he self-actualizes into a female conception of a masculine ideal. Might it be, as Miriam Hansen suggests for other fi lms during this period, that the “unstable and destabilizing force of the female gaze exceeds and impairs even the power of an aggressive masculinity?” (158). The power of Lucy’s look would certainly suggest so (Fig. 3).

Fig.2 | Battling at the ready to strike with his whip.

Fig.3 | Cheng Huan moves in on Lucy.

Fig.4 | Lucy cradles her doll.

Therefore, does Broken Blossoms root a new female spectatorship in patterns/models such as those of the romance novel? Attempting to read Broken Blossoms through a lens of female spectatorship remains problematic since the gaze of male characters is so often

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thrust upon Lucy; her image is consistently infantilized, maternalized, or both simultaneously, as evidenced when Lucy plays with a doll (Fig. 4). Additionally, the narrative punishes Lucy with death. Yet, still, we cannot discount – even momentarily – that Lucy’s gaze has transformative power over the men around her.

Somewhere in the nexus of the emerging New Woman, melodrama cinema, and the romance novel, the ephemeral notion of a female spectator exists.

It may not be complete in off ering the equivalent of an active male gaze, but it is unique in establishing a more psychologically complex female protagonist who catalyzes a transformation of aggressive masculinity into something far more appropriate: domestication. The power of this conversation lies in Griffith’s interests in race, class, and gender, and this conversation continues to situate Broken Blossoms as a powerful case study of what might have been from early silent cinema. 

WORKS CITED Broken Blossoms. Directed by D.W. Griffith, performances by

Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men

Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, and Donald Crisp,

and Mainstream Cinema.” Hollywood: Critical Concepts

D.W. Griffith Productions, 1919.

in Media and Cultural Studies. Edited by Thomas Schatz

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “The Blossom and the Bole: Narrative and Visual Spectacle in Early Film Melodrama.” Cinema Journal, vol. 33, no.3, 1994, pp. 3-15.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Harvard UP, 1991.

Lesage, Julia. “Artful Racism and Artful Rape in Broken Blossoms.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, vol. 26, 1981, pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/ brokenblossoms.html, accessed 9 Jan. 2017.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

Visual Culture: The Reader. Edited by Jessica Evans, Sage Publications, 1999, pp. 381-389.

Routledge, 2004, pp. 127-137.

Projansky, Sarah. “The Elusive/Ubiquitous Representation of Rape: A Historical Survey of Rape in U.S. Film, 19031972.” Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2001, pp. 63-90.

Radway, Janice. “The Ideal Romance: The Promise of Patriarchy.” Reading the Romance, University of North Carolina P, 1984, pp.119-156.

Simmon, Scott. “‘The Female of the Species’ D.W. Griffith: Father of the Woman’s Film.” Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no.

2, 1992, pp. 8-20.

Søland, Birgitte. Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s, Princeton UP, 2000.

Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade. Columbia UP, 1996.

72 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

FEATURETTE

To Be Felt:

Examining Textility in Spike Jonze’s Her

BY CHRISTINA PARKER-FLYNN | Florida State University

ABSTRACT In Spike Jonze’s Her, the normally incongruous principles of the technical, as a system of operational principles, and the textilic, that which is concerned with feeling and materiality, uniquely merge. The fi lm’s mise-en- scène sets forth a surprisingly “felt” phenomenology, a narrative founded on touching in both the literal and metaphorical senses, that affi rms the romantic content of the fi lm and the fashion of its form.

T

o analyze a film’s mise-en-scène requires a decoding and subsequent understanding of its patterns, the structural and symbolic repetitions that are woven together into the cloth of the text. Certainly, Lucy Fife Donaldson suggests that all fi lms have texture, “shaped through details of production design, costuming, make-up, sound design, all of which determine the look and feel of surfaces, décor, and bodies” (37). Not only is Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) a profoundly original story—winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay—it is also a deeply textured one.

The normally incongruous principles of the technical, as a system of operational principles, and the textilic, that which is concerned with feeling and materiality, uniquely merge in the mise-en-scène of Her. It is compelling to note that many reviewers have employed metaphors of tangibility to describe Her, especially considering the fi lm’s central conceit of a man falling in love with an operating system (OS) which lacks any semblance of a physical body and therefore never appears visually within the fi lm’s diegesis. The New York Times fi lm critic Manohla Dargis suggests that the fi lm is “vividly tactile,” calling it “a movie you want to reach out and caress” (8). Writing for The New Yorker, Christine Smallwood takes a contradictory stance on the fi lm as “static” and “antiseptic,” reversing Dargis’s spectatorial

desire to touch and instead asserting that “no one is at risk of actually touching anyone other than themselves” within the fi lm’s story (8). Yet touch and tactility are at the heart of the fi lm’s mise-en-scène, causing it to adopt an ironic yet meta-level quality in relation to its overall narrative principle. Indeed, the fi lm’s “fabric” is both narrative and woven textile.

Centrally concerned with protagonist Theodore’s (Joaquin Phoenix) inability to feel or to be “felt,” the tactile quality of the fi lm’s images provides the spectator with the warmth and comfort that he has seemingly lost.

On the brink of finalizing his divorce, Theodore purchases a talking OS to mitigate his feelings of isolation. The first night he “initiates” this OS, named Samantha (the voice of Scarlett Johansson), Theodore laments his loss: “I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel, and from here on out I’m not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I already felt.” Th rough a subjective fl ashback montage sequence centering on images of Theodore with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), Jonze offers the audience a glimpse—powerfully symbolized by Catherine’s sweaters— of the loving comfort Theodore now misses. In nearly all of these shots, Catherine is seen wearing some type of knit, oftentimes fi lmed through a diff use light that creates an additional gossamer-like blanket over the image (Figs. 1, 2, 3).

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Fig.1 | In most of the flashback images of his soon-to-be ex-wife Catherine, Theodore sees her wearing sweaters, and the audience is made aware of the tactile quality of the various knits.

These highly textured yet explicitly past moments evoke the loss of feeling Theodore is experiencing on the brink of his divorce. Such three-dimensional textures correspond to the coziness of his lost and long-standing love, only available to him now as memories—something “felt” both as past emotion and also something with the textural quality of a fabric, like felt. Additionally, these sweaters symbolize a past wherein Theodore and Catherine's experiences were entirely interwoven. Having grown up together, their lives were connected in every functional way. Indeed, Theodore’s life coming undone represents the fi lm’s primary dilemma: to quote from the lyrics of Weezer’s song “Undone” (1994), for which Jonze directed the music video, “If you want to destroy my sweater/ Hold this thread as I walk away.” Th is flattening of affect experienced by Theodore puts him in the structural position usually reserved for the androids that litter the science fiction landscape, a hard-wired characteristic of the “andys” in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Th at Theodore resorts to screen love via digital device further suggests a flattening of affect equating directly to and commenting on fi lm spectatorship as well.

74 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Fig.2 | Flashback of Catherine in another sweater.

Fig.3 | The squiggly lines on the wall behind Catherine mimic the zigzag stitch, used to adjoin two pieces of fabric edge-to-edge— or symbolically, two persons in a relationship.

Christina Parker-Flynn

Though many consider the film science fiction, Her eschews the cold, metal tones of future worlds in favor of warm colours and woven qualities that harken a recycled renaissance. Preliminary discussions between the fi lm’s main creators—director Spike Jonze, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, production designer K. K. Barrett, and costume designer Casey Storm—focused on emotions and feelings that they wanted to express, which then gave way to their choices for colours, garments, and settings.

Storm confirms that instead of creating “a cold world for yourself,” you would “want something that feels comfortable, happy, less anxious, that shows you participate in society and you’re in touch with your emotions” (Harris 12). To emphasize these elements of “feel” and “touch,” Storm chose “cottons and wools, not metals and plastics” to clothe the film’s characters (12). In terms of colour, the entire group became enamored with using the colour red; Barrett confirms that if you look closely there’s some of it in every frame. The most notable use of red in the film is Theodore’s oft worn button-down shirt and its direct coordination with the red background of the OS’s start-up sequence screen, punctuated by the swirling threads of the program’s signature double helix. Jonze confirms that he was always hoping for the film to be “warm and colourful” (Dodes 11). Red, a colour that often represents passion, love, blood, and other life forces, dominates the warm side of the colour wheel. Jonze also cites the interior of Jamba Juice establishments, whose wood-grained interiors inspired the handcrafted quality of the film’s wood-framed computers and phone cases, as an unlikely influence on the mise-en-scène (Chew-Bose 2) (Fig. 4).

Fig.4 | Theodore’s wood-framed computer screen, showing the start-up screen for his OS: a warm, red background punctuated by a double helix.

Fig.5 | The blank screen Jonze shows for nearly 70 seconds of runtime during Theodore and Samantha’s first sexual encounter.

Over the course of the fi lm, and through the development of his relationship with Samantha, Theodore turns this “felt” into a new, metaphorical blanket to keep himself warm. Like his heart, which now has a “tiny little hole” that The odore hopes to darn, the fabric of his being has ripped and is in desperate need of being mended. Samantha helps stitch him back together, their relationship reinforced when the two have a sexual encounter. One could suggest that they have sexual intercourse in terms of their becoming intertwined like threads do, mainly by “feeling” each other. Surely, this non-traditional coupling is a challenge to represent when

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one participant has no three-dimensional presence: Jonze decides to project a blank screen (Fig. 5). Seemingly evoking the utter absence of mise-en-scène, one could instead consider this image as a blanket of darkness covering the lovers. The power of mise-en-scène itself is evinced in relation to many audiences’ uncomfortable reactions to this lack of image, which forces them to face a black screen for over a full minute of runtime. Though this blankness firstly equates to an erasure of any on-screen corporality, it ironically opens a space for Samantha to begin to “feel” as if she did, indeed, have a body.

Fig.6 | The bodies of the beachgoers form the warp and weft of the film’s fabric in this scene.

Her not only tells its story through textures, but also through literal and metaphorical blankets like that of the blank screen, which help cover its vital subjects.

Once they become “connected,” for instance, Samantha tells Theodore that it feels as if they are “under the same blanket, it’s soft and fuzzy.” Her relationship with Theodore allows her to inexplicably feel too, and thus leads her to begin using tactile metaphors that harmonize with the tactility of the film’s overall mise-en-scène. The suffix –ility suggests ability, and Samantha had already confirmed to Theodore during their initiating sequence that her DNA, a combination of all the programmers who made her, ensures her “ability to grow through [my] experiences.” Once seemingly in love, Samantha leads Theodore to the beach for a day date; arriving at the summit of the subway station, he looks out onto a beach-blanket composed of the bodies of all the various beach-goers (Fig. 6). On the beach, Samantha provocatively questions what would happen if the patterning of the human body was reconfigured, and ears were where navels were, and so on. Warmed by their companionship and the comforting music she plays for him, Theodore rests on the beach underneath a blanket of rich, warm light (Fig. 7).

The fi lm ends with the unraveling of the internal story woven together by Samantha and Theodore. She tells him she’ll be leaving permanently, and upon her departure she explains: “It’s like I’m reading a book, and it’s a book that I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now so the words are really far apart, and the spaces between the words are almost infinite.” Upon her utterance of these

76 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Fig.7 | Theodore is covered by a texturized blanket of rich, warm light while sleeping on the beach.

Fig.8 | Jonze inserts this extreme close-up of the fabric of the quilt Theodore lays on while Samantha tells him she’s leaving.

Christina Parker-Flynn

lines, Jonze inserts an extreme close-up of the fabric of the bed’s quilt on which Theodore lies, a tightly woven textile serving to juxtapose the action: at this very moment the fabric of their love story is falling apart (Fig. 8). In the reverse, however, this insert shot might directly suggest that the fi lm sets forth a surprisingly felt phenomenology, a narrative founded on touching in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

When interviewed by Humberto Leon, friend and co-founder of fashion brand Opening Ceremony in 2013, Spike Jonze cautiously affirmed that Her had to be, “what’s the saying? Invented from whole cloth?” (Leon 12). He’s primarily referring to the idiom that suggests

pure invention, the fabrication of something entirely new.

More importantly, the reference fittingly describes the interwoven aesthetics of fashion and fi lm that converge into Her. Indeed, Jonze spoke to Leon regularly while writing and making the film, admitting that once finished it had consequently assumed a woven quality: “Your and my aesthetics were already so intertwined by the time we got to do a line together” (Leon 11). Here, Jonze refers to their mutual fashion collection, which Opening Ceremony released concurrent with and inspired by the fi lm. After contemplating the fi lm’s heavy investment in the “feel” of textiles, one can see how Jonze’s Her presents both a warmly blanketed romance and his own directorial vision of film for fashion’s sake. 

WORKS CITED Chew-Bose, Durga. “Lonely Palette: The Economy of Colour

Harris, Rachel Lee. “Clothes and Character: Her.” The New

in Spike Jonze’s Her.” Hazlitt, 8 Jan., 2014. //hazlitt.net/

York Times, 21 Feb. 2014, carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.

feature/lonely-palette-economy-colour-spike-jonzes-her .

com/2014/02/21/clothes-and-character-her/ . Accessed 2

Accessed 2 Jan. 2018.

Jan. 2018.

Dargis, Manohla. “Disembodied, but Oh, What a Voice: ‘Her,’ Directed by Spike Jonze.” The New York Times,

Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Brothers, 2013.

Leon, Humberto. “Humberto Leon Interviews Spike Jonze.”

17 Dec. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/movies/

Opening Ceremony Blog, 6 Dec. 2013, blog.openingcere-

her-directed-by-spike-jonze.html?mcubz=0 . Accessed 2

mony.com/entry.asp?pid=8949 . Accessed 2 Jan. 2018.

Jan. 2018.

Dodes, Rachel. "Spike Jonze on Scarlett Johansson and 'Her'."

The Wall Street Journal, 12 Dec. 2013, https://www.wsj.

Paterson, Mark. The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Aff ects and Technologies. Berg, 2007.

Smallwood, Christine. “Spike Jonze’s Abandonment Issues.”

com/articles/spike-jonze-on-scarlett-johansson-and-

The New Yorker, 19 Dec. 2013, www.newyorker.com/

8216her8217-1386880394 . Accessed 22 May 2018.

culture/culture-desk/spike-jonzes-abandonment-issues .

Donaldson, Lucy Fife. Texture in Film. Palgrave Macmillan,

Accessed 2 Jan. 2018.

2014.

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78 Vol.03, No.01 | Spring 2018

BOOK REVIEW

"The Challenges in Archiving Film History": David A. Cook’s A History of Narrative Film (Fifth Edition)

BY MINA RADOVIC | University of St Andrews

A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook Fifth Edition: 2016 New York: W.W. Norton & Company 864pp., ISBN: 978-0-393-92009-3 (pbk), CAD $116.25.

D

avid A. Cook’s fifth edition of A History of Narrative Film is a perceptive examination of the past, present, and potential future of narrative film in the many forms it has taken across world cinemas. As introduction to film form, the book provides insight into the origins of the cinematic apparatus, subsequently giving generous coverage to unpacking cinema’s multiple dominant centres of historical influence: from early formative silent pieces

of French and American cinema (tracking the Lumieres’ building blocks to Melies’ magic pictures, Griffith’s founding father work to Chaplin’s pedestrian slapstick, Feuillade’s innovation in narrative to Gance’s aesthetic experimentation), the Soviet inf luence (among them Kuleshov, Eisentstein, and Kino Eye founder Vertov), the seminal work of Italian neorealism to the widely disparate yet rich French, British, Czechoslovak and German New Waves of the 1960s. What surfaces in

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Cook’s text is a particularly keen eye for exploration: sentences filled with an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm spill over each page. While the text is premeditated and for the most part chronologically structured, one gets the impression that Cook is writing anew, discovering the medium himself. Its tone is infectious and the content rich and filled with surprising filmic anecdotes. In balancing form and content so effortlessly, it enables both cinephiles and elated newcomers to learn something new about cinema from the material and to savour the journey through his writing style. Cinema is treated as concrete occurrence within history, always specific to the political context of a country and the aesthetic sensibilities of its filmmakers.

Besides the careful contextualization of the country at hand, Cook’s work takes a threaded approach in weaving together parts of film history that may not always appear related. In other words, Cook maps out the relations across different cinemas as well as describing the ones that existed. In this way he is successful in equally generating a “narrative”, one of many from which cinema, as realized in history, can be observed.

A way he does this for instance is, in describing Indian cinema (Chapter 18), he talks about dialogical inf luences among filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, and their relationship to the wider political environment. In doing this, Cook shows the cultural, national sensibilities of the specific cinema (India) and then proceeds to evince the cross-cultural, transnational capacity of cinema by clarifying, in one case, the neorealist inf luence on Ray, whose films in turn inf luenced world cinema at large. Such allusions to the boundlessness of film form are often brief but they are necessary, in particular to welcoming newcomers into film. This is because Cook shows how seemingly unrelated cinemas across the globe – like art and politics in a wider sense – remain related in dialogue with one another, learning from each other. However, this dialogical dimension of film is somewhat compromised in the book. Cook spends nearly ten chapters out of twenty two discussing North American and Hollywood cinema, thus lionizing Anglo-Saxon tradition in the cinematic imaginary.

80 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

Nonetheless, in mapping out the simultaneously occurring relations in fi lmic creation, Cook manages to incriminate several layers of history: the socio-political (fi lm influenced by relations among people and in turn influences joint realm in which we act and manifest ourselves as human beings); the economic (the business element, that is, the modes of production and the art’s everlasting war with capital); the individual or personal (fi lmmaker as person with unique vision; the ability of cinema for vital expression of the human condition); and finally the metaphysical (film as a platform for channelling the transcendent). In doing so, the book recognizes that a challenge in archiving fi lm history lies in recognizing the multiple layers of a fi lm by its very occurrence in the world. Th is is the fi lm’s ability to serve as an archive of human history: it is a sophisticated platform for channelling, negotiating, and challenging our perceptions of reality. The notion of reality is first tackled at the beginning of Chapter 1 and carries all the way through to the Digital Domain section, unpacking the various changing political realities of the twentieth century and how they influenced fi lm form. An illustrative example of this can be found in the Chapter 4 discussion of German expressionism as an artistic reaction that follows World War I, and at the same time, through its stark representation of reality, foreshadows the fatalism of World War II. In discussing archiving as a means of preserving reality the crucial question is what should remain and what should be left out? Th is may be a difficult question to answer and perhaps to some it may seem unnecessary.

After all, it is precisely the archivist that is to collect and to preserve regardless of his/her own bias and personal interpretation. However, when it comes to writing any larger text on the history of world cinema, one can be forced to excise or at least summarize certain traits or tendencies in specific cinemas. Cook’s work proves exceptional in preserving much of world heritage in fi lm and describing, albeit in a condensed form, the parallel cinemas arising over the last hundred years. The text does suffer, however, when it comes to the point of excision, as many national cinemas – including South Korea and Filipino – are never given treatment. Similarly, cinemas like that of East Germany, a cornerstone in socialist

Mina Radovic

culture of the last century, are mentioned in the context of West Germany, but never discussed beyond on their own terms. Excision demonstrates a serious danger in archiving fi lm by excluding certain cinemas altogether. The criteria for exclusion, although in technical terms this should be avoided, will vary depending on the archivist and Institute in question. When it comes to Cook’s work this particular incision should be sutured when releasing future editions of the text, in order to supplement the rich historical analysis on display and retain a degree of objectivity. The title of the book, however, presumably by intention, poses a clever strategy in solving the problem of objectivity in calling it “A History…”, the article ‘a’ indicating the book presents more an account on the genealogy of narrative fi lm rather than a defi nitive canon. In this title, Cook may relieve the tension of appearing definitive and allow the text to read more as deeply-insightful and tasteful kaleidoscopic view of cinema’s history without the danger of appearing ‘objective’.

In the ways discussed above we learn that archiving may not consist only of collection or amalgamation of information but structuring of information. In other words, it is a creative (in the most conservative sense of the word) chiselling: a sculpting of individual instances of history into collective history, all aimed at the preservation of the human condition for future generations. Cook’s work serves a fine starter for preservation: an introduction outlining most essential elements about narrative fi lm, from which the reader can build a more comprehensive awareness of fi lm form and aesthetics.

More specifically, the book provides an excellent overview of the many countries around the world which number lower by population but remain aesthetically immense national cinemas. Cook’s strength lies in contextualizing much underrepresented yet essential work of world cinema, including but not limited to pre-war Japan all the way through to post-war fi lm and anime, carving out candid director profiles including that of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Oshima, Masomura, Yoshida, Kinoshita, Wakamatsu, Kobayashi, Teshigahara and Oguri (the one great addition for the future would be Shuji Terayama who is surprisingly left out of the

avant-garde discussion, even though he was crucial in shaping it in 1970s Japan). Cook contextualizes the Three Schools of Polish cinema and Australian and Oceanic works, from mesmeric Peter Weir to Geoff Murphey work in New Zealand. There is equally coverage of Transcaucasian and Central Asian Cinema, ranging from Georgia and the visually-arresting art pieces of Georgi and Eldar Shengalaia to the harmonic experiments of Otar Iosseliani, to silent Azerbaijani cinema (Boris Svetlov), Kyrgyz experimental work of the 1960s and the Turkmenistan fi lm industry. The text also spans Chinese cinema in the People’s Republic and the fluid politically-charged aesthetics of multiple Latin American cinemas.

Cook critically examines the traditions of great fi lmmaking countries, highlighting many that are often left out of critical and historical debate. It is countries such as the ones mentioned above that deserve further treatment in books on fi lm history. Such examination would work to expand much of the grassroots writing displayed in this book. What one particularly fi nds more rare in writing on fi lm history is an elementary overview of the cinemas of Yugoslavia, a unique force in European aesthetics, but one frequently left out.

Therefore, Cook’s advantage is his information-packed yet brief examination of Yugoslav cinema. Working from the new sensibilities emerging with Dušan Makavejev and Živojin Pavlović in the Yugoslav Black Wave, Cook manages to also cover the basics of Partisan cinema and the essential works of the Prague School group, including the existential comedies of Goran Marković, the artistic twists-and-turns of Goran Paskaljević and the palliative heaviness of Srdjan Karanović, the last of whom is especially left out of historical discussion.

His poignant Petria’s Wreath (1980) warrants further treatment, building on its inclusion in this book.

Most of all, what remains commendable is that Cook recognizes the national sensibility of the country’s cinema by keeping the very title “Yugoslavia” when referring to the fi lms made within the country during the period of its existence. He thereby avoids a recently popularized tendency of former Yugoslav countries to ‘reclaim’ fi lms from within each newly formed country (Serbia taking the ‘”Serbian” productions, Croatia the

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“Croatian” and likewise), which while understandable may mark historical ly an inaccuracy. Therefore Cook’s treatment of Yugoslavia, like many of the countries and cinemas handled in this book, proves perceptive and inclusive.

An inclination, however, present in much historical writing is the tendency to institutionalize fi lmmakers.

Case in point: the institutionalization of Swedish regisseur Ingmar Bergman by fi lm historians in the cultural imaginary may become clear in the very structure of the text: precisely three full pages are spent on Ingmar Bergman while Sweden as fi lm industry and its other major figures including giants Victor Sjöström and Jan Troell are treated in altogether two paragraphs. This is less a critique of Cook’s writing and more a reflection of wider historical misappropriation when it comes to Swedish cinema, where Bergman is perceived as the beginning and end of a country’s national cinema, with everything else lying on the periphery. Th is claim serves not to dispute Bergman’s significance in the annals of cinema, but rather to point to other existent and equally significant figures, in order to remind readers that a national cinema cannot be reduced historically to one director, if only for the reason that it gives the impression that he is the only one around.

Cook appears selective when it comes to Greek and Turkish cinema as well. These national cinemas are discussed in two pages, primarily highlighting fi lmmakers Theo Angelopoulos and Yılmaz Güney. In the case of Greece, the formative work of Yorgos Javellas, Alexis Damianos, Michael Cacoyannis, Orestis Laskos and avant-garde formalists Nikos Koundouros and Nikos Nikolaidis, along with the country’s rich platter of actors, cinematographers, writers and editors, should not be left out of any historical analysis, be it of narrative, aesthetics or context. In Cook’s case it would be good to fi ll such gaps in later editions of the book, as well as altering the rather inappropriate subheading under which Greece and Turkey are treated, that of “Other Balkan Cinemas” which connotes a degree of Othering and exoticization.

While national cinemas like that of the United States may certainly be more dominant in shaping convention and particular forms of narrative fi lm, it is the historian

82 Vol.03, No.01 | Winter Spring 2018

or theoretician’s job to weigh out the significance of that influence and to balance it in relation to national cinemas across the world. Giving more space to examine national cinemas including Greece and Turkey, as well as Finland and Spain among others, would bring back balance into this fi ne text, thereby providing an even more accurate look at the various histories of narrative fi lm.

A History of Narrative Film functions as a perceptive reading of history, being both informative, rich in detail and analysis, jubilant in tone, in many ways posing challenges to how we perceive cinema and reality, and finally offering a sampling of what the new digital domain may bring for the future of the medium. Will cinema die out or evolve into something new? Perhaps this is not something we should ask as the archivist is the one who preserves history and constantly updates it as the cinema updates itself. Th is book works well to the goal of preservation.

I hope its future editions will build on the collection assembled here. 

MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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84 Vol.03, No.01 | Spring 2018

OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS ISSUE 4.1 · SPRING 2019

For its upcoming issue, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual

(250-300 words); interviews (4,000-5,000 words); undergraduate

Narration (MSJ) currently seeks submissions that encompass the

scholarship (2,000-2,500 words) or video essays (8-10 minute

latest research in film and media studies. Submission categories

range). All submissions must include a selection of supporting

include feature articles (6,000-7,000 words); mise-en-scène

images from the film(s) under analysis and be formatted according

featurettes (1,000-1,500 words); reviews of films, DVDs, Blu-rays

to MLA guidelines, 8th edition. Topic areas may include, but are

or conferences (1,500-2,500 words); M.A. or Ph.D. abstracts

not limited to, the following:

Mise-en-scène across the disciplines Transmedia Film spectatorship Auteur theory Adaptation studies

JAN

5

Frame narratology Pedagogical approaches to film and media studies Genre studies Cinematic aestheticism

Documentary studies Fandom studies Seriality Film/video as a branch of digital humanities research

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS JANUARY 5, 2019.

Please sign up as an author through the registration portal to begin the 5-step submission process: journals.sfu.ca/msq/msq/index.php/msq/user/register

ABOUT THE JOURNAL Situating itself in film’s visual narrative, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (ISSN 2369-5056) is the f ir st of it s kind: an international, peer-reviewed journal focused exclusively on the artistry of frame composition as a storytelling technique. With its open-access, openreview publishing model, MSJ strives to be a synergistic, community-oriented hub for discourse that begins at the level of the frame. Scholarly analysis of lighting, set design, costuming, camera angles, camera proximities, depth of field, and character placement are just some of the topics that the journal covers. While primarily concerned with discourse in and around the film frame, MSJ also includes narratological analysis at the scene and sequence level of related media (television and online) within its scope. Par ticularly welcome are ar ticles that dovetail current debates, research, and theories as they deepen the understanding of filmic storytelling. The journal’s contributing writers are an eclectic, interdisciplinary mixture of graduate students, academics, filmmakers, film scholars, and cineastes, a demographic that also reflects the journal’s readership. Published twice a year by Simon Fraser University, MSJ is the official film studies journal of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, Canada.

It is included in EBSCO’s Film and Television Literature Index.

ONE FRAME AT A TIME