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SUPERCUT An Undergraduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Volume I, Winter 2018

Executive Editor: Elizabeth McElroy

Editors & Reviewers: Lara Besharat Sadie Cunningham Aidan Ingalls Katie Keizer Kelly Li Genevieve Oliver

Cover Photography: Travis Devonport Instagram: @Traveling___Trav Printed in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia by Halcraft Printers Inc. 3

Supercut is published by the Dalhousie University Cinema and Media Studies Society and through a grant provided by the Fountain School of Performing Arts.

Dalhousie University Cinema and Media Studies Program: Fountain School of Performing Arts, Dalhousie University Room 514, Dalhousie Arts Centre, 6101 University Avenue PO Box 15000, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4R2 Supercut would also like to thank the following individuals, offices, and departments for their support in the creation of this project: Dr. Shannon Brownlee Dr. Donna de Ville Dr. Elizabeth Edwards Dr. Yuri Leving Dr. David Nicol Tatjana Vukoja Dr. Jerry White Halcraft Printers Inc. The Fathom Creative Writing Journal The Dalhousie English Society Supercut is an open-access, printed, and free undergraduate journal which aims to create conversations about cinema and media studies through a collaborative and entirely student generated project. Supercut acknowledges the scholarship in its development, including the creation of Supercut, takes place on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.

This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik/Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1726. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik/Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations.

Visit our journal online: https://issuu.com/supercutjournal 4

Contents

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Tarini Fernando The Cinematography of Tangerine

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Trynne Delaney Realism Through Sound and Mise-en-Scene in Boyz in the Hood

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Alex Elvidge The Question of Reality in Behind the Mask

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Kelly Li Repression and the Politics of Memory in Haneke’s Caché

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Rose Fitzpatrick Framing Reality in Mirror and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

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Jessica Wilton Film in the Weimar Republic: Pandora’s Box and the Femme Fatale

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Libby Schofield “This is she!”: Considering Queer, Black Masculinity in Harold Perrineau’s Performance as Mercutio in Romeo + Juliet

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Tyler Fleck Three Minutes of Melancholy: A Technical Analysis of Sound and Mise-en-Scene in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

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Aidan Ingalls Hearing the World: Melancholia in Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue

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Contributors

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Glossary

5

The Cinematography of Tangerine Tarini Fernando

Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) presents a day-in-the-life story of Sin-Dee Rella and Alexandra: two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood.

The plot follows Sin-Dee, shortly after she has been released from prison, as she tries to find the woman who her boyfriend has been cheating on her with. While the film presents a brutally honest depiction of the struggles women like Sin-Dee and Alexandra regularly face, it balances this harsh reality with humour through the witty nature of its lead characters. The bold cinematographic techniques used in this film simultaneously support the harshness of the narrative, and the colourful, dynamic personalities of its characters.

One of the most well-known cinematographic choices in this film is the fact that it was shot entirely on an iPhone 5S. A major benefit of using such a portable device was that it could be moved with a speed and flexibility that would have been more difficult with a larger camera (Marine). This quick, mobile framing of the camera can be seen in multiple following shots in the film. In one tracking shot, Sin-Dee is seen running down the street holding Dinah, the woman her boyfriend has been sleeping with, by the wrist and neck. The camera follows their quick movements, and because of the use of an app called Filmic Pro, the cinematographers were able to lock the focus on the subjects in fast shots such as this one (Marine). The quick movement of the camera, along with its shakiness in this shot, indicates the uncontrollably angry state Sin-Dee is in, and the urgency of her situation. This kind of movement is contrasted by other shots where the camera moves much slower. In the shot immediately before the scene where Sin-Dee is running down the street with Dinah, the camera slowly, smoothly pans to the right as it follows Alexandra walking away from Razmik, a client’s, car. To create such a smooth shot with an iPhone, Baker and his co-cinematographer, Radium Cheung, used a Steadicam Smoothee, a tool made to mask the shaky, unfocused effect that can be seen with hand-held iPhone video (Marine). In the shot with Alexandra, because the camera is at a lowangle and moves in such a smooth, steady manner, it creates a sense

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that Alexandra is a strong person currently at a brief stable moment in her life.

These contrasting styles in the film create two patterns of camera movement that are used as motifs throughout the film to compare Alexandra and Sin-Dee. The shaky, quick movement of the camera when it films Sin-Dee indicates her erratic nature, while the slow, smooth camera movement used for Alexandra implies her more level-headed nature. Even when Alexandra gets in a fight with one of her clients, the camera does not become nearly as shaky as when it films Sin-Dee running down the streets with Dinah. As a result, the two distinct camera movement patterns emphasize the difference between Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s personalities.

The camera also makes several circular pan movements in the film, which creates a sense of energy in the characters and their mission. Near the beginning of the film when Sin-Dee and Alexandra are still together, searching for Dinah, they meet two of their friends near a brightly coloured mural. The camera follows the two women walking up to their friends, and circles around the group as they hug each other. The same kind of 360-degree pan is done around Sin-Dee and Alexandra as they walk up to a stoplight at an intersection. These quick circular motions seen several times throughout the film create another pattern of camera movement. This motif creates a sense of excitement in Sin-Dee’s mission, and reflects her determination to divulge the truth from the people she meets.

The use of canted angles in the film also adds to the energetic nature of the characters. In the shot right after the circular pan around Sin-Dee, Alexandra, and their friends, a canted angle is used to frame Sin-Dee in front of the bright mural. The somewhat cliché understanding of a canted angle is that it signifies a level of dysfunction or unstableness (Bordwell and Thomson 192). In this shot, however, the canted angle does just the opposite. It dynamizes the interaction between the friends and reflects Sin-Dee’s strong conviction to complete her mission.

The use of a wide-angle lens in the film supports the harshness of the narrative by bringing the audience into the characters’ minds, 7

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and showing the viewer how the characters maneuver through their chaotic environment. Baker and Cheung were able to achieve this wide-angle perspective by using an anamorphic adapter that attached onto the iPhone. This modified the lens to about 24 mm and gave the projected image a large aspect ratio of 2.40:1 (Thomson). Baker once said that the reason he decided to use such a wide-angle lens was to bring “the audience closer to these characters,” and “to immerse [the viewer] in the hardship and chaos of the area.” (Thomson). This idea is present in the most extreme close-up shots and the farthest long shots.

In one shot, the audience sees a close-up of the top half of Sin-Dee’s face at the right of the frame as she is riding on the subway. She stares towards the left side of the frame where the underground walls and lights quickly pass by the window. Her wide-eyed gaze through the window shows that her mind is clearly on something else: her mission to find Dinah. This intense proximity reflects Sin-Dee’s bold, “in-yourface” attitude and allows the audience to feel her passion.

One medium-close-up shot that invites the audience into a character’s world is the recurring shots of Razmik in his taxi, driving around town. Early in the film, the audience sees a medium-close-up showing Razmik driving at the right of the frame, and an elderly passenger conversing with him on the left. With the bright, natural sunlight pouring through the car windows, and Razmik’s higher position in the frame, this shot implies how there are some pleasant interactions in Razmik’s chaotic daily work life. Later in the film, the audience sees another medium-close-up of Razmik as he talks to a sexworker to try and locate Sin-Dee and Alexandra. This time, he is to the left of the frame, and the sex worker seen standing outside his window is to the right. In this angry conversation, where Razmik is in a lower position in the frame than the woman he is speaking to, the audience sees the more difficult interactions Razmik must regularly face. He is defeated in this scene as he has to give the woman money so that she will talk. Overall, the wide-angle of these medium-close-ups allow the audience to experience these one-on-one interactions in the same close way that Razmik does.

A similar effect is seen in some of the long shots. Near the end of the film, there is a long shot showing Sin-Dee, Alexandra, Chester, 8

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and Dinah standing outside Donut Time after a climactic fight. In the shot, Sin-Dee and Alexandra are facing each other at opposite ends of the frame. In the surroundings, the audience can see the bright neon signs and white light coming from Donut Time, implying the harsh reality of the situation and the truth just revealed to Sin-Dee. There are also several advertising posters and signs that can also be seen in the background, and because of the large depth of field of the wide-angle shot, all these elements are in focus. These small details in the setting indicate the incredibly busy world Sin-Dee and Alexandra live in. Their lives are filled with so many chaotic ups and downs, but they keep pushing through it all every day.

The high saturation and high contrast colouration in the film reflect both the lively nature of the characters, and the narrative’s brutally honest depiction of their situation. In an interview, Baker stated that he chose a high saturation look for the film “because these women are so colourful” (Marine). Indeed, the bright golden-yellow of Sin-Dee’s hair and her colourful surroundings, such as the bright red in the iconic Donut Time eatery where the first and last scenes are shot, effectively support the women’s funny, energetic nature. At the same time, the harshness of the colour also mirrors the confrontational approach of the film. Just like the colouration, the tough situation of transgender sex workers like Sin-Dee may be difficult to watch and acknowledge at times. But Baker shows the audience that whether the world accepts it or not, these women are ever-present in Hollywood and have incredible stories and struggles that deserve to be told and heard.

The duration of the shots in this film are quite short and emphasize the urgent nature of Sin-Dee’s mission, generating excitement in the audience for what is to come. For example, in the scene where Sin-Dee and Alexandra meet Nash at a restaurant, there are several cuts to quick shots showing different angles of the same conversation. The same is done in the scene showing Sin-Dee and Dinah fighting on the street, and in several other scenes throughout the film. These short shots, shown in quick succession, are reflective of Sin-Dee’s tireless nature. They also help bring attention to the few takes in the film that are considerably longer in duration. In one long 9

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take, Razmik is seen fellating Alexandra in his taxi as they go through a car wash. This sequence shot shows a moment of simple pleasure in privacy from the fast-paced, chaotic lives of Alexandra and Razmik.

However, the brief nature of this type of long take in the film suggests that these chaos-free moments are rare in the characters’ harsh lives.

In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the lives of two transgender sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella and Alexandra, are shown to be filled with chaos, excitement, and brief moments of peace. Their lively, colourful personalities are expressed through the vibrant colours of the film, and the energetic camera movements that follow them throughout their adventurous day. Through bold cinematographic choices, the film brings the audience close to its characters, absorbing the viewer into Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s world. The film reveals the universality of their story, showing that in spite of the harsh reality of their daily lives, these women find the strength, determination, and humour needed to push through to the end of every day.

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Works Cited Bastanmehr, Rod. “'Tangerine' Was Shot on an iPhone, But Director Sean Baker Still Pines for Celluloid.” Vice, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/exqzak/talkingtangerine-with-filmmaker-sean-baker-253. Accessed 5 Dec. 2017.

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thomas. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2008. PDF File.

Marine, Joe. “How the Filmmakers Behind Sundance Hit 'Tangerine' Shot on an iPhone & Got Cinematic Results.” No Film School, https://nofilmschool.com/2015/07/tangerinesundance-iphone-5s-sean-baker-radium-cheung-interview.

Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

Tangerine. Directed by Sean Baker, 2015.

Thomson, Patricia. “Tangerine.” The American Society of Cinematographers, http://www.cinematographer.org/ac_magazine/February2015 /Sundance2015/page5.php. Accessed 5 Dec. 201

11

Realism Through Sound and Mise-en-Scene in Boyz in the Hood Trynne Delaney

John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood explores themes of blackness (especially black masculinity) in America through a coming of age narrative. Set in South Central LA, the film presents a diverse range of experiences and struggles that resonate with inequalities and violence that persist to this day in underprivileged communities. Some inequalities and violence explored are: gun and gang violence, drug addiction, poverty, racism, and classism. Though the story centres on Tre Styles and his relationship to his wise and devoted father, Furious, the stories of Tre’s friends are also essential to understanding the different levels of privilege that can exist within one community, or even one household. The structure of the film shifts from Tre’s childhood (1984) to his young adulthood, culminating in Tre’s complete loss of innocence (1991). Sound and mise-en-scène are essential to the film as a whole as they signal the attitudes and atmospheres that are experienced and produced by the characters. The film score and rap music are used in tandem to integrate traditional and contemporary styles and ideologies of film. Singleton effectively creates a film which does not cater to the traditional white gaze (though it does still cater to the male gaze) and uses signals familiar to black folks to advance the plot embedded in the mise-en-scène, as it is an essentially realist film.

The opening of Boyz N the Hood relies heavily on sound to set the film’s overall tone. We are introduced, without the ability to see the action (only the title cards and a few quotations), to a few black men, and the recognizable sounds of a car, and a gun, then shooting, and screaming. All realistically mixed to provide both context and realism.

To promote this realism, a high level of fidelity is maintained throughout the film. Diegetic sounds are prioritized over non-diegetic.

The sound perspective shifts as we are brought close to the shooters, and then hear them drive away into the distance, and hear the voice of a child saying “they shot my brother.” In the case of this opening, what is closest to our perspective tends to be what we should be paying 12

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attention to. In providing us solely with the sound and no images to accompany it, Singleton creates the illusion that we are only auditor witnesses to this crime. The sound is revealed to be diegetic as the viewer is introduced to the young characters who are discussing the shooting of the night before. This places the viewer (especially a relatively privileged viewer) in a similar position to the characters: though we know that these crimes exist, we have not yet seen them.

The diegetic sound detached from an image allows the viewer to enter into the world of the film with Tre. Effectively, it causes the viewer to relate to Tre’s curiosity and innocence.

The mise-en-scène does a similar job early on. The first visual shot the viewer is given is of a stop sign—this places us in a neighbourhood or community location, as well as performing the double duty of providing a subtextual message. The crimes indicated through the diegetic sound that has now transitioned into the daytime noise of chirping birds and planes, signals that these crimes should “STOP”, and indicates through an extended zoom that the “STOP” is addressed to the viewer—it becomes her responsibility to act outside of the diegesis of the film. Other indicators of location are the presence of unleashed dogs and trash on the streets, both of which imply that this is a neighbourhood of lower socio-economic class.

A relatively shallow depth of field is employed throughout the opening scenes, which indicates the closeness and cramped nature of the neighbourhood. This strengthens the sense that these characters are stuck here. The natural feel of the neighbourhood, and the world of the film, is reinforced through the lighting, which appears realistic and natural in brightness, colour, and contrast. Indoors, it appears that a three-point lighting system is employed.

To demonstrate the time period, the mise-en-scène is filled with artifacts and signs of the 1980s. This is done in costume through; for example, the Hello Kitty backpack worn by one of the girls, the hairstyles, and sweaters with ‘80s patterning. The time period is also evoked through props such as Bush/Reagan posters. These posters not only effectively establish the time period, but they also establish the political position of the rest of the film as working against the conservative politics of the US and their disservice to the black community. This political stance is emphasized by the characters’ 13

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acting, as Tre’s young friend flips Bush/Reagan posters off, suggesting that these children are already aware of the negative effect of government policy on their lives at this young age.

As the young characters enter the crime scene with the Bush/Reagan posters, the score begins to rise in volume while it is mixed with the characters’ dialogue and actions. The rise in volume takes place as the tension heightens and Tre is exposed to the first evidence of a dead body. As Tre’s young friend describes the separation of blood and plasma, the scene fades into children’s drawings of trauma, death, and police presence on the classroom walls.

This sound bridge leads into the white teacher’s settler-colonial centred discussion of Thanksgiving. In the scene that follows between the teacher, Tre, and Tre’s friend, a definite rhythm is established. The dialogue between the higher-educated white woman’s speech and the African-American Vernacular of the black kids heats up and Tre takes the lead in the classroom, and the power dynamic shifts. The shots shorten and place characters face to face, or otherwise rely on eye line matches to sustain tension as dialogue overlap begins between Tre and his friend, and they eventually end up wrestling at the front of the classroom. All these techniques are used throughout the rest of the film, especially to maintain parallels as Tre ages.

Boyz N the Hood is strong formally as it is loyal to its source material: the actual communities of South Central LA in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The mise-en-scène is essential in building themes and foundations for parallelism in the rest of the film. The subtext of the film is often contained in the mise-en-scène which provides political details that are not necessarily mentioned explicitly in the dialogue of the film. In addition to providing the viewer with temporal and local context, the mise-en-scène and sound make signals that might be more apparent to black viewers than white viewers, perhaps hailing people who are not often hailed directly through the form of film. The smooth transitions made with sound bridges give the film the quality of a memory rather than a series of events, contributing to the idea that this is a realist film.

John Singleton’s stance is strong and consistent from the opening seconds of the film, and only layers as the film progresses. Though it is a realist film, the quotations that appear at the beginning of the film before the first shot ask the reader to always reflect back on their present situation as they are enveloped in the highly conceived world 14

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Singleton presents. Nothing happens accidentally in the film, though it may appear so initially. This is the real talent attached to good realism and Singleton is precise in his direction of the story, which is devastating, but not out of the ordinary as a narrative in contemporary America.

Works Cited Singleton, John. Boyz N the Hood. Columbia Pictures, 1991.

15

The Question of Reality in Behind the Mask Alex Elvidge

The metacinematic film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Scott Glosserman, 2006) follows a graduate school journalist named Taylor (Angela Goethals) as she and her crew seek to film a documentary about aspiring horror slasher Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel). Over the course of the film, Leslie informs the crew of his intended horror filminspired killing spree and reveals the logical explanations behind seemingly supernatural illusions in slasher conventions. On the night of his intended massacre, Taylor and her crew decide that they cannot let him go through with his plan, inadvertently becoming themselves victims in his equation in their attempt to stop the murders. The film language of this mockumentary functions to deliberately question the reliability of popular artistic culture and examines, through a metahorror film format, the manipulation of human perception. Alternating between grainy, low-quality documentary film footage and a high definition cinematic style, Behind the Mask has the viewer doubt the trustworthiness of their own perceptions and the reliability of reality over cinematic creation by deconstructing the tropes and conventions of the slasher film genre. This essay will examine the film’s metacinematic structure and how this style forces the viewer to question the trustworthiness of reality when it is juxtaposed with the unreliable, artistically constructed medium of cinema. Glosserman experiments in particular with contrasting cinematographic techniques, unrestricted versus restricted narration, and sound fidelity to separate the diegetic “reality” in his film from the idealistic slasher fantasy which Leslie attempts to emulate. The film’s language manipulates the viewer’s certainty of the truth to such a degree that by its resolution, the audience is forced to question whether the film’s diegesis is represented by the seemingly realistic documentary footage or whether “reality” can be found in the scenes shot with dramatic, Hollywood quality cinematography representative of traditional slasher style. The film language of Behind the Mask presents themes of uncertainty and untrustworthiness, leading the viewer to question both the 16

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manipulability of human perception and the authenticity of constructed images versus the reality from which they derive.

The ambiguity between cinema and reality is not initially obvious in Behind the Mask. For the first hour of the film, the audience is led to understand that the scenes in the diegetic world are the ones that are shot on low-quality documentary footage. After the opening credits, the viewer is immediately shown a reel of news footage which uses an expositional monologue in the form of a voice-over looped on top of a montage of eerie shots of the town. This exposition establishes that the diegetic setting of this universe is one where infamous slasher villains in Hollywood horror films such as Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddie Kruger actually exist. The news footage has a nearly square Academy aspect ratio which transitions to widescreen as soon as the news footage cuts to the in-progress documentary filming, which indicates to the viewer that they have now entered the diegetic world of the film.

The use of film language is significant in how the viewer understands this as “reality”, as Glosserman employs many cinematography and sound techniques which make the documentary seem more realistic, particularly when juxtaposed with the artificial nature of the film’s more cinematic world. The grainy quality and digital noise which characterize the low-budget documentary scenes, evident particularly in the poorly lit nighttime shots, increase the sense of realism. The documentary footage is done almost exclusively with handheld shots, evidenced by the shakiness of the cameras, without the use of any expensive movie equipment like a dolly cart or tracks to take away from the gritty realism of these scenes. These shots alternate between two cameramen, Doug (Ben Pace) and Todd (Britain Spellings), the commentary of whom can often be heard in a low, muffled volume as if from behind the camera, offering sound perspective as their dialogue is not picked up clearly by the single directional mic that they are using for their amateur documentary.

The audience can also hear intentional “errors” in sound such as when the cameramen shuffle with the mic causing muffled bumping noises which, in a more professional production, would likely be removed in sound editing. The overall poor sound quality coming from the cameramen makes the documentary sequences feel more realistic because it draws the viewer’s attention to the metacinematic 17

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nature of this film. This is amplified by having the characters appear more realistic by means of their natural human error: stumbling over their words, having their film equipment appear in the frame, bumping into the mic, and directly addressing the fact that they are making a film. Other ways in which the film uses sound to increase the realism of the documentary footage is through an apparent lack of sound mixing or added atmospheric musical effects in post-production, likely done in an effort to emphasize the sound fidelity of the documentary world in accordance with what the viewer would expect to hear in “reality”. While the majority of the sound present in the documentary footage is the characters’ dialogue and the realistic ambience of white noise caused by the outside world and the film equipment, the more cinematic scenes are characterized by non-diegetic high-pitched sound effects which create an eerie, ominous timbre typical of Hollywood horror films. While the documentary footage maintains a realistic sound fidelity by stripping down the sound editing to the very basic diegetic sound that one would expect to hear in the real world, the cinematic slasher scenes appear more artificial due to non-diegetic sounds added in post-production to emphasize the feelings of a higher production quality.

When the shot suddenly cuts from the low-quality wide-angle lens of the documentary footage to a more professional looking high definition telephoto lens, the viewer understands this as a departure from the film’s established diegetic reality to an inside look at events as if from Leslie’s slasher film fantasy. The first of these cinematic scenes is in the film’s credits sequence, which opens like a traditional Hollywood slasher movie with a pretty, innocent looking girl who thinks she sees something in the bushes. It is revealed later in the film that this girl is Kelly (Kate Lang Johnson), Leslie’s intended victim and the “virgin survivor girl” trope in his planned slasher film-inspired slaughter. This being the opening sequence of the film, the viewer would likely interpret this as the diegetic universe and thus expect this dramatic cinematic style to continue for the remainder of the film.

When this scene is immediately followed by the lower quality documentary footage, there is a flaunted causal gap which asks how this high definition suspenseful opening sequence relates to the film’s established process of shooting a documentary about an aspiring serial killer. This gap is temporary as the film later revisits this same scene, this time filmed through the handheld cameras of the documentary 18

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crew, as Leslie explains the “behind-the-scenes” process of creating the illusion of a realistic horror experience for his victims like we see Kelly undergo in this opening sequence. With the viewer unaware of the reasonable explanations behind the seemingly supernatural occurrences in this opening sequence, tension and suspense are created by means of traditional horror film editing. The camera observes Kelly from a voyeuristic subjective shot from behind the bushes, leading the viewer to infer that she is being watched. The following shot is an eye-line match of Kelly looking back at the bushes, which increases the viewer’s suspense because though the narration is not completely unrestricted in this scene, we know that there is someone in the bushes by means of the previous subjective shot, while Kelly remains unaware of being watched.

There are also several subjective shots from Kelly’s perspective in this scene, which adds tension to the audience’s viewing by having them experience the scene as if from Kelly’s own point of view. To place this scene at the start of the film is to have the audience experience the effect of being immersed in Leslie’s fantastical horror movie world. When later in the film Leslie gives logical explanations for how he creates these illusions, it is difficult to understand how they could be terrifying when he breaks them down to essentially parlour tricks. However, to have this scene at the start of the film before the audience is shown how any of these horror illusions are created allows the viewer to share the perspective of Leslie’s victims right from the outset, which is perhaps done in an effort to have the viewer subconsciously empathize with Leslie’s victims throughout the course of the film in spite of the temptation to view him as a charming protagonist.

While Glosserman uses sound fidelity in particular to convey the realism of the documentary footage in Behind the Mask, he uses suspenseful editing, dramatic lighting, and focalized narration to suggest that the high definition cinematic scenes are fabricated constructs in Leslie’s mind. We initially understand these cinematic scenes as only existing in Leslie’s imagination because they play out exactly as he describes them, with his commentary often looped in a voice-over on top of these scenes to explain what he plans to happen in each sequence. His voice-over even has the capacity to stop these sequences at will; for instance, one of the cinematic scenes jolts to a halt mid-action when Leslie’s voice-over says “stop” as he decides to 19

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rewrite these events. This instance indicates that Leslie has the capacity to alter these scenarios, suggesting that these cinematic scenes only exist in his malleable imagination while the reality of this film’s diegesis is shown through the lens of the documentary cameras.

The cinematic sequences often open with an overhead angle shot giving the sense that the viewer is looking down over a fabricated set, increasing the aesthetic artificiality of these scenes. To have an overhead shot be the establishing shot of the scene also suggests the viewer’s omniscient perspective and the more unrestricted narration in these cinematic sequences, while in the documentary format the narration is focalized through the two cameramen. The subjective shots and eye-line matches in the cinematic scenes increase suspense as they allow the viewer to share the victim’s point of view.

Another way in which Glosserman has the audience view these scenes as more unrealistic than the documentary footage is by use of lighting. When the film parodies slasher conventions in Leslie’s horror fantasies, the shots are filmed in low key lighting, with many shadows to emphasize the dramatic and ominous nature of these scenes. While the contrast and hard lighting in the cinematic scenes hint at the fabricated quality of Leslie’s slasher fantasy, the even, high-key lighting in the documentary sequences suggests a more realistic setting. Leslie even uses film terminology to describe his planned scenarios, stating that in order to create an ideal horror film illusion it is necessary for his “virgin survivor girl” to have a “supporting cast”. Leslie himself evidently separates his idealized fantasy from the real world by referring to it in cinematic terms. As is demonstrated in analyzing the film’s opening sequence, Glosserman uses carefully focalized narration, suspenseful editing, and dramatic cinematography to suggest that while the documentary footage represents “reality” in Behind the Mask, the more cinematic sequences parody the slasher film genre to represent the horror trope fantasy in Leslie’s mind.

While initially the viewer is led to believe that they can easily differentiate between reality and Leslie’s slasher trope fantasy based on the film language examined above, the relationship between reality and artistic emulation becomes more challenging as Glosserman’s film progresses. The midpoint in Behind the Mask occurs an hour into the film when Taylor and her crew abandon their documentary to stop Leslie from following through with his murders. At this point in the 20

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film, the two-camera digital format is abandoned. Taylor and her cameramen find themselves within Leslie’s imagined cinematic world.

The viewer is finally able to see Doug and Todd, the faces of whom had thus far been hidden in the off-screen space behind their cameras, and these characters are thrown into a universe that, prior to this point, they had only heard about from Leslie’s descriptions. If these characters existed in the “reality” of this film’s diegesis, how is it that they can now also exist in what was established to be Leslie’s fictional imagination? This jarring and exciting shift muddles what was initially a clear distinction between reality and fiction, and has the audience question which cinematic elements of what they have seen and of what they are yet to see are actually real.

In the transition of these central characters from their low quality digital documentary footage to a high definition Hollywood style format which only existed previously in Leslie’s imagination, the film takes on an ambiguous reality. To enforce the thematic significance of this final cinematographic shift, as the high definition cinematic universe becomes the film’s new diegesis, Taylor says, “It’s over, the documentary is done”. In accordance with this film’s aforementioned pattern, the first shot in the transition from documentary footage to high definition is an overhead angle shot, indicating that the viewer is moving from a restricted, subjective narration, focalized through the two handheld cameras, to a more unrestricted, objective point of view. This first overhead shot indicates that the story is no longer being told to these characters. Instead, they have now become characters within the story. Behind the Mask uses its metacinematic structure to have its audience question the distinction between reality and fiction. The documentary format gives Leslie’s interview-style interactions with the crew a strong sense of reality.

However, this realistic universe begins to blend with Leslie’s idealized “slasher” fantasy until eventually reality and fiction become indistinguishable from one another.

The first hour of Behind the Mask seeks to clearly differentiate between its diegetic reality and Leslie’s fictional slasher fantasy.

Glosserman employs intentional sound “errors” and fidelity as well as amateur looking cinematography to suggest that the grainy, low-quality documentary footage provided by Taylor and her crew represent the film’s actual setting. To alternative ends, Glosserman uses professional sound mixing, dramatic lighting, suspenseful editing, and unrestricted 21

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narration to imply that the scenes which have a cinematic Hollywood quality are representative of slasher film conventions which exist within Leslie’s imagination. By blending the film’s diegetic reality and fabricated cinematic fiction through the sudden placement of the established “real” characters into Leslie’s slasher movie-inspired fantasy, Behind the Mask renders the viewer uncertain as to the nature of reality and truth. While the director leaves the viewer with a sense of doubt, his examinations of the unreliability of reality and art can be understood as a search for meaning. The film asks why senseless atrocities happen through the documentary crew’s attempts to discern meaning in the acts of supernatural serial killers. Behind the Mask examines the reality to be found in artistic constructions and uses film language to convey the uncertainty afforded by the manipulability of human perception.

Works Cited Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Starz Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

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Repression and the Politics of Memory in Haneke’s Caché Kelly Li Eminently compelling in its allegorical nature, Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) both presents itself as a self-contained fiction and gestures beyond at a political issue which resists gesture, precisely because it is “hidden” from collective memory and national identity. Engaging with the concept of the moving image at a diegetic level and at an abstract level, Caché’s explorations suggest limitations of the medium and the inevitable manipulation of audience perception. The filmic medium has the unique mimetic ability to record and immersively reflect our external reality, but it can also operate outside the conditions that govern our reality, such as temporality and incongruity between subjective experiences, as well incongruity between the subjective and narratives collectively accepted as fact. Just as our memories are inherently imbued with particular intention and are simpler in comparison to the past events they mimic, film mimics the recorded, more complex physical reality but dictates our perception of it through exclusion and context. By maneuvering medium-specific possibilities, Caché examines tensions between past, memory, and present; it renders existent a hidden past, and in doing so forces it into confrontation with individual repression, national identity, and the politics of memory.

Haneke’s project employs film’s unparalleled ability to operate outside of set focalization and temporality, to glide through perspectives and time frames seamlessly without situating them. The entirety of the film is primarily focalized through Georges, but in the first act, the narration splices in strange, unexplained, brief images into the regular action and exposition. In the first twenty minutes, while we are being familiarized with the Laurent family and the perplexing videotapes they are receiving, the unfolding plot is interrupted twice by images of dark, shadowy rooms. The first appears only for a very brief

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moment—a medium shot of a child with a bloodied mouth. The second is marginally longer, a point-of-view shot in which the Steadicam advances through the room until it locates the same bloodymouthed child standing in the corner, who then looks up, acknowledging the camera. We shortly come to realize that these scenes parallel the drawings on the postcards as well as Georges’ dreams of his childhood. We eventually learn also that the child’s name is Majid, and these rooms are in their shared childhood home. The initially unpresented information, unexplained montage, and doubtfulness surrounding the dreams’ accuracy to the past create a sense of abruptness and inexplicability, relating the past and the present with a confusing immediacy that comes to permeate the entire film.

With these unprocessed, uncomprehended, immediate images, Haneke suggests a Freudian repression in Georges, characterized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle by an inability to “remember all that is repressed within him, especially perhaps its most essential elements” (56). On one hand, this delineation does not seem to entirely match Georges’ behaviour, as the dreams may constitute as some form of memory, and Georges is capable of suspecting Majid of sending the tapes, and even tells Anne a version of their childhood story, indicating that he does remember the events. On the other, these dreams and retellings appear consistent with Freud’s childhood screen-memories, which repress a particular memory through the construction of an alternate memory that “contain[s] not merely some essential elements of the patient’s childhood, but all such elements” (“Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” 34). To understand these complete, yet incomplete memories, we may draw upon Maureen Turim, who writes that in film, "Flashbacks in most cases terminate at precisely the point at which they must be sealed off, in which the imperatives of fixing interpretations and reaching judgments in the present must be imposed. Made aware of the past, the spectator is freed to forget it once again" (12). Georges’ dreams depict only the premises of the lies he told about Majid as a six year old—that Majid coughed up blood, that he approached Georges with an axe—and no more. They recapitulate the content of the lie but fail to include any more context, 24

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which could reveal the instability of the lie and force him to presently reinterpret the memory, thus saving him from having to confront the consequences of his past actions.

For Freud, such early childhood memories are “experienced at the time without understanding, but are then subsequently understood and interpreted” (“Remembering” 34). Though Georges, at six years old, would have been too old for early childhood, there is a similar original lack of understanding and subsequent understanding and interpretation—he would not have understood the weight and consequence of his actions, because the matter would have seemed far simpler. Though he likely recognized it as malicious, he could not have known that his actions would cause Majid to be sent to an orphanage, where the mistreatment and lack of care or education would come to preclude the hope for a good life. Residual childhood guilt, as well as adult, unconscious guilt (springing from the capacity now to understand the gravity of such actions), lead the event to remain a screen-memory, fully remembered in terms of detail, but interpreted in a limited fashion and closed off to further consideration. His extreme reluctance to retrieve the memory and open it to scrutiny reveals itself when Anne confronts him after they view the footage of Georges in Majid’s apartment. Unrelentingly, he deflects her interrogations and only concedes to simplistic, non-implicating responses. He repeats: “I can’t remember,” “I don’t remember,” and “I don’t know.” However, under her probing, he exposes some degree of awareness in brief statements: “The usual stuff kids lie about. Things you make up. Stupid stuff”, “One day he was gone, and I was glad. And then I forgot all about it. That’s natural, no?”.

Georges finally divulges the incriminating nature of his lies to Anne after the film’s turning point, Majid’s suicide. Inescapably brought to accept and confront the past, he has a final dream, wherein the consequence of his lies is apparent. A scene, filmed in a single stationary, extra-long shot, depicts young Majid being forcefully extricated by two strangers from Georges’ mother’s home and driven away, presumably to the orphanage. There is no explanatory scene before Georges’ admission to Anne that discloses this information, and it is corroborated in a subsequent scene of Majid’s son’s confrontation 25

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with Georges. The fact that Georges seemingly independently acknowledges this information, coupled by the factualness suggested by the dream’s visual style, implies that Georges possessed this information all along, repressed.

The pathology of Freudian repression is inextricable from repetition, wherein action replaces memory in reproducing the unconscious mental content. The patient is unaware “of the fact that he is repeating it,” and the content is represented in their “manifest personality—his inhibitions and unproductive attitudes, his pathological characteristics” (“Remembering” 36-8). Repetition is evident in Georges’ recurring opinion in the beginning that the tapes are a schoolboy prank of Pierrot’s friends; this is a belief that children do not necessarily understand when they do malicious things selfishly and for fun, and a belief that pardons himself for his own childhood crime. Moreover, it is especially evident in his continued aggression towards Majid. He is convinced that Majid is trying to ruin his life with the tapes and the notes, just as young Georges was convinced that Majid was trying to ruin his life by joining his family, and in both past and present he is determined not to let Majid interfere. This aggression is directed later at Majid’s son, who, after his father’s suicide, replaces him in his role as Georges’ antagonist, and even at the black cyclist in the beginning of the film.

Georges’ repression of guilt and consequent refusal to acknowledge the crime or Majid’s suffering is the defining feature of the film’s political allegory. The story of the Georges’ repressed memory of a childhood crime parallels France’s collective repressed memory of the Paris massacre of Algerians in 1961, and both narratives stand complete unto themselves. In both repressions, the unrecognition of tragedy and death is potentially even more critical and inhumane than the unrecognition of the crime, because the aggressive unwillingness to acknowledge forcefully disregards the existence of the victim through a prohibition of discourse. The content and experience of Majid’s suffering are never explored nor developed, and we know nothing of his unhappy life, except its use as a tool to antagonize Georges’ life. Likewise, the massacred Algerians are unnamed and unrecognized. Unacknowledged and unremembered, they become only 26

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elements of the nation’s collective repressed memory, rather than lives in and of themselves. In Violence, Mourning, Politics, Judith Butler delves into the function of public obituaries, which serve “as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed” (23). When employed in the service of nation-building, the omission of an obituary decides which lives do “not qualify as a life and [are] not worth a note,” thus excluding those dead from a societal definition of humanness and, reciprocally, creating “a conception of the human that is based their exclusion” (21-3). The ungrievability caused by unmarked deaths annihilates them from collective memory and vanishes them from discourse. Excluded from humanness, these victims are not only dehumanized, but their lives are derealized as well, which prompts Butler to importantly beg the question of whether or not violence can take place on the condition of this unreality, where the Other is “neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral” (22). Indeed, Majid’s life, and the massacred Algerians’ lives never exist frontally in action or in dialogue, but only pragmatically in reference to their implications on their lives of their white aggressors. It is these white aggressors who lead the narratives, whose emotions and experiences are portrayed and comprehensible, and who, ultimately, are centred as subject rather than the as other.

In her essay “‘I Wanted You to Be Present’: Guilt and the History of Violence in Michael Haneke’s Caché,” Ipek. A Celik addresses the way in which Majid takes form as the alterity to Georges’ subjectivity, highlighting the “inaccessibility of Majid’s subjectivity throughout the film,” which “erases any possibility of recognition of the other” (77). Majid’s son is equally othered, in his namelessness and inability to relate neither to his own nor to his father’s life, as the pair only play a role in a story that is focalized through Georges’ perspective. For Celik, Majid’s “absent presence” and the “prioritiz[ing] of the history” through the perpetrator’s lens, as well as the “narrative closure” provided by his dreams undermines the film’s “progressive political agenda” (77-8). However, her criticism fails to address the necessity of this focalization in order to portray the repressed psyche of the perpetrator. All these elements stabilize the film in order to achieve what is arguably Haneke’s intention, a direct 27

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portrayal of the state of France’s national repression—somewhat aware of its violent past, but not self-condemning nor comprehensively reflective—rather than an explicitly moralizing narrative that promotes specific action and reparations. To convey the latter would be to do the nation’s psychic work of moving past repression for it, less powerful than forcing a direct self-confrontation of repressive barriers.

As such, Haneke’s project may fail to be, as Celik contends, politically progressive, but it does accurately depict a portrait of the state of unrecognition and repression.

Celik’s description of Majid as an “absent presence,” however, evokes more than the spectral figure she seems to intend in her criticism. Majid suffers both a physical death in his suicide and, in being derealized, a kind of death in his alterity. While death is quite clearly an absence, and “presence” juxtaposed next to it is living, the juxtaposition itself creates a living that is in relation to a death. One’s presence, felt as relative to another’s death, is the origin of the condition of mourning, which Freud describes as “regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, and ideal, and so on” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 243). He characterizes mourning as like melancholia with the exception of the latter’s “disturbance of self-regard”, in its “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity” (244). Until his suicide, Majid lacks any kind of action, and we see him only in his bare apartment devoid of anything but the necessities, walking feebly or sitting. He appears outside the apartment just once when he is forcibly removed by the police, and even then sits in the police vehicle with a still resignation.

His self-confinement to his meager apartment suggests the “cessation of interest in the outside world,” and he does not even appear in the apartment with his son—he is only ever alone, interrupted by Georges’ presence. His seeming lack of relationship with his son, despite his son’s claim that his father “raised him well,” suggests the “loss of capacity to love,” and his breakdown, recorded on tape, reveals the “profoundly painful dejection.” This expression of Freudian mourning in Majid opens up Haneke’s portrayal to a very narrow gap of the 28

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victim’s experience, but still does not offer the victim’s subjectivity.

The film prioritizes perpetrator’s perspective, and even the victim’s suffering is mediated through the perpetrator’s gaze, as well as the audience’s.

Grounded directly in the historical content of the allegory, Majid likely mourns the death of his parents, as they themselves were amongst the massacred, unrecognized Algerians, as well as his own desolate life after the ruined hope of a good upbringing under Georges’ parents. Though the incident occurred when he was a child, we see the mourning in him as he appears in the film, much later in life, as though he never recovered from his grief. Mourning for Freud is a work, a normative process, occurring when “reality testing [shows] that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachment to that object,” as slow as it may be, “carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathetic energy” (244-5). Butler considers mourning in terms of “the transformative effect of loss” (11), wherein “we develop a point of identification with suffering itself” (19). But given that these Algerians have been rendered ungrievable in their exclusion from humanity, is grief on their behalf and the process of mourning thus blocked?

Majid’s prolonged mourning cannot be ended because he cannot ask or answer the questions of “who have I become?”, “what is left of me,” or “what is it in the Other that I have lost?” (19)—the questions and answers that allow grief to be a process, to develop, and to transform oneself. These questions, for Butler, requires one to “[posit] the ‘I’ in the mode of unknowingness” (19). In mourning the ungrievable, Majid is unable to proceed in the process of mourning, and he is thus denied the positing of the ‘I’. This condition of a deprived self-identity is doubly exacerbated when combined with the fact that his own life and body, as an Algerian and the Other, is derealized by his nation. Within this society, Majid sees himself paradoxically as the Other and is an “absent presence” unto himself.

Caché’s allegory implicates the generation after those affected in the site of violence, through Majid’s unnamed son and Pierrot. Because both characters figure so centrally in the diegesis, the question arises of how they are affected by the original incident and what their roles are 29

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within it. Derealization is not created at the event of an individual’s death and the subsequent lack of obituary, but in the moment that one is considered an other. As such, Majid’s son, as a second generation Algerian living in a France where the memory of the violence is still repressed, is as other and derealized as his father was. Accordingly, the film portrays him with respect to the same alterity as in Majid, failing to name him and to give any content to his character apart from his role as Georges’ antagonist. However, the prohibition on discourse supposes a possible alleviation in the second generation—the last scene of the film depicts Majid’s son with Pierrot, having an inaudible conversation. This is potentially vital to an interpretation that supposes any kind of political progressiveness to Haneke’s project, because here, the perpetrator’s son acknowledges the victim’s son as human. We may presume that this scene indicates that Majid’s son told Pierrot of his Georges’ crime and Majid’s suffering, and Pierrot, feeling the injustice, decided to join in the project of the tapes in hopes of forcing his father to acknowledge the repressed memory. Though the conversation is silent and thereby contentless, the action caused by it is implicated in the entirety of the film before the scene—the attempt to open discourse and to acknowledge the crime and the victim does not necessarily succeed, but is at the very least brought to the fore of the perpetrator’s mind.

This stationary, extra-long shot of the conversation between Pierrot and Majid’s son elicits the sense of surveillance that so many sequences in the film also suggest. Caché’s cinematography consists of an unnerving amount of stationary camera and long shots, which resemble the footage of a surveillance camera, even when the characters are assumedly not being recorded in the diegesis.

Surveillance footage and film as a medium of art are interestingly opposed—they are, in a way, antithetical. Surveillance records indiscriminately in the mode of exact documentation, archiving every second. But in its indiscriminateness, it denies any subjectivity of the individuals recorded. Film art, on the other hand, manipulates recordings of reality, often prioritizing subjectivity and rarely disguising itself as objective. Haneke uses comparatively few long lens or close-up shots focused on his characters, and in doing so surrenders any 30

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particularly subjective shots for the illusion of constant surveillance. In recording elements of Georges’ life, the second generation takes surveillance as a kind of pre-emptive measure. Surveillance exists always for a purpose—to record a crime, should one happen, and identify the criminal. Thus, in its indiscriminateness, it assumes culpability in everyone, in every action, in every moment. And so appears to be the approach of the second generation to prevent violence before it happens, and to archive all events, so that in the event of a perpetrator who refuses to be accountable, repression is impossible.

CachĂŠ may not advocate a progressive agenda with regards to the political issue it draws attention to, but it captures the event without the blatant assumption of anything other than culpability, as would a surveillance tape. Deviating from surveillance in its thorough ability to convey subjectivity and relationality, it brings to light a past that was previously entirely shrouded in a mute national denial. While doing so, it illuminates the tension in things simultaneously known and unknown to collective and individual memory.

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Works Cited Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics”. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4:1, (2003): 9-37. Web. 15 December 2015.

Caché. Dir. Michael Haneke. Les films du losange, 2005. Film.

Celik, Ipek A. “"I Wanted You to Be Present": Guilt and the History of Violence in Michael Haneke's Caché”. Cinema Journal 50.1 (2010): 59–80. Web. 15 December 2015.

Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through”. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. Trans. John Reddick. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia”. On the History of Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Print.

Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.

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Framing reality in Mirror and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Rose Fitzpatrick

The Revenant is the most famous example of Tarkovsky’s much-cited influence on Alejandro Iñárritu. However, the Russian director’s impact is visible in many of Iñárritu’s other works as well, including the comedy Birdman, which shares a number of parallels with Tarkovsky’s Mirror. For instance, both films are about artists near the end of their lives, and both examine the theme of nostalgia. Most notably, the two films also share certain techniques of framing and blurring reality, as well as discussing the concept of reality or “truth.” The effect of these techniques in both films is to raise questions about the relationship of artistic production to objective truth, another parallel that links them thematically as well as cinematographically.

One of the most important aspects of Tarkovsky and Iñárritu’s framing of reality is the way they contextually situate their filmic worlds within external reality, hence creating the context for what can be seen as “real” or “fake” within the fictional universes of the films. The directors establish three layers of reality: extra-film reality (the audience’s reality), intra-film reality (usually a slight variation on the extra-film reality, such that it is still recognizable to the audience), and intra-film unreality (dreams, hallucinations, and to some extent memories).

One of the main ways external reality is established in both films is through allusions to real-life or historical events, entities, and especially artists and works of art. In Mirror, for example, Tarkovsky includes clips from Soviet news footage about real events like the Spanish Civil War, as well as mentions of real events that fit within the film’s timeline. Like the Siege of Leningrad, which the main character, Alexei, experienced as a child. Birdman, on the other hand, is rife with references to social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter that 33

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clearly situate the film within the present world of America in 2014. In terms of real artists, Mirror includes numerous references to classical Russian authors and thinkers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Chaadaev; and there is also a copy of the real poster for Tarkovsky’s own film Andrei Rublev in Alexei’s apartment in one scene. Birdman, on the other hand, is based around a fake stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s real short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, and the protagonist, Riggan, claims to have met Carver when he was a child. Birdman also includes a monologue from Macbeth.

Hence, both films seem to have realistic settings with elements traceable to the world outside the films and thus to the viewer’s own reality.

And yet some of these references to the external world are modified in a way that seems to suggest that the films’ realities are not quite the same as our own. Mirror, for example, heavily relies upon the real, externally published poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky. Yet within the film the poetry is never attributed to him, but instead to the character Alexei, who is based upon him. Similarly, in Birdman, the superhero “Birdman”, is based off of the real Batman franchise (which also starred Michael Keaton as the titular character); but this slight modification of the character’s and actor’s names forces the audience to distrust this real-life correspondence to some extent, hence giving the film an internal reality all its own that is not totally traceable to the world outside of it.

The third layer of “reality” within the two films is equally as disorienting as the second; it consists of events which seem as though they cannot be real even within the film’s universe and yet, through careful manipulation by the directors, are never proven nor disproven— that is, intra-film unreality. In Mirror this blurred unreality mainly consists of Alexei’s dreams and of confused timelines. While the dreams are clearly marked off from the “real” events in the film by their black and white colouring, the fact that the viewer is even able to see these dreams, which obviously occur within Alexei’s mind, is complicated through the film’s unclear perspective. The film is clearly meant to be from the aging Alexei’s perspective, given his voiceovers and the fact that young Alexei is shown within the frame (suggesting 34

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memories) but old Alexei never is. Yet, the audience is sometimes given insight into events at which Alexei was not present: for instance, the beginning scene with Maria and the doctor. This disorients the audience and questions whose perspective is guiding these scenes. If it is still Alexei’s, and he is seeing things he cannot have been present for, then his perspective in other scenes cannot be trusted to have conveyed reality. If it is not Alexei’s perspective, then it is unclear precisely when these shifts in perspective occur. Equally problematic is the fact that one seemingly realistic scene, depicting Maria at her job in the print shop, is also shown in black and white. This is also a scene unlikely to be from Alexei’s perspective, which further complicates matters, possibly suggesting that dreams or unreality can come from an omniscient perspective in the film, and thus undoing our trust in the existence of an objective reality. This blurring helps to additionally blur the lines between Alexei’s dreams and reality— if the unlikely fact of Alexei’s being omniscient can occur within the film, or if there is some unexplained shift in perspective occurring at unclear points, then perhaps the events the poet sees in his dreams, such as hovering and ghostly reflections of the future in mirrors, are somehow realistic within this film, as well. Hence Tarkovsky, while seemingly separating “dream” from “reality” within this film, actually confuses the two.

Tarkovsky’s confusion of temporality, on the other hand, is achieved through specific application of long shots. In Mirror, occasionally a scene will suddenly shift timelines without a clear break in the filming sequence. One example is a scene where Alexei as a child is seen standing in one part of his house, and the camera pans to a different room, whereupon a noticeably older Alexei walks in, with no break to indicate the temporal shift between the two scenarios. This effect is intensified by the fact that the major roles of young Maria and Natalia (one belonging to the past and the other to the present) are both played by Margarita Terekhova and those of young Alexei and Alexei’s son Ignat (another past/present pair) by Ignat Daniltsev.

Thus, the faces shown on-screen are sometimes unhelpful when trying to discern the precise moment in which the current action is taking place.

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In Birdman, Iñárritu uses a slightly different approach to the concept of unreality, though he uses similar filmic techniques to confuse reality. In this film, unreality does not take the form of dreams and memories, but of hallucinations, both auditory and visual. These hallucinations are triggered by Riggan’s inner voice, and are personified by his former superhero character, Birdman. Alike Mirror, it is clear when Riggan is undergoing what the audience initially recognizes as a hallucination because these sequences are always initiated by a conversation between Riggan and Birdman. However, what initially appear to be hallucinatory sequences are, by the end of each of these sequences, blurred into the apparent filmic reality through a technique very similar to Tarkovsky’s temporal blurring shots: Iñárritu uses long (apparently continuous, though in reality edited) shots that do not show the interaction between “reality” and “hallucination” when they transition back to “reality,” therefore leading the audience to question where one ends and the other begins. For instance, at the film’s beginning, Riggan goes from hovering in lotus position to standing, but as the camera frame does not show his legs at the point of transition, it is unclear how he accomplishes this shift from the seemingly impossible to the obviously real. Another notable example of this technique is the end of the film, where Riggan is shown preparing to exit his window, and Sam is subsequently shown looking up at the sky with a smile on her face. Riggan’s actual exit from the window and any flying that the viewer might interpret from Sam’s reaction is left to the viewer’s imagination. This particular scene also makes the audience question whether earlier hovering and flying scenes were more than mere hallucinations. As in Mirror, double-casting also plays an important role in this film. Michael Keaton plays both Riggan and Birdman, leading the audience to question whether Birdman is a figment of Riggan’s hallucinations (a product of his mental illness— which is clearly present given the character’s use of cognitive behavioural therapy techniques) or a side of Riggan’s true thoughts and feelings that he simply prefers not to acknowledge. Given that conversations with Birdman always precede Riggan’s flying or other superpower episodes, the question of what the character represents is crucial to the film’s presentation of reality.

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The framing of Mirror and Birdman continues to blur our conception of what is “real” within the films. The idea that the directors’ respective filmic universes obey some laws of the viewer’s reality means it is impossible to dismiss all conceptions thereof and simply claim that “anything can happen” within these films as this would permit the discarding of any notion of what belongs to dreams, memories, and hallucinations and what is actually happening within the film’s present timelines. In other words, because of the films’ allusions to the outside world, the viewer is forced to feel that the line between imagination and reality does exist within the films and that it has to be drawn somewhere; however, thanks to the other two layers of reality and the blurring of them, it is very difficult to determine precisely where to draw this line. Another example of the “framing” of reality in the two films is the literal visual framing used by the directors to demonstrate both the viewers’ distance from the action and the different layers of action that can occur within a single narrative. In both films, the focal point of action is sometimes surrounded by a number of framing objects or viewpoints. This reminds the viewer that they are not in fact present in the setting of that action,the opposite of the cinematic aim to suspend the disbelief of the viewer.

A vivid example of this technique in Mirror is the scene in which young Alexei and his sister are watching a farm burn outside from a doorway inside their house, and the camera depicts the two children from behind, through another doorway. This framing is suggestive of the division between the viewers’ reality and that taking place within the film. Another instance of double-framing in Mirror is the repeated shot of a book about Leonardo Da Vinci, in which the viewer is shown the book, on the page with an image of the artist, the portrait hence being “framed” within the page. Interestingly, this book is also one of the instances of an allusion to external reality through the historical fact of Da Vinci’s existence: Yet in this scene viewers, who are also members of that external real world, are removed from the link to it. Tarkovsky alienates viewers from their own conception of reality, forcing further engagement with the question of what is real within the film as opposed to without it.

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Other examples of this technique in Mirror appropriately involve mirrors: for instance, a scene of young Alexei visiting a neighbour involves a sequence where the audience sees only the back of his head and his reflection within the literal wooden frame of a mirror. In a dream sequence, young Maria sees elderly Maria in her reflection. The relationship of this framing to the theme of reality is further complicated by the fact that it occurs within a dream. Here, Tarkovsky reminds viewers that they are not as in tune with elderly Alexei’s perspective as they might believe, and hence that their conception of what is “dream” and what is “real” is imperfect within this world.

Birdman sometimes uses mirrors in a similar manner. For instance, one relatively long conversation between Riggan and Leslie shows Riggan’s face only in the mirror of his vanity throughout its duration. Similar framing is used in several other conversations involving not just Riggan but other characters, as well. This may suggest the characters’ alienation from themselves, a factor in making their perception untrustworthy and hence conducive to unrealistic viewpoints. Another factor in the unreality of the film is the fact that it is principally concerned with theatre, an industry totally concerned with fiction. This is reflected both in high-angle shots of the stage used to show the division between what occurs onstage and what goes on off of it. One instance of this is the rehearsal seen from Sam’s perspective.

This stage framing is also not limited to the actual stage. For example, one scene of Riggan in a liquor store that involves framing reminiscent of a proscenium arch. This framing further complicates matters, bringing elements of the stage into real life and perhaps reflecting Riggan’s deteriorating understanding of the line between real life and performance. Another type of “performance” explored in the film is social media, which Iñárritu examines using smartphones as framing mechanisms similar to the mirror or the Christmas lights used in the scenes explored above. An example is a scene in which Sam shows Riggan a Youtube video on her phone. The video is the focus of the action, but the audience is removed from this video; instead of watching the video directly, the viewer is watching Riggan watch it.

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And the video itself is only a presentation of a real event seen just a few scenes previously, further complicating its status as something “real.” Additionally, social media itself is one of the details of the filmic universe that tie it to external reality— the unreality of reality and the anchor of social media is emphasized here through our distance from it. In this scene, and those like it, Iñárritu not only blurs the lines between fiction and reality in the film’s plot, he also forces audience to question what they themselves consider to be “real.”

Complementary to this visual blurring of reality is the commentary within the films on the nature of reality and of “truth,” especially in the context of artistic creation. In Mirror this is achieved in a number of ways, such as on the level of the narrator through voiceover: Alexei repeats lines from Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem “Жизнь, жизнь,” (“Life, Life”) which includes the line “Есть только явь и свет,” (“There is only reality and light”) throughout the film. “Жизнь, жизнь,” is a complex work of poetry in and of itself, and in the context of the occasionally unrealistic scenes in Mirror, it complicates the theme of reality even further. In addition, the theme is sometimes explored through different characters’ perceptions. For example, the conversation between Maria and the doctor near the beginning of the film includes a reference to Chekhov’s short story “Ward N° 6,” about which the doctor points out, “It’s all Chekhov’s invention.” While the story has other connotations in the context of the film, one effect of this line is to place the concept of invention and the inherent falseness of even realistic or Realist art in the front of the viewers, possibly in preparation for the rest of the film. There is also a scene in which Maria, who works at a print shop, becomes convinced that she has made a misprint. However, when the document in question is examined, it is found to be flawless, and Maria’s supervisor scolds her with the accusation “You created the whole situation!”. This not only suggests that some characters’ perception cannot but trusted, but also calls attention to the possibility of creating one’s own reality, another key part of artistic creation. Here Tarkovsky adds yet another layer to the theme of reality; not only is it sometimes indistinct from unreality, but one can even create one’s own reality, and this is especially true for artists like Tarkovsky himself.

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In Birdman, the theme of reality is explored largely through discussions about and scenes depicting life in the theatre. For instance, Mike repeatedly expresses an obsession with “truth” throughout the film, even demanding in one scene that he be allowed to drink real gin onstage instead of water. Mike also suggests that truth, paradoxically, exists for him only onstage and not off it, claiming he “pretend[s] just about every place else, but not out there”. The fact that the actors playing couples onstage (Riggan/Laura and Mike/Leslie) are real couples who both in the filmic reality break up over the course of Birdman adds another dimension to the idea of the connection and the contradiction between the two worlds of the theatre and of reality.

This idea is further explored through the motif of Riggan putting on and taking off wigs, a process that is shown at length a number of times over the course of the film and clearly suggests the inherent contradiction between theatre and reality. Additionally, separating the theatre from the real world is Iñárritu’s heavy use of blue lighting during onstage scenes, which has an eerie, otherworldly effect and also, serves to set these scenes off from those taking place in “real life,” emphasizing for the audience just how far from reality the enterprise of theatre, is.

The exploration of this theme in Birdman perhaps reaches its apex in the scene where a drunk man on the street recites the famous monologue from Macbeth that relies upon this contradiction between the theatrical and the real for its extended metaphor. This speech is being performed outside the theatre, amongst the “real world,” and seems to suggest that Riggan’s conception of reality, and therefore the audience’s conception of reality begins to break down here. Iñárritu only further complicates from this point forward, culminating in the final flying scene. The monologue is also immediately preceded by the proscenium arch framing in the liquor store, which further supports this idea of a breakdown between performance and reality, showing the way art can leach into real life and confuse one’s understanding of the latter.

The similarities between Mirror and Birdman in their approaches to portraying reality provide a clear example of Tarkovsky’s influence on Iñárritu. Clearly, in their exploration of this theme both films share 40

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a focus on art: not only portraying the lives of their respective artist protagonists, but also alluding to famous works of art and including discussions on what it means to create art, and how far removed such work is from the real world or from the truth. Both directors seem to reach the conclusion that art is constructed and is not exactly truth, but this does not detract from its value in any way; the films themselves are proof of this. Ultimately what is most radical in this particular parallel between the film is Iñárritu’s explicit treatment of a commercially successful, mainstream film as a work of art, a presentation that is only reinforced by his allusions (intentional and otherwise) to the more traditionally “artistic” Tarkovsky.

Works Cited Iñárritu, Alejandro G. Birdman. Twentieth Century Fox, 2014.

Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Mirror. Mosfilm, 1975.

Tarkovsky, Arseny. “Жизнь, жизнь.” Ruthenia, n.d., http://www.ruthenia.ru/60s/tarkovskij/zhizn.htm. Accessed 24 November 20

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Film in the Weimar Republic: Pandora’s Box and the Femme Fatale Jessica Wilton

In the wake of World War One, Germany underwent a fifteen year period of dramatic change—ranging from devastation, to prosperity, to collapse—commonly known as the Weimar era from 1919-1933 (Hans 15). Widely considered the “Golden Age” of German film, the Weimar Republic produced films that dealt with people’s ordinary lives in the machine age and imitated the unconscious (Fullbrook 35). A common thread amongst these films was the prevalence of gender stereotypes—their encouragement, as well as reversal—particularly in regards to the depiction of female characters. In the context of the Weimar period’s turmoil, as well as the role of the “New Woman” in society, these depictions can be seen as a reflection of the conflict.

Illustrated by the film Pandora’s Box (1929), Weimar era films portray the Weimar Republic’s “New Woman” as a femme fatale; furthermore, this character arose in Weimar films in response to male anxieties stemming from the trauma of the First World War, which also embodies women’s anxieties about destabilized gender roles via the uncanny.

Weimar Germany’s film industry had a unique opportunity to develop in isolation from the universal film community due to embargoes on German exports and international imports of film (Hans 28). As a primarily “closed circuit,” the era is an exceedingly interesting time for film study as one can more directly correlate a film’s content with its contemporary historical background. This historical background is riddled with turmoil, both politically and economically, but also in relation to the new role of women in society, and men’s responses to these new roles (Hans 22). According to Anjeana K. Hans, the trauma of the First World War “undermined the individual’s masculinity” (20) as war neurosis was seen as feminine.

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postwar Germany, the perception was that their new role was radical and threatened the status of men (22). Mary Fullbrook, similarly, writes that women’s emancipation was “more theoretical than real” (37) as stereotypical roles of the wife and mother still persisted in Weimar Germany. During this period, the “Legend of the Stab in the Back” was rampant amongst the Germans— a myth claiming that Germany had lost the war at home, instead of the battlefield, placing the blame on German women (Hans 22). Essentially, during the Weimar era women did gain a degree of emancipation, but it is more accurate to say that women were mainly perceived to have entered a radical new role, while still being held to the standards of the stereotypical maternal figure. This perceived emancipation was then seen as a threat to men, particularly those reeling from the trauma of the First World War who were both emasculated by war neurosis and were indoctrinated to believe they had lost the war because of a stab in the back.

In order to analyze the role of the femme fatale in Weimar film and place it into a historical context, one must first establish a definition of the figure. Barbara Hales, in her analysis, defines the femme fatale with Virginia Allen’s interpretation of a “woman who lures men into danger, destruction and even death by means of her overwhelmingly seductive charms,” as well as the opposite of the maternal, “good” woman (227). According to Richard W. McCormick, both the right and left wing in this era valourized this “good” figure (660). The main female character in Pandora’s Box, Lulu, certainly fits this definition as she seduces multiple men, including Schön, Schigolch, Alwa, and eventually Jack the Ripper. Out of these men, her seductions kill Schön and put Schigolch in danger. Schön dies on his and Lulu’s wedding night, after walking in on his wife flirting with Quast and Schigolch in the newlyweds’ bed. Lulu’s seductive charms first put Schigolch in danger as Schön attempts to shoot him for being sexual with his wife. Then, possibly by accident, Lulu shoots Schön while grappling for the gun after he tells her to shoot herself so he does not have to be a “murderer too.” In this scene, both men are put in danger, or killed, directly due to Lulu’s seduction, which places her character firmly into the genre of femme fatale.

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With the evident demonization of women—alongside persisting prescriptive maternal roles in reality—the female figure in Weimar Germany was one of duplicity and conflict, which films of the era illustrate. Barbara Hales argues that the femme fatale conveys crisis of male identity resulting from the First World War, and that this figure constructs women as both criminal and double as a result of this trauma (224). She uses Freud’s concept of loss as a psychoanalytic framework to essentially argue that men suffered an “unidentifiable loss” during the war, which left them unable to unify their identities and therefore transferred their psyches on the femme fatale character to resolve this (227). Hales does not focus her analysis on Pandora’s Box, but does describe the film’s main female character, Lulu, as an “instinct driven woman possessed by insatiable sexual desire” (228).

Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, her desires become evident with the entrance of both Schön, the man she’s having an affair with, as well as Schigolch, her first client (and possibly her pimp or father).

Hales explores the concept of “doubling” female nature, where the femme fatale is the monstrous, masculine sexual entity, and the maternal figure is her feminine counterpart (232). The femme fatale’s sensuality is associated with that of the masculine woman, the powerful and socially dominant, who was seen as a “threat to the social order,” (232) which was of course patriarchal. In contrast to Weimar films— like Metropolis, where there is unambiguous female doubling in the role of maternal Maria and her sexual, robot double (235) —Pandora’s Box does not include an explicit “good” woman character, at least with a large role. Although Charlotte, Schön’s first fiancée, only appears sporadically in the first forty minutes of the film, there are some cinematic techniques and plot points, which paint her minor role as that of the “good woman.” In Act One, Charlotte’s father brings up the rumours of Schön’s infidelity and she responds by saying that she “[doesn’t] care about gossip.” Here, the film portrays Charlotte as passive, choosing to ignore the gossip, and think the best of people, rather than confront her fiancé. This explicitly contrasts with Lulu’s intense jealousy—and refusal to be passive—during Alwa’s play when she throws a tantrum over having to perform in front of her lover’s fiancée. The film juxtaposes these two female characters even in their physical appearances and movements; for example, Lulu has black hair 44

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whereas Charlotte is blonde, and it does not seem too far of a stretch to associate the lightness of Charlotte’s physical features with a form of purity. As well, Charlotte’s unexaggerated, smooth movements in the play scenes greatly contrast with Lulu’s sporadic, intense, and passionate movements in the opening scene where she embraces Schigolch. Thus, it is evident that to some extent, Hale’s concept of doubling can be found in Pandora’s Box through the characters of Lulu and Charlotte. Following her theoretical framework, this doubling reflects the un-unified male psyche projected onto the female characters as a result of the war. Essentially, using Hales’ argument to analyze Pandora’s Box as a case example, Weimar film appears to portray female characters in a dichotomy of sinner versus saint— femme fatale versus the maternal woman, respectively— resulting from the projection of the fractured psyche of men onto these characters.

Hans similarly places the femme fatale as resulting from war trauma, but focuses particularly on women as the uncanny. She writes that Weimar films first represented the female characters as “empowered, the over-powered, violated, or eradicated” (Hans 2) and that this representation addresses both the anxieties of men—who perceived themselves as threatened by women— as well as those of women, who were faced with new challenges alongside new opportunities (3). Hans argues that men were powerless in combat during World War One and when they returned home, the new role of women appeared to strip them of any power that remained (6). With the femme fatale as a literal danger to the film’s male hero, the character becomes a figurative threat to the male viewer by extension, therefore embodying the perceived threat of the New Woman in Weimar Germany (7). With the previous discussion placing Lulu firmly into the category of femme fatale, it is evident that she is a threat to the male characters in the film. However, her threatening air goes beyond plot points as Schön, multiple times, speaks of Lulu as dangerous. He tells his son, Alwa, to “beware of that woman” and says, more than once, that she will be the death of him—which she ultimately is. In this way, Pandora’s Box depicts Lulu as the embodiment of a threat to men, which reflects the perceived threat of 45

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the New Woman in Weimar Germany. Ultimately, for Hans, the femme fatale narrative is an “attempt to reassert power over [the woman], subordinating her within the story,” but also illustrates aspects where these women cannot wholly be contained (Hans 9).

Pandora’s Box illustrates the first part of this argument, as Hans argues herself, in the ending scene of the film where the femme fatale is killed

by Jack the Ripper. She says that Lulu’s “promiscuity and seductiveness is punished with execution by the ultimate embodiment of sexual violence, Jack the Ripper” (Hans 2). However, still following Hans’ claim, Lulu is also not entirely contained, as exemplified by the fight at the play between her and Schön. She absolutely refuses to be “brought to her senses” by anyone, including Schön, and becomes violent towards her lover multiple times throughout the act. However, Lulu’s demise at the hands of a man ultimately negates her initial refusal to submit, and can even be read as an act of retribution for her murder of Schön. In fact, the fight scene instead seems to illustrate the demonized Weimar New Woman and her refusal to stay in her stereotypically passive place. This interpretation differs from Hales’ in the sense that Hans considers only the femme fatale role, not in relation to any “good” woman characters; in this case, only the threat of the femme fatale to men is significant. The latter scholar’s argument relates the femme fatale character in Weimar film even more directly to the trauma resulting from World War One; the men perceived themselves as rendered powerless—first by war, then by the New Woman—and so portrayed the femme fatale role as the embodiment of this threatening woman who is then eradicated to reassert men’s lost power. Pandora’s Box can certainly be read in this light—as an attempt at resolving male anxieties—as Lulu’s character aligns perfectly with the threatening femme fatale character, and is ultimately served “justice” by Jack the Ripper.

Not only can Pandora’s Box be read as a technique to overcome male anxieties and reassert power, but can—and, I argue, must—be read within the framework of a female viewer rather than a male viewer. Patrice Petro contends that this type of interpretation is widely missing from Weimar film narratives where “the male spectator has served as the unquestioned model for analyses of spectatorship” (xix).

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In respect to this, Petro interprets depictions of female characters in Weimar culture from the standpoint of female subjectivity, rather than male. For example, Petro chooses to understand Lulu as “exemplary of both the modern woman and the female reader in Weimar” due to a scene in Pandora’s Box where she, the viewer, watches her read a woman’s magazine (80). She argues that this illustrates the character as deriving pleasure outside of the male gaze and, therefore, parallels the “role of the female reader who is given something specific with which to identify” (80). The lack of female spectatorship is an evident issue in Hales’ work since, while she does provide a detailed and compelling analysis, she fails to mention the female spectator and only acknowledges male anxieties with changing gender roles. It could appear that Hans also falls into this category, but a significant part of her analysis is spent on the idea of female characters embodying the uncanny and so does give respect to female anxieties. For Hans, women became an embodiment of the uncanny in themselves while trying to adjust to their new roles as they are “both familiar and alarmingly changed” (Hans 7). Her definition of the uncanny is twofold; firstly, the act of watching a film is an “innately uncanny experience” as it tries to replicate life where there is none (57-58) and, secondly, the female character embodies the uncanny when her identity destabilizes by shifting from maternal body to a threat to the (male) viewer (55). Since Pandora’s Box is a film, the viewer can already detect uncanniness by Hans’ definition, but a sense of the uncanny is also prevalent in the mirror scene when the viewer can see Lulu and her reflection, which is then ominously replaced by the angry figure of Schön. By seeing both Lulu and her reflection simultaneously, she appears to be doubled which parallels being simultaneously familiar and changed. There is also uncanniness in the death scenes of both Schön and Lulu, since the actual death blow is obscured from the viewer. The obscurity evokes a sense of the sublime, a term often related to the uncanny, in that these scenes elicit an unsettling sense of fear where the terror is known to be there, but its content is unknowable. This concept of unknowable terror and the uncanny mirrors women’s anxieties about destabilized gender roles in the Weimar Republic in a historical context. Society promised women a degree of social mobility, while demonizing the women who acted on 47

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this promise (McCormick 662). In this way, for women, the terror of destabilization is both within themselves and a threat from the outside, therefore indefinable and ultimately unknowable.

Much of Hans’ analysis is placed in the context of male anxieties and so could be problematic in regards to Petro’s emphasis on the female viewer. However, McCormick’s work appears to resolve this tension. He argues that you must include the presence of female spectators in any complete analysis of film (as they too had anxieties about destabilized gender roles in the Weimar Republic), but they cannot preclude the dominant interpretation nor can the dominant preclude others (662-663). Essentially, Hans, Hales and Petro’s interpretations are all necessary, separately and in conjunction, in order to strive for a complete picture of the portrayal of women in Weimar film. Consideration must be given to the dominant interpretation— since its dominance arose for a reason, and can reveal insights about the era it was formulated in—but to not include the marginalized interpretations of female spectatorship is to continue the patriarchal structure of the Weimar Republic.

In conclusion, the femme fatale is an enigmatic character that can shed a significant amount of light onto the complicated portrayal of women in Weimar film. By analyzing Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929) through the frameworks of Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Patrick Petro and Richard McCormick, it is evident that this portrayal is deeply associated with the trauma and destabilized gender roles caused by the First World War. Essentially, the war fractured the psyches of German men, causing a split in their identities, which the femme fatale character embodies in comparison to the “good” woman figure. With the new perceived threat of women at home—after feeling powerless on the battlefield—the femme fatale character first represents the threat, and the character’s eventual demise exemplifies a way for men to reassert power. Lulu’s plot-line in the film follows both narratives in the femme fatale role who is the opposite of Charlotte, a threat to men (Schön) and is ultimately murdered by a man. From the female spectator’s perspective, this character is also the embodiment of the anxieties they felt in regards to destabilized gender roles, which is depicted in Pandora’s Box as the uncanny.

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Works Cited Hales, Barbara. "Projecting Trauma: The Femme Fatale in Weimar and Hollywood Film Noir." Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007): 224-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688286.

Hans, Anjeana K. Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic. Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2014.

Fulbrook, Mary. A History of Germany 1918-2014: The Divided Nation. Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

McCormick, Richard W. "From "Caligari" to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film." Signs 18, no. 3 (1993): 640-68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/317486.

Petro, Patrice. Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Pandora's Box. Directed by Georg Whilhelm Pabst. Performed by Louise Brooks. Germany: Nero-Film, 1929. Film.

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“This is she!” : Considering Queer, Black Masculinity in Harold Perrineau’s Performance as Mercutio in Romeo + Juliet Libby Schofield

Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet stars American actor Harold Perrineau in a supporting, but memorable, role as the charismatic Mercutio. Examining one of Perrineau’s most spellbinding scenes from the film—the Queen Mab speech—this essay will analyze the ways in which Perrineau’s performance of Mercutio presents alternative readings of the character. This will be explored through a discussion of casting choice and relevance of this scene in relation to the film as a whole. Additionally, a detailed analysis of Perrineau’s artistic choices as an actor considers the effects of these choices on the audience’s understanding of Mercutio.

According to IMDB, Romeo + Juliet is Perrineau’s sixth film acting credit, with all previous roles being minor, making him a largely unknown actor at the time of the film’s release. In comparison to upand-coming leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, it makes sense to cast a lesser known actor, in order for the leads to shine without having to compete with someone else’s star power. Additionally, in a largely white cast, Perrineau plays one of two black characters with substantial speaking roles in the film (the other is the smaller role of Captain Prince, played by Vondie Curtis-Hall). Portraying Mercutio as a black man offers Perrineau unique opportunities to explore the character’s masculinity and sexuality within the context of the film’s centering of white, heterosexual masculinity. That being said, Perrineau has also been cast, literally, as the “black best friend,” a trope familiar, in recent decades, in nearly all genres of television and film wherein a black character plays a comedic second fiddle to the white lead. While this may arguably be true in the case of Perrineau’s Mercutio, the actor’s performance overshadows ideas of tokenism and leaves the audience reveling in his performance.

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The Queen Mab speech takes place relatively early in the film, when Romeo still pines for the unseen Rosalind, and sets the stage for Romeo’s arrival at the Capulet’s party. Viewers may anticipate what is coming next: Romeo meeting Juliet and kicking off the titular aspect of the plot. First, however, we are dragged through a long and complex scene in which Romeo must be convinced to attend the party at all— and which quickly morphs into a dark foreshadowing of future events and dangerous consequences of love. Furthermore, it sets Mercutio as an important character in his own right, and central to the future catastrophes of the film, denying the audience the meeting of the two lovers and shifting the focus entirely on one of its supporting characters. His speech, at first theatrical and performative, quickly becomes dark, engulfing him physically and emotionally, signalling to the viewers the absence of a more complex character backstory from the original text and the adapted screenplay.

The moments leading up to the speech feature Mercutio squealing up to Sycamore Grove in a red sports car with a vanity plate, dressed in drag and cackling joyously. His outfit includes a full face of makeup, a platinum blonde wig, silver heels, and a matching sequined miniskirt and bustier, contrasting comically with Perrineau’s beard, muscular arms and toned torso. He fills Mercutio with energetic movement: he struts to his friends, gyrating his hips, flashing his buttocks, singing, and offering an over-the-top performance consistent with a drag persona. When convincing Romeo to attend the party— after pulling the invitation out of his miniskirt—he at first tries to cheer up the moping Romeo, lovesick for Rosalind. “If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you bring love down,” he says (1.4.27-28). Perrineau presents this line with both tenderness and mischief, offering genuine advice but transitioning into a lighthearted manner, singing the word “down,” as he pulls DiCaprio’s Romeo towards the party and puts him in a playful chokehold. When Romeo resists again, Mercutio mocks his lovesick sorrow, Perrineau drawing out the “O” of the text into a long sarcastic note, putting his hands to his temples in mock surprise, separating the word from the rest of the sentence and playing against the text. “…Then I see Queen Mab hath been with you,” Mercutio says to 51

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Romeo, and holds his finger up to the camera to reveal a tablet of ecstasy (1.4.57). Perrineau adopts a softer, mesmerizing, rhythmic tone, staring unblinking into the camera and moving his outstretched finger back and forth as if to hypnotize Romeo and the audience.

Perrineau’s performance shifts dynamically throughout the speech, oscillating between breathlessly giddy and uncontrollably distraught. He often acts out the words he speaks, galloping when he says, “she gallops night by night” (1.4.75), saluting at “she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck” (1.4.87), and crossing himself at “swears a prayer or two” (1.4.192). While these may seem like childish acting tricks, Perrineau delivers them with a vibrant mockery, aiding in his tirade against love and its follies. His Mercutio becomes embittered, yelling, “And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,” reaching out and grabbing Romeo’s neck in an unexpected moment of violence (1.4.88).

By this point the audience understands his speech is no longer about Romeo’s resistance to attending the party, but a reflection on the inner workings of Mercutio’s mind. Looking at the ground and outstretching his arms, he spits out both bitterly and sarcastically, “This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,” spitting out the word “backs” in anger towards these invisible maids on the ground (1.4.97). Becoming violent again, he shouts out the next lines while kicking and beating the invisible maids in front of them, picking one up and throwing her in an odd but undeniably passionate miming sequence. Throwing himself to his knees, the scene reaches its climax as he hysterically shouts, “This is she!” and repeats it again with even more power, although the original text only says it once (1.4.100). Screaming this interpolated line at the top of his lungs, leaning into it with his head and torso, Perrineau emotes a raw and haunting pain in Mercutio’s facial and body language, tensing his entire body and distorting his face into one that looks on the verge of tears. The stakes in this moment are clearly extremely high, if not for the plot then at least for Mercutio. Silence follows, letting both Mercutio and the viewers dwell on this emotional explosion. When a concerned Romeo reaches out to touch him, Mercutio jumps, and emits a small terrified noise, as if being pulled out of a deep and dark reverie. His facial expression is one of shock or confusion, as if unsure what had just happened, and then becomes 52

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poignant—Perrineau uses small muscle movements in his mouth and eyes to signal the character’s internal surge of emotions. His Mercutio is clearly tortured, and is at once flamboyant, angry, manic, bitter, and heartbroken.

But why? Textually, Shakespeare gives Mercutio no backstory and Luhrmann adds no extra dialogue or explanatory flashbacks.

Given that the subject of his speech foreshadows the foolishness and folly of love, coupled with Perrineau’s distraught performance of it, we are left with the impression that Mercutio is possibly queer in either his sexuality or his gender. His drag costume, initially comedic, takes on additional and weighted meaning, particularly when he screams “THIS IS SHE!” The she is no longer Queen Mab, nor a euphemism for ecstasy or love, but is Mercutio, denied an acceptance that he desperately seeks, and only able to express himself through drag, a caricature of queer identity. Proclaiming himself as she not once, but twice, Mercutio’s desperation frames his speech both as a commentary on the structural follies of love, and as a frustration and desire to be included in these follies in ways that hegemonic masculinity and homophobia will not allow. This also accounts for his violence at the invisible “maids,” whom he metaphorically beats—Mercutio may jealously view these “maids,” like Rosalind and later Juliet, as barriers to his own participation in relationships with men, or at the very least, representative of relationships that they can have, and he cannot.

Furthermore, transitioning the scene from chiding a lovesick Romeo to an emotional breakdown, Perrineau’s queer-coded performance links the two—he implants the question into the audience: is Mercutio in love with Romeo? Is Mercutio frustrated with his friend’s privileged ability to fall in and out of love, where the same opportunity is not accorded to him and his own desires? There are no explicit answers, but Perrineau’s performance does plausibly account for this, and aligns with Mercutio’s later outburst at Tybalt in defence of Romeo, resulting in his death—in this reading, Mercutio dies for his love, much as the heterosexual protagonists do, and increases the haunting foreshadowing of his speech twice over.

Playing a black, queer man in 1990s America, where memories of the AIDS epidemic are still raw, would be something very close to 53

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revolutionary, particularly in the context of Lurhmann’s gang-filled, hyper-masculine, hyper-heterosexual world. Perrineau’s performance of Mercutio challenges the film’s hegemonic masculinity, which is aggressive, violent, and white. Instead, Mercutio revels in his drag persona and flamboyant sexuality—flashing his buttocks, gyrating, pulling the invitation out of his skirt—and bares his most vulnerable emotions to his friends during his emotional breakdown in the Queen Mab speech. Perrineau establishes Mercutio’s masculinity as flexible, open, and queer in representation if not in action. The Queen Mab speech positions him as a complex, queer-coded character within the context of a hyper-masculine and hyper-heterosexual world, and Perrineau’s multifaceted performance of Mercutio enables these nuanced and socially updated alternatives to Shakespeare’s original text.

Works Cited “Harold Perrineau.” IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0674782/. Accessed 28 October 2017.

Romeo + Juliet. Directed by Baz Lurhmann. 1996. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library. http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/html/Rom.html

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Three Minutes of Melancholy: A Technical Analysis of Sound and Mise-en-scene in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia Tyler Fleck Lars Von Trier’s 2011 film, Melancholia begins with an opening sequence that acts as the film’s overture, a prelude that joins together a number of seemingly unrelated images into a highly stylized montage that stands as its own structural unit. Of the eight shots that comprise the opening three minutes of the film, each is as meticulously crafted and as decadent as a Renaissance painting. Von Trier films the entirety of the sequence in slow motion, allowing the viewer to study and consider the meaning of each frame as if it were a gallery exhibit. The time and space of the sequence remains nonlinear with the rest of the film’s narrative, and together with the slow motion effect, works to prepare the viewer for the slow pace and bleak tone of the film. But these aspects also aim to put the viewer inside of the mindset of the film’s protagonist, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) by illustrating the character’s distorted sense of self and time caused by her oncoming depression. In fact, Justine’s psychological state is repeatedly communicated with references to famous works of art, both visually and sonically throughout the film. With a close frame-by-frame analysis of these eight opening shots, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which Von Trier uses sound and mise-en-scène to communicate character information to his audience.

Melancholia opens by fading in to a close-up shot of Justine as she slowly opens her eyes. The lighting of the sky behind her fills the rest of the frame with mottled grey and wisps of rose that blend together to match Justine’s skin tone, hair, and the sleeplessness that nests her eyes. These tones give the frame a muted colour palette, causing the blue of Justine’s irises to pop coldly against the background. Dunst’s performance is equally tepid as she stares deadpan and expressionless into the camera. The colours and performance in this opening frame work together to immediately establish a sense of Justine’s character.

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As the viewer soon discovers, Justine has a history of lapsing into bouts of depression. The instability of her emotions costs her her wedding night, and her mood continues to decline as the film progresses until she is rendered nearly catatonic. The care and warmth that Justine receives living with her sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is at times met with a biting, scathing cruelty, foretold here by the contrast of the coldness in her eyes against warmth of the backdrop.

Justine’s character is further represented by the nondiegetic music that accompanies the opening shot. As is the case with many of the paintings Von Trier references throughout the film, Richard Wagner’s composition, Tristan und Isolde, was composed in the 19th century, and provides the soundtrack for the entirety of the opening sequence.

The music fades in as Justine opens her eyes, suggesting that, although the music remains nondiegetic, it is somehow representative of an awakening within Justine. There is a lull in the composition, pausing for just a breath as Justine continues her moment of stasis. From behind her head, birds begin to fall from the sky. The pitch of the strings drifts from high to low, mirroring the descent of the falling birds. In fact, the entire composition is characterized by frequent harmonic and tonal shifts that become a fitting motif for Justine’s abrasive personality throughout the film. The sonic component of this shot creates the sense that Von Trier is not only trying to communicate Justine’s emotion, but wants to immerse the viewer in a literal work of art as he does so.

Von Trier continues to play with depth of field in the following shot, as an extreme long shot reveals Justine for the first time in her bridal gown. Von Trier creates a linear perspective within the composition, increasing the similarities between the film frame and a painting by placing rows of trees in parallel lines that appear on each side of the frame. A large sundial is strategically placed in the center-bottom of the frame, while Justine is pictured much smaller in the background. Along with the scale of the parallel trees, this creates a size diminution that further emphasizes the amount of distance between foreground and background, adding an incredible sense of depth to the composition.

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manage to add an even further sense of distance between foreground and background. That she appears so small and insignificant in relation to the sundial, like Von Trier’s use of slow motion and nonlinear editing, reiterates Justine’s distorted relationship with space and time. It is apparent from studying this shot that Von Trier does not want to simply draw the viewer’s attention to the foreground, but to maintain a striking balance between foreground and background simultaneously.

Melancholia’s relationship with historical paintings is more overtly explored in the following shot as Peter Bruegel’s 1565 painting, Hunters in the Snow, fills the entirety of the frame. Ashes and embers rain down onto the canvas, not unlike the shot of birds falling behind Justine’s head that opens the film. That Von Trier should choose to depict the burning of a piece of art dating from the early modern period also bears certain significance. Most of the paintings that Von Trier makes explicit reference to in this film belong to the period of Romanticism (John Millais’ 1851 painting, Ophelia, is referenced later in this sequence), a movement that arose as the dark underbelly of enlightenment ideals and scientific reason. Artists of the Romantic era rejected modernity and instead chose to use their art to emphasize notions of sentimentality, emotion, and human beings’ place in nature.

As such, one possible interpretation of this shot is that Von Trier is attempting to convey the complexities and frequent failures of modern medicine and scientific reason in the treatment of mania and depression. As epitomized through the character of Justine, the struggle of these illnesses often annihilates the rational world. The relationship between art and depression, however, can be a much more profound one. Justine’s depression is certainly never explained rationally, but is continually referenced by these works of art, making the interpretation a bit more enticing.

Von Trier changes location in the fourth shot, abandoning the terrace and plunging the viewer into outer-space, thus marking the viewer’s first introduction to the planet, Melancholia. Although it shares the frame with Earth, Melancholia looms in the foreground, taking up the majority of the screen space, and making the Earth appear dwarfish in the background by contrast. The framing and composition of Melancholia is strikingly similar to that of Justine in the opening shot, 57

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and the exhaustive, slow rotation of the planet mirrors her lethargic movements both in this opening sequence, and throughout the rest of the film. As Von Trier’s camera moves in closer, Melancholia eventually occults the earth entirely - a symbolic representation of Justine’s oncoming depression. Each of these technical similarities between Melancholia and Justine (screen space, framing, and movement) works to establish the sense that the two are, in some way, intrinsically linked. The emotional significance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde also becomes more apparent during this shot. The composition is livened as the orchestra swells to a crest, increasing in loudness to match the immensity of scale that Melancholia portrays. Although the sound clearly does not emanate from the planet itself, the music creates a sense of fidelity that makes it seem as though the occurrence of the music is the direct result of the viewer’s encounter with the planet. Stringed instruments take the forefront of the orchestra, giving it a rich texture and timbre that is at once sizable and saturnine.

The subsequent shot returns the viewer to the terrace in a long shot of Claire carrying her son, Leo (Cameron Spurr), across the estate’s golf course. As she slowly moves across the landscape, her feet sink into the earth, as if in a poignant last effort to leave behind some trace of existence before the impact of the intruding planet. To her left, in the background, stands a white flag, mimicking a flag of surrender. The rhythm of Tristan und Isolde matches the almost stagnant movement of Claire as she eventually falls to the ground, pulled down by the earth. This is graphically matched by the next shot which depicts Claire’s black horse as it also collapses to the earth. A noticeable difference in lighting joins these two shots, as well as the subsequent shot together. Each of the three shots appears over lit and takes on a distinctively artificial quality that is absent from the other shots that comprise the opening sequence.

The first shot of Claire contains diurnal lighting, though it is later established that the event actually occurs in the evening, serving only to complicate the sense of time and space further. Meanwhile the shot of the horse reveals a midnight sky, with cobalt blues and an ethereal, golden hue. The last of these three shots depicts Justine in center frame, plainly dressed once again, now in neutral colours. Her arms are 58

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outstretched on either side of her body, and an assortment of moths and other winged insects swarm the periphery of the frame, caught mid flutter in the background and foreground alike. This shot prefigures Justine’s complicated relationship with the natural world, which increasingly features into the film’s plot as it progresses. In a later scene in the film Justine announces with confidence that “life on Earth is evil,” a sentiment that Von Trier also explored in his previous film, Antichrist (2009). Though, interestingly, as Claire, Leo, and the horse sink toward the earth, it is Justine who is photographed as if she is an incarnation of Mother Nature.

The eighth shot of Melancholia’s opening sequence is another long shot which depicts Justine standing on the far left of the screen and Claire parallel on the far right. Between them is Leo. Each character’s costume has changed to their wedding attire. This shot in particular is notable for its masterly symmetrical balance as trees once again line both sides of the frame, becoming smaller in distance until they converge at the estate mansion. Beyond the mansion, three planets align in symmetry hovering over Justine, Leo, and Claire. Claire appears here as a visual balance to Justine, with Leo meeting them in the middle. This is fitting on a narrative level as well, considering that Claire often functions as a balance for Justine’s emotional terrain throughout the film: she is at her most active when Justine is most lethargic, expresses panic when Justine is calm. Her son, Leo, on the other hand, serves as a medium between the two, rarely expressing any concern for his surroundings although he certainly bears witness to many of the dismal events of the film’s plot. The planets looming in the distance also offer visual clues into each character: on the left of the frame, where Justine stands, Melancholia erupts through the blackness of the clouds; on the right, where Claire stands, the clouds have parted for the sun. The unknown planet over Leo is only partially eclipsed, dark on Justine’s side, bright on Claire’s, affirming his place between the two. This shot continues to evoke a sense of the painterly in its use of chiaroscuro shadow and deep space composition, and is readable as a balance of dark and light as the viewer’s eyes move from the left to the right of the frame. The achievement of this final shot is 59

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its ability to relay the mood of each character by way of deftly crafted symmetrical balance.

Each of these technical aspects of Von Trier’s craftsmanship and mise-en-scène allows the viewer insight into his character’s psychological state. Justine’s distorted sense of self and time is captured in the opening sequence by Von Trier’s choice of slow motion and nonlinear editing, which serves to reflect the character’s stagnation. Justine’s character is further reflected in the culmination of colour palette, performance, and costume changes as the sequence unfolds. Furthermore, with references to historical paintings and music Von Trier is able to further communicate the mindset of Justine while simultaneously establishing her relationship with other characters, as well as the planet, Melancholia. The depth of field and symmetrical balance of the compositions transforms each frame of this opening sequence into its own crestfallen version of the paintings that Von Trier is attempting to evoke. However, whether or not Melancholia is Von Trier’s grandeur statement on modern art remains to be seen.

What is clear, though, is that the stunningly photographed opening sequence of the film highlights the relationship between depression and art by making Justine appear as if she herself were trapped in one of these somber works of art.

Works Cited Melancholia (2011). Directed by Lars Von Trier. Entertainment One Films, 2012. DVD.

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Hearing the World: Melancholia in Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue Aidan Ingalls Blue (1993), the first film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy, follows a Parisian woman named Julie, after an accident that kills her daughter and her husband. In response to the loss of her family, Julie's grief leads her to eradicate her former external connections and to isolate herself. Kieślowski traces the development of the grieving subject from mourning to melancholia through Julie’s movement in Blue: she is steely and apathetic until its final minutes when she is able to confront her loss as more than just a loss of the particular, but of world. The film portrays melancholia by cinematically emphasizing the phenomenological framework of this world-grief. This framework is largely consistent with Heidegger’s analysis of one’s relationship to their own death, but also expands upon the relation between grieving and world, in which otherness perpetually interrupts being.

Kieślowski’s cinematic phenomenology of grief stages a dialectic between the subjective and intersubjective elements of being, tracing the psychological possibility of a return after tragedy to the other—that is, a return to the world.

Kieślowski uses the colour blue to express the allencompassing character of Julie's grief. As Julie dozes on a lawn chair at an unspecified time after the funeral, Kieślowski shows her jerking awake to the swell of an orchestral score. Simultaneously, a heavy blue tint saturates the screen, fully enveloping her sitting form. Passively, Julie is thrust from the seeming immediacy of world, into a primordial alienation. The director begins the scene with a medium close-up, before tracking left and panning right, such that Julie's eyes are glued to the movement of the camera, seeming to acknowledge a presence, loosely embodied by the camera. The camera feels disembodied like a spirit, detached from Julie's physical body, but somehow still fixed to her Being. She cannot shake her eyes from it nor hide her muted terror. These elements—the camera’s alien presence, the blue tint, and 61

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the surging score—together lie on the boundary between the diegetic and nondiegetic. They exist for the purpose of symbolically and cinematically representing Julie’s grief for the audience, but the ‘objective’ quality of the camera also gives these elements a peculiar forcefulness because Julie reacts to these jarring elements. Kieślowski uses this technique to suggest that this anxiety belongs to her ontologically, but it is also detached from her, as she is helpless to its alien presence within herself. Kieślowski never reuses this totalizing blue tint, giving the first onset of anxiety a distinctive place in the narrative of Julie's melancholia. After the initial shock, Julie’s anxiety retreats into the ever-present, but obscured, background of her life.

The next instances of Kieślowski uses of blue are comparatively dampened in that they do not tear the protagonist out of the narrative the way the aforementioned instance does. The director often uses beads of reflected blue light projected onto Julie's face, rather than a complete tint, especially during moments of self-isolation.

Kieślowski uses this technique as Julie surveys her emptied house, and again on the stairs of her new apartment, having locked herself out, reluctantly realizing that she must reach out to her neighbours for assistance. A blue crystal chandelier, one of the only possessions Julie keeps from her former life, also plays a significant role in the film-- a symbolic reference of her familial loss. Julie initially keeps the chandelier away in a box, but as the film progresses, it draws her into its orbit. Kieslowski films her through the strings of blue glass, panning from left to right as Julie, transfixed, contemplates the object with a certain amount of awe and numbed horror. Another image of this subdued blue occurs immediately after she refuses to accept the return of a cross pendant salvaged from the scene of the accident: Julie is submerged in the glowing blue waters of a pool at night. This image is particularly striking because the blue light engulfs her body fully and the pool is resolved against a black void that swallows the rest of the room. Set low, just above the surface of the glowing water, the camera follows her immersed figure as it swims across the pool. It rises slightly as Julie begins to lift herself onto the edge of the pool, before tilting downward as she lowers herself back into the water, face down.

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very slightly to the right to reframe her limp body as she holds her head under the water, drifting in the surrounding blueness. Julie gives herself fully to the saturation of blueness in her exhaustion, completing the shift from grief as an alien ‘other’ to its ubiquitous presence in her life.

It is difficult to discern the structure of Julie’s grief, or even any determinate object-loss from which it originates. The obvious answer is to point to the loss of her family at the film’s opening, but this explanation falls short, considering Kieślowski’s depiction of her mourning period and acceptance of this loss early on. It is significant that the intrusion of the alien blueness occurs after these scenes, suggesting that this is a novel form of grief or at least a new mode— something disembodied but totalizing in her experience of the world.

A psychoanalytic and phenomenological lens may shed light on the kind of grief Kieślowski portrays. Freudian psychoanalysis understands both mourning and melancholia—commonly aligned with ‘depression’ in more contemporary terminology—as occurring in a subject reacting to the loss of a loved object. In mourning, the subject gradually comes to accept through “[r]eality-testing [...] that the loved object no longer exists” (Freud 244). In melancholia, on the other hand, the individual loses something external that the ego has introjected into itself. This allows for “one part of the ego [to set] itself over against the other, [to judge] it critically [and to take] it as its object,” as the subject is unable to realize that any object is lost at all (247). For Freud, the love-object in both mourning and melancholia may be abstract. With a lost physical love-object, the recognition of loss is easier, because its reality is evident to the subject in the immediate physical and temporal disappearance of the object. Julie's libidinal attachment to her family is such a relation, to objects within time and space: Kieślowski portrays her beginning to accept the reality of the loss shortly into the film, visibly shedding tears upon watching the funeral on a screen from her hospital bed. Contrary to this, with the disappearance of abstract relations or ideals, reality-testing is more difficult because the individual “establishe[s] an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (249). Reality-testing can be impossible since the subject may always find the abstract love-object somewhere within 63

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their own self-identity, and prevents the mourning process from commencing. Julie's melancholy is not a direct response to the bodily deaths of her family, but rather a response that stems from something more basic and abstract.

In Being and Time, Heidegger theorizes on the conditions necessary for one particular kind of melancholia, but his postulations differ from Freud’s central claim that it always stems from a lost object. Heideggarian ontology describes a similar experience of melancholia that is instead radically non-pathological: for Heidegger, melancholia is rooted in the primordial structures of ‘Dasein’—literally, ‘being there,’ Heidegger’s term for a being that takes up and questions its own existence. He finds that the “totality of Being-in-the-world as a structural whole [reveals] itself as care” (Heidegger 274). Dasein, by Being-in-the-world, is always already related to the totality of its Beingthere through its care, which allows for the emergence of the world as significant and meaningful to the subject. Dasein relates to its cares in an ontologically receptive way; it does not posit its own care. Instead, care immerses Dasein in a particularized world.

This withdrawal of care represents a kind of melancholia, in that there is a loss of the very ability to derive meaning at all. Dasein is still technically Being-in-the-world, but without the structure that essentially relates its totality to that world and gives the world meaning.

This kind of melancholia resists Freudian interpretation because one cannot take 'care' or 'world' as a love object in itself, since it grounds all love-objects. Likewise, world is not an abstract idea, but rather an ontological relationality that grounds the pre-existing multiplicity into which Dasein is born. For Heidegger, “thrownness into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive manner in that state-of-mind [called] anxiety,” which involves the withdrawal of care from all objects present-at-hand (295). In recognizing its thrownness through anxiety, Dasein sees all objects present-at-hand as existing independently from its care. In its thrownness towards its own death, Dasein comes to realize that things do not naturally possess the essence that it bestows to them, and thus opens a space for meaning.

However, meaning does not pre-exist its Being-there.

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In a similar manner, Kieślowski seems to challenge the Freudian delineation of melancholia through Julie, who does not exemplify such a rigid subject-object relationship. Blue portrays a kind of melancholia that is not implicated with a particular love object but rather an entire world that is lost. World is an ontological reality, not a graspable love-object, but the very grounds that allow objects to appear as meaningful at all. Julie makes explicit this will to selferadication when she states, "Now I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I want no possessions, no memories, no friends, no lovers — they're all traps,". In Freud's account of melancholia, there is “an identification of the ego with the love object [such that] the shadow of the object [falls] upon the ego” (249), but this interpretation cannot account for the total eradication of the self that Julie attempts. She loses access to the totality of her Being, and with it, a meaningful world. All the ego's libidinal attachments reveal themselves as having an artificial quality in light of Dasein's thrownness toward death. Only an ontological interpretation of Julie’s grief can explain this kind of totalizing, existential melancholia that strips her of care entirely.

In “Kieślowski and the Antipolitics of Colour,” Paul Coates' analysis of Blue centres on the juxtaposition of sound and colour, and how these aspects relate to the theme of 'liberté.' Coates draws to importance “the classical Greek opposition between a seeing derived from the action of the subject (via eyebeams 'extramitted' to strike the object), and a hearing originating in the object (causing airwaves that then strike the ear)” (47). In this opposition, the Greeks conclude that seeing privileges an action on the part of the subject and that hearing requires an activity on the part of an exterior object. Coates suggests that Julie attempts to eradicate her own internal active 'seeing,' but throughout Blue, “sound jabs at her from without,” consistently breaking her attempted solipsistic hibernation (48). Julie believes herself to be free in her retraction of care, reflecting Freud’s conception of freedom, in which “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” when the mourning process is completed (Freud 245). However, Coates notes that the word ‘liberté’—the term of the French motto that corresponds with the blue of the flag—appears only briefly as Julie ascends the stairs of the courtroom at a crucial point in 65

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the narrative, precisely at the point when she begins to find it impossible to remain in her absolute isolation. Kieślowski indicates that freedom lies not in the eradication of libidinal attachments, but in the active attachment with world.

Coates' analysis of Blue can be interpreted in ontological terms consistent with existential melancholia. By describing the 'antipolitics of colour,' Coates recognizes Kieślowski’s rejection of the ontic realm of politics in favor of the underlying complexities of subjective experience. In the images of Greek seeing and hearing, Coates interprets Blue as a dialectic between Julie's active self-alienation and the intrusion of her former life, which she cannot wholly black out.

Active seeing and passive hearing conflict on a primordial level.

Ontologically, Coates describes a dialectic between mood and world.

Heidegger rejects such dialectics in his philosophy, but in doing so, puts too great an emphasis on the subjectivity of world, as it is subservient to the care of Dasein. Care changes the world by relating it to Dasein in a particularizing way. Heidegger declares that “when we speak of 'Being-with,' we always have in view Being with one another in the same world,” but world as such only exists formally, because each Dasein experiences world radically differently through their particularized cares (282). Dasein situates other Dasein in its own network of cares, but it cannot share in another Dasein’s Beingtowards-death, and thus cannot truly experience the individualizing cares of another, which arise in the face of its confrontation with its finitude. Heidegger's assertion that “Dasein is essentially disclosed to itself” signifies that the totality of Dasein's world is only apparent in its own Being-there (94). In ontological terms, Heidegger states that Dasein both is the creator of its own world through care, and also rests inside the very world it has created. In Coates’ terms, Heidegger’s Dasein as an 'active hearer.' Dasein is both the object that actively creates the sound as well as receiver of that sound, eradicating such that the distinction between hearing and seeing is eradicated. While Heidegger never outright dismisses a possible passive 'hearing' of something that juts into Dasein's world, his treatment of this subject is scarce as he is more interested in the world that springs forth from Dasein itself. Dasein is Being-with-others-in-the-world, but again, 66

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Dasein may never truly share in others' care, which is always a particularized disclosure of the world. Blue offers a counterinterpretation of world that displaces it from a totalizing subjectivity, into an intersubjectivity that exists in the space between Dasein, while still depending upon a Heideggerian ontological foundation.

In Blue, Kieślowski emphasizes that the world is not merely a subjective and passive emanation of Dasein's cares; world is equally as active as the individual who experiences it. Kieślowski juxtaposes Julie's anxiety—her attempted elimination of Being-there—with world, which consistently interrupts her solitude. Though both her husband and daughter are characterized by their no-longer-Being-in-the-world, the world that they have created and been implicated in transcends their deaths, repeatedly moving Julie to grief. The independence of world is emphasized through the repeated phrase, “[o]ne can't give everything up,” implying that even if one were to will the destruction of a past world, its full eradication is impossible. World still exists through memory. The aforementioned blue crystal light fixture emphasizes this fact. The world remains within Julie as memory, though she does not actively experience its presence in the present.

World also interjects into her life unpredictably in her interactions with other people, especially in her friendship with Lucille, which springs up initially against her will. A separate Dasein’s world appears to Julie when she is implicated in another's network of care.

Julie ignores most invasions into her world: a man pounds on the door of her apartment for help, but the world invasions are continuous.

After she sees her father in the crowd at her strip-club, Lucille reaches out to Julie for comfort. This is the first instance in which Julie actively drags herself out from her own solitude, willingly implicating herself in another's world, even at the expense of convenience. As the unforeseen appearance of intersubjective world clashes with the eradication of her cares in anxiety, Julie’s melancholia begins to break down. In the void of care, other people's worlds still appear to her, and though she is ontologically separated from them, they are potential worlds for herself. There is a potential actualization of freedom in her adoption of another's world as her own. Regardless of Julie's dismissal of her own world, other worlds still cut into her void of care. The 67

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dialectic of Greek seeing and hearing stages an encounter between her eliminated active seeing faculty and the hearing of others' worlds, which may never be fully muffled. Frequent fades to black, indicate such a dialectic; though Julie may, in her melancholia, shut her eyes to her own former world, the worlds of others still impinge upon her Being. At each time this fade occurs, Julie's solitude is violently broken open by another Dasein's surprising appearance. Kieślowski shows that world not only affects Dasein as an active relationship to exterior objects, but Dasein's implication in others' care networks also delineates a world-appearance that the individual cannot flee.

Julie weeps at only two points in Blue: once as she watches the funeral of her husband and daughter from a tiny screen in the hospital, and again at the end of the film, an instance which does not have as clear a cause. The first instance implies that the mourning stage of reality testing is occurring. The significant time gap between these two instances of her weeping Kieślowski indicates a difference in significance. There is no particular obvious cause in the latter case, after she has begun a relationship with a former family friend. A white light brings Julie out from the black background, and there is a blue reflection in front of her. It is crucial to note that this blue reflection does not illuminate the protagonist but merely forms a screen in front of her, like the reflection of light in a window. Kieślowski uses this lighting scheme in order to manifest Julie’s transition from existential melancholia to the re-emergence of world, allowing her to look back on her former melancholia with a new comportment—that of mourning. Julie is no longer illuminated by the blueness of anxiety, but rather turns and truly confronts what she has lost, now immersed in the new world. Her previous melancholia, a product of her world withdrawal in the wake of her family's death, finally can be confronted in both the grief at its loss, and crucially, the freedom to take up a new world.

Death plays a major role in the freedom of taking up a new world. Blue diverges slightly from Heidegger on the subject of the state of Dasein after anxiety. For Heidegger, anxiety allows Dasein to confront its own “authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole” (277).

Death individuates Dasein in a kind of completion for which only the 68

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particular Dasein has the potential, though it can never experience it themself; Heidegger is clear that “No one can take the Other's dying away from him” (284). The individual takes up death as a yetoutstanding possibility that may be actualized at any time, resulting in Dasein no longer being Dasein. In the everydayness of Das Man—'the they'—Dasein fails to take up death authentically as a potentiality-forBeing-a-whole, that is, as having the potential at any moment to be completed in death. Heidegger summarizes the everyday relation to death in the saying, “One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us” (297). Since Das Man inauthentically relate themselves to their own deaths by denying the possibility at any moment, Dasein, in the circumstance of the everyday, lacks the relation to death that allows for authentic individuation.

Heidegger implies that the realization of one's thrownness in anxiety, is necessary in order for the authentic Being-one's-Self to understand its cares in the context of temporality.

Anxiety is not synonymous with melancholia for Heidegger.

He seems not to leave any room for an ontological melancholia to exist if he maintains that anxiety allows for Dasein to take up an authentic relationality to death. Blue finds fault in the idea that anxiety necessarily brings Dasein into an authentic relationship with their Being-towardsdeath. When Julie asks, “You did what I asked? You emptied out the blue room?” immediately on her return home from hospital, she demonstrates the effects of anxiety. In contrast to the scene where she is almost 'struck' and terrified by the reality disclosed in anxiety, Kieślowski here shows her aligning herself with this withdrawal. Though the retraction of world occurs without her explicit will, she begins actively pursuing this self-annihilation. Through editing, Kieslowski almost wholly eradicates Julie from a temporal framework. The scenes in the middle of the film lack a causal correlation, and for the most part each scene rarely runs over two minutes. There is a moment, as Julie settles into her new apartment, when a simple straight cut to leads into the next scene, giving no indication whatsoever—except through dialogue—that months have passed. These directorial choices detemporalize Julie's character, as if she is merely Being without the care that allows Dasein to situate itself in the temporal world.

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Heidegger writes that “the primordial ontological basis of Dasein's existentiality is temporality” (Heidegger 277), but Kieślowski makes clear that in anxiety, Julie is atemporal, outside the world that allows for a relation to temporality. The immediate authenticity that Dasein supposedly attains in confronting the state of anxiety does not apply for her.

Though it is true that Heidegger's analysis of inauthentic Being-towards-death only extends to Das Man, Kieślowski picks up on a different kind of inauthenticity that Heidegger himself fails to propose. Where Das Man's inauthenticity stems from a refusal to take one's own deaths as a distinct possibility, Julie has an inauthentic Being-toward-death, in that she takes it up as her only possibility. In confronting anxiety, she remains in it, uninterested in an authentic relationality with world. Thus the annihilation of the self, achieved through the distancing of worldly relations and interests, is an inauthentic relation to death directly opposite to that of Das Man, who attempt to understand their lives outside the context of mortality.

Julie's mode of inauthentic Being-toward-death attempts to eradicate both the worldly aspect of Being as well as the temporal aspect that is essential to Dasein's existentiality. Julie attempts a 'Being-at-demise,' an impossible project because it implies the very eradication of Dasein itself, which only happens in a no-longer-Being. Inauthentic Being-atdemise cannot dissociate Dasein from Being-towards-death. It is an illusion because the actual demise of Dasein is always outstanding as long as they are Being-there, just as Das Man can never eradicate the reality of Being-towards-death, in their avoidance of thinking about it.

In Being-at-demise, Dasein is still always already related to world, but in a different way. Heidegger mentions that “Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially” (284).

Though Julie actively tries to exist at the event of her own death, as Dasein she is still related to death as dying—a not-yet. This is summarized by Heidegger, in that “[h]opelessness [...] does not tear Dasein away from its possibilities, but is only one of its modes of Being-towards these possibilities (279). Kieślowski emphasizes this relationship to her own demise in the costume choices throughout the film: Julie generally wears a dark black coat and blue jeans, as if caught 70

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between her desire to exist at her own death—in the black—and the reality of her still Being-in-the-world, the mood of anxiety which still relates Julie to it. Even submerged in this sustained anxiety of existential melancholia, she is still Dasein. Crucially, it is only through this inauthentic 'Being-at-demise' that Dasein confronts the dialectic between world and mood. Dasein's recognition of its “authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole” is made possible in anxiety, but never certain, because it always may remain this 'Being-at-demise' (277). In stripping away the individual's self-constructed world—its 'seeing'— anxiety allows for the 'hearing' aspect of Being-there to be more pronounced. Though Julie herself does not speak, it is only through her inauthentic 'Being-at-demise' that she is able to regain a world for herself authentically, since it is only then that a void is created, through which the intersubjectivity of world emerges. The Dasein’s 'hearing' is therefore most active in this void, where Dasein is most aware of others' worlds continually impinging upon its own, because Dasein does not actively 'extramit' its care network. Kieślowski complicates the quasi-solipsistic understanding of world by detaching it slightly from the consciousness of Dasein. In care, Dasein makes a world inside itself, but this world also transcends itself and allows for an intersubjectivity by placing other Dasein as an object of care, implementing it in a world that they did not themselves create.

Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue stages an ontological battle between Julie's melancholic anxiety and the infiltration of world, which she attempts to block from her life. Thus, in many ways the various plot strands of the film actually foreground the dialectical struggle that occurs in three parts. First, Julie is immersed totally in her inauthentic Being-at-demise, brought about by the death of her family; in the next segment of the film, elements of world intrude upon her solitude; and finally she begins to embrace world, now able to mourn her former life.

Kieślowski 's depiction of melancholia is distinctly linked to Heideggerian ontology, and yet Blue challenges several omissions in this ontology. Kieślowski portrays Dasein in a new kind of inauthentic Being-towards-death, and draws out an intersubjective character of world which remains under-stressed in Heidegger's work. This 71

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existential melancholia is necessary to achieve an authentic Beingtowards-death and the freedom of taking on a new world for oneself.

Works Cited Blue. Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski. Perf. Juliette Binoche and Benoît Régent. Criterion Collection,1993. DVD. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York:Harper, 2008. PDF file.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.”The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1955. 243-258. PDF file.

Coates, Paul. "Kieślowski and the Antipolitics of colour: A Reading of the "Three colours” Trilogy." Cinema Journal 41.2 (2002): 41-66. Jstor. Web. 14 Mar. 2016.

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Contributors Trynne Delaney is completing her honours BA in English and Creative Writing. Her interests include intersectional feminist praxis and snacks. If, one day her writing reaches as far as Michael Jordan’s arm in seminal 1996 classic SpaceJam, she will die happy.

Alex Elvidge is in her graduating year at the University of King’s College. Majoring in Classics, she balances her study of the ancient world with her love of modern popular culture and a particular interest in film. She loves her cats and consuming queer content (go figure) and plans to pursue a Master’s degree in Classics next fall.

Tarini Fernando is a first-year student at Dalhousie.

In recent years, she has developed a keen interest in film, with some of her favourite directors being Park Chan-wook and Ana Lily Amirpour. Besides watching foreign horror films, Tarini also enjoys reading and writing short fiction, and drawing portraits. She hopes she can soon decide on a major that will combine her interests and also keep her mother happy.

Tyler Fleck is a student of Cinema and Media studies at Dalhousie University, and a lifelong fanatic of horror and cult cinema. Most of his free time is torn between contemplating Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), respectively.

Rose Fitzpatrick is a fourth year Double Major student in English and Russian Studies. Her favourite film is the 2013 Russian movie “Winter Journey.”

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Aidan Ingalls is a fourth year student at the University of King’s College, majoring in Classics and Contemporary Studies. In his spare time he enjoys yelling at people about Heidegger and moshing (inclusively) like there is no tomorrow. Among his favorite media products are Autumn Sonata, Hausu Chungking Express, Stalker and the Pride and Prejudice mini series.

Kelly Li is a fourth year student at the University of King’s College. She is a strong proponent of intersectional representation in film, filmmaking, and academia. When she grows up, she wants to be a filmmaker, potter, painter, photographer, art writer, curator, test kitchen cook, vegan butcher, accordionist, and cicerone.

Libby Schofield is a graduating student with a combined honours degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and English at the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. Her research interests include applications of critical and feminist theory, representations of gender in literature and the media, reproductive justice, reproductive and rural healthcare access, and intersectional feminism. In September, she will begin her Master’s degree in Gender and Women’s Studies studying issues of reproductive healthcare and feminist discourse. She hopes to continue to incorporate literary analysis in her studies and is interested in engaging in the medical humanities in her spare time as a graduate student.

Jessica Wilton is in her graduating year at the University of King's College. She can most likely be found drinking her fourth cup of coffee for the day in the Wardroom or proofreading her friends' essays. Her interests include photography, art history, binge watching TV shows with 10+ seasons and bothering her roommates with bizarre "would you rather" questions.

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Glossary Canted angle A viewpoint that mimics the perspective of tilting one’s head to the side, achieved by tilting the camera so that the shot is not parallel in the frame.

Cinematography The artful technique of capturing images and lighting effects in film.

Cinematographers use camera angles, framing, film stock, and arrangement of lighting to create the image they want to see on screen.

Diegesis/diegetic The film narrative and anything existing within it. This includes dialogue, action, and anything else occurring within the film’s world.

Dolly shot A moving shot taken from a moving camera that is mounted on a hydraulically-powered wheeled camera platform. The platform is pushed on rails to achieve a smooth and quiet shot during filming.

Eyeline match A shot that creates the illusion that a character is looking at something by showing their face, and then cutting to what they are looking at.

Handheld shot A shot that is either taken with a handheld camera or made to mimic the shaky/unstableness of one. Often used to suggest either documentary footage or realism.

Long shot A shot in which an object or character is shown from a long distance so that they appear relatively small in the frame.

Long take A shot that is long in time duration as opposed to distance.

Low angle shot A shot in which the subject is filmed from below and the camera is tilted up at them.

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Metacinema Cinema that reminds the audience that they are watching a film.

Mise-en-scene Anything placed in front of the camera and within the frame. Includes settings, decor, props, actors, costumes, lighting, and the positioning of these elements.

Mockumentary A fictional film that incorporates documentary-style elements (such as interviews). Often a parody of documentary film but not always.

Montage A series of short, separate shots that are stitched together to create coherent sequence in order to convey a particular meaning or idea.

Score The music that underlines the film, often composed specifically for the film.

Single direction mic A mic that picks up sound from predominantly one direction.

Steadicam A hand-held camera with a mechanical harness that allows the camera operator to take relatively smooth and steady shots.

Telephoto lens A camera lens that has a very long focal length and narrow angle of view in order to compress depth in space, and make distant objects appear in the foreground.

Tracking shot A shot in which a camera (usually mounted on a dolly) smoothly moves alongside or follows the subject.

Restricted narration A narration that is limited to one character.

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SUPERCUT Wide angle shot/lens A shot taken with a lens that depicts a wider field of view in order to capture more of the scene’s elements.

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