Tampilkan postingan dengan label film and allegory. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label film and allegory. Tampilkan semua postingan

Home » Posts filed under film and allegory

Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 02 Februari 2012

Framegrabs from Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα/Voyage to Cythera ( Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1984)
The world needs cinema now more than ever. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Andrew Horton]
Realism? Me? I’ve not a damn thing to do with it. The religious attitude to reality has never concerned me. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Raymond Durgnat in “The Long Take in Voyage to Cythera: Brecht and Marx vs. Bazin and God.” Film Comment 26.6 (November/December, 1990): 43-46]
[Some] complain that Angelopoulos’ films are long, slow and boring, but that is exactly what they are not. They are too short (for the subject matters they cover [...]), quite fast (within the image or sound or the narrative, there is always something occurring) and always fascinating (in the multi-layered way they mix the personal with the political, the aesthetic surface with the deeper meaning, etc.). [Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000]
What is important, what has meaning, is the journey... [and] journeys are through history as well as through a landscape. [Theo Angelopoulos, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, 1997: 98]
Today, Film Studies For Free solemnly pays tribute to the monumental cinematic career of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who very sadly died last week while near the set of his film The Other Sea.

David Hudson has collected a wonderful series of links to items of interest to anyone who has been touched by or is studying Angelopoulos's films. Below, as is its memorialising wont, FSFF points its readers in the online direction of a whole host of high quality academic studies of his work, including a number of freely-accessible, book-length items.
    More about → Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos
    di 05.36 { Add komentar }
    Label: , , , , , , ,

    "Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies

    Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 28 September 2010

    Image from I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
    The zombies in these films are a kind of revolutionary force of predators without a revolutionary program. Their only concern is to satisfy an instinctual drive for predation; a drive which, as is pointed out in Day of the Dead, serves no actual biological purpose. They appear and attack without explanation or reason, violating taken for granted principles of sufficient cause and rationality. Because of this, they are especially threatening to the surviving human beings. Enemies such as Nazis or Communists are comprehensible in terms of their historical backgrounds, economic interests, religious, political or philosophic beliefs. But these zombies are a new breed of enemy in that they do not operate according to the same underlying motivations human beings share in common. They are a nihilistic enemy which, as lifeless, spiritless automatons, exemplify the epitome of passive nihilism. They wander the landscape exhibiting only the bare minimum of power that is required for locomotion and the consumption of living flesh. They must steal life from the strong because they possess such a depressed store of innate energy. They are, literally, the walking dead. [John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996] 
    In [George Romero's films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 
    The fear of one's own body, of how one controls it and relates to it, and the fear of not being able to control other bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is too fundamental to capitalist economy, are both at the heart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more deliriously evoked than in these films of the Dead [Richard Dyer,  White: Essays in Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)].

    Film Studies For Free is quaking in its digital boots as a whole host of freely accessible zombie studies gathers menacingly on the online horizon and shuffles ever nearer.... No, no, no, nooooo...

    Yes.

    Resistance is futile on this the Night of the Living Links.

    (The only comforting thought is that film zombies also grow old and win the undying loyalty of their fans...)

      More about → "Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies
      di 06.00 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , , , , ,

      Studies of censorship and cinema: in solidarity with Jafar Panahi

      Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 06 April 2010

      Image from Dayereh/The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000)

      Film Studies For Free brings you a list of direct links to valuable and noteworthy scholarly material on the frequently iniquitous, and certainly far from just academic, subject of censorship and the cinema. 

      Today's list is brought to you in solidarity with Jafar Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker who, on March 1, was arrested and imprisoned (reportedly at present in solitary confinement) 'apparently while working on a film that, rightly or wrongly, the authorities understood to be “anti-state.”'

      As Vadim Rizov wrote for the IFC website:
      Panahi's brilliant series of films from 1995's "The White Balloon" (his first feature) onwards have steadily ramped up the contentiousness. After "Balloon" and "The Mirror," Panahi ditched children altogether (normally the standard way of avoiding censorship) and began focusing on adults -- specifically, those damaged and abused by society. "The Circle" and "Offside" focus on women (enough said), and "Crimson Gold" manages to indict an entire society through the desperation of one pizza-delivery guy. Observing from a chilly distance, Panahi gives the disenfranchised a voice in the traditional visual language of the contemporary arthouse film -- until, all of a sudden, he's in the same spot as the people he's filming. What makes Panahi brilliant (and dangerous to the regime) is that he's a visceral filmmaker above all, in his masterful feel for the hustle of urban Iran.
      To find out more about the campaign to free Panahi and other political figures imprisoned in the aftermath of the Iranian elections, do follow the links in Jeffrey Overstreet's post for Filmwell; also check out the Free Jafar Panahi Facebook group; visit the Our Society Will Be a Free Society: Campaign to free imprisoned writers and journalists in Iran website; or explore the website for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. If you would like to donate money to support the aims of the latter organisation, a direct donation link is right here (thanks to the Self-Styled Siren for highlighting this link). You can also follow, as filmstudiesff does, the micro-bulletins (and blogs) of the brilliant US-based film and media studies academic Negar Mottahedeh via Twitter to keep up with events in Iran, along with academic and other responses to these.


      FSFF also wanted to publicise a related call by the Index on Censorship for short film submissions on 'the subject of freedom of expression or censorship, dealing with issues or events from a unique perspective that is not often acknowledged'.  
      The call is on behalf of Index on Censorship, one of Britain’s leading organisations promoting freedom of expression and protection of human rights. We are currently in the process of curating a series of monthly EPIC short film nights with a focus on freedom of expression and censorship, in conjunction with English PEN at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon, London. The launch night for the event will be in mid-May, kicking off with a night of short films made by the Go Group in Georgia. You can find more information about the night here. If you do have a short film or documentary that you would like to be screened at one of these nights, email intern1@indexoncensorship.org with a short 100 word summary of your film, or a link to your video online and details of any charities/organisations that you are affiliated with. As Index on Censorship is a non-profit charity, we cannot offer any payment for the artists, just a platform and opportunity for new filmmakers to screen their film to a large public audience.
      More about → Studies of censorship and cinema: in solidarity with Jafar Panahi
      di 07.35 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , , , ,

      "Making films anyhow": On Glauber Rocha's DIY cinema

      Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 01 April 2010


      Terra em Transe/Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1967)
      Glauber said more: "We are going to make our films anyhow: with handheld cameras, in 16mm if there is no 35mm, improvising in the street to get people's true gestures"; "..a cinema on the basis of whatever means are possible, at low cost and in a short time"; "..a political cinema that intends to inform not by logic, but by poetics."
      Making films anyhow. Not making films anyhow. In fact, filming with a hand-held camera revealing its nervous presence in the scene more than the scene itself properly speaking, was not a way of simplifying and impoverishing cinematographic writing, but a creative intervention to make it more complex and rich. Glauber's Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe, 1967) is a good example, the scene improvised, not because it had not been thought through properly beforehand in the screenplay, but because it continued being thought through there in the shooting; the image tremulous; not because of any failure or lack of skill on the part of the photographer, but because at that time reality was being discussed like that in speech, nervous and tremulous.
      In fact, this cinema, with an idea in its head and a camera in its hand, enriched the speech of itself. It helped people think of screenplays as a challenge to shooting, of shooting as a response to the challenge of the screenplay, of the camera as a challenge to the eye. It helped people think of cinema as an expression finished, on the screen and, at the same time, unfinished, just in the imagination, part of a process that does not end with the film on the screen; it helped people think of film as a work print, a not yet finished print for the spectator to clean up and bring order to; cinema as an inventor and stimulator of images.
      José Carlos Avellar, 'Writing the Speech', FIPRESCI, 2006
      The links list offered up today is Film Studies For Free's customary tribute to Glauber Rocha, a political and aesthetic leader of the Cinema Novo movement which emerged in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

      Known above all for the trio of films Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), Terra em transe (Earth Entranced/Land in Anguish, 1967), and O dragão da maldade contra o santo guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes, 1969), the latter about a legendary gunman hired to kill a group of rebelling peasants, Glauber Rocha's work -- made according to his DIY dictum 'An idea in your head and a camera in hand...' -- has been an inspiration for much cinema in Brazil and elsewhere.

      This post is also intended to support and publicise a (for charity) screening of Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe in London by Latin America House/CasaLatina.org on April 8. Do please go along if you can, and find out more about about this important filmmaker's work and about Brazilian cinema, politics and culture more generally.
        More about → "Making films anyhow": On Glauber Rocha's DIY cinema
        di 04.27 { Add komentar }
        Label: , , , , , , ,

        The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist Era

        Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 23 Maret 2010


        Private Property - Joseph Losey's The Prowler by Matt Zoller Seitz 
        at The L Magazine, March 2010
        (also see Justin Stewart's essay on this film in the same issue)
        A ghost town also frames the haunting final scenes of Joseph Losey's The Prowler, when an adulterous couple (Evelyn Keyes and Van Heflin) take refuge in an abandoned Mojave desert village so that the woman can secretly give birth to their child. Webb killed Susan Gilvray's husband, successfully making it look like an accident, and he fears that proof of their affair will put him under suspicion.
        He's a shady, disaffected cop who first meets Susan when he responds to her report of a prowler. She's a lonely housewife whose husband is an all-night DJ, a disembodied voice on the radio, unable to provide her with the child she craves. Webb takes one look at the wistful blonde and her luxurious Spanish-style suburban palace and decides he wants both. Reluctantly Susan succumbs to his aggressive persistence, as he keeps turning up to investigate an imaginary intruder, finally gunning down her husband, ostensibly by mistake. Fragile and passive, Susan believes Webb's story and marries him; their wedding is mirrored by a funeral at the church across the street.
        Isolated in the desert ruin, Susan struggles through a difficult labor. The refuge turns deadly, with dust storms raging, and in desperation Webb finally fetches a doctor to save his wife, and she learns the truth about him when she realizes he plans to kill the man who saved her. The setting is appropriate: though they conceived a child, their relationship built on greed and deception is more barren than Susan's first, childless marriage.   Imogen Sara Smith, 'In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 65, August 2009 [my emphasis]
        Film Studies For Free, a born "fellow traveller" blog if ever there was one, today brings you some choice links to high quality material pertaining to the study of the Hollywood Blacklist era.

        The post begins with Matt Zoller Seitz's latest video essay - a wonderful dissection of Joseph Losey's 1951 film noir thriller The Prowler. This was one of the last films Losey made in Hollywood before fleeing the US, refusing to inform on his friends to the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Zoller Seitz compellingly teases out The Prowler's concerns with social class and property; these would become even more central themes in Losey's film work after his exile to England.  
        More about → The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist Era
        di 09.38 { Add komentar }
        Label: , , , , , , , , ,

        Seeing through Avatar: Film Allegory 101

        Diposting oleh good reading on Rabu, 27 Januari 2010

        Links updated February 17

        Two wounded men: an image of some of Avatar's polysemic screen layers...
        "[F]or an allegory to be effective, there must remain some sense that it is actually an allegory" Jeffrey Sconce, Ludic Despair, January 3, 2010
        "I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head" Scott Eric Kaufman, Acephalous, December 20, 2009
        Like/unlike (delete as appropriate) rather a lot of other spectators, Film Studies For Free's author very much enjoyed her recent absorbing encounter with James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar in 3D.

        In fact, her immersion in the story-world of this film served to remind her -- in this, the age of more permanent film 'possession' (DVDs, downloads) -- that what we have always been purchasing with our cinema ticket, especially as regards a first-time film viewing, is a one-off and unrepeatable experience. 

        Just as in the good old days of old-fashioned cinematic spectatorship, Avatar really has created the space for a thrilling, phenomenological ride. Thanks for the sense-memories, Mr Cameron. 

        As for Avatar's plot, however, it is not so much absolutely fabulous as overwhelmingly fabular... Indeed, coming away from the cinema, it's very easy to understand the utter fascination, bordering on obsession, in reviews and discussions of Avatar, with the notion of the 'messages', 'allusions', 'analogies', 'parallels', and, especially, 'allegories' seemingly conveyed by Cameron's film. 

        Here's a list, in a nice Na'vi blue, of ten of the 'allegories' most frequently detected by the reviews, together with direct links to an example or two (note: many more, online, allegory-reading reviews are listed further down the post): 
        The reviews are frequently (if by no means always) characterized by a sense that the above allegories are 'inherent' and obvious. Evidently, such critical moves obviate the need for much, if any, detailed discussion as to how we read, or do not read, particular allegories in particular films.

        This is absolutely fine, of course, for journalistic, or, indeed, any "instant impression" reviews, based as they invariably are on just one viewing of the film. Taking on complex questions, such as how Avatar's subtexts might have found their expression through their particular "patterns of metaphorical substitution" (Jeff Smith, p. 1 [pdf]), is not their usual purpose - Jeffrey Sconce's hilarious demolition of some of these fabular processes in his own rapid response to the film notwithstanding ('Before racing the hare, the tortoise does not stop to opine, “By participating in this unlikely contest, I hope to teach you some important lessons about hubris, determination, complacency and the work ethic."').

        But, being an earnestly scholarly blog, Film Studies For Free is not happy with any dearth of understanding on this earth. So, as heroic Jake Sully might also say, it's 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more', as FSFF humbly proffers the following notes on film allegory, together with a handy and extensive listing of online and openly accessible resources on Avatar and allegory, and also of (generally, more scholarly ones) on allegory in film.

        The evidence base for allegorical interpretation?
        "Allegory -- from the Greek, allos, "other" and agoreuein, "to speak in public" -- figuratively unites two orders, one of which is shown and the other of which is kept out of view, establishing relationships of resemblance between them such that the reader or spectator may construe meaning over and above the literal. Allegory stages the relationship between personal and political, private and public, which is often central to the production of political meaning in art." Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 182
        Film allegory paradoxically requires spectators to take up a particular vantage point from which a story "kept out of view" (to use Page's words) can clearly be seen. As Ismail Xavier writes in Allegories of Underdevelopment, in the case of allegory, it's a particular 'narrative texture [that] places the spectator in [this] analytical posture' (FSFF's emphasis).

        This 'texture' -- including repeated or repetitious story-elements, such as, sometimes, seemingly gratuitous features of characterization, dialogue (e.g. "shock and awe"), etc. -- eventually provokes in the spectator the question "why are you telling me that when you are supposed to be (necessarily and literally) telling me this (direct) story?"

        The salience of the elements and their patterning, together with their hermeneutic journey from 'unnecessary' to 'necessary', are essential in the triggering of "our operations of decoding". This latter phrase comes from cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. In his many discussions of allegory, Jameson makes clear that allegorical reading is a kind of pattern recognition, involving our imaginative capacities.

        For Jameson, political and historical facts and realities external to films find themselves
        inscribed within the internal intrinsic experience of the film in what Sartre in a suggestive and too-little known concept in his Psychology of Imagination calls the analogon: that structural nexus in our reading or viewing experience, in our operations of decoding or aesthetic reception, which can then do double duty and stand as the substitute and the representative within the aesthetic object of a phenomenon on the outside which cannot in the very nature of things be 'rendered' directly. [Fredric Jameson, 'Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film', College English, Vol. 38, No. 8, Mass Culture, Political Consciousness and English Studies (Apr., 1977), pp. 843-859, p. 858(pdf) (hyperlinks added by FSFF)]
        Allegorical recognition works best when a film's patterns of allusiveness (Jameson's 'structural nexus') offer ‘clear configurations for the essential pieces of its game'; when there's a 'graphic isolation of the [allegorical] elements put into relation’, as Xavier again puts it (p. 20): 'The greater the pedagogic impulse of the allegory, the more unmistakable is [the signalling]' (Xavier, p. 16).
         
        This is probably why Avatar, with what many critics of the film have noted are its 'cardboard cutout' characters and at times 'clunky dialogue', has provoked so much discussion about its allegoricalness: the excessive signalling of its 'other stories' is, indeed, completely unmistakable. 
         
        But that doesn't explain the proliferation of these stories, or why there is complete lack of agreement on what the film's 'principal allegory' is, other than Avatar's own Unobtainium, perhaps.
         
        As Joanna Page continues in her theoretical exploration of allegory, it
        marks a gap between representation and referent, the essential otherness of two planes of signification that is precisely the quality that permits them to be aligned in the production of meaning. Reflexivity, on the other hand, enacts a conflation of the two and a collapse of possible distinctions between them. Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 182, 189
        A polysemic text par excellence, as befits one designed to draw in the largest possible global audience, Avatar literally cannot afford to convey only one allegory, to provide only two vantage-points for its stories, because it is a reflexive film -- not an especially complex one, but a reflexive one nonetheless.

        As such, it chooses to conflate and collapse many of the distinctions between its literal stories and its 'hidden' ones. In other words, nothing much is really hidden, everything is seen through: indeed, Avatar veritably lets it all hang out. 

        In one of the best critical assessments of Cameron's film so far, Jörg Heiser writes
        Avatar is an amalgam, as if in a strange dream, of many of these kinds of allusions and associations, and you can look at it being very clever[ly] calculated to capture the widest possible audience globally, playing many cards at once; but by way of the very same strategy, it also could be seen as capturing the widest possible 3-D panorama shot of collective anxieties about the future (ecology, war, loss of social love and security etc.). And in the same contradictory way, it is this all-encompassing ambition that is interesting about it, but also what is off-putting." Jörg Heiser, Editor's Blog, Frieze Magazine, January 26, 2010

        On Avatar and Allegory: 
        On Film Allegory:
        More about → Seeing through Avatar: Film Allegory 101
        di 02.32 { Add komentar }
        Label: , , , ,