Yellow

Ruan Lingyu, imperfect and perfect at the same time

The following is a paper that I’m particularly proud of having written. The actual wording is clumsy, due to the fact that it’s about Asian representation onscreen, which strikes a particular chord with me because of my ethnic background. I’m sensitive to the issue, and so my thoughts were shaky. But this same sensitivity is why I love the paper so much; rather than being objective, it’s a topic that had a personal effect on me.

I also enjoyed writing about D.W. Griffith. I become sentimental when speaking about classical filmmakers, simply because everything they did was as much of a risk as it was novel. Does this make Griffith’s racism forgivable? No, of course not. But engaging with someone, or in this case, with an artist’s work, is the only channel of dialogue I can have. Dismissing his work, which is what some people will do, is not the mode of interaction I judge to be the most effective at dispelling racism and ignorance. It’s always the people who are willing to engage, at whatever level, that seem to make a difference.

Self-representation is also a tricky topic. Wu Yonggang is a filmmaker that I’m even less familiar with than Griffith. It was then important for me to see how a filmmaker constructed a type of self image in relation to an established giant in Hollywood. How does a false construction, a marred representation, sully one’s ability to create something true? Is there an effect at all?

Don’t get me wrong- I know writing a paper doesn’t change the world. But maybe it changed my heart in a way. And as small of a change as that may be, and in breadth, tiny the repercussions, I think I’m better for it. I’m better for attempting to engage with Griffith, to understand him a bit more, and I’m better for getting to know Wu Yonggang. My paper didn’t change the world. But it did give me a channel to dialogue with myself.

Yellow

Broken Blossoms (1919) is often referred to as one of the films that D.W. Griffith made as an “apology” for the director’s overtly racist attitude in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Assuming that audiences are forgiving, when an artist desires to make an honest attempt at repairing an earlier wrong, they are quick to reconcile, which is usually the case unless there is significant evidence that suggests the artist has not changed. This is the point where previous wrongs become solidified as a consistent issue that the artist is remembered for and Broken Blossoms is a film that exists in Griffith’s oeuvre to confirm his intolerance.  Some artists are forgotten about due to these disagreeable elements, but Griffith cannot be, as his work is arguably of great influence in cinema.  The racism contained within his films becomes a salient element, especially due to that very legacy.  As an instrumental figure in the development of narrative, Griffith is often the filmmaker that all other works can be defined in relation to; this paper attempts to frame Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess (1934) as such a text. Where Griffith’s Broken Blossoms constructs the “Chinese” as a threateningly exotic “other”, The Goddess is Wu’s attempt in using self-representation to create a “Chinese” identity that is more accurate. This opportunity for self-representation, however, is not without its limitations: though The Goddess does present “Chinese-ness” in a more a precise light, it does not completely shed itself from the racist constructions of stereotype and sexuality within Broken Blossoms – ultimately placing it in a complicated space where it is both a response to and consequence of Griffith’s stained cinematic vision.

Though “stained” is used here as a metaphorical term, it can also be appropriated for a literal meaning in Griffith’s work – Blackface and Yellowface. He is probably more known for his offensive depictions of African-Americans in The Birth of a Nation, but this does not mean that the Yellowface depiction of the Chinese in Broken Blossoms is any less distasteful.  Jun Xing, in Asian America Through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity, addresses some of the basic problems with Yellowface, telling us that it “not only allows the white actors and actresses to steal the show, but, like blackface, it helps dramatize Asian racial features (such as “slanted” eyes), to the extent of absurdity” (Xing, 67).  Peter X. Feng, in his introduction to Screening Asian Americans, further outlines the principals behind the technique of yellowface:

The U.S. motion picture industry’s institutionalized racism manifests itself in role segregation (wherein white actors portray non-whites, but non-whites can never portray whites), in role stratification (wherein the larger the role, the greater likelihood that a white actor will be cast), and in the relatively limited (that is to say, stereotypical) dimensions of Asian characters (Feng, 8)

As a visual art form, this distorted caricature of the Chinese does more damage in comparison to the good that may be associated with any positive agency given to the character. The technique panders to and affirms the negative ideas of a then more prejudiced white audience, and perpetuates the idea that it was somehow inappropriate for featured onscreen white actors to share the stage with capable Chinese actors.  It is often argued that this is simply a convention of the time that Griffith employed as narrative technique, but in light of the fact that there are Asians in the film (as background performers), the argument is not viable – there certainly exists the possibility, and actuality, of shared screen space between Chinese and Caucasians. Furthermore, if Griffith was trying to alter his image as a racist, it seems reasonable for a master filmmaker to think of the possibility of using an actual Chinese man to play a Chinese character.  Griffith certainly had the artistic cache to make that very choice; there is precedence in earlier films of his tendency to try unconventional techniques in narrative. The refusal to be experimental in this respect only further supports readings of continued racism.

To be fair, Griffith did think that he was treating “The Chink” (or “The Yellow Man” played by Richard Barthelmess) in a affirmative light, and there are moments where “The Chink” positively affects other characters of the film – but this does not forgive the fact that he is overwhelmingly portrayed as having no singular identity or agency.

First, being called the Chink or the Yellow Man in the title robs the character of a name, which any true person would have.  By de-emphasizing the character’s actual name (Cheng Huan) and repeatedly referring to him as a generality, Griffith effectively makes him a stand-in for Chinese people as a whole, implicitly stating that he is an accurate portrayal of anyone of Chinese ethnicity.  Visually, Griffith supports this idea by the design of the makeup and costuming of these caricatures.  Both the Chink and a character called “Evil Eye” wear the same type of clothing, the same hats, the same face makeup, the same eyebrow prosthetic, and are both essentially closing their eyes in the entire film.  By constructing them this way, all the Yellowfaced actors are positioned as the same and difficult to tell apart, which is damning because the only other credited Yellowface actor is Evil Eye, who is portrayed as a lustful, threatening character. With no clear distinguishing features, Evil Eye’s negative attributes are imputed onto the Chink.

In contrast, Wu Yonggang visually divides moral Chinese characters from immoral Chinese characters in The Goddess.  The film is about a woman who works as a prostitute to earn enough money so that she can give her son a proper education.  Along the way, she is forced into an abusive relationship by a gambler, ostracized by other women in her community, and must deal with the fact that her son has been expelled out of school due to her business.  She is later thrown into prison, where she is visited by the former Principal of the school (who is sympathetic to her situation and stepped down from his role as principal because he did not agree with the other administrators who deemed it necessary to expel the son) telling her that he would personally give her son a proper education.  The summary of the plot is enough to make it clear that there are some characters who are morally upright and some that embody evil, but Yonggang makes it abundantly clear by using distinct costume design choices as a visual partition between them.  The title character wears lightly colored and elaborately designed traditional Chinese qípáo (dress) while the judgmental women who gossip about the title character wear dark, dirty, peasant outfits.  The helpful Principal wears a traditional western-style suit, while the abusive male wears a common street suit. Any person familiar with these types of Chinese clothing and culture will recognize that the title character is associated with beauty and the principal with education and progress, a clear distinction from the rest of the women and abusive man who are associated with commonness, banality, and ignorance.  Though not all the characters are heroic, Wu has to be given credit for portraying multiple, nuanced types of Chinese people, each with agency to do positive or negative – rather than generalizing the Chinese into stereotypical figures.

Despite Wu Yonggang’s multifaceted, sympathetic treatment, the opportunity to offer up a portrayal of Chinese-ness through self-representation is not without its limitations, specifically in the area of sexuality.  The title character in The Goddess is heroic but never crawls out of the shadow of her chosen profession.  Prostitution is what enables her to provide for her son but it is precisely the prostitution that gets her into trouble, causes her son’s expulsion, and serves as the catalyst for her fate in prison.  Sex and sexuality for the Chinese, therefore, is positioned in The Goddess as a negative issue.

Broken Blossoms shares this negative position regarding Chinese sexuality, but to a greater degree.  It fully embraces the tradition of “Yellow Peril”, which Gina Marchetti calls “one of the most enduring characteristics of racist ideology in American cinema, with Asian males depicted as rapacious savages, whose lust is often cloaked by a veneer of Westernized manners” (Marchetti, 39).  White women are often the targets of the Asian male’s depraved sexuality, and as Broken Blossoms confirms, the white man must come to the rescue of the white woman who is always under the threat of rape.  “The Chink” is like other Asian men during that time in popular culture, “routinely portrayed as gangsters or rapists with perverted sexual appetites for white women” (Xing, 56).  This supposedly deviant sexuality is displayed in many sequences: The Asian carouse with “street women” in an opium den rather than in a sanctified place, like their homes, with their wives; when Lillian Gish’s character, Lucy, first steps out of the house, “Evil Eye” hovers over her in a clearly threatening manner, and is only helped by “The Chink” due to his own sexual attraction toward her; and despite all “The Chink’s” kindness, she exercises great caution and clear anxiety whenever he comes near in an attempt to help her recover from the beating received at the hands of her father.

The most disturbing aspect of this anxiety toward Chinese sexuality in Broken Blossoms is in translating the story from book to screen.  In D.W. Griffith: An American Life, Richard Schickel tells us that in the original story, “the Chink” kisses Lucy, and “she eagerly, if innocently, responds, [and this moment] is not present in the film” (Schickel, 390).  Furthermore, there is many more instances of the positive portrayal of Chinese sexuality in the book, and this “erotic charge of the story [is not] visible on screen: at most the Oriental is seen in genteel longing for a love that he knows to be forbidden” (Shickel, 390).  In light of the revelation of the progressive tolerance within the original story, Broken Blossoms becomes even more damning to Griffith.  The constructive portrayal of Chinese sexuality is essentially erased by Griffith’s adaptation to the screen, and the racism behind the “Yellow Peril” is allowed to proliferate.

This proliferation is exactly the reason why Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess, made 15 years later, never fully embraces Chinese sexuality as an occasion to celebrate.  As aforementioned, there is film before Griffith, and there is film after Griffith, and The Goddess is firmly wrestling with the idea of a cinematic portrayal of Chinese identity after certain legacies have been left for so long.  Though Griffith cannot be held in sole responsibility for Wu’s inability to construct more affirming ideas, he has to be regarded as a great contributor to the overall constructed landscape of cinema at the time.  As such, Broken Blossom might have been an opportunity for Griffith to do something greater than just clear himself of racism (which he obviously did not achieve) – it could have been a turning point for the portrayal of Chinese people in general, whether constructed or self-represented.  But it is not, and Wu made his film within the confines of general cinematic sentiment at the time.  Consciously or unconsciously, Wu’s The Goddess suffers from the legacy of purported deviant Chinese sexuality throughout the entirety of the film – even beyond the aforementioned prostitution.  The Gambler in the film embodies male sexuality, paralleling it with abusive dominance which effectively makes it rape, of the body, and of the mind.  The townswomen gossip, never saying a word about the educational opportunity given to the son through the mother’s prostitution, but serve to only condemn her lifestyle choice – a clear indication that the rhetoric surrounding sexuality remains overtly negative.

Wu never takes the opportunity to portray sexuality in a celebrated light.  As such, we need to examine the possibilities for this clear absence (or at the very least, we can regard it as a somewhat balancing factor, especially since The Goddess is such a clear attempt at shaping a national identity).  There are only two possibilities here.  First, we must allow for the option that it was not of central concern.  Secondly, it is possible that he contemplated the idea and decided not to include that element.  Either way, there is something disturbing about The Goddess:  it is a film that attempts to address what it means to be “Chinese” through a pessimistic construction.

This clearly complicates “self-representation” as an entirely accurate depiction of identity.  The Goddess clearly suffers from following cinematic conventions of the time, and it never seems to celebrate being “Chinese” as much as it should.  Instead, there is a cloud of depression and negativity that hangs over the film – a desire to go beyond previous cinematic institutions that is met with an uncertainty, a lack of ability, to get over those hurdles.  Griffith, in this respect, could have been the catalyst to make it easier for filmmakers like Wu Yonggang to construct a beauty that builds upon the shoulders of a cinema giant like himself.  As it stands, Broken Blossoms only serves to continue the racist tendencies that Griffith assumed he was battling, and even under misplaced auspices of his best intentions, acts as a disservice to Chinese people specifically and race relations in general.

Examining Older Cinema Through Paradigms Shaped by More Recent Theory

Hedy Lamarr. “Exotic” back then. “Exotic” even now.

The following are three “reading responses” I wrote for a class on Pre-WWII Global Cinema. I think there are some interesting questions I had at the time, that reflected a more academically rigorous train of thought when I watched a film than I currently employ when watching a film. Noting this difference, I wonder what happened to my mind. Has it become a pile of mush?

These days, I think I approach cinema less critically, concerning myself with the craft of it all. “Less,” however, is the key word here- I do not think I can disengage my intellectual faculties in it’s entirety. Instead, I want to say that they are more mitigated by the knowledge of the production of cinema, and how those forces (at a practical, crafting, creative level) sometimes leave the intellectual to a secondary priority. In some ways, I’m more balanced than ever, which in truth, might be the best approach to this beautiful form, this lovely art, the movies.

It’s still great to revisit how I used to think as a younger man. A man who viewed life theoretically, romantically, ideally. The nuts and bolts are now included, and in many ways, added some grease to my gears. They might turn more efficiently, but they are definitely not as pretty as when they are untouched, clean.

There are some interesting topics here: Sound; Image; The Invisible Man; Chion; Hedy Lamarr; Film Noir; Humphrey Bogart.

Here. We. Go.

Reading Response for 4/7/09

The first reading that I want to discuss is Chion’s section on “Phantom Audio-Vision”.  He begins this chapter discussing Whale’s The Invisible Man, starring Claude Rains.  His essential argument here is that the character is constructed through sound – a complete paradigm shift from cinema as a mode that presents images only.  He says that “The sound film made it possible to create the new character through his voice, and thereby give him a wholly new dimension and a completely different presence” (Chion, 126), in a sense, devaluing the importance of the image in this instance.  However, I have a problem with this argument, due to the fact that The Invisible Man captures the imagination by the special effect that is created on screen – most of the scenes that contain “Griffin” show him with a constructed partial corporeality (whether it’s clothing, sunglasses, bandaging, or a cigarette).  The filmmaker uses most of his narrative time giving Griffin some kind of visual presence, even though we can’t necessarily see his body.  As a visual reference point, however, a robe or sunglasses can be just as much of a presence.  Chion exploits a single scene to make his point (the scene which the camera follows “nothing” up the stairs) but I really do feel that this is a convenient example that is not reflective of the whole of the film, as Whale uses this technique rarely.

A point that I do think is worth contemplating is the moment that Chion writes about Griffin’s moment of death.  Chion says that “becoming substantial for the eye means meeting with the common fate of corruptible beings, and to leave an impression on film is to be stamped with the seal of death that film places on those it captures” (Chion, 128).  Somehow, capturing a moment so that it becomes timeless emphasizes that those who are involved are subjected to the laws of time; no one is eternal, except for the image of the person that can be imprinted on celluloid.  It’s a fleeting moment in Chion’s text, but it opens up a realm of philosophical underpinnings that can be debated: the nature of film; the nature of an image.

Glossing over that point briefly, Chion then goes on to describe what he calls “the acousmetre.”  He uses this term to describe a sound that is “not inside…the image…nor is it outside, since it is not clearly positioned offscreen…it is implicated in the action, constantly about to be part of it” (Chion, 129).  Here, he invokes the language of God, by saying that the acousmetre “sees all,” has the power of “omniscience” and omnipotence to act on the situation.  This relationship between the cinematic and the theological has many implications:  here, Chion speaks of a constructed sound, but I would also emphasize the importance that the audience plays in this construction.  I would argue that without an audience, the “acousmetre” does not have these attributes.  It does not “see all” or “know all” or “have the power to act” until we acknowledge it existence in relation to what’s happening on screen.  Much like the question that we ask regarding a tree falling in the forrest, the acousmetre, along with the nature of film itself, the people captured onscreen, the narrative, etc, only exists in a vacuum.

This relationship between film art and theology also extends to the filmmaker; in a sense, the filmmaker is a creating a world, creating characters, and creating a story.  At a larger parallel, in reality, these are the notions that we typically attribute to a higher power.  I would’ve liked to see Chion address this idea at more length – though I freely admit that it would disrupt his train of thought in this chapter, which goes on to address the suspension of sound (“a sound naturally expected from a situation [which we usually hear at first] becomes suppressed, either insidiously or suddenly” [Chion, 132]) and the complex, cross pollinating relationship between audio and visual.

I would now like to move on to “Berlin, 1931” by Anton Kaes, which acts like both a critical analysis of the film M and a cultural study of the surrounding environment where the film was produced.  Kaes doe an impeccable job of breaking down the opening sequences of the film, explaining in plain terms what audiences have been experiencing at a subconscious level.  He says that “Lang wanted sound to be independent from the movie itself so that it might mediate between the film and the audience, just as in early film a lecturer stood next to the screen and explained the movie’s action to the audience”.  I’m glad that Kaes raises this issue, as it seems that modern film has strayed away from Lang’s example of sound usage.  Where Lang would use the children’s singing to implicate a thematic concern, the modern filmmaker’s more often are concerned with presenting the realism of the moment.

Initially, I found the “cultural interruption” of the piece jarring.  Kaes went from a close textual reading, and immediately followed the moment by giving some sociopolitical context.  The first interruption of this kind, where he discusses the SA as a political force, seemed to have no connection.  As the piece progressed, he then began drawing the connections, which eventually clarified the implications that M might have as a film.  As a stylistic criticism, Kaes piece would’ve been more robust if he interweaved his cultural analysts and cinematic analysis.  Instead, he opted to go with the “page break” to divide sections.  Formally, I don’t think these clear divisions work: Kaes is attempting to show how the artwork does not exist as a separate entity.  He is attempting to show how M is firmly entrenched, commented on, commenting on, resulting from, reactionary to, the cultural framework in which it is being produced.  There are very complicated, natural relationships that are interweaved between M and the Germany of the time. Instead of using these literary membranes, a more fluid and interchangeable approach would strengthen his argument and provide a more clear correlation.

He ends the piece by describing how Peter Lorre entered into his working relationship with Fritz Lang, which I think is the strongest point.  He does not see a break between the art and the artist’s context.  Instead, everything is interrelated, which makes the section much more engaging.  Rather than having a section that dissects Peter Lorre’s acting, then following it with a section that addresses Lorre’s relationship with Lang, he addresses both topics within the larger sectional framework.  At some level, I think this is the clearer parallel that a spectator has with the film – we enjoy the momentary performance of Peter Lorre, all the while wondering about the reasons behind what makes it so enjoyable.

Both pieces give a spectator an expanded capacity to appreciate M.  Though they stand as their own works, Chion gives us tools to approach M, which Kaes allows us to ruminate and reflect upon its significance.

Reading Response for 4/21/09

The first reading that I would like to respond to is Diane Negra’s piece.  Negra frames Hedy Lamarr as an example of how American ideals were transported beyond your traditional political rhetoric – they were also embodied through the corporeal body – actual people like Lamarr.  Despite her ethnicity, there was a sense of “Americanness” that she was made into as a commodity for movie companies to exploit. Initially, interest rose in Hedy Lamarr due to the film Ecstasy, which was “celebrated in Europe as art film…banned in the US” (104). This forces us to consider why there was such a difference in perception of this piece of film.  I think we often relegate this to the fact that Americans, during the respective time period, were of a more conservative bent in regards to sexuality, whereas Europeans were much more open.  However, I think this is an oversimplification of the issue: obviously, it’s this sexuality which made Lamarr a commodity – whether she was nude or she was covered up.  There was something there that could be represented onscreen that would bring people to movie theaters. Either way, I think this piece would’ve benefitted from a discussion of the sexual mores of the time.  Negra writes about Lamarr with much political context, but a deeper understanding of the social/sexual times would’ve given clarity to why Lamarr was chosen as this type of symbol in the first place.

I also find Negra’s argument that “ethnicity took on positive connotations of transformation for both American and foreign figures in Hollywood” (107) somewhat problematic.  In theory, Negra used Lamarr as a case study to strengthen her argument, but I find that making a general observation about the whole of Hollywood difficult when only addressing a single person.  If Negra had focused directly on Lamarr as a positive reinforcement of the Austrian Female, Lamarr as an example would have been sufficient for the specificity.  When looking at Hollywood in general, the times that Negra is referring to is a racist and divided one.  People of “real” ethnicity (black, asian, middle-eastern) were often ostracized and stratified, and it is insufficient to regard Lamarr as “ethnic” when her skin color is so close to any typical American.  This is the problem that I have with Negra’s whole section on “American interventionism and ethnic femininity”: She uses Lamarr as the single defining case for her to build her argument, but never once takes the time to define what it means to be “ethnic” or what it means to be “feminine”.  Instead, she loosely uses those terms to describe (what seems to me) an indescribable sense of “star glamour” rather than a true categorical sense of the “other” to “Americanness.”  But the section is not all problematic; I think Negra does an excellent job reiterating how the United States moved from foreign policy that was isolationist toward a foreign policy that was interventionist.

Much of my problem with Hedy Lamarr as the ideal actress to use in a discussion of ethnicity extends to Negra’s section on “Hedy Lamarr and the management of exotic sexuality,” due to the fact that she “had her own whiteness symbolically compromised through the application of body makeup” (116).  Negra uses it as an example of a type of subversive element of whiteness, whereas I see it as merely an aesthetic choice: Lamarr is white, she’s playing an ethnic person, so we need to make her look more ethnic.  And by making this choice, the filmmakers are necessarily commenting on Lamarr herself – that in her natural state, she is not nearly “ethnic enough” to constitute a person from a foreign land.

Negra continues her argument on several fronts: Lamarr as a symbol of domesticity; Lamarr as an interventionist accessory; and Lamarr as a symbol of rescue fantasies.  These eventually give way to a talk of Lamarr’s waning years as an actress, and her newfound love for “inappropriately exhibitionistic behavior” (132).  I find myself most fascinated with this section of the article, as it finally addresses Hedy Lamarr as a person, an individual, who has some semblance of agency in her own life.  The rest of the piece frames Lamarr as a construction, a symbol that is formulated for the goals of others (whether national, corporate, or individual).  Here, we finally get to see a bit of Hedy herself, and she has problems.  Negra goes on to say that “rather than building a narrative through accretion, Lamarr’s periodic decision to sell her belongings at auction ruptured the continuity of her evolving persona, severing links to her own history,” (133) and though this is a compelling statement, it’s really a conjecture.  I see these final moments in Hedy’s life (whether we’re discussing the auction or her tendency to shoplift) as a neurotic outpouring of a person that audiences didn’t really know.  Like I mentioned above, all we knew of Hedy in her earlier career was the constructions of others – it was not necessarily her.  To say that this later “acting out” was a “rupture” is to assume that someone that constructed image was intimately tied to the real person of Hedy Lamarr, and I just do not think we are capable of really assessing that.

This is where I would like to begin and talk about the next article, Braun’s “Advanced Weaponry of the Stars.” Here, unlike Negra’s piece, we are introduced to the more personal side of Lamarr, and some of the things she did outside of being a tool for Hollywood/National ideology.  Braun starts by giving us the interesting premise (a glamorous star patents a device for warfare) and then moves into telling us a little about the principal characters (Lamarr, Fritz Mandl, and George Antheil).  Then, the piece moves into the actual development of the project, and its significance at the time and how it has impacted military warfare today.

Though short, the article reminds readers that these “movies stars” are people, and people have varied interests.  Often times, we relegate actors/actresses/filmmakers to an image in our head that is defined by the moments that are captured onscreen.  It is only when we read articles like this are we reminded that the movies is only a small part of their lives.  It might be true that Lamarr was used for any number of reasons by filmmakers.  In Negra’s piece, it seems that this is all that we are concerned with.  But the strength of a symbol, its ability to represent an idea, is only as effective as the depth that it is constructed out of.  There are plenty of beautiful actresses in early Hollywood who were from varied ethnic backgrounds, so why is Lamarr a more relevant case study than any of them?  I would have to argue that it is because there’s a certain unexplainable depth to her, which makes her ability to be a symbol more powerful. This depth can only be explained by her experiences in personal life, as all the “constructions” of who she is will ultimately be brought to light as “constructions” and not truth.

All this to say that though we’re “surprised” to hear that Hedy Lamarr came up with a sophisticated idea for military use, we should not be. It should not be a surprise that these “stars” are people, and have just as many interests and abilities as the next person.

Reading Response 3

For this third reading response, I would first like to address “Towards a Definition of Film Noir.”  This article, written in 1955, seeks to formulate a working definition of Film Noir, which seemed to be a recurring “style” of filmmaking that was showing up during the post-WW2 period.  To this day, film scholars do not have a hermetic definition of “Film Noir” and this article can be seen as an early attempt to begin that type of debate.

The article begins by giving a small bit of background on why the film categorized as “film noir” initially seemed so fresh and new: the war had left Europe with a large gap in the exchange of culture (in particular, American films), and as styles continually change, the “American film” as they knew it was different from what they remembered.  The authors then proceed to outline some parameters on which to form their discussion, making it clear that they’re not just looking for an oversimplified definition.

One of the first points they make, however, seems to muddy their attempt.  They make the claim that the “noir film is black…specifically for the Western and American moviesgoers of the 1950s…It exists in response to a certain mood at large in this particular time and place” (19).  Saying that film noir exists “in response” signifies two things for me: first, a response necessarily means that there is a relationship between films that are not noir and films that are (in this case, that there is somehow an opposition present); secondly, that even in the early stages of categorization, there is permeable quality to the very style.

These issues force us to think about how noir originated in the first place.  If noir exists only in relation to other films, is it a strict antithesis to another type of film?  If so, then what is this type of film?  There seems to be no answer to such, which I believe weakens the authors’ attempt to make a salient point.  To say that film noir is a response, necessarily means that there is an “other” that it exists in relation to – at this point, I think it would have been useful to make an attempt to formulate an idea of “the other.”  At the very least, this “attempt” would help with creating a definition for noir that would have less slippage.

The authors proceed by giving some actual cinematic qualities which they think fairly represent what a noir film is: a sense of police documentary realism with a shift from the police perspective over to the criminal point of view, a shift away from moral absolutism over to moral ambiguity of characters, and a new emphasis on violence. These all work together to provide an air of mystery and confusion, effectively “disorienting the spectator” (24).

These qualities serve to formulate a paradigm to determine what is or is not film noir, though any attempt at categorization, in my opinion, can be somewhat debatable.  This is what I think is the ultimate problem with this article: it does not take a firm enough stance. It instead gives us a permeable definition, but its permeability does nothing except leave it up to an individual’s interpretation.  Even if their attempt to create a stricter definition was wrong, it would have been more useful than this muddy treatment, which ultimately makes the article seem less useful than it has the potential to be.

Next, I would like to talk about the article “Blackout: WWII and the Origins of Film Noir,” which gives a explanation to the specific industrial forces which created the film The Big Sleep, now considered a cornerstone of the Film Noir moment in cinema history.  The article sets itself up by giving us a thorough treatment of the development of Howards Hawks’ career, moving then to the rise of Humphrey Bogart as a genuine star, and the discovery of Lauren Bacall.

The article spends an ample amount of space framing the film Conflict as the precursor to To Have and Have Not.  One of the more interesting issues in this discussion is how Humphrey Bogart’s image has changed.  The author writes that during this period, that Bogart was “transitioning his male persona from destabilized patriotic wartime (anti)hero to gritty, hard-bitten professional” (176).  The reason I find it interesting is because there is no room (and certainly, this is not the scope of the article) to speculate on the pressures which force this change for Bogart.  Is it a personal decision to change his image?  Was it an accident that Bogart landed in these roles that made him a star?  Was this a result of pressures outside of Hollywood, somehow a reflection of the way society-at-large was changing?  I think it might be salient to further investigate these issues, because it can tell us something about film noir in general (and at the very least, can give us a more defined understanding of Bogart’s career trajectory).

Certainly, this line of thought would delve into economic considerations, which the article does address next (thought not specifically regarding Humphrey Bogart).  The article describes at length how attitudes in the film industry towards violence were changing.  Furthermore, marketing often revolved around exploiting the darker characteristics of these types of films: “Publicity pitched violence, often sexual violence, to sell and sensationalize, and also to justify and naturalize its narrative exploitation in the effort to increase verisimilitude and ‘realism’” (181).

Here, I would have liked to see a more in depth discussion of the industrial practices of marketing at that time.  Again, I think it’s an important issue, because it can tell us something about the way attitudes at large were changing.  The emphasis on violence certainly says that people were more willing to accept its portrayal.  The same can be said about sexual attitudes.  Relating to the previous article, a discussion of marketing can help us create (possibly) a firmer definition of “film noir” or the “other” type of film that it exists in relation to.  Rather than only theorizing how these categories came to be, I think that taking a closer examination to how the movie studios themselves attempted to situate the films might be helpful in how they were seeing the differences between different types of films; this might give us a more solid foundation to further parse the categorization.

The article then moves into it’s last section, which starts as a description of the developmental process for The Big Sleep.  Development moves to writing, and the article then ends with production (a shoot that was apparently filled with working tensions along with personal relationship issues).  In comparison, the scope of this second article is much larger than the first, and I find that the author’s willingness to discuss much of the industrial pressures give ample support to how the aesthetic qualities of the films play out.  At the end, however, “film noir” as a genre, or style, or “series” still remains somewhat nebulous, which is somewhat reflective of what the general public truly feels about it.  We can generalize to a point that is useful, but in actuality, it is still quite hard to pinpoint.

Questions Are Better Than Answers

Ziggy as Tesla. A true original playing a true original

When I started my program at USC in ’08, I felt very out of place. My mind seemed small in comparison to the other members of my cohort. Most seemed far more cultivated than I was, and I was often intimidated by the discussions we had around the table.

This intimidation showed itself through silence, a characteristic that people from my other social circles wouldn’t believe was a part of my fiber.

There was one class that I felt especially unable to contribute: Film Theory. Everyone had many thoughtful, interesting, and intelligent things to say. I had nothing but questions, and sometimes the extent of my contribution was asking the professor to clarify a term that I didn’t understand.

Part of the class was to post entries onto a discussion board, supplementing whatever we discussed in our meetings. I always thought that my contributions were idiotic, even when I had hours and hours to construct the ideas. I always posted them with a fear in my heart, a little voice inside me telling me that I was dumb.

But I look at them today, and I must say, it might’ve been the point in my life where I was challenged most, intellectually. I ask a lot of questions, questions that remained unanswered to this day, but nonetheless, the questions were real, and they came from a place that was vulnerable, seeking, hoping, and grasping.  I am smarter today because that class was so difficult. I am smarter today because I had so many questions.

Four postings follow. Maybe you can help answer some of the inquiries that have plagued me for years.

Post 1)

I would like to discuss Derrida’s example of “language” as a useful parallel to explain his belief that “we are by and large in a state of quasi-illiteracy” (59).  The point in my discussing this analogy is not whether or not I believe that the analogy is a strong or weak one – rather, it was the starting point in which I began to think of the ways in which we acquire literacy (especially in respect to “the image”).

From my point of view, we learn and are learning how to intelligently “read” the image by the fact that we are born with operating eyes.  In this sense, I believe the analogy breaks down somewhat, as there is a definite mode of effortful acquisition when it comes to written language.  We learn the shapes of letters by repeating them over and over again.  We learn how to connect those letters into words.  We then have tools to proceed and string the words into coherent sentences, paragraphs, etc.

With respect to images, we begin to take everything in once we open our eyes.  The meanings that we associate with everything that we see are created automatically, without effort, and without a necessarily strict adherence to a set of grammatical structures.  As a result, I have difficulty pinpointing how we would begin to approach literacy with respect to the image.  It seems difficult to teach someone how to “watch” when they’ve been doing it all along.  Even then, meaning conveyed through image would inherently be more nebulous than firm denotations and connotations of language.  I’ve always thought this was part of the strength of the image (especially that of the moving image), as it can be a catalyst to a wide array of interpretation.  However, I do concede that there is always room to make interpretive skills deeper and more accurate.  Is that what Derrida is proposing?

Moving to Bazin, the image and it’s relation to language collapses into a single entity.  Rather than seeing the image and language as independents that share functionality, Bazin states that “cinema is also a language.”  If this is true, the implication is that there are a set of motifs/structures/devices/rules that is legible to a collective audience- which again, should cause us to inquire about how we’ve acquired these motifs/structures/devices/rules (assuming that they do exist).  If this is the case – that cinema is a language that can communicate and transfer meaning – then I speculate as to whether we might be more literate than Derrida would argue.

Post 2)

While reading Lacan, I was captivated by the story of the father who went to sleep next to the room where his dead child lay who is then awakened not only by “a noise made to recall him to the real” (57) but the dream of his child whispering “Father, can’t you see…that I am burning” (58).

First, Lacan discusses the dream as that which approximates reality so closely that there is almost no need to emerge into reality from the sleep state.  If this is true, then I wonder what the nature is, of this moment, where the world of dreams and reality intersects.  Is it merely a place where elements of one dimension somehow bleeds into the other? Or does it lie on a completely different plane, operating on a level where dreams and reality mix in an unexplainable harmony?

Lacan makes the point that there can be “more reality” (58) at the “dream” moment when the child speaks to the father than at the “real” moment of being awakened by the noise of what is happening in the other room.  It’s as if the moment in the dream has the ability to encapsulate both the unconscious and the conscious at the same time, a simultaneous, and therefore, more thorough experience of the truth, whereas the “real” may be limited by what is factually occurring.  If this is true, then there is a deep tension between this ability that a dream has in approximating reality and the tendency to move over into the fantasy, where everything has the potential to be false.

Lacan also says that this “terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream” (59).  I agree, though I believe that the vision making itself “heard” is an understatement.  It would seem to me more appropriately expressed as some kind of violent, penetrating force; that which is outside manifesting itself inside the mind.  This opens up a new group of questions: what is the nature of the force itself? How is it empowered to interject itself into dreams? Is it merely the unconscious playing tricks on us?  Or does the mind, while in a dream state, have access to another level of conscious sensitivity, where there can be a means of communication that is beyond our typical understanding of communication?

These questions might lend themselves to be answered with some “supernatural” explanation (which I would fully entertain), but I also hope that there is a space in Psychoanalysis which attempts to address these issues.  I do not have a strong background in Psychoanalysis, so any enlightenment is welcome and appreciated.

Post 3)

In class, we’ve touched on the topic of “world building” thanks to Andy’s presentation.  I’d like to direct this post to how “world building” is a significant marker for many filmmakers, David Lynch being one of them.  Through this concept, I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for Lynch.

Drawing a parallel to music, John Fogerty (post CCR, during one of his solo albums) was sued by CCR producers for basically “sounding too much like CCR”.  But I think it’s one of the unique things about the arts is that you’re able to see the connections that an artist makes within his/her own body of work.  Which is why I think it’s ridiculous that someone would complain that John Fogerty sounds too much like John Fogerty.

We’ve been talking about Lynch’s work in class, and how there’s seems to be this unexplainable “connectiveness” going from one film to the next.  They way the idea is discussed, however, makes it seem that it is somehow unique, but I’m a firm believer that this is not necessarily true, or that at the very least, I’m forgetful of the fact that with any great director, there is a body of work to be discussed, and an intelligible way of approaching that discourse is to see what the common threads are in multiple instances of his/her work.

Alfred Hitchcock repeats themes, as does Lynch.   Quentin Tarantino uses similar/same characters, as Lynch seemingly does.  What would Kurosawa’s work be like without the great actor Toshiro Mifune?  As such, I see Lynch’s tendency to gravitate to what and who he knows best as nothing surprising.

He is building his world.  He uses a lot of the same tools, as aforementioned, that other filmmakers use, but where I think the difference lies is the fact that the world he is building does not operate on the level that our world does, which I think is a more useful plane of discussion. There are no parameters between real/reality/fantasy/dream, and like we’ve discussed in class, there seem to be theses portals that the characters and people involved with his films simply “channel” through.  With that said, why is it that we need to have things “make sense”? After all, it’s not reality we’re talking about- where things can be tested against logic and rationality.  This is art, and though I have been previously upset with “not understanding” Lynch, I am now at a place of peace in “not getting it.”

This is Lynch’s world, where things make sense only to him, where things are how he wants it, where rationality, cause and effect are not the rules that he plays by.  If anything, I appreciate the fact that he’s undertaking art in biblical proportions: Like God in Genesis, Lynch is creating a world as he sees fit.  In no way am I saying that Lynch is God or even anything close; what I am saying is that world building is an almost impossible task.  The fact that he’s able to make these connections and create the interlinked Lynch-universe (“Lynchverse”?)  is pretty impressive.

Finally, though somewhat off-immediate-topic, I’d like to say that David Bowie is being unfairly discriminated against in our class. Please remember, we are talking about Ziggy Stardust.  This is the man that gave us “Suffragette City” and “Moonage Daydream” without which I would not have made it through college.  I agree completely with Dr. Lippitt about his acting ability (or lack thereof); however, I do believe that this “lack” can be used for good.  Case in point: Zoolander.  Even better, David Bowie as Nikola Tesla in “The Prestige.”  In my opinion, this was genius casting: a true original playing a true original.

Post 4)

An issue that I’ve been thinking about is spectrality, and how the spectre of prior art work can have a small or significant influence on a work in progress.  We are more accustomed to terms like “influence” or “homage” or even “copy” but I think in view of our discussion on spectrality, these terms now seem somewhat lacking in their ability to accurately capture how an artist might look to another work for inspiration.

This leads to the obvious question: can the ghost of work that has come before even be measured in this way?  Can it have varying degrees of influence? Or is it a concept that should be regarded as having no real quantifiable existence.  After all, we are talking about ghosts and hauntings, which are not necessarily tangible, and as such, difficult to realistically measure.

In cinema, I do believe that there are varying degrees of influence that the haunting of a previous work can have on one that is in progress. For example, Star Wars owes a lot to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which George Lucas will readily admit.  However, Star Wars can stand on its own, and a healthy discussion about C-3PO and R2-D2 does not necessarily require a previous knowledge about the two peasants in The Hidden Fortress.

But, there are those films that go beyond a mere “influence” and make conscious attempts to refer to another film.  Take for example, Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1. It is impossible to watch those fight scenes between “The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo” and “The Crazy 88’s” and not draw comparisons to Game of Death and The Chinese Connection. I don’t know what the purpose of this reference is- it’s often disregarded as just a nod of respect.

Van Sant’s updated version of Hitchcock’s Pyscho is a different beast altogether.  It’s a colored copy of the original.  What are we to make of it?  In Van Sant’s eyes, it was probably a way to honor the genius of the original- but to the eyes of audience members, most dismissed it as a hack job that shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath.  How does this acknowledgement of the spectre backfire, while others are seen as a clever “homage”?

Maybe there’s a certain degree to which an artist can appropriate the ideas of an influential work for himself or herself.  If it seems like they’re trying to steal, then people get upset.  If this is the case, my ultimate question is: where is the line drawn?  It seems that intuitively, we know what’s too much and what’s tasteful. But this is far too nebulous for me, and if anyone can offer a more “quantifiable” explanation as the good/bad influences of spectrality, please share.

Hitchcock and the Hollywood Machine

Dirty Alfie

I should rename this blog “michaelliuwrote” rather than “michaelliuwrites” because it’s starting to become a place of archiving work for posterity rather than new work. I’m not saying that this blog is in some way not important to me- in fact, archiving my writing so that others might be able to find it is a very valuable function.

I guess I just want to be accurate. This probably entails that I’m constrained to write something new soon. And by “soon” I mean, three months from now. Ha. Ha.

Today I present to you a paper I wrote for my class on old hollywood and the studio system. It carries less of a personal voice because it is a research oriented paper, detailing historical events rather than presenting an argument as it’s primary objective (though after reading it, you might “argue” that as well).

I like this paper because it took months of filtering through old-timey documents and contracts and messages and wires and correspondences between titans of cinema. Though I only present the few articles of evidence necessary and relevant to the central ideas of my paper, there were tons of stuff that I came across that were just as insightful and interesting. Mostly, correspondences help paint a picture of public figures that are a little more revealing, simply because the nature of those correspondences are private, and typically, for an audience of one or two. This allows for an air of truth that I find charming.

I also came across original documents which had personal notes and signatures, and I have to tell you, running my index finger over Alfred Hitchcock’s name, knowing that he use the blue pen to sign it, was quite the experience for a fanboy. Probably one of the great experiences of my life.

Here is the paper. Like previous entries, forgive the lack of perfect formatting- I’ve yet to try and discover a way to port it to wordpress easily from word or google docs.

Michael Liu

Dr. Rick Jewell

CTCS 510

12/15/08

Hitchcock’s Years in the Hollywood Studio System

Creative control is an issue that often causes tension in the working relationships that directors have with the studios. To varying degrees, directors want the freedom to pursue an opportunity to produce a great work of art, and while the studios may say that this is also their official intention, no one would argue against the fact that they exist for profitability. Often, this fundamental disagreement in filmmaking philosophy leads to a split – for better or worse – on behalf of both the director and the studio after a contract has been fulfilled. This was the very case for Alfred Hitchcock, who, after years of working under contract to David O. Selznick, left and formed Transatlantic Pictures (with longtime associate Sidney Bernstein). Transatlantic Pictures became the place where Hitchcock could finally experiment the way he saw fit, and through this company he released Rope, 1948 and Under Capricorn, 1950. But with these two films, Hitchcock soon found out what the real cost of creative control often was: disastrous financial returns. On an artistic level, Rope was an important work in both thematic issues (the homosexual undertones) and formal issues (edited as a single continuous shot taking place in real time), and Under Capricorn allowed Hitchcock to stretch his abilities in finally directing a period piece. However, this artistic broadening could not save the company, and Hitchcock went back to working for the Studios. From 1950 to 1956, Alfred Hitchcock went under contract with Warner Bros. Studios, and directed the following films for them: Stage Fright (1950); Strangers on a Train (1951); I Confess (1953); Dial M for Murder (1954); and The Wrong Man (1956). During that time, he also worked with Paramount on a project-to-project basis, directing the films Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

This time was an obviously beneficial time for Hitchcock, both financially and artistically. He was able to erase any arguments against his reputation as an artist and his name as a costly liability. So when his contractual obligations to Warner Bros. ended in 1956, it would be reasonable to assume that he would again seek to go his own route with an independent company (just as he did with Transatlantic after working with Selznick). After all, Hitchcock was always regarded as a man who liked having complete control over his films, and it would seem against his nature to remain under studio power after rebuilding his career to such an impressive degree.

From hindsight, we now know that Hitchcock did the exact opposite of what we might think was reasonable for him at the time. Instead of going and formulating a new independent, he stayed with the larger studios for the rest of his career. But the question still remains: why did Alfred Hitchcock, a man known for his preoccupation with control, not turn his back on the profit-driven Hollywood system, as he had tried to before?

The answer lies with the positive business relationship he maintained with Warner Bros. Studios while he was there. At Warner Bros., Hitchcock was given the full creative freedom that he loved and sought after. On top of that, Warner Bros. was willing to treat him as an important person rather than just a commodity, by agreeing to contractual stipulations, tolerating the times that he seemingly broke contract, and supporting all his efforts on an interpersonal level.

Hitchcock had not always been treated this way. In fact, his experience at Warner Bros. looks like an anomaly when compared to his time with David O. Selznick, who he came under contract to starting July 14, 1938. Even early in their relationship, after Hitchcock had just moved to the United States and directed the highly regarded Rebecca (1940), Selznick was unaccommodating to Hitchcock’s requests. In a telegram shortly after the release of Rebecca, Hitchcock says:

“DEAR DAVID I UNDERSTAND FROM MYRONS OFFICE THAT A REFUSAL WAS GIVEN TO MY REQUEST FOR PERMISSION TO MAKE ONE IMMEDIATE PICTURE OUTSIDE ON MY OWN AND EXTEND MY CONTRACT WITH YOU ACCORDINGLY stop I WOULD NEVER HAVE MADE THIS REQUEST IF IT WERENT FOR THE FACT THAT I HAVE HAD TO SPEND SO MUCH MONEY ON GETTING ESTABLISHED DOMESTICALLY AND THAT I HAVE BEEN PREVENTED FROM TAKING ANY OF MY MONEY FROM ENGLAND ON ACCOUNT OF WAR RESTRICTIONS stop IT IS FROM THESE REASONS THAT I AM ANXIOUS TO AUGMENT MY FINANCIAL STATUS HERE IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE AND ONE PICTURE AT MY PRESENT MARKET VALUE WOULD SUFFICE TO DO THIS stop PLEASE DAVID IF YOU HAVE A SHRED OF LOVE FOR ME AT ALL ANSWER THIS PLAINTIVE CRY OF YOUR DEVOTED SERVANT WHO HAS LOST A LOT OF WEIGHT THROUGH ANXIETY AND DIET HITCH

ALFRED HITCHCOCK”

It is clear from this correspondence that Hitchcock means no ill will. The least that we can assume is that he is making a reasonable plea, not out of mere desire or preference, but due to financial necessity. This plea, however, apparently falls on deaf ears, as Hitchcock never gets to make an outside picture while under contract to Selznick. He only makes films for Selznick directly, or is loaned-out under Selznick to other studios.

In defense of Selznick, it would have been a bad business decision to let Hitchcock do a picture “out of contract” even if it meant that Hitchcock would stay on with him for an extended period. We have to remember that at this time, Selznick had other high in demand people (actors, actresses, directors, etc.) under him. If he had given Hitchcock anyway latitude, he would have to grant that same generosity to his other employees, which would be devastating to him as a producer. The best policy, as a business man, is to follow the stipulations as outlined within contract.

But when the contract itself is far too favorable for one party, tensions can certainly arise, as it did with Hitchcock. Selznick had played his cards correctly, and the original contract, along with the amendments made on March 4, 1939 (before Hitchcock had done any work for Selznick at all), were all advantageous for Selznick International Pictures. In an undated and unaddressed memo found in the Alfred Hitchcock Papers (located at the Margaret Herrick Library), the writing party (assumed to be a legal advisor of some sort, due to language of document) states that “as unfavorable as the provisions were for Hitchcock, he, nevertheless theoretically had the right to work elsewhere aside from his agreement with Selznick.”  However, the writer further states that this right to work elsewhere is indirectly done away with, because “Hitchcock’s right to cancel the agreement as to any assignment by Selznick to another producer is eliminated. In other words, if loaned by Selznick to another producer Hitchcock is obligated to accept such assignment.”  Essentially, Hitch must work for anyone that Selznick loans him out to – and because Selznick continually loaned him out, Hitchcock could never exercise that theoretical right to work with an outside company under his own discretion.

For Selznick, he saw an opportunity to repeatedly profit off of the control he had over Hitchcock. For every film production that Hitchcock was loaned-out on, Selznick saw an immediate weekly return of several thousand dollars. Depending on the year, Selznick was obligated to pay Hitchcock $2,500.00 to $3,750.00 per week. If someone else was paying Selznick thousands more to “rent” Hitchcock, anything above and beyond Hitchcock’s salary requirement was money in Selznick’s own pocket. All he had to do was execute the options as outlined in the contract (which he did, as much as he could), keeping Alfred Hitchcock from choosing who to work with (and at the price that Hitchcock could now command), and keeping his own profits flowing.

For Hitchcock, this situation was constraining. Financially, he could not reap the benefits of his reputation. Professionally, he had no choice, and was placed in working situations which were unpleasant to him. One production, Lifeboat (1944), was plagued by disagreements that he had with then VP of Production at Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck. Zanuck questioned many of the choices that Hitchcock made, suggesting that “drastic eliminations are necessary […] You are going to have to be prepared to drop some element in its entirety.”  Hitchcock, who was thoroughly involved in every stage of the script (to the point that he kept what was important and eliminated inconsequential details during the treatment and screenplay phases), responded to Zanuck by stating that any potential changes “in the ultimate may make us all look extremely ridiculous.”

Zanuck had real concerns, one being that the budget was inflating. He immediately responded to Hitchcock again, saying “I have been advised to call off the production. The picture was devised originally, so I understand, to be a million dollar cost project. Suddenly its cost has doubled, and no one could possibly dislike the idea of butting in any more than I do.” To this, he maintained that the project should be finished after all this investment, but cuts needed to be made wherever possible. Hitchcock responded by voicing his concerns that cutting the story “will find that the picture is so short that we will have to commence writing added sequences to make the picture sufficiently long for an important release.”

Cuts or not, the production of Lifeboat was a troubled one, and it serves as an illustration of how the loaning out of directors was not always the most harmonious of endeavors. It was Hitchcock’s only work for Twentieth Century-Fox.

These employment conditions had an effect on Hitchcock, and when his obligations to Selznick came to an end, he made sure that he made certain demands in any future contract that he would enter into. He tried to negotiate a new deal with Selznick, as he probably respected him on a personal level. But on a business level, they just could not agree on Hitchcock’s new demands. Now that he had the negotiating power, he made requests that favored him. One document asks for $5,000.00 per week for 26 weeks, which would then be prorated at the same rate for every week afterwards against 10% of the profits. Another document, from the beginning of the negotiations, asks for a series of concessions among them: an “Alfred Hitchcock’s Production of” title, with credit of “Produced and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock” on every picture; specifications on loan-outs, like prior notification and pre-notice of subject matter, and loan-out credit as Producer-Director; Hitchcock’s right to do an outside picture, and extend that period if needed. A third document requires that there will be the option of an outside picture which “shall alternate with a Selznick Studio picture”, and that Hitchcock would have the right to “Approval of story, script and cast.”

As aforementioned, the deal fell through. Selznick was not willing to give up so much power (control was just as important to him as to Hitchcock), and Hitchcock was not willing to yield himself anymore. And though this working relationship would not continue, no one would disagree about how prolific Hitchcock was during this time (even if it was forced). He exercised great skill when placed into directing situations that he had no power to refuse, and the list of films from his period with Selznick (Rebecca [1940], Shadow of a Doubt [1943], Notorious [1946], just to name a few) attest to his consummate professionalism. Alfred Hitchcock appropriately described this period himself: in a letter to Leo Mishkin, after listing each work he did during the time he was with Selznick, Hitchcock says “I think this covers all my direct, or shall I say indirect, association with David O. Selznick.”

With a newfound professional freedom and a stellar reputation, Hitchcock found that it was the right time to take a risk. With Transatlantic Pictures, he finally had that sense of creative control that he always wanted. He decided to exercise it by making Rope (1948), a film about two homosexual males who commit murder for the sake of seeing if they could get away with it. Though it is now lauded for its formal elements (a total of 9 cuts, creating the effect of a single take for the entirety of the film, experimentation with space), it did not find an audience at the time of its release.

Not letting Rope cripple his output, Hitchcock went to work on Under Capricorn (1949), his next film for Transatlantic. Under Capricorn was a period piece about a love triangle and  contained very few moments of suspense or thrills. An obvious departure for Hitchcock, it was not well received by audiences. There are probably many aesthetic reasons for its failure, but these were overshadowed by its financial shortcomings. In effect, this was the film that shut the doors at Transatlantic Pictures.

Transatlantic was a brief moment in Hitchcock’s career, and in context within the larger body of his work, it still is a notable time. Rope and Under Capricorn allowed Hitchcock to stretch his abilities and take significant risks. There was a financial price that he had to pay, but it was a necessary step. If it had not been for the failure of Transatlantic, Hitchcock would not have had the impetus to move into the next phase of his career.

Transitioning to Warner Bros. Studios was not a quick move. Hitchcock had made some films that were box-office disasters, but he was still highly respected and far from financial poison. He still had the professional clout to make contractual demands, but now, he just needed the right home to support his projects.

Warner Bros. spent many months making sure that they were going to be that home. The first draft of the Hitchcock contract was completed on April 6, 1948. However, the final draft of the contract did not get signed until October 13th, 1948. Throughout this span of six and a half months, there are 20 revisions or updates made, going back and forth from the Warner Bros. Legal Department and Alfred Hitchcock’s agents. These requests finally produce a 63 page document that sufficiently gives Hitchcock everything he needs to do good work.

At times, this back and forth seems to exasperate those involved. In a correspondence dated July 21, 1948, Warner Bros. Legal Dept. Head, R. J. Obringer, writes to his the contract reviewers “I do not know whether or not you want to be bothered again reading this Hitchcock contract,” indicating that they have reviewed it more than a few times. In another correspondence to Sam Schneider, Obringer says “I admit that this contract is rather long and complex,” but he further explains the issues by saying that it is “due to Hitchcock’s reserving story approval” and the unique payment arrangements that he has requested.

Some of the caveats of Hitchcock’s contract should be discussed in depth: First, Hitchcock demanded a peculiar pay structure. He requested that he be paid on a weekly basis rather than a large sum per completed picture, along with a percentage of the total gross. Within the same correspondence in which Obringer calls Hitchcock contract “long and complex” he clearly notes the following:

“Briefly, this deal is that we are entitled to 333 weeks of Hitchcock’s services at $3,000 per week, during which period we can obtain his services as the producer and/or director of 4 motion pictures, with Hitchcock having the right during this period to do 3 outside motion pictures on a 10 month per picture basis. In addition to the $3,000 per week, Hitchcock, of course, gets 10% of the total gross receipts in excess of $4,000,000, or in excess of twice the production cost of the picture, whichever sum is lower, and the production cost includes our general application of overhead […] These arrangements were part of the deal, and, consequently, the agreement had to be prepared along those lines.”

In total, his contract was a just shy of a $1,000,000.00 agreement.

Secondly, but of equal importance, is what the correspondences repeatedly refer to as “paragraph 17” which details the issue of story approval. The first demand that paragraph 17 makes is that the “Director shall not be required to render his services in connection with the production of any motion picture contemplated hereunder unless Producer and Director shall have mutually agreed upon the story, screen play or other literary property” essentially protecting Hitchcock from taking on any projects that he feels would not be in alignment with the reputation that he has built. In regards to the mechanism of selecting a work to make into film, the paragraph stipulates that “Producer [in this case, Warner Bros. Studios] agrees that it will from time to time […] consult with Director and suggest, recommend or submit to Director literary properties to the end that a literary property may be mutually selected and agreed upon.”  This way, Hitchcock does not always have to find properties himself, which relieves some of the burden that he has to take on. The paragraph also includes a similar statement with the tables turned so that Hitchcock also has the authority to submit properties to Warner Bros. for consideration (with the agreement that acquiring the rights to the property must cost less than $50,000.00 for the studio). All submissions (3 in total) to Hitchcock from Warner Bros. must be made within a timeframe of 26 weeks, and if Hitchcock does not approve of one, Warner Bros. is free to stop his salary, which seems like a concession to Warner Bros, assuring them that they do not have to continue to pay him if he is not working. Once a work is submitted, Hitchcock will approve or disapprove of any submission after 2 weeks (unless he is working on a project with another company).

Though the contract obligates Hitchcock to direct 4 pictures, he has also stipulated in paragraph 17 that the first of these films will be a property that he has been working on already: Man Running, which will become Stage Fright. I see this as an important compromise because Warner Bros. is essentially promising to finance a film that they previously had no stake in. They did not own this property, and were not interesting in making the property into a film. However, Hitchcock had already bought the rights (which Warner Bros. would reimburse him for on the same day he signs the contract) and was interested in doing the picture – so they placed their trust in him as a filmmaker, as well as pledged their pocketbook, and agreed to make the picture so that he would agree to sign with them.

Business aside, there were a few other quirks that Hitchcock demanded from this agreement: Hitchcock received a provision for “two weeks trip to New York each contract year with all expenses paid by [Warner Bros.] such trip to class as exploitation of his pictures of [them], the trip to be made or not made at his election and at a time mutually agreeable” which, despite its language, is really a free vacation;  He also persuaded Warner Bros. to hire Alma, his wife, at the cost of $800.00 a week, to write the full screen play treatment of Stage Fright.

Warner Bros. was obviously obliging to Hitchcock at the time of the signing of their contract. However, the generosity did not stop once Hitchcock got on payroll; over the next few years, they repeatedly make concession after concession, compromise after compromise, all to make Hitchcock happy with his time there.

The first of these concessions is minor, but seems to set the stage for Hitchcock taking advantage of Warner Bros. Studios good graces. In a memo from R. J. Obringer to a Mr. Ed Depatie (who can be reasonably inferred to as an employee in payroll), Warner Bros. places “Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary on the Warner Bros. pay roll at whatever salary she has been receiving from Hitchcock.”  Apparently, Alfred Hitchcock was tired of paying his personal secretary out of his own pocket, and somehow managed to get the Studio to foot the bill.

Another concession that Warner Bros. makes to Alfred Hitchcock is in the display size type of his name on the main title of Stage Fright. Hitchcock’s contract explicitly states that his name must be 50% size type of the title. Arbitrarily, Hitchcock did not like the way 50% looked, so he changed it to 37.5% of the size of the title. Though this may seem trivial, it implicates several things: Hitchcock had a tendency to ignore or forget contract stipulations; Warner Bros. explicitly stated this in his contract because the name of Alfred Hitchcock is a commodity to be exploited; if allowed, it sets a precedent for Hitchcock to interpret his contract “loosely.”  Instead of creating a hard line for Hitchcock to follow, they do, in fact, confirm and allow this design to proceed.

Warner Bros. also honored Hitchcock’s right to do films outside of the company. Apparently, Alfred Hitchcock made a deal with Quebec Film Corporation to direct “Nos Deux Consciences” – later named I Confess – as an “outside” picture after finishing Stranger on a Train (his 2nd picture out of the 4 on his contract). Somewhere during the pre-production phases, Alfred Hitchcock changed his mind; what he chooses to do with Quebec Film Corporation instead is to make a film based on the property called “The Bramble Bush.”  As a result of this maneuvering, which was an inconvenience for Warner Bros. Studios, Hitchcock agrees in a memo to produce and direct an extra picture for them “without additional salary for [his] services.” In the same memo, Hitchcock says “Of course, Jack, the material must be something that I would like to do and I am confident we will be able to get together on something mutually agreeable.”

This incident involving “Nos Deux Consciences” and “The Bramble Bush” is one of the better examples of the positive working relationship that Alfred Hitchcock had with the heads at Warner Bros. Instead of regarding this situation as a strain to their contractual obligations, both parties figure out a way to resolve the problem. Most surprising is Hitchcock’s willingness to work for free; the language of his memo to Jack Warner is lighthearted and respectful, and when placed next to past correspondences that he sent to David O. Selznick and Darryl F. Zanuck, Hitchcock sounds like a completely different person.

But it is not just Hitchcock who compromises for “The Bramble Bush”. Warner Bros. does their fair share of making sure that Hitchcock can make a film out of this property. They go about resolving several of the copyright issues (which is Hitchcock’s own fault) to get the rights for him. Apparently, when Hitchcock bought the rights to this property, the contract did not contain the verbiage of “motion picture rights,” so as a favor to Hitchcock, Warner Bros. uses its own manpower to help resolve the situation

Despite all this cordial maneuvering, “The Bramble Bush” never got made:  there was an unclear disagreement with Quebec Film Corporation over the property, and on June 23, 1952, Hitchcock decided that he would rather make “The Bramble Bush” in-house with Warner Bros.  So Quebec Film Corporation again assumed “Nos Deux Consciences” as their Hitchcock vehicle, until August 14, 1952, when they released all their rights to the property to Warner Bros. Studios.  Subsequently, Hitchcock decided to forego pre-production on “The Bramble Bush” and opted for directing I Confess.

I Confess was not without maneuvering either. Warner Bros. had to work out a deal with Benjamin Gitlow over the title I Confess because he wrote a serialized book with that same title in a Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, from December of 1939 to February of 1940 (it was a biographical confession about a former leading communist). They also had to get approval to use the title from I Confess magazine, published by Mutual Magazine Corporation, which was an exploitation magazine filled with lurid stories of teenage sex clubs, frigidity, and chastity. Neither proved to be a serious problem – but did involve a certain amount of manpower.

From there on out, I Confess had no more problems; the film was in production from August 21, 1952 until November 19, 1952. After a few months, within the 26 week timeframe that the contract required, Dial M for Murder was selected as the next property that Hitchcock would work on.

Much like I Confess, Dial M for Murder was also a film in which Warner Bros. really made their best efforts to help Hitchcock realize his ideas. One such example was Hitchcock’s obsessive concern with the way that the “Old Bailey Judge” looked in the courtroom. In a memo to Steve Trilling, Rudi Fehr (editor of the film) asks for “a photo of an Old Bailey judge to make sure he will have the proper outfit […] [Hitchcock] does not want the outfit of the Lord Chief Justice as it would not be right. He would also like to know the proper size of the cap that is worn by the judge when pronouncing sentence.” He furthermore makes a request that seems overly indulgent:

“Mr. Hitchcock also feels that it would be very valuable if we could get a sound track of London traffic, to be used in the duping of the picture whenever we have street scenes. He feels that English traffic noises are different from the American ones. He would also like a few distant English auto horns, which will be used when the detectives bring Margo [played by Grace Kelly] back and approach the apartment house in the car […] As indicated in the script, there should be three distinct blasts of an automobile horn in the distance.”

There is no further documentation showing whether Hitchcock actually gets the “English auto horn” sounds that he needs, but there are definitely confirmations of his getting the look of the Old Bailey judge exactly right. In order to do so, Warner Bros. had to hire a model to pose in authentic robes because they could not find a colored photograph of a Judge in appropriate attire anywhere in London (due to the fact that “such photographs are the personal property of the Judges”). They also had an authentic “black cap” as worn by an Old Bailey judge sent to the production, and airmailed a colored photographed (directly from the photographer, to save time, and not money) along with an old “bench wig” from a judge, that looks surprisingly different from what they would think because “popular conception has been misled […] photographs cannot be taken of judges inside their courts, and are only taken on ceremonial occasions” where they wear different robes and wigs entirely.

This attention to detail may now seem overly cumbersome, but again, the correspondence going back and forth from the Warner Bros crew seemed very cordial and approving. Not once did they regard Hitchcock as an overindulgent tyrant on the set – instead, they just went about, fulfilling any kind of request he had, not questioning whether it was really worth the time or energy to do it.

That attention to detail paid off, as Dial M for Murder is now widely considered a classic. Delivering such a hit to Warner Bros. probably helped Hitchcock when he tested them next by breaking contract in a more serious way. In taking a look at Hitchcock’s body of work, you will notice that after Dial M for Murder, he makes Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. These films are all done with an outside company, not Warner Bros. Studios.

Hitchcock’s contract is clear: if he chooses to do an outside picture, which is in his very right to do, he must alternate it with a Warner Bros. picture. So how is Hitchcock able to make these films consecutively without fear of legal consequence?

When To Catch a Thief went into production after Rear Window, Warner Bros. Studios asked themselves the same question. In a memo dated January 7, 1954, R. J. Obringer says the following to Steve Trilling:

“Alfred Hitchcock is now directing, or possibly has completed, the picture REAR WINDOW for Paramount. It is my understanding that Hitchcock intends to do an additional picture immediately for Paramount. Of course, our agreement with Hitch provides for outside pictures on an alternate basis, that is, he does a picture for us and then he can do an outside picture. Has some arrangement been made with Hitchcock to do two successive pictures at Paramount?”

If anyone was supposed to know the answer to that question, it should have been Mr. Obringer, as he was still in charge of the Legal Dept. His not knowing indicates that Hitchcock acted without permission, simply not caring about the repercussions of his actions.

Warner Bros., on the other hand, remained silent on the matter. Instead of pursuing any legal action, they looked the other way and allowed Hitchcock to do as he pleased. He had put together some strong films for their catalogue – and it was probably a bad move on their part to try and force Hitchcock’s hand on their next film, especially if he had already agreed to not take payment for it (The Wrong Man was completed in 1956, and Warner Bros. still allowed Hitchcock to receive the profit sharing portion of his payment, which amounted to nothing, because the film did not turn a profit – it was, at the very least, an unforced, and generous gesture).

And so Hitchcock was able to do some of his greatest work, not for Warner Bros., but during the time that he was under contract to them. He did not have to plead with Jack Warner to go outside – all he had to do was go and do the pictures, which was a far cry from the circumstances that he had to deal with when under contract to Selznick. In fact, Jack Warner was vocal to Hitchcock about how much of a privilege it was to have him on the team at Warner Bros. He often sent telegrams to Hitchcock, encouraging him and his work with simple notes: “WISH THAT MORE PEOPLE WOULD BE AS COOPERATIVE AS YOU HAVE BEEN”; and “EVERYONE SAID THIS IS THE REAL HITCHCOCK WE KNOW AND LOVE”.
Hitchcock even kept invitations that Jack sent out on his personal stationary, asking Hitchcock to join him in charity dinners.

That interpersonal touch was completely different from what Hitchcock had experienced before. At Warner Bros., Hitchcock was finally treated like the great artist that he was. He was allowed to pursue any project that he wanted, knowing that the studio would support him, even if it was not necessarily in their interest. More importantly, Warner Bros. realized that a good working relationship was built on compromise and concession – as great of an artist as Hitchcock was, he was still just another human being, who appreciated being respected and listened to.

For this very reason, Hitchcock never needed to create another independent company like Transatlantic. He saw the potential for complete control within the larger studio system. With that territory, he did not need to take on as much financial risk, and could depend on a steady paycheck. He finally saw the good that could come out of being a part of the Hollywood machine – just as long as it was the right studio and the right deal. For the rest of his career, he stays within the studios, doing some of his best work, and realistically speaking, we have the people at Warner Bros. Studios to thank for that.

NOTES

Cinema, Medium Specificity, Converging Forms

Why so serious, Mr. Eisenstein?

Recently, my friend Robin and I were discussing the role of dialogue in cinema. Though initially we differed in opinion, after wrestling with the connotation/denotation of certain terms (like story, dialogue, writing), I think we actually came to a place where we’re agreed on many things. The last front that we need to delve a little deeper into is to discuss what is “foundational” in cinema. From my perspective, the word “foundational” implied a sort of “essence” while Robin seemed to use it as a word that means a sort of “powerful use.”

On a sentimental note- I appreciate Robin for these conversations. We speak of art, but we also speak of matters of the heart, and I have found him a friend. It’s often difficult to find people whom you can relate to in both your areas of interest and personal matters, but it does happen once in awhile.

Back to cinema.

I was thinking of that prior conversation when I came across a paper I wrote as part of my MA comprehensive exams. In the critical studies track at my particular grad school, the powers that be forced you to sit for comp exams rather than write a thesis. This was a week of torture, as you had to produce papers in a window of 24 hours that would regularly take weeks to produce. They had to be as close to “publication worthy” as possible in a single day turnaround. Furthermore, we were subjected to three or four days of this within a five day span, so let me take a moment to thank the manufacturers of NoDoz and the baristas of my local Starbucks during that time for their ability to make an impeccable “Black Eye.” Apparently, the powers that be decided that it was better for the MA cohort to sit through comp exams rather than write a single thesis because the program itself was focused on sending all the candidates to PhD programs (which often end with comp exams alongside the dissertation). I guess that was good practice, but I opted out of pursuing a PhD anyway, because 1) I’m dumb, and 2) it’s way too much school and therefore, I would’ve much rather been afforded the opportunity to write a thesis, being that it’s much easier and I could do further in-depth research into a topic to my particular choice.

So here is the paper (sans footnotes), and it’s on “medium specificity in cinema.” There are no novelties to the presented ideas, but I guess I’m proud of the fact that I was able to turn it around in 24 hours. There is no way I would have the stamina or the brainpower to accomplish this now. And it was only three years ago.

I swear, 30 was the magic number. The day before I turned 30, I felt like I was mentally and physically capable of doing ANYTHING. The day after I turned 30, I couldn’t wake up early anymore, and things in my mind started to turn “foggy.”  The actual day of my 30th birthday? Well, that’s a story for another time…

Michael Liu

MA Exam for FILM THEORY

Critical Studies

1/5/10

Question 3:

Trace major changes in theories of medium specificity from the cinema’s silent era to the present time of media convergence.  Describe the contributions of at least three of the most relevant theorists and explain the significance of the main cultural, technological and political factors that have effected shifts in defining what film and film theory are.  Based on this trajectory, what is your prediction for the future of film theory?

Answer:

As soon as the cinema was given to the world, questions about its nature arose.  Most viewers were primarily concerned with how such a thing could exist in the first place, fooling their eyes into thinking that an actual train was coming toward them while they were sitting in front of a simple screen with light dancing on it.  The sharper and more curious mind would recognize that it was simply a projection, and at best, want to know the actual mechanism that was behind the wonder of the moving image.  But there were also the men and women who sought to put cinema onto a pedestal akin to the other arts.  They immediately saw its potential, and though they could not foresee the exact powerhouse of industry that cinema would become in the future, they were certain of its continued success.  Immediately, thinkers began contemplating what the cinema meant, and much like the other arts possess, they questioned what cinema’s unique essence was.  This has set precedence for the field of medium specificity, and these questions continue today, as theoretical approaches continue to create an eclectic understanding of the form, rather than producing an absolute approach to it.

Theories about this medium specificity extended from multiple entry points for the cinema.  Some have been based upon the fact that it is undeniably an art form that is tied to the inner workings of a machine.  Other theories rest on the fact that cinema is about spectatorship, and others are rooted in an understanding of the actual film stock. Others are focused on the way that those things can be manipulated (unlike other forms) – for example, editing.

Sergei Eisenstein is the primary theorist who ushered Soviet film into the world stage.  Primarily, his understanding of the essence of cinema is the way that meaning can be constructed from images.  By placing one image on the screen and immediately replacing it by another through an editing cut, Eisenstein theorized that meaning could be derived. Here are his very words, when describing the way that juxtaposed shots work together:

“The representation of water and of an eye signifies ‘to weep’,

The representation of an ear next to a drawing of a door means ‘to listen’,

A dog and a mouth mean ‘to bark’

A mouth and a baby mean to ‘scream’

A mouth and a bird mean ‘to sing’

A knife and a heart mean ‘sorrow’, and so on

But – this is montage!!

Yes, it is precisely what we do in cinema, juxtaposing representational shots that have, as far as possible, the same meaning, that are neutral in terms of their meaning, in meaningful contexts and series.”

This idea, though simple, set the tone for Soviet film during the early part of the 20th century.  Eisenstein not only theorized the way that editing could be used in the film form, he employed it as a tool in his films, the most famous of which is the massacre at the Odessa Steps in The Battleship Potemkin (1925).  Here, Eisenstein moves from shots of ailing victims of gunfire to the approaching, rhythmic machine like soldiers who are causing all the people turmoil.  Cut after cut, the suturing allows the audience to make connections between characters, actions, plot points, movement, that would otherwise be missing if the shots were stand alone.

The strength of his argument and the virtuosity which Eisenstein used to demonstrate his theory led others to adopt this functional mode of film.  Dziga Vertov, famous uses the power of “Soviet Montage” for Man with a Movie Camera (1929) in which he presents the urban life of Odessa and other Soviet Cities.

The artistry with which these films were made had a significant impact on the public.  The Soviet people were able to see a representation of themselves on the screen, and the films could be used as rallying tools to mobilize the people for or against their government.  Knowing this, the Soviet powers strategically used cinema, through the state run school and financing, as a means for political propaganda.

Eisenstein felt that the juxtaposition of images that were not related (sometimes even contrary) was the essence of cinema.  But this was entirely based on the cinema in which he operated: Silent cinema.  As the film form grew, Eisenstein was hesitant about newer technical advancements.  One of those advancements was the addition of sound to the picture on screen.  Eisenstein’s theory was predicated on the fact that no words were exchanged in his pictures, and therefore, meaning was observed through image.  Now that words or music (with its ability to alter a viewer’s emotional palate) was being added, his theory would have to be reevaluated.  After some apprehension, however, Eisenstein was able to accept music and sound – with the condition that it was used as an “opposing” force from the action onscreen, so that a sufficient amount of meaning can be derived from the clash between image and sound.

This seems to run completely opposite to the way that some of the high modernists in the early 20th century treated film.  In fact, they used music as a template for the way that film worked, arguing that what music did for the ears, cinema can do for the eyes.  Rather than being fearful of the connection, they embraced how film and music can work in similar ways, while keeping the two art forms “medium specific.”

Furthermore, they differed from Eisenstein in his use of realism and narrative.  Seeing those tools as not essentially cinematic, they instead went toward the usage of abstract imagery in their films, focusing on the way that shapes could be animated.  This, they argued was a purer version of “cinema” as it was not tied to traditions that were associated with the other arts (realism was a mode for painting, narrative a mode for literature).  Among these artists were the likes of Hans Richter, Leopold Survage, and Oskar Fischinger.

Richter argued that the “main aesthetic problem for the movies, which were invented for reproduction is, paradoxically, the overcoming of reproduction.” Rather than allow film to be constrained by images of the real, these artists were experimenting with movement itself, not bound by the laws of physics, but merely with the idea that they could be pleasing to the eye.

Among these artists, Oskar Fischinger was the artist who took the parallel to music most seriously.  Using the tools of abstract animation, he attempted to makes films that used shapes that move in the visual field to represent the way that notes move through the air in the aural field.  In Studie Nr. 6, he experiments with how melody is represented onscreen. He uses shapes like dots, crescents, circles and lines (done with charcoal and paper) and animates them so that they seem to move freely within the frame onscreen.   In Optical Poetry: the Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, William Moritz says:

“Beyond the barest requirements of choreography, there are two consistent patterns of interwoven imagery – one of flying objects in the warping currents of space (either inner or outer…), and the second of the eye as a centre of focus – half target, half mandala exuding waves of vibrations.  These two images (represented by broad fluid forms sweeping across the frame in fluctuating clusters) are linked by a pattern of dots that split like atoms again and again, sometimes seeming like a dynamic interchange between matter and space, and sometimes like darting points of focus or fragmentation of vision in the cosmic eye.”

Moritz is able to clearly define how Fischinger approaches the medium specificity of cinema, which is the mimicking of the eye.  This mode of cinema, however, does not stop with Fischinger, and becomes an important legacy to the works of mid to late 20th century filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, who repeatedly visits this theme of “eyesight” in his films.

Stan Brakhage is among many other avant-garde filmmakers from this specific school and time period, but no others have made an impact as recognizable as he. He further expands upon the foundations that the previous “abstract animators” have laid, increasingly calling attention to the medium itself.  With Mothlight (1963), Stan Brakhage systematically pastes small parts of moths onto the celluloid strip, and then proceeds to project that celluloid onto the screen.  The result is a film that does not contemplate the nature of the moth or look for meaning in the insect; instead, it brings our attention to the nature of the celluloid strip that is running through the machine which is hitting light.  Rhythm is emphasized; movement is seen, but not meant to understood in any particular way.

Black Ice (1994) is another Brakhage film that attempts to capture on film a visual phenomenon.  Here, the viewer is repeatedly subjected to images of color that have an almost mineral like substance, which does, in some respect, look to be like ice.  These multiple images of color are superimposed on one another, fading in and fading out, with the feeling of zooming into each one.  Again, narrative of any kind is done away with, and we are simply given these images to see, mimicking the experience of flashes of color to our eyes.  These images also mirror the experience that one has when closing the eye, allowing the previously retained light from our open eyes to refract within our closed lids.

These two films, in particular, do not carry a soundtrack, like much of his other work. His body of work, over 400 films, owes its existence to the forerunners of Richter, Eggeling, and Fischinger.  However, these films still exists as films, and one of the questions that we need to consider is how theoretical concepts have adapted to the fact that our culture of visual arts is moving toward convergent forms.  Medium specificity itself needs to be questioned at this point, and much of the final years of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century have been dedicated to theorizing how the movement away from celluloid affects the cinematic arts.

At the beginning of Robert Stam’s Chapter on “Post-Cinema, Digital Theory and the New Media,” he gives an introduction into the issues that are currently affecting the field:

“The current of cinema in its much-vaunted specificity now seems to be disappearing into the larger stream of the audiovisual media, be they photographic, electronic, or cybernetic.  Losing its hard-won privileged status as “king” of the popular arts, the cinema must now compete with television, video games, computers, and virtual reality.  Just one, relatively narrow band on a wide spectrum of simulation apparatuses, film is now seen as on a continuum with television, rather than as its antithesis, with a god deal of cross-fertilization in terms of personnel, financing, and even aesthetics.”

These issues are especially prevalent with the rise of digital media, which some feel can obliterate the need to talk about medium specificity at all.

Cinema, being considered on a “continuum” with television, has in some sense lost it identity in recent years.  For decades, narrative was considered optimal at the level of cinema.  But recently, with the rise of cable television networks and their production of true “quality programming” like The Sopranos, The Wire, or Mad Men, films no longer seem to be where people get their daily dose of culture.  A shift can be seen: television is where people enjoy the stories, and films seem to be somehow reduced back to spectacle, much like how they originally were conceived.

Another pressing issue that theorists face at this moment in time is how to think about the way that distribution practices have changed.  Distribution, at one time, was simple.  Television could only be attained through television. Films could only be seen in the movie theaters (subsequently moving to video and DVD).  But now the internet is in every home, people have access to libraries that were previously impossible to attain (through both legal and illegal channels).  The advent of YouTube has to be considered as a new force in visual culture that needs to be studied continually.  With that said, the lines have blurred immensely.

Specificity, therefore, seems to be a thing of the past.  The death of cinema, as some have said, has already occurred, and we are in a moment where this could be the last of what we hold dear.  On the other side, it could be the moment where our existence and consumption of media is yielding brand new thresholds, and we could be seeing glimpses of what is to come.

This then yields the question, what is the future of film theory?  In my opinion, film theory as we know it will be a thing of the past.  This is not to say that the concepts of film theory will be disregarded in the future.  They will be used, but simply in an evolved form.  The 20th century was very “film” centric, as cinema was the dominant mode.  As such, the newer forms are all informed by the way cinema communicated to us, and operate in the “language” of film that we know.  For a very long time ahead, digital media, TV, and all of these other converging forms will be as a result of their being, in some sense, ‘birthed’ by cinema, and therefore, film theory will continue to be applied, and necessarily studied.

However, I see theory heading toward a bent that is less “text” oriented.  As aforementioned, the study of distribution and reception will continue to grow.  Digital technologies allow access, and takes control away from the conglomerates that used to have full say over how we attain the media that we want.  As such, people are developing new avenues for access every day.

Since it can be clearly seen, intellectual properties are being moved from movies, to TV, to fashion, to books, etc.  Therefore, I also see an emphasis on the study of the synergistic qualities of corporations.  The way that properties get moved into different areas of consumer products is a field that can yield important concepts.

Film theory is not going to go away – but the emphasis on medium specificity will fade into studies that approach the emerging technologies.  These emerging technologies, however, have all been influenced by the presence of cinema in the 20th century – and therefore, the theorists of that time will still be read and make an impact in the fields that are just beyond the horizon.

Where Foo Fighters and Freud Meet

Little Joel, Big Joel, Big Clem, Little Clem

This was one of my first papers from grad school. Admittedly, I had little grasp of Psychoanalysis at the time, and even now, I possess nothing but a perfunctory knowledge gleaned from my love of In Treatment (Thanks Gabriel Byrne. Actually, they hardly mention Freud, something inside just wanted to admit that I’m a fan of In Treatment). Despite this, the professor (the most cosmopolitan man I ever met, Akira Mizuta Lippit) gave me a high mark. As you read it, you will notice that it’s written by a man that’s tries to but fails at understanding Freud. I think it’s clear that I have a stronger understanding of Michel Gondry’s work, but failing one man will automatically flaw the arguments for both men.

What strikes me the most is how my writing has improved since this period of my life. As I write now, I am careful of every word that I type. Back then, which was about 5 years ago, I was much more concerned with merely finishing the paper with the little time that I had as a result of trying to balance class, study, and life.

Nowadays, I no longer go to class. But I still try to balance study and life. Two of the three is hard enough.

This paper, though long, might be worth a read for you not because it’s profound in any way, but because it shows how desperation can be masked by the illusion of formality.

Michael Liu

Dr. Akira Lippit

CTCS 500

12/12/08

Dreams at Work in the Films of Michel Gondry

The works of Michel Gondry address a large breadth of subject matter. He has directed work ranging from a feature documentary about a Brooklyn block party (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party) to short music videos that use human beings as the image of rhythmic components (Daft Punk’s Around the World), to a commercial for Levi’s Jeans. Because the nature of his filmmaking is so eclectic and each work can stand on its own, it is then notable that the topic of Dreams is a thread that serves to link several of those works. Gondry seems to be repeatedly engaging with the world of sleeping and dreaming, and a careful examination (through a paradigm shaped by Psychoanalytic Dream Theory) reveals that the films that use Dreams as a primary topic are following a trajectory of maturation: first, the 1997 Foo Fighters’ Everlong video, which takes place almost entirely in an anxious dream state, has a blatant disregard for the dreamer and the psychological underpinnings which give rise to the dream; second, the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind addresses how dreams stem from and have serious repercussions in the “waking-life”; and finally, the 2006 film The Science of Sleep, where Gondry contemplates the potential for the dream-work to be constructed in a “real” sense by the dreamer who possesses that empowered agency.

As aforementioned, the paradigm that will shape this discussion of Gondry’s work is Dream Theory as it is presented in Psychoanalysis. Coming to a firm understanding of all principles within the Psychoanalytic framework is a daunting task; possessing a rigorous enough command of those principals so that you can apply it (whether to an individual or to an art form like cinema) is even more exhaustive and seemingly unapproachable. This vastness, however, can be mitigated in two ways: limiting the scope of work discussed, and using only a specific area of study to engage with that work – in this case, the scope is the three previously stated Gondry films and the area is Dreams within Psychoanalysis.

Henk de Berg addresses how one can use Psychoanalysis in the study of literature (and by extraction, study of film) in Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies: an Introduction. In particular, de Berg says that it can be used for both the text itself and the author:

Everything people do depends on their mental states – on conscious deliberations, conflicts, and decisions, but also on unconscious mental processes – and can therefore be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms. This holds true for the writing of literary texts as well. Indeed, the creative process is among the psychoanalyst’s favorite objects of research, because the unconscious element in it is particularly strong. Like dreaming, the creative process provides a valve to the pressure of the unconscious. The creation of literary fictions allows the writer to work his repressed desires out of his system by expressing them in a cloaked, socially acceptable form (without being aware that this is what he is doing) (de Berg, 84).

Assuming that de Berg is correct, the Gondry directed video for the Foo Fighters’ song Everlong (1997) is a text that then asks us to pose the question of authorship. Are the authors the characters who are dreaming? Is the author Dave Grohl (the lead singer of the band) who had his dream translated to film by Gondry? Or is the author Gondry himself, using the music video as a canvas to display a nightmare he once had? In the context of the video itself, there is no explicit answer.

The video proceeds as follows: two would-be home invaders (played by Pat Smear and Nate Mendel, Foo Fighters’ guitar and bass players) break into a home presumably owned by a man and woman (played by Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins, both males and the singer/guitarist and drummer, respectively) who are asleep in bed. The video then alternates between Dave’s dream (a 1980’s era party that he’s attending) and Taylor’s dream (a cabin in the woods where they are staying). In both dreams, the home invaders are antagonizing Dave and Taylor: At the 80’s themed party, they are attempting to harass Taylor, and at the site of this, Dave confronts them. He raises his right hand, which proceeds to mutate into a giant hand, and he uses this as a weapon, slapping each until they are knocked out, lying unconscious on the floor waiting to disintegrate; in the cabin, Taylor is alone and reading a novel, while Dave is out collecting firewood. Pat and Nate (dressed in the same costumes as the 80’s themed party and the “real-world”) attempt to break into this cabin. Taylor tries to stop them by placing heavy objects in the way of doors so that they cannot push through. Eventually, they do get in, and tie him up, but Dave comes to the rescue with a pair of nunchakus that are fashioned out of the logs that he was collecting for the fire. He threateningly swings them around, but eventually drops them to the floor, opting to use his hand as a weapon against Pat and Nate. Just like the 80’s themed party dream, his hand mutates from normal sized to giant, and he attacks one of them; in the midst of the struggle, Taylor is able to break free and knocks out the other invader with a frying pan. With both Pat and Nate knocked out, Dave and Taylor proceed to take their bodies into the surrounding forest, dumping them into a lake. We then are moved out of the dream state back into the “real-world” where Dave and Taylor are sleeping in bed, with the villains standing over them. Pat and Nate (the villains) faces begin to contort, and through their respective mouths, their “true-self” emerges and rips apart their villain costumed bodies. Dave and Taylor also wake up from their sleep, and all four members of the band grab their instruments. The band begins to perform the remaining portion of the song, which up until now has been non-diegetic in nature, and the video ends.

The two dreams contained within this music video can be best described as anxiety dreams. After all, both dreams seem to focus on defending oneself and family against outside forces who want to harass or enact violence – and to this end, we must ask ourselves the most general of questions: what is the purpose? In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud has posited that “wish-fulfillment is the meaning of every dream, so that there cannot be any dreams other than wish-dreams” (Freud, 44). In both cases, we can see that the Dave Grohl character is a hero: the 80’s themed party dream has him delivering Taylor from the hands of two men who are bothering him, and the cabin dream has Dave rescuing Taylor from the villains who have tied him up and are presumably going to act violently against him. If we assume that Dave is the “dreamer” then we can interpret both dreams as a reaction to an inner need for him to protect. It either shows that he has never had the opportunity to physically defend someone, has at some point failed to properly defend someone, is merely a visualization of the cultural expectation of males to be a heroic defender of the female, or any combination of these wishes. In contrast, if we assume that Taylor (who plays a female character) is the dreamer, we can interpret the dreams as a desire to be saved. This could be visualization of the cultural stereotype that females are defenseless and in need of a male hero. Or, more disturbingly, it can be a fulfillment of some sadistic wish, where Taylor wants to be somehow violated, penetrated, and Dave is the barrier to the fruition of that desire. However, through the use of the dream dissolves, the video complicates matters because it presents one dream as fully Dave’s and the other belonging to both Dave and Taylor. As a result, “authorship” of the dreams (who the dreamer is) is uncertain at best, which makes it difficult to ascribe a purpose for the dreams; if a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, the logical conclusion is that there exists a wisher. We are stuck in a position questioning whether the dreamer is Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Michel Gondry, or a combination of them.

Right from the outset, Gondry’s direction shows that he has little concern for who the “dreamer” is. His use of color (or lack of) indicates where his interests lie: the content of the dream itself, and not in the psychological issues that it might reveal for the dreamer. In the video, only the dream sequences are in color, while the “real-world” sequences (the home invaders coming in, Dave and Taylor sleeping, the home itself) are all shot in black and white. This inverts some of the conventions that other filmmakers use: often, the “dream sequence” is shot in black and white and the “real-world” is in color. This switch forces us to recognize that the dream itself is the primary thread in which the video takes place. The black and white “real-world” shots serve only as that which sets up the occurrences in the dream. The color serves to emphasize the content of the dream, and in contrast, the black and white de-emphasizes the content of the “real-world,” which includes who the “dreamer” is.

This lack of a central dreamer is also due to the cabin sequence becoming a shared dream between Dave and Taylor. The 80’s themed party dream is always entered into from a dissolve of only Dave’s face and ends with him being awakened by a telephone ring, effectively showing us that it all takes place in his head; the cabin sequence, however, begins only after a dissolve from Taylor’s face – this is our entry point of the dream. But Dave is able to consciously decide to enter into this dream too (the telephone which awakens him to reality from the 80’s theme party dream is actually a phone call that Taylor is making from within the cabin dream) by willing himself back to sleep. This sets up several questions that seem to have no answer: how is Taylor able to make the phone call from within her dream into reality? How is Dave able to will himself into her dream? Does he have the agency to change the outcome of her dream or is he acting according to her unconscious desires?

Within the context of the video, there are no sufficient answers to these questions, and this lack of answers suggests that the video is deficient in being the visualization of the fulfillment of a wish (by the subject who wishes it, whoever he may be). I make claim to this deficiency by appealing to Freud’s own words, when he says “That the dream actually has a secret meaning, which proves to be a wish-fulfillment, must be proved afresh in every case by analysis” (Freud, 54). If there is no clear dreamer in the text, there is no one we can regard as the “wisher”. Without a wisher, then the argument that the video is a “wish-fulfillment” cannot be made, and logically, if we cannot sufficiently prove that the text is wish-fulfillment, it then cannot be a dream as defined by Psychoanalytical theory.

Could it be that Gondry was unaware of this deficiency when he was directing the video. At the time, it might have been as complete a dream-work as he could make – but based on what he visually emphasizes in the video, he consciously chooses to ignore the importance of the dreamer. As a result, it seems that with his next film involving the realm of dreams, he becomes aware of this incompleteness and presents a dream-work as the fulfillment of someone’s wish. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry makes an alert effort to clearly outline who the dreamer is, thereby firmly defining the film (in Psychoanalytical terms) as an actual dream. Through the character of Joel Barish, we see Gondry’s take on dreams mature from merely a bizarre visualization to a work that can be examined and understood in a coherent manner.

Released in 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the story of a man named Joel Barish (played by Jim Carrey) who decides to erase any and all memories of his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) after he finds out that she has done the same with the memories she had of him. The procedure for this erasure is as follows: Joel collects all physical items which have any connection with the memory of Clementine. He brings these items to Lacuna, Inc (the company that he has contracted to perform the procedure) who uses the items to trace an exact map of where all memories of Clementine reside in his brain. He is asked to go home, and before he goes to sleep, takes a prescribed pill which will induce a dream state. While he is in bed sleeping, technicians from Lacuna begin to erase every one of his Clementine memories in reverse chronological order. As they are completing their task, Joel is also experiencing every one of those memories as a dream that is being erased, and he becomes “lucid” (given the power to take action within the dream). Going through these erasures, Joel realizes that he still loves Clementine, and this conscious self who resides in his dreams decides that he does not want the procedure to continue. Instead, he would like to retain as much memory of her as he can. But the “real” self is asleep in the “real” world, and cannot do anything to stop Lacuna from fully performing the job they were hired to do. Due to this bind, Joel’s conscious dream self devises a plan with the “memory” or “constructed projection” of Clementine to avoid any further erosion by hiding in the area of his memories that they were never part of in the first place. They begin to run all through Joel’s memory archive, and they find themselves in the instances of his life that he has repressed. This method of hiding in his repressed memories does not work; eventually, Clementine is completely erased. However, through a serendipitously shared desire to go to a beach in Montauk, New York, Joel and Clementine meet each other again, both unaware that they were involved in a serious relationship with one another. The film ends with them deciding they want to give the relationship a try.

It is clear that Gondry gives equal time to the dream-state and the dreamer Joel Barish. He even emphasizes the importance of his personhood by giving him agency within the dreams, so that he attempts to make decisions within that will affect him in his waking-life. This fundamentally shifts the focus of the dreams from being a self-contained visualization (as Gondry presented it in the Foo Fighters’ video Everlong) to that which serves the real world of the people involved. As such, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind falls even more in line with the tenets of Psychoanalysis, so that we can attempt to take an understanding avenue into the psyche of Joel Barish.

What are the tenets of Psychoanalysis (specifically regarding Dreams)? First and foremost, Freud proposes that there is work of condensation. He makes a distinction between what he calls the “manifest dream-content” the “latent dream-thought”. The manifest dream-content can be described as “the dream as we remember it after we have woken up” (de Berg, 18). The latent dream-thought is “what we might call the dream’s hidden message” (Ibid). In concept, condensation is the act of shrinking the urges, desires, and wishes of the latent dream-thought into the manageable and accessible manifest dream-content. Freud says that:

“The dream, when written down, fills half a page; the analysis, which contains the dream-thoughts, requires six, eight, twelve times as much space. The ratio varies with different dreams; but in my experience it is always of the same order. As a rule, the extent of the compression which has been accomplished is under-estimated, owing to the fact that the dream-thoughts which have been brought to light are believed to be the whole of the material, whereas a continuation of the work of interpretation would reveal still further thoughts hidden in the dream.” (Freud, 175).

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we see condensation at work in a dream/memory/scene of Joel Barish being ignored as a child. As Joel and Clementine run and seek refuge in one of his repressed memories, they arrive at a scene of Joel’s childhood home, where he is hiding under a table as his mother is talking to his babysitter. Clementine has been projected into the clothes of the babysitter (in effect, “becoming” the babysitter), and Joel is visibly frustrated at the fact that he is being ignored by both his mother and Clementine. He has condensed the two characters, his former babysitter and Clementine, into one, so as to address (in a singular, focused manner) the problems that he has with both. This gives us insight into some fundamental psychological issues with Joel. First, he has an unresolved problem not receiving enough female attention. Early in the film, Joel mentions that he falls “in love with every single woman that pays [him] the least bit of attention.” In the childhood home dream sequence, he yells that “nobody is ever looking at [him]” which is further complicated by the fact that Clementine is one of those women who is ignoring him. This scene also opens up the question of the sexual objectification of women, starting at a young age. Joel sees his former babysitter as a sex object, because in this same scene, Clementine seeks to resolve his whining by flashing her panties to him. This combination of the objectification of the female and an attention-seeking disorder can then be regarded as possible explanations as to why Joel has reacted in the way he has to the central premise of the narrative. Clementine has left and erased all memory of him in her own mind, and he no longer has “possession” of her body. As a result, he chooses to completely delete the situation, rather than address the deeper-rooted problems.

A second tenet of the dream-work is displacement. Freud explains displacement through the following:

“That which is essential content of the dream-thoughts need not be represented at all in the dream. The dream is, as it were, centered elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts […] In dream formation the essential elements, those that are emphasized by intensive interest, may be treated as though they were subordinate, while they are replaced in the dream by other elements” (Freud, 196-197).

Displacement plays a smaller role than condensation in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; we can see it at work in the background and sets of Joel’s dreams. As Joel and Clementine run through his memories, searching for a place to hide from the Lacuna erasing technicians, there is one thing that they are having a difficult time erasing: Clementine herself. Their goal is to erase her completely from his memories, but it seems that in the actual procedure, they are effectively erasing the environments that she was exposed to, and not her. This could explain why the film ends as it does – there is some kind of unexplainable desire for both Joel and Clementine to head to Montauk, where they will meet each other again, and maybe this inkling is the result of Clementine’s incomplete erasure. In regards to the disappearing environment, the argument can be made that this is the way that Lacuna, Inc. works: they erase the complete memory, not just of the person. But there is no explicit dialogue in the film that can support this argument. What is explicit is the fact that Joel leads the Lacuna team on a chase through his dreams, and they erase wherever he leads. As aforementioned, Joel leads them into dream memories that Clementine was never a part of in the first place, so they have no business being there. Yet, they still erase those sites: places like his bedroom as an adolescent, or his childhood home. As a result, it can be reasonably inferred that Joel is, for all intensive purposes, displacing the “erasing mechanism” from the person of Clementine over to the surrounding background and environment.

In the film, symbolism plays an even smaller role. Generally speaking, Freud finds that determining what symbols represent can be both easy and difficult. He says that “in a number of cases the common quality shared by the symbol and the thing which it represents is obvious, in others it is concealed; in these latter cases the choice of the symbol appears to be enigmatic” (Freud, 240). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind seems to be included in these latter cases as it is difficult to pinpoint where the symbols, if any, present themselves. What complicates matters is that Joel Barish’s dreams in this film are not the dreams that he would have on any typical day. The dreams contained in this film are lucid experiences of his previous memories. As such, most of the content in the dream should not be explained away as symbolic: a pen in his dream should be regarded as merely a pen because the dream itself is a memory of a “real” experience in which he was using that pen.

However, this “literal” interpretation of objects within Joel’s dreams only takes into account the assumption that the world in which Joel exists is the “real” world. If this world is a construction (which it is, as film art), there lies the potential for everything we see to be a symbol. Though this argument can be made in theory, Gondry makes no explicit appeals to this type of self-reflexivity. He is not opposed to the practice, as we will see in The Science of Sleep – so we should assume that Joel is a character in the real world as Gondry decides against using anything within the context of the film to clearly ask the audience to read the film as highly symbolic.

As such, the only way we can refer to anything as potentially symbolic is if it was not present in the moment of Joel’s “real” experience (which is encoded in his memory, then re-experienced through the dreaming contained within the film). This severely limits the possibilities: the only potential “symbols” would be Joel and Clementine themselves, as they are the only objects that appear in certain dreams that were not literally there when Joel was creating that memory in the first place.

But if Joel and Clementine are the only potential symbols, what do they symbolize? If we remember that the dream is a wish-fulfillment, then we must assume that Joel and Clementine (as they are formed by Joel’s mind) are the versions of themselves that he wishes they were. Comparing these dream versions of Joel and Clementine to their waking counterparts, we see that they clearly display personality traits that differ. Waking Clementine is self-centered, brash, loud, and a woman who’s “looking for her own piece of mind. Dream Clementine (Joel’s projection of her) is vulnerable, sacrificing, forgiving, apologetic, and follows Joel in the path that he leads. Waking Joel is a man who is wrought with fear, passive, and waits on women to pay attention to him. Dream Joel (his projection of himself) is an assertive, take-action individual, who seeks to change his life in a tangible way, and leads Clementine into the difficult task of preserving her memory.

This agency that Joel displays within his dream world can also be regarded as what Freud would call secondary revision, though secondary revision is not absolute in its definition. Henk de Berg writes about the nature of secondary revision at length, saying that:

“Secondary revision links up individual symbols and images by establishing causal and chronological links between them. Freud’s explanation of this mechanism is not particularly clear, but the idea seems to run as follows. In the dream, our deepest desires manage to manifest themselves. But they do so in a civilized disguise. The dream-work subjects them to processes of symbolization, dramatization, displacement, and condensation to make them more acceptable to our social conscience. One could describe these processes, with the term Freud does not use himself, as forms of primary revision. The result of this transformation are individual symbols and images, which are combined into a story by another process of transformation acting […] the insertion of narrative putty is supposed to take place, not after, but at the same time as the primary revision […] this process, too, is a form of censorship, because in [Freud’s] view the story that emerges is even further removed from our original wishes than are the symbols and images” (de Berg, 23).

Joel is that very link between the images in his dream. His dream-self is that civilized disguise. The dream that we see on screen is determined by the areas of his memory that he decides to run to, creating that story or “narrative putty.” Furthermore, this agency to decide which memories to run to is a form of censorship, as he does not allow the dream to go anywhere without his expressed desire.

This agency is certainly empowering. We often describe something similar by saying that we become “lucid” in a dream, but that usually does not entail that we can control secondary revision like the dream version of Joel can. Even when we do have some power within our dream, it lacks the potential to make an impact in our life when we are awake. With The Science of Sleep, Gondry finds this interaction between the dream world and the waking “real” world similar to the experience of the filmmaker. Stéphane, the protagonist, is not only a subject in his dreams but is actually the constructor of them. He inverts his dreams with reality, where the former takes precedence over the latter and is in many respects the more real plane of existence. Often, he is seen designing his dreams in an imaginary film studio, which is precisely the appeal to self-reflexivity that Gondry deliberately chose to not make with Everlong and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI), Lacan speaks of this powerful connection between the dream and reality. He says

“If the function of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream after all, may come so near to the reality that causes it, can we not say that it might correspond to this reality without emerging from sleep. After all, there is such a thing as somnambulistic activity. The question that arises, and which indeed all Freud’s previous indications allow us here to produce, is – What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another reality?” (Lacan, 57-58).

This other reality is what The Science of Sleep consciously explores – and for Stéphane, it is this alternate reality which bears more consequence than the waking-life that fails him so often.

The Science of Sleep is about a young man, Stéphane (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) whose dreams are so powerful that they take priority over his existence in the real world. He comes back to France from Mexico to live with his mother, and is in the process of adjusting to a new job that she has found for him. One day, while heading to work, he meets a girl, Stephanie (played by Charlottes Gainsbourg), who happens to be a tenant next door in his mother’s apartment building. Through a slow process of interaction, he comes to discover that he has fallen in love with her, but it is not the simplest task to get her to feel as deeply for him as he does for her. As a result, Stéphane resorts to creating his own alternate dream reality rather than dealing with the one he is already subject to. In this dreamspace, which is often portrayed as a tv/film studio, he acts as a director; he constructs an existence where the inhabitants act according to his desires, and where Stephanie loves him.

It is through the presence of this reoccurring motif of the tv/film studio that Gondry does what he has not done before. Gondry draws a parallel between the nature of constructing dreams and the nature of directing films (and by inference, Stéphane can be seen as stand-in for Gondry). However, Christian Metz, in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, writes about the existence of a tension in this parallel between dreams and cinema. He says:

“As hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, the fiction film is less certain than the dream; it fails more often at its ordinary mission. This is because it is not really hallucinatory. It rests on true perceptions which the subject cannot fashion to his liking, on images and sounds imposed on him from without. The dream responds to the wish with more exactitude and regularity: devoid of exterior material, it is assured of never colliding with reality (and reality includes other people’s phantasy). It is like a film which has been ‘shot’ from beginning to end by the very subject of the wish – also the subject of fear – a singular film by virtue of its censorship and omissions as much as its expressed content, cut to the measure of its only spectator […], a spectator who is also the auteur and has every reason to be content with it, since one is never so well served as by oneself” (Metz, 112-113).

I see Gondry wrestling with this tension: As a filmmaker, he is bound to the “true perceptions” and “exterior material” that will never allow his films to be the perfect visualization of what he imagines. At the same time, what other choice does he have if he wants to experiment with the great power that lies within creative agency?

Here is where I believe he makes his compromise: if Stéphane is to be understood as a stand-in for Gondry himself, he can, in a sense, reap the benefits of both worlds. As Stéphane, the dream constructions within the film are not bound by the rules of reality, because they are fully his wish-fulfillments. As Michel Gondry, he is then able to exercise his cinematic control in this real world. It is in this dual modality that Gondry works in The Science of Sleep: waking and dreams, reality and alternate reality, filmmaking and film.

Now that we understand Stéphane as a stand-in for Michel Gondry himself, we see how this third film in the line of “dream-films” is the most complete film-work so far. Everlong was only concerned with the dream, not the dreamer, whereas Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind addressed that insufficiency by successfully integrating the dream world with the real world. The Science of Sleep goes to an even greater degree, consciously aware of that parallel between the film and filmmaker, dream and dreamer.

However, this more complete work poses some problems, especially as it pertains to its subjection to Psychoanalysis: The Science of Sleep, because it concurrently addresses both Gondry the filmmaker and Stéphane the dreamer, operates at multiple levels. It is unlike Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is a completely self-contained narrative – all the deep-rooted emotional issues gleaned from a psychoanalytical examination can be related back to the character of Joel Barish. With The Science of Sleep, we cannot do the same with Stéphane, as he is understood as a stand-in for Gondry himself.

The reason for this inability is the lack of personal history. With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, everything we need to know about Joel Barish is contained within the world of the film. He does not exist in our plane of reality, or any other alternate reality outside of the context of the film. But this is untrue for The Science of Sleep. Stéphane exists beyond the walls of the film; Gondry’s appeal to self-reflexivity compels us to see Stéphane as more than a character within a constructed film world. He has to be considered a representation of Gondry himself.

As such, taking a Psychoanalytical approach to the film is somewhat limited. The audience does not and cannot have an extensive enough understanding of Michel Gondry as a person. We are not privy to all the details that must be required to formulate an appropriate interpretation of this work: what his childhood was like, what his fears and anxieties are, the extent of his relationships with the opposite sex. Freud met with his clients for years, rigorously dissecting dreams in order to unravel the mysteries of the unconscious. He painstakingly discovered detail upon detail, which were the tools that he used for interpretation. As a film audience, we do not have this privilege.

Where do these limitations end? Though we cannot gain a complete understanding of Gondry’s psyche, The Science of Sleep is still a work of art that can be studied in some context. As a standalone piece, it can seem a schizophrenic piece, filled with one abstract image after another. But placed alongside Everlong and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we can see it as a natural progression in Gondry’s work. Each film has gained a higher level of psychological maturity. We see the move from a dream, to a dream and its interaction with reality, and now the dream as a construction of the dreamer.

Not only is this the practical approach to understanding The Science of Sleep, but there is evidence in the text to suggest this is also the optimal approach. A connection that The Science of Sleep shares with Everlong is the recurring motif of giant hands. Where Everlong displayed the giant hands as a tool of power, The Science of Sleep uses them as a obstacle. Their appearance in The Science of Sleep is very minimal, showing up in a dream where Stéphane, who uses his regular size hands at work, cannot perform his duties because of the enlarged hands. Again, the psychological reason for the appearance of these giant hands is unclear, due to our lack of knowledge regarding the historical details of Gondry’s life. I doubt that he, himself, even really knows what they represent in his unconscious. But, they do serve the purpose of aligning these film-works together, signifying a thread that the audience can latch onto.

It is important that Gondry creates this thread for his audience. Without a conscious effort to interconnect and creating meaning in his work, Gondry’s visionary style can seem unapproachably esoteric. However, the clear trajectory that dreams take within these three films, interpretively guided by the tenets of Psychoanalysis, gives us a working paradigm for viewing his body of work. Ultimately, this paradigm is limited, but it is the most rigorous system that we can make use of; and in regards to Michel Gondry and the idea of dreams in his films, the system offers a pathway to interpretation that we might otherwise not have. I like what Henk De Berg says about Psychoanalytic literary criticism (and by appropriation, cinema), as I think it reflects my sentiments on the subject:

“Psychoanalytic literary criticism does not confine its attention to the relationship between text and author. It also takes account of a third element, the reader. Readers react to what they read in a variety of ways; they like it, love it, admire it, loathe it, are abhorred or fascinated by it, and so on. These feelings reveal a great deal about those who have them, but they may also point to specific themes, motifs, structures in the text, to features of the text that an emotionally uninvolved interpretation might miss. Paying attention to such emotional responses can therefore be a great help in uncovering textual phenomena relevant to the understanding of literary texts. Such an approach does not in any way imply a lack of methodological rigor. Like Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic literary criticism is a rational activity; it is not founded on readers’ responses but merely seeks to use them as an additional source of information. Of course, the inclusion of readers’ responses is not always possible or practicable, and many psychoanalytic interpretations have to manage without them (and often do so quite well). Still, the analysis of the way people respond to literary texts remains a valuable tool of the psychoanalytically oriented critic” (de Berg, 85).

Works Cited

1. De Berg, Henk. Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies: An Introduction.  New York: Camden House, 2003.

2. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Dr. A. A. Brill. New York: Random House, 1950.

3. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978.

4. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Aflred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1977.

Documenting the Documentary?

Donkey Kong!

I’m posting a paper I wrote a few years back on Documentary’s strength in the telling of a story versus the limitations of Narrative Fiction. I specifically couch my argument in the world of competitive subcultures, which, at that time, seemed a rich place to pull examples from.  Again, it’s not a polished paper, and really, this one probably would never see the light of day in a serious publication, but there are still some ideas there that I like. Let me know if you find it interesting.

Also, I just wanted to put up a picture of Donkey Kong.

Michael Liu

Dr. Michael Renov

CTCS 400

4/29/09

And the Winner is…Documentary

            The thrill of competition is a difficult sensation to capture onscreen. Fictional narrative often makes attempts, but it has its limitations.  To a reduced extent, actors can give the sense of urgency required to make a last second score, the pain that a right hook inflicts on a boxer, or the sheer excitement of a horse winning the race – but the common complaint is that the dramatized version lacks real drama in comparison with the actual event.  Actors are, in the end, only actors who are hired to give a performance. The strength of documentary has always been that real people who experience real emotions can project those emotions into the camera; when it comes to competitive games, sports, events or arts, it takes disciplined, often life-consuming commitment to become a high ranked participant, and this devotion is hard to emulate by an actor who has a few weeks training for a role.  This is not to argue that constructions are not an element to consider, but when the subject matter is a competition, Documentary is the optimal form to utilize in telling a story.  Recent years have shown that filmmakers have used this unique relationship in the films SlamNation (1998), Spellbound (2002), and The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2006), which tell the stories of people involved in the world of competitive spoken-word, competitive spelling and competitive video game play, respectively.  Via Dr. Michael Renov’s Toward a Poetics of Documentary as the paradigm for critical analysis, this paper uses the aforementioned film texts to argue that the realistic elements of these “sports” and their participants make these types of stories more effectively told through the Documentary form rather than a constructed fictional narrative.

Dr. Renov says that the first tendency of documentary is to record, reveal or preserve, stating that the “emphasis here is on the replication of the historical real” (Renov, 25). Fictional narrative (if utilized for something “based on a true story”), by contrast, can be said to reconstruct a previous historical moment, attempting to capture the essence of it.  For a film like Paul Devlin’s SlamNation, we can quickly see why fictional narrative would fall short, as it would be unable to accurately reproduce the gravity of emotional content that comes through a performance of spoken-word poetry.  Rather than focus on the development of a single person or group of persons, the film is really about the art-form itself. As such, ample onscreen time is given to the actual performances, with little editing (other than to give a sense of a variety in point-of-view).  All the poems are recited by the people who write them, so each and every word is filled with all the emotional depth of the original artist’s intent – something that cannot be replicated by an actor.  When Saul Williams recites his poem “Aum” it is filled with all the years that he has been practicing the “Aum” meditation, and it works as both a deeply personal expression and one for us to interpret.  If an actor were to perform “Aum”, that personal expression would be lost: it is not the actor’s poem, so any performance would be an interpretation at best, however deeply it may resonate.

Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound differs from SlamNation in that it highlights the participants more so than the competition itself, but the capturing of a historically real personal sentiment is quite the same.  Spellbound follows eight different kids who have hopes of winning the 1999 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, and it reveals intimate details about the kids’ family lives, academics, and the commitment required in studying for the spelling bee.  The film most thoroughly investigates the spelling practices of a young man named Neil Kadakia, who ultimately placed ninth in the Nationals.  When highlighting this young man’s life, the camera cuts from one scene to another, in rapid succession, and in each scene, Neil is shown to be employing a different tactic to memorize the spelling of different words: a private tutor for words of French-origin; a private tutor for words of German-origin; taking a class for Latin-rooted words; computer programs which correct spelling; reviewing over 4,000 words daily with his father; and meditation to prepare both spiritually and mentally.  It is revealed that this is a daily process that has taken place over two years.  As a result, when it is finally time for Neil to perform in the final round of the Nationals, the extreme close-up shot of Neil’s face (as he is given a word he does not know but is processing the way it could be spelled) is filled with a tension that is really impossible to duplicate.  There is just no way that an actor can put in the time and effort required to fill that frame with as much anxiety as Neil does.  Even then, the moment would be missing the fact that there are no real stakes involved – if Neil spells the word wrong, he loses the competition, and all the dreams that he has trained years for will be dashed in a single moment.  If an actor spells the word wrong, it is in a fictional world, a fantasy spelling bee which has no real life effects.

This ability for Documentary to capture real emotion does not stop at narrative tension.  In Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong, grown men weep over their performances in video games.  The film follows Steve Wiebe, a teacher from Kirkland, Washington, who is trying to take the world high score for the arcade game Donkey Kong from reigning champ Billy Mitchell, a restaurant and hot sauce brand owner.  The first 20 minutes of the film introduces the “world-class” players and gives a brief description of the difficulty of Donkey Kong, but Gordon spends most of these minutes aligning us with Steve Wiebe.  He creates this identification by giving us glimpses to his family, interviews with his wife (who tells us that he is a “good and decent man”) who has been down on his luck his entire life: missed opportunities, unfulfilled expectations, and a victim of company layoffs.  This effectively positions Wiebe as an underdog against Billy Mitchell, the eccentric “best classic gamer” in the world, who Gordon paints as an egotistical video game dictator.  After forming our alliances, Gordon allows us into a unique weekend at “Funspot” (an official arcade sanctioned by the organization which keeps these high score “records”, called “Twin Galaxies”) where Steve Wiebe spends hours on a Donkey Kong machine and is able to finally break the world record.  As we celebrate with him, Gordon then cuts to Walter Day (head of Twin Galaxies) immediately usurping Steve Wiebe’s score with a “video-taped” performance sent in by Billy Mitchell.  Steve Wiebe is then shown leaving Funspot, with his achievement immediately taken away from him, and crying in the car.  The film then cuts to an interview-style moment, where Wiebe is still crying, explaining that he cannot believe that they “took that moment away” from him under dubious (video-tape rather than live play) circumstances. At that moment, the audience is manipulated into an sympathetic mode, which is a testament to both the documentary form and to the Gordon, who has effectively utilized a very personal and objectively unimportant moment in the larger spectrum of life – it’s just a video game score – and converted it into a piece of film that is deeply painful.

This moment can also be seen as a perfectly executed example of the second function of documentary: to persuade or promote.  As aforementioned, this is just a video game score. It is not a high and lofty idea to change the world.  It is a man’s attempt to conquer a leisure activity. However, it is incredibly effective to the point of making us care about the video game score when surely we would otherwise find it insignificant.  Dr. Renov claims that the “persuasive or promotional modality is intrinsic to all documentary forms and demands to be considered in relation to the other rhetorical/aesthetic functions” (Renov, 30) positing that there exists an idea that the film is presenting for the audience’s consideration.  In this instance, it can be as simple as competition or as important as the male ego and the obsession of the mind.  Whatever the idea may be, the documentary form does a more efficient job in persuading an audience member than fictional narrative.  Here, the stakes are once again the core of the issue: a constructed character has nothing to lose in reality.  Though we may be persuaded to entertain an idea, even buy into it, the fictional character’s experience should never be on par with the experience of a real person.

With Spellbound, the surface topic at hand is again, seemingly insignificant in relation to larger occurrences in the world.  It is hard to argue that spelling is a life or death skill.  But if this is true, why do we care for these kids so much?  We care because the issues are deeper than spelling. This film promotes the value of hard work, the importance of seeking significance, and the support of family in life’s experiences.  Blitz is clearly highlighting these ideas over the task of spelling simply by the sheer amount of time he gives to moments where the kids or the parents are speaking about the relative insignificance of the National competition when compared to the lessons in life that the kids learn.  Even the most “spelling-focused” student, the aforementioned Neil, is reminded by his father that it does not matter if he wins or loses.  What matters is that “Neil experiences what it’s like to strive for something and to put all his efforts into a goal.”

Paul Devlin’s SlamNation has the opposite outlook: its primary focus is the activity at hand, the performance of spoken-word poetry.  The film clearly seeks to promote awareness of this little but immensely expressive art form.  Little screen time is given to any discussion of personal details – even when the artists are pulled aside for singular interviews, the focus is on the art.  Furthermore, complete poem performances are highlighted onscreen, and the camera serves as a witness.  An interesting point here is that these performers are hardly ever shown practicing their pieces; instead, each time we hear a poem, it is when the camera is part of an audience, during an actual show, when the artists are at the top of their game.  This captures the electricity of a show, and the experience of watching the film is much like being there at one of the night clubs.  It is clear that one of the film’s intentions is to serve as a marketing tool for audiences to become more familiar, and go to a live show – Devlin starts the film by revealing the fact that these spoken word clubs can be found in almost any major city, waiting to be discovered by us.  This grounding in actual locations is another facet of documentary that fictional narrative cannot necessarily proximate: if we go to the spoken-word club in New York, we are likely to re-experience the poet that we viewed in the film.  A fictional film might be able to use the correct club, but the performance by an actor does not entice the filmgoer to try and seek out a live show as much as the performance by the poet.

This complete focus on the art itself is also a sign of the next tendency of Documentary: to analyze or interrogate.  Again, Dr. Renov indicates to us that the “artwork should encourage inquiry, offer space for judgment, and provide the tools for evaluation and further action – in short, encourage an active response” (Renov, 31).  Implicit in this argument is that the analytical tendency exists on two separate planes.  First, it occurs between the filmmaker and the subject.  The filmmaker dives into a subject, usually with a level of unfiltered access, and ultimately, his or her opinion can be gleaned from the final film product.  Second, the analytical and interrogative tendency exists at the level of the viewer: we are given the access to the subject (now edited by the filmmaker), and are asked to consider it for ourselves.  At this point, a unique relationship between the filmmaker and audience exists, especially in the world of competition. Often, the filmmaker is an outsider to the subject matter, and initially acts as a spectator.  This parallels the audience’s point of view, and in fictional narrative, this “moment of spectatorship” never purely exists for the filmmaker.

I argue that documentary is the only fertile ground for an interrogation into competitive subcultures.  An analytical or interrogative look can only be as truthful as it is objective.  With that said, documentary is the only time that the filmmaker can have the possibility of a moment of objectivity.  In fictional narrative, the filmmaker is constructing at all times, and though they are not necessarily responsible for every single detail that is presented on screen, the details do need to align with their personal vision.  The documentary of competition does eventually become a construction, but only after there is a significant amount of time that the filmmaker devotes to being an objective viewer.  We can then view the final product (the film) as the filmmaker’s attempt to form an opinion or argument regarding the events that have taken place before the camera.

In SlamNation, Paul Devlin gets to examine spoken-word at its very essence.  The camera never seeks to impact, but only to record – and it records some profound moments.  In particular, there is a scene where a poet by the name of “Mums the Schemer” is performing live on stage and forgets the rest of his poem.  He struggles multiple times to regain his composure, until he finally remembers the words and proceeds with completing the poem.  This moment has to be considered, first and foremost, as a function of the analytical tendency.  To get a fuller understanding of the art form, an examination of its flaws must be present.  Here, Devlin presents us with the beauty of spoken-word, but also displays how it can be a frustratingly difficult art.  It also reveals the pressures of spoken-word as a competitive event. As with any type of competition, people enjoy watching an individual step up to the challenge or fail.  This increases the pressures to perform well, and gives the audience a sense of the hardship that can come with devotion to an art form.  It lacks the false romanticism that is usually portrayed through fictional narrative.

Blitz’s Spellbound operates in much the same fashion.  The last third of the film is a section devoted entirely to coverage of the National Spelling Bee.  One of the competitors that the cameras have been following, Harry, is asked to spell a word that he does not know.  The film goes to a series of cuts, one after another in rapid succession, each showing a different facial expression: fear, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, feeling lost, unsure of what to do, etc.  The camera stays unflinchingly close the whole time, forcing us to experience this spectrum of emotion along with Harry as his time runs out and is forced to make an attempt at spelling the word.  He is incorrect, and the disappointment on his face shows.  There is no heroic end for Harry – only another chance that has passed him by.  This scene does something to the viewer that is even more important than the moment in SlamNation.  We are forced to ask ourselves if the pressure brought upon these children by this spelling bee is inappropriate.  Granted, the camera shows us that most of the kids respond very well to making a mistake and losing their chance at the crown, but this moment with Harry serves to give us an example of when the competition is not just a fun event to participate in.  There is real anxiety over their performance, and it begs the audience to question whether it is damaging for these kids knowing that almost all of them will have to deal with such a degree of disappointment.  Again, Spellbound does a fair job of showing us the National Spelling Bee for what it is, warts and all.

The King of Kong is unique in this trio of films because of Seth Gordon’s emphasis on rivalry.  SlamNation and Spellbound are primarily concerned with the poetry and the people, but The King of Kong takes the opportunity to show how competition can breed ill will between the parties involved.  By the end of the film, Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell seem to hate each other.  The clearest depiction of this rivalry stems from the moment that the two finally come into the same frame onscreen.  Throughout the whole film leading up to this moment, the two “rivals” never meet each other, and when they finally do, Billy Mitchell is presented as “not wanting to spend too much time” with Steve Wiebe.  The moment is presented as a blatant refusal to interact with one another, and again, forces the audience to ask themselves if this world of “competitive gaming” is worth all the negativity.  The important thing here is that Seth Gordon does not provide an opinion.  He presents the positive side and he presents the drawbacks – whether or not it’s a worthy lifestyle choice is a decision that we have to make for ourselves.

The choice to not pass judgment on the “gamer’s world” can be regarded as an impulse “to express” on the behalf of the filmmaker. This is the fourth tendency (and for the scope of this paper, the final) of documentary.  As Dr. Renov declares, there is “great expressive variability – from that which attends little to the vehicle of expression…to that which emphasizes the filtering of the represented object through the eye and mind of the artist” (Renov, 35) and I believe that the three films in discussion here each have differing degree as to the amount of manipulation that the artist has decided to inject into the film.

The film with the least degree of artist expressivity would be SlamNation, but in this instance, expressivity needs to be qualified.  Clearly, Paul Devlin’s intent here is to present the subculture of spoken-word poetry as it is.  There is not even a clear-cut narrative that is formed by the editing of the documentary.  Instead it plays out like a series of images of a four-day event that is merely recorded for posterity.  At no time does the filmmaker ever interject how he thinks the progression of events should occur, and at no time makes any visible influence.  To that extent, Devlin is “expressing” an artistic viewpoint: one of little impact to the subject of his film.

SlamNation is a good film to compare to Spellbound, as Jeffrey Blitz uses editing to create a “story” more so than Paul Devlin.  Again, artistic “expressivity” needs to be qualified somewhat.  Like Devlin, Blitz at no time makes any visible interjections to the progress of events in the film, but it is clear that the people in the film are often answering a question that Blitz has posed off camera.  This gives more coverage for Blitz to use later on in the editing room, and he has used it to extend the piece beyond a mere documentation of the Spelling Bee.  Instead, he has cut his footage together to build a piece about the people who participate in these competitions, rather than the competition itself.

We can place The King of Kong at the furthest end of the spectrum, with what seems to be the clearest amount of artistic “license” taken in constructing a story.  Again, “license” needs to be qualified: there is not necessarily any computer imagery, or voice-overdubbing, things that we can consider as documentary “abuse.” All the footage that Seth Gordon uses did in fact happen.  However, he uses editing to the extent that he basically constructs a fictional narrative.  There are obvious attempts to create opposing forces to enhance the drama, the clearest example being Gordon’s framing of Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe as bitter enemies.  But Twin Galaxies, the aforementioned record-keeping/governing body, has an official statement on their website exhaustively disputing some of the “constructed” ideas that The King of Kong presents.  Ethical questions do come into play here, but objectively speaking, this was a competition, and Seth Gordon merely decided to employ his skills as an artist to overly emphasize this aspect of gaming, exploiting it as a narrative tool to tell the story he wished to tell.

Which brings us back to one of the fundamental functions of cinema in general: many movies tell stories.  Some are more constructed, some less so.  Some seem to have subject matter that has deeper implications, some are lighthearted.  Documentary can occupy all these spaces, and more.  SlamNation, Spellbound, and The King of Kong all fall somewhere on the line that divides reality and fiction, but on different parts of that line.  One thing is for certain, they all have to deal with a basic human experience: that of competition.  All three of these filmmakers made a conscious decision to tell a story about these competitive subcultures, and all three employed Documentary as the form to do it, rather than fictional narrative.  Through the paradigm presented in Towards a Poetics of Documentary, it is clear that the filmmakers recognized the strengths of telling their stories in this way.  If there were a more efficient or artistic method to tell these stories, they would have used that method. The fact that they did not indicates that as far as competitive subcultures go, the winner is the documentary form.

Works Cited

1. Michael Renov, “Towards a Poetics of Documentary.” Theorizing Documentary.

Ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993. 12-36

I Was Once a Pretty Decent Writer…

So I’m currently in a phase in my life where I get to work on my writing. It’s been up and down, as the creative mode makes me swing from ultra confident to super doubtful (even this blog has suffered- I haven’t treated it with enough tender love and care). However, today, this inconsistency in my “feelings” received a positive bump, as I rediscovered some of the research and critical papers I wrote while I was in grad school. Admittedly, none of these papers are slick enough at this point to be publish-worthy (“publish” meaning in a journal or something to that effect) but I am proud of some of the ideas presented within these papers and I thought that I would share them. I doubt that I’ll ever polish them for publication, but maybe they’ll be an interesting time killer for a couple of people, and at the very least, they’ll be out there in the ether for posterity, rather than sitting on my hard drive to collect virtual dust. I’ll probably post one every day/couple of days, and I’ll start with a paper about my favorite pop culture subject: Batman.

hi guys!

Michael Liu

Dr. Tom Kemper

CTCS 587

5/14/09

Animating Batman

            People often call Batman a character that you cannot “do” wrong.  As an icon, he has been subjected to many different treatments, from campy to psychedelic to dark and gritty.  The versatile and resilient nature of the character lends itself to endless debates about who has constructed the “true” version of Batman: some say that Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original Batman is the standard that all others must be measured against; some will say the 1960s TV show starring Adam West is the only version of the character that is fun; others will mark Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman as the rebirth of the character.

An offshoot question that arises from this endless debate is “which is the truest ON-SCREEN depiction of the Caped Crusader?” But before even beginning to answer, the inquiry effectively does two things: it eliminates the medium of comic books and graphic novels (where Batman originated) and it posits that there is quantifiable degree to the “trueness” of each depiction of the character.  For some, this exclusion of comics and often non-rigorous attempt to measure each version makes the question useless, but among internet communities, purists (or, likely in this case, the “fanboy”) each has his or her opinion and staunchly defends it.

What becomes fascinating is that these opinions, among a seemingly myriad group of people, often come to one conclusion.  They can choose from a list of options: Adam West; Tim Burton and Michael Keaton; Joel Schumacher and Val Kilmer or George Clooney; Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale; the old serials produced in the 30’s and 40’s. But more often than not, people who claim to be Batman aficionados remarkably agree that the “truest” depiction of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego is the television show Batman: The Animated Series.

This cartoon program, which aired on the Fox Network from the years 1992-1995, was almost universally lauded from the moment it hit the airwaves. To this day, it is highly regarded, recently ranking 2^nd behind The Simpsons on the “Top 100 Animated Series” list created by IGN.com.  The show’s simple, yet timeless design and willingness to take on deeper psychological issues made it somewhat of an anomaly for a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon, but is it merely this “difference” that made it a quality show?

From this observation, the question that naturally arises is “Why?” Why is this cartoon version that is seemingly “made for kids” better than a live-action portrayal? Why is this show considered an excellent animation series in the first place?  The answers to these questions are often quick, ill-informed opinions on internet message boards.  This paper will also address some of these issues, but instead, it will attempt to explore the creative genesis of this show in a more thorough manner, and use an Emmy award-winning episode entitled “Heart of Ice” as a case study of the multiple layers of viewer reception that the series is often lauded for.  Furthermore, it will investigate how the series continues to make a cultural impact even though it has been off the air for over a decade.

Though fans often think of the show only through the lens of this cultural impact “hindsight,” it is important to remember that there was a time before the show existed – and it was during this time of development in the history of the character (through comics, movies, and previous television incarnations) that had direct influence on the creation of Batman: The Animated Series.

The most significant shift during this time in the history of Batman is Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 1986.  Miller used this graphic novel to paint a picture of Gotham City that was dark and bleak, 30 years into the future.  Within the context of the story, Bruce Wayne has been retired for ten years, and during that time, Gotham City has plummeted into a state of chaos.  Violence is up, gangs rule the streets, and there seems to be no respite for law enforcement.  This is a newer mode of portraying Gotham – up until this time, the city did have crime, but it was not nearly as abundant.  Batman’s enemies were colorful caricatured super-villains who liked to rob banks, not murderous gang members that forced him out of retirement.  Batman himself, however, was largely a reversion back to his original incarnation: a dark, brooding, obsessive vigilante, rather than the campy, psychedelic figure of the 1960s or detective adventurer of the 1970s.

This version undoubtedly influenced Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), which was the first live-action portrayal of the hero that took the premise seriously.  Dressing up as a bat to fight crime did not have to look as laughable as Adam West anymore, and it could also be done in an artistic manner that did not date the project – with quality people hired to do work that had a timeless feel.  This respectable take of Batman was a big hit with audiences, and the film was the highest grossing picture of that year.

Warner Bros. quickly went to work developing a sequel that had a similar darker tone.  The result was Batman Returns (1992) also directed by Tim Burton.  This film gave an even greater emphasis on the villains than the first one (now it was two villains: Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer, who played The Penguin and Catwoman, whereas the first film had only one villain, The Joker, played by Jack Nicholson) to the point where people have noted the remarkably low amount of screen time that Batman actually had in comparison to the previous film.  Either way, the darker Batman was again a hit for Warner Bros., and as any corporation would, they began looking to exploit the franchise.

This is the environment that fostered the desire to put out an animated version of Batman.  It had worked in the past, as Batman was a central character in the old Super Friends cartoons and even made appearances on Scooby-Doo’s television series.  However, the creators of the show realized that they could not go back and represent Batman solely like they did in these overtly “kid-friendly” versions.  They had to take into account the recent, irreversible trend toward darker territory.  Paul Dini and Chip Kidd in Batman: Animated  (a history of the development of the show) state that:

From the outset MacCurdy, Timm, and Radomski [the initial producers-creators] made it clear to Fox, the network that had bought the series, that they intended to deliver a more serious version of Batman that had ever been seen on television.  Their Batman would not crack jokes with a pun-happy Robin while running around in daylight – the heroes would be believable, their enemies threatening, and the world they all inhabited dark and frightening.  Happily, Fox Kids execs Margaret Loesch and Sidney Iwanter were longtime Batman fans who respected the intrinsic power of comic book heroes and were all in favor of Warner’s serious take. (Dini and Kidd, 12).

As with any animated series, everything on the screen needed to be designed.  For that task, Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski were both producers that had a very distinct vision.  First of all, Timm was a fan of Batman, and desired to give him a classic, heroic look that would balance well with the more serious subject matter.  As an influence, he cited the old Fleischer Superman cartoons, where Superman embodied the broad-chested, chiseled jaw American male hero.  He also designed the character to have a very simple but elegantly strong line style, which made Batman less menacing than his counterpart in the films, whose costumes were black and intricately designed to the finest detail.

Radomski was more responsible for settings, background, and the overall feel for Gotham City.  Immediately, the concern with keeping the series serious gave him an idea: paint the backgrounds onto black boards, rather than the traditionally used white materials.  This effectively kept the color palette somber and captured the essence of a city at night, as the black would not let the colors applied onto the board bounce off as vibrantly as they could.  Radomski also decided to use the influence of art deco architecture in his constructions of the buildings in Gotham.  This choice gave the show an air of sophistication, and did not pigeonhole the show into a certain time period, so that they could take advantage of things like Batman’s reliance on the newest technology in his battle against crime, while at the same time, resonating with Film Noir and the seedy atmosphere that that particular style brings.

After the basic design ideas were mapped out, they realized that they needed strong storylines to coincide with the powerful visuals.  This was a little more difficult to develop than the look of the show.  Dini writes that “while the look of Batman was established with comparative ease, writing the show was another matter.  The first scripts did not capture the darkness and the drama of Bruce and Eric’s visuals and were quickly scrapped.  The big problem was, it took a long time for the writing staff to gel” (Dini and Kidd, 16).  Dini, who was also working on Tiny Toon Adventures at the time, realized that they had to go another route.  The producer’s of the show decided that it was best to give very specific guidelines to the show’s writers so that they could use those principles as a template for the “feel” of the show.  At that point, as long as they kept in line with those initial rules, their imaginations could stretch anywhere they desired.  The following rules are from what the animators called the Batman “bible”:

1. Batman is a solo act, usually working alone.  He has allies in Alfred and Robin, but it is Batman himself who carries the bulk of every episode.
2. Batman does not work directly with the police.  He’s not a member of the force or a deputized agent.  There’s no Bat-Signal or hotline, and they can’t contact him.  If he needs to inform the police of anything, he’ll phone them.
3. Robin is not Batman’s full-time partner.  Although adopted and trained by Batman, Dick Grayson now leads a separate life as a college student and solo crime fighter.
4. Our stories will be hard-edged crime dramas with villains who play for keeps.  Though many of them will come from Batman’s famous Rogues Gallery, they will be as wild, dark, and sinister as we can make them.  Each episode will also feature a big set piece – an incredible visual action sequence that will be a looked-forward-to element in each show. (Dini and Kidd, 16).

With the story and visuals taken care of, the next important element to decide on was the sound talent, which included character voice actors and scoring.  The primary concern, when it came to sound, was voicing Batman, aka Bruce Wayne.  For the central character, they needed to hire someone that can do a slightly menacing tone while Batman was in costume, but at the same time can be a charming, playboy type for when Bruce Wayne was himself.  To do the voice, they hired Kevin Conroy, an actor who essentially used his own voice: altered slightly to a higher register for Bruce Wayne and altered to a lower register for Batman.

From a cultural point of view, Kevin Conroy has made a huge impact on the world of Batman and “Batfans.”  An offshoot to the earlier debate of “what is the best on-screen adaptation of Batman?” is the question “Who has best portrayed the Caped Crusader?”  The answer to this, according to many internet communities, surprisingly, is not Michael Keaton or Christian Bale or Adam West (or any other actor who has done a live action Batman).  Instead, Kevin Conroy is often the actor that people select as their favorite choice, and he has never had to dress up into the Batsuit; it’s purely on the strength of the vocal portrayal.  Kevin Conroy was able to project, through his voice, an authenticity, and intensity, and a psychological fragility that was so close to the Batman that people had in their heads that they didn’t even need an actual physical representation.

Additionally, Batman: The Animated Series had incredible music.  Their in-house composer, Shirley Walker, had complete access to Danny Elfman’s score for the 1989 Batman film, and she used it as a starting off point and central theme for the show.  This created immediately familiarity for audiences and associated the cartoon with a high degree of production value.  Furthermore, she had the benefit of working for Warner Bros., who always had a completely different outlook on music for cartoons:

Where other studios traditionally use a library of stock cues as background music for their cartoons, Warner Bros. Animation has always insisted on original music scored directly to the picture.  That gave Shirley and her team of composers (including Michael McCuistion, Lolita Ritmanis, Todd Hayen, Harvey R. Cohen, and Carlos Rodriguez) opportunities to musically explore each major character in depth. (Dini and Kidd, 19).

These essential elements all combined to create the episodes for Batman: The Animated Series, which became an immediate hit when it aired on television.  Fans were finally given a cartoon version of their favorite character that was treated with respect.  The show was gritty, Batman was dark, the villains were scary, and a complete adventure would be contained within each single episode: an evil character would try to do something evil, Batman would engage that villain, and at the end, the enemy is thwarted.

Though that description of the show is somewhat simplified, it does the give the general pattern of stories that were displayed on the show.  These simple, canned plotlines, however, was merely the skeleton on which the art was made.  The beauty of the series lay in the line art, the backgrounds, the voice acting, the music, the tone, and the psychological truthfulness of characters.  As a result of the high regard that critics had for the show, Fox even decided to move (for a time) the show from its intended airing time – Saturday mornings, along with the other cartoons – to a primetime slot.

The move to primetime indicates that Batman: The Animated Series was being received in a unique way.  First, as a cartoon meant to be shown on Saturday Morning, it clearly made an appeal to children.  At the same time, however, being shown on primetime is a genuine gesture to appeal to adults.  This two-tiered reception is a difficult balance to achieve – very few cartoons have ever done it – but this very universal appeal is what has bolstered this show’s legacy and contributed highly to its success.

How does this show operate on these two levels? It is only appropriate that this discussion of Batman: The Animated Series – because it is on a scale that is more than just casual – include some textual analysis: in the episode “Heart of Ice” we can see how the show provides enough adventure for the younger audience while at the same time providing a deeper psychological exercise for adult viewers.

The plot of “Heart of Ice” moves as follows: Gotham City is suffering from a series of high profile robberies, targeting a company called Goth Corp.  Batman is able to use some of his detective skills to figure out that the specific items stolen can be assembled to form a powerful freezing weapon.  One part has yet to be stolen, so Batman goes to the site, waiting for the villain to come and steal the part.  The perpetrator arrives, and it is Mr. Freeze – who Batman is unable to initially stop.  In the process, Freeze reveals that this is a personal vendetta that he is settling, which forces Batman to do some more detective work.  Batman breaks into Goth Corp, and finds out that Mr. Freeze was formally Dr. Victor Fries, who worked for Goth Corp, but was using company funds to develop a working cryogenic chamber that was housing his sick wife.  Ferris Boyle, who up until this moment has been a business partner to Bruce Wayne, is revealed to be the man who forcibly stopped Fries research, destroying his machinery, killing his wife, and leaving Fries in a physical state that requires him to be in a contained environment that is below freezing in order to live.  Freeze uses the now fully assembled freeze weapon to break into a banquet that Ferris Boyle is being honored at – and makes an attempt on his life.  Batman is able to intervene in the matter, preventing Mr. Freeze from taking Boyle’s life, but also presenting a video of the moment where Boyle murdered Fries’ wife.  The episode ends with Mr. Freeze sitting in a cell in Arkham Asylum, holding a snow globe of a ballerina, which represents his deceased wife.

First of all, as a kids show, it is pertinent to discuss its merits as such. The issue that works at a fundamental level is that Batman is a hero. He does everything it takes to catch the villain.  Primarily, this embodies itself through the martial arts depicted.  Almost every time Batman gets into an altercation, he relies on pure hand to hand combat, punching, kicking, and it is always effective but never lethal. His strength comes from himself, not any super powers, or a bite from a radioactive spider, or the fact that he is an alien. The violence is somewhat tame, and he never needs to resort to anything like a gun (which the villain uses repeatedly).  Though we may not be able to track accurately the effect that this actually has on a child, we can at least acknowledge that this line of thinking has always been regarded as a “good message for children” by adults.  The show can be perceived to teach a child self-reliance and the power of the human spirit rather than an over-dependence on technology or that which is unreal.

As much as Batman wants to eliminate crime, he cares for people, even the criminals themselves.  There is a scene in the episode where Mr. Freeze has left for dead one of his own henchmen.  After he escapes, Batman is shown caring for the henchman, nursing him back to health in his secret lair, the Batcave. Again, barring any direct comment on the effect it has on a child viewer, we can at least say this is yet another principal that adults typically associate with good kids programming – learning to care for people, even if they are disagreeable to you.

Most importantly, Batman wins at the end.  This reaffirms traditional views of the hero, and that the entity that represents “good” always comes up victorious against “evil.” Parents and critics alike, knowing that this is a show for kids, would shun a program where the villain was able to commit terrible crimes and not pay terribly for it.

Speaking of the villain, Mr. Freeze also fits the surface mold for what we could call a “kid-friendly” villain.  In the design of the character, he is not overly menacing: he uses a gun, but it is a gun that only shoots out water that freezes the objects that it is aimed at.  Against Batman, he is small in stature – where Batman is big and bulky, representing your traditional strongman, Mr. Freeze is thin with an oversized head, indicating a high mental capacity but no imminent physical threat. In the way he speaks, he is clearly other-worldly: his voice always sounds part robotic, and completely monotone, which a kid would not easily mistake as being believable.  This again lessens the “potential threat” of the character, firmly couching him as a figure that exists only in fantasy.

Also, all of Mr. Freeze’s efforts (the serious ones, anyway) are thwarted.  His primary objective in the episode is to enact revenge upon Ferris Boyle, which does not work.  This sends two messages, that revenge is never a goal that will prosper, and that some kind of authority figure of the law will step in and intervene.  Even before he was Mr. Freeze, when he was still Dr. Fries, he was using company funds and equipment to conduct his personal experimentation.  Right when they are introduced to that idea, the project gets shut down by Dr. Fries’ superiors, diffusing any confusion over whether that is an acceptable practice in a work environment.

Another more subtle feature of the villain is that he never works alone.  At all times, Mr. Freeze is surrounded by at least four to five “goons” that do his bidding.  They are drawn to look buffoonish, and the only time one speaks is when he calls for help, which Mr. Freeze quickly dismisses, saying that “If he’s too weak to fix his own problem, we don’t need him.”  This also suggests a certain attitude to children that adults often perpetuate, namely, that bad people help others to become bad people.  It is easy to submit to peer pressure to do “wrong.”  This is completely opposite of what Batman represents.  He is the single person, the “lone ranger” who is willing to stand up for what is right, and he will do it even if no one cares to join him.

These might not have been conscious choices on the part of the writers, but they are choices nonetheless.  We can reasonably infer that these choices arise from certain industrial pressures of producing a children’s show.  They must tell a story that is exciting, but not violent.  They must have villains, but make sure there are compensating moral values, and evil is punished at the end.

On the other hand, the beauty in the show also lies in the subtleties of characterization of these central figures that might not necessarily be picked up right away by the younger viewers.  There are clearly conscious nods to the more sophisticated audience members, which intermingle alongside the moments that are clearly meant for the kids.  Batman, though a “costumed hero” is a vigilante.  Children understand that he is fighting crime, but do they understand the fact that he is essentially a criminal himself?  He fights crime outside the bounds of law – and we older viewers can see that presented to us in multiple ways.  First, he has to always wear his costume.  As much as he says the costume’s purpose is to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, he is also always hiding himself from the general public.

This secret identity factor begins to align Batman with the criminal.  From the outset, Mr. Freeze is a mysterious figure who we do not know much about.  Only after Batman breaks-in to Goth Corp do we realize that he was once just a man that used to work there. But in order to discover this truth, Batman had to break-in to Goth Corp and search through the company’s private files.  It is a short scene, and the story is much more focused on the discovery of who Mr. Freeze is, but adults will pick up on this more so than the kids.  Batman has broken into Goth Corp just like Mr. Freeze has broken into Goth Corp.  Batman has stolen information from them just as Mr. Freeze has stolen items to build a weapon from them. Ultimately, Batman is painted as a morally ambiguous figure – he is not willing to do things “by the book.”

Furthermore, as Batman seems like a “lone ranger” hero for young audiences, adults will probably ask if his lifestyle has had a necessary consequence of isolating himself from others.  We see the very same characteristic, but through a slightly more discerning lens. Maybe the reason why he always works alone is because he is so obsessed with crime-fighting that everything else has been pushed away in his life.  There are no heterosexual romances, no children – only his job as the city guardian. Maybe he does not desire those things in life, and that is fine, but it is a choice that he has to make in order to continue the lifestyle that he lives.

Batman, therefore, becomes a foil for which adult audience members can examine their lives against.  As a symbol of heroism and the commitment that is necessary to maintain that status, he is a character that has always challenged us to be more than what we are.  As a fellow human being, Batman has the unique ability to mirror our lives, in both simple and complex ways. Other superhero icons do not run as deep of a connection simply because the nature of their powers.  They are mutants, or aliens, or have been bitten by a radioactive spider, etc.  But becoming Batman is something that is possible in reality.  He had a goal in his life and he pushed himself to achieve that goal. But he is also fallible, with emotions, pain, and psychological issues that he is working through.

This ability to appeal to our humanist side lies in every Batman episode, as his status as an icon does not change from one to the other. One of the unique issues about the episode “Heart of Ice,” however, is that this very appeal to our human side also aligns us to the villain Mr. Freeze.  He is villain and victim, oppressor and oppressed, a character we cannot relate to but a character we understand completely.

It’s clear that what has motivated his criminal actions is an emotion that we understand far too much: Love.  Dr. Fries wife was terminally ill, and in order to preserve her life, he did the only thing he could do, which was look for a cure.  Yes, he did take advantage of the company that he was working for and used their equipment without permission, but as the episode explained, he had no other choice.

Even when his goal changed and became more criminal, it was motivated by love. After his wife was killed, he felt it necessary to enact revenge for her.  It was not a purely selfish act, which we often associate with these supervillains, who lie, cheat, steal and murder for personal gain.  For Mr. Freeze, there was nothing physical or material to be gained.  He was only appeasing an emotional desire.

Batman understood this, which is why he ultimately helped Mr. Freeze by breaking the silence on who actually killed his wife, the aforementioned Ferris Boyle. In this way, the episode aligns Batman with Mr. Freeze.  Both do what they do because of a traumatic event that occurred earlier in life.  Both take on an alter-ego to protect what’s left of their fractured psyches.  And both go beyond the bounds of the law to fulfill a psychological need.  Reduced to their essence, Mr. Freeze and Batman are actually very similar, to the point where it is difficult to separate the hero and the villain.  Yet, the creators of the show are able to walk that very fine line – no one for a second, not even the most discerning of critics, will say that Batman is not the hero or that Freeze is not the villain.

The episode also deflects some of this “villain” quality over to the character Ferris Boyle.  Initially introduced into the show as a successful business man, as the story progresses, he clearly becomes the catalyst that has forced Mr. Freeze into his position.  At that point, he is the villain to both Batman and Mr. Freeze.  To Batman, he is the man who initially committed a murder, and who hid that information.  To Freeze, he is the man who murdered his wife and turned him into a freak.

There is a complex movement of guilt from one character to another.  When examining the cartoon from this angle, any sense of morality collapses, as all three men, Batman, Mr. Freeze, and Ferris Boyle, are essentially criminals, working outside of the law to accomplish their goals.  And yet, the writers still manage to ride the fine line where it seems that the just and the unjust are divided in a way that is clear.

Inherent in the character of Ferris Boyle is a commentary on the ills of the corporate structure.  As the head of his company, it is his responsibility to look out for the best interests of his shareholders.  But does that justify murder? Does it justify a cover up?  This is a question that plagues the modern man, as time and again we are forced to see these very corporate evildoers fess up to their crimes in the news.

It becomes abundantly clear that “Heart of Ice” is an episode that has many layers of meaning, and it operates fully at each level.  It can be reduced to something as simple as an adventure story for the kids, but it can also be interpreted as a tale of moral ambiguities and an attempt to deal with greater social concerns.  As amazing as that is, the issue that becomes even more salient is that Batman: The Animated Series was able to maintain this tone during its complete run.  Some stories were more complex than others but, but all were consistently able to offer the audiences members something, no matter what age group they belonged to.

If legacy is the standard by which to measure a show by, then Batman: The Animated Series has earned its place among other important works.  Hal Erickson, in his exhaustive work Television Cartoon Shows, speaks on the influence of Batman in many respects.  He mentions that “the enormous success of Warner Bros.’ Batman: The Animated Series prompted Marvel to announce that a state-of-the-art Spider-Man was on the TV cartoon horizon, to be co-produced by Saban Entertainment” (Erickson, 781). He goes on to mention how Batman helped give rise to other shows, namely X-Men, Teen Titans, Superman: The Animated Series, and Justice League, all important cartoons in the era between the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s.

The show continues to make a difference today.  In 2008, in preparation for Warner Bros. release of The Dark Knight (2008), Warner Animation released a straight to DVD collection of animated Batman stories that were supposed to help fill in the gap of time in between Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight. Though the animation was far different from The Animated Series (They had decided to go with many different companies each doing short stories) there was one influence that they could not deny: the voice work of Kevin Conroy.  In the minds and hearts of fans, he had become the essential voice of Batman – to the point where Warner was almost “forced” to hire him to reprise his role.

The show has come full circle, altering the comic book medium from which it borrowed so much.  Characters like Harley Quinn or Officer Montoya, who were introduced specifically for the show, became so popular that they were written into the comic book continuity.  Harley Quinn has become one of the top characters at DC comics, warranting her own title.

More can be said about Batman: The Animated Series and its influence, but that’s not the issue at hand.  What is pressing is that at a certain moment in time, the right people came together, had a common vision, respected their work, and put out a good product.  The legacy that the show has had in subsequent years merely attests to the fact that the crew at Batman did something right, which, under industrial pressures, is a rare occurrence in modern television.  It is this rare mixture of quality that leaves audiences stunned and willing to put a show on their personal “best of” lists.  Even if it is informal, its placement is well-deserved.

Works Cited

1. Dini, Paul, and Chip Kidd. Batman: Animated. New York: HarperEntertainment, 1998.
2. Erickson, Hal. “Spider-Man.” Television Cartoon Shows: As Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949 through 2003. 2 vols. Jefferson: Mcfarland & Company, 2005.

Vacation Part 2: Bay to Santa Barbara and Back Home

So it’s been over a month since I posted.  I should’ve posted earlier, but alas, I am a busy man.

I’m glad I found some time so that I could finish up the entries about my vacation.  After the last entry, there was still some cool stuff that happened, and I want to share that with you. However, there might be a slight problem: I’m probably going to be foggy about the details, so I’m going to make it all a bit more truncated. I’ll also embellish where it needs, bridging the gap between the reality that I lived and the fantasy that I’m trying to remember.

Here. We. Go.

When I was hanging out in the financial district (mentioned in the previous post) I stopped into the Westfield shopping center. The mall located in this area is just a mall, nothing special to make note of, except, maybe, a certain view to the top.  The mall is built upward, and the unique architecture makes for an interesting look up:

I like this shot. I’m not a talented photographer by any means, but this isn’t bad. The rest of the day was already summed up, but I at least wanted to show you that pic. Couldn’t get Batman into this one.

The next day, after I woke up, I think I said goodbye to YYY’s drummer. We probably hugged it out, I’m sure I told him to be nice to Karen O. and I told him to return the apartment to my cousin Wilson. I proceeded to head from Hayward back into San Fran again, wanting to finish up my “Vertigo Pics” trip. First site I got to: the apartment building that “Judy” (Kim Novak) called home. This apartment building has since been converted into a hotel, and whoever owns this building now has decided to exploit the fact that it was featured in Vertigo.  The hotel is now named The Vertigo Hotel (what a stroke of brilliance and originality). The building is not much to look at, but it has an interesting awning. Again, Batman goes missing.

The next place I stopped at is classic, historical, haunting, morbid, beautiful, spiritual, religious, grand, simple, ornate, quiet. It’s called the Mission Dolores, and is comprised of the Misión San Francisco de Asís (Old Mission) and the Mission Dolores Basilica. As for some historical background, the old mission is the oldest intact mission in California and the oldest building in San Francisco. The Basilica, which is quite beautiful, was added later on. The site is significant to me because Madeleine (Novak) visits this site as Scotty (Jimmy Stewart) follows her.  The whole scene is spooky, as she visits the cemetery, stopping at the grave of “Carlotta Valdes” who “haunts” Madeleine. Realistically speaking, the ghost of Carlotta Valdes haunts the whole film, remaining a somewhat spectral figure in our minds throughout the narrative. 

The outside:

The inside of the Old Mission, a place of piety:

The sanctuary of the Basilica, glorious:

And finally, the cemetery:

Batman makes a cameo in some of these last pictures, but not in the cemetery one. This place was a little spooky, but that feeling fades into a strange but strong sense of history. There are tombstones here that date from hundreds of years ago. The cemetery is a popular tourist attraction, and though I initially felt strange about the idea of walking around the resting place of the religious deceased, it made me think about the past, and that all who rest here were real people who walked, breathed, ate, slept, and lived life during a time that was completely different than now. But they undoubtedly felt the feelings that we feel, they laughed the way we laugh, they loved the way we love, they prayed the way we pray, they suffered the way we suffer. Real people, who I wish I could’ve met or broken bread with, who I could interact with and know, but cannot, because we are separated by the boundary of time.

I enjoyed my time at Mission Dolores.

I then drove to a random apartment building. It’s part of the Vertigo trip only because there’s a brief scene where Scotty is committed to a crazy house, and the apartment passes as the asylum. Since the building was a little boring, I focused on the star of the picture rather than the background.

I then spent some time at the Legion of Honor. I enjoy art, though I’m certainly not as well read as someone who majored in art history. My knowledge continues to grow though, and visits to museums like this only serve to feed that hunger to learn more. I took too many pictures at this location, anything and everything from Monet to Rodin, and can’t share all of them in this post- but I thought I should select a photo of at least one piece of work that would be interesting to share with you all.

Bacchus and Ariadne by Corneille van Cleve.

I know nothing more of sculpture than the average person who studied the humanities, which is saying that I know very little. But I do know that this piece made me think of certain attributes: I thought of how a motionless sculpture can represent movement; I thought of how the piece  shows a specific moment from a specific story, but the emotion is universal, experienced by many. I think about the way that the light hits it, creating shadows in certain angles, while a simple step in another direction might reveal more detail that I didn’t see before. And I think about why the artist felt compelled to create this work (which I could never know), but the fun part is in the speculation.

I should’ve spent longer there, but my time was limited. I regret that, as I should’ve carved out the whole day for the Legion of Honor.

After that, I left the Bay area. It was fun while it lasted, but I was now on my way to Santa Barbara.

I took the 101, which is a long drive unfortunately made longer by traffic. Before I got into Santa Barbara, I also needed to visit San Juan Bautista to take some more Vertigo pictures. San Juan Bautista is a SMALL town, but it’s home to several buildings that were prominently featured in Vertigo. This is where the pivotal final scene takes place, as well as the middle portion where the mystery starts to really come together.

The above building was a stable where Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak embrace and kiss. There is an amazing shot where they stay in the same spot while the camera moves around them, all the while keeping them in the middle of the frame. A circular type shot, emphasizing a type of confusion and revelation all at the same time (I think).

This is the supposed “courthouse” where Scotty (Stewart) gets grilled. I won’t talk about what he’s going through, you have to watch the film. The scene is just a few minutes long, nothing significant, though I thought it would make for a nice picture. Batman is here in the picture- he’s hard to spot though.

This is the Mission San Juan Bautista. Critical in Vertigo, and quite a site for me to see. It’s strange to see it up close after so many years of admiring it in the film, as it seems almost decrepit compared to it’s glorious representation in the film. It also is missing the famous tower, which, truth be told, was never a part of the actual building. The tower was constructed as a “matte painting”- an old school special effect to create a landmark that is not really there during production of the movie. The fictional tower would’ve been right behind the front entrance, at the apex/roof of the building. Movie Magic, yaheard.

I left the town after I snapped these photos. I was heading toward Cypress Point on 17 Mile Drive, Pebble Beach in Monterey, because there’s a super romantic sequence in Vertigo filmed right there, but I never got a chance. It was going to take awhile to get there from San Juan Bautista but I would’ve made it if it wasn’t for A COP GIVING ME A TICKET. Speeding. 65 in a 55 zone.

Needless to say, I thought it was lame. 10+ mph over the speed limit, really? I’m not going to sit here and say that I didn’t do it. I did, I will fully admit that I was speeding. But going 10+ mph over isn’t exactly the definition of a speed DEMON. I just knew it was bad luck, and the cop was fishing for someone to give a ticket to.

Oh joy, traffic school.

This little “speedbump” in my drive down made me late- by the time I got to Cypress Point, I wasn’t allowed in. Sucks.

I kept driving. By now, it was night, and the 101 is a dark, dark road. I didn’t get into Santa Barbara until late, like 12:30 am. But when I got in, my buddy Randy welcomed me into me into his home. A total bachelor pad.

The next couple of days, Randy and I just chilled. We didn’t do anything noteworthy per se, though the time was filled with catching up and good conversations. Whether it was sitting at a restaurant or watching a movie or walking on the pier, Randy and I tend to have a good time, because we are “cut from the same cloth,” as they say.  I didn’t need to take too many pictures, but here’s a partial list of “fun times in SB”:

-pushups
-Naked Juice Green Machine
-Strong Coffee
-Ahi Salad
-UC Santa Barbara
-Trying to pee in a hidden spot (still in public) and runners coming across our trail
-a visit to Costco
-Buffalo Wings
–Lawless (which was pretty good!)
-trying to find a open blues jam, to no avail

It was a good couple of days. Relaxing, which is, in my best estimate, the whole point of vacation. San Francisco was busy, but Santa Barbara was a good wind down.

I took this picture the last day I was in Santa Barbara. I asked the dude if I could take a picture of him, and he told me that it was cool if I donated some money to him. 1 Dollar for a few shots, I think that was a pretty fair trade. Sand Sculpture of a mermaid, though the Sunglasses strike me as a bit strange.

We also ate at The Santa Barbara Shellfish Company, located at the end of the pier. Had some fresh Rock Crab, and if you know me, I cannot stay away from good crab. Randy liked it too.

After we hugged it out, I made my drive back home. I made a stop in Camarillo to do some shopping. Bought a couple of necessary items, and got home at 9pm on a thursday. The next day, I was back at work.

All in all, a good trip.  I’ve been back over a month, but that week was a good one- there are some memories made that I will carry with me.

I’ll post again soon.

Vacation Part 1: Bay Area Shenanigans

I’ve been up here 3 days, and it has thus far been fun, already different but better than I expected.  Though I didn’t have big plans in the first place, I would’ve exchanged them for the exact days I’ve been having.

Nothing is life-changing or mind-blowing, but restful and relaxing. And pensive at times.

I left Alhambra a little later than expected.  I was potentially going to start my drive on thursday night, but got busy with packing and preparing stuff that I sold on Ebay to ship out.  For those of you who don’t know, I’m selling my batman/joker collection on Ebay.  Yes, the collection that I’ve worked on for five years, the best collection of toys ever, the collection that put The 40 Year-Old Virgin to shame.

I think people like my collection. First of all, people all secretly want to be geeks (not nerd, there is a distinction, look it up sucka).  Secondly, even among people who call themselves geeks, there are rarely people who “put their money where their mouth is.”  I spent hours, I spent days, I spent weeks, I spent years.  If you want to take a glimpse, check it out here. The photos do not include everything, but you’ll get an idea.

Greatest BATMANS and JOKERS collection ever.

This collection was put together at a time of my life where I was committed to a relationship. That relationship is over, so I’m letting go of this collection too. Don’t need it anymore.

So back to the trip:

Of course, I wasn’t sure if the Bay Area had any Yoshinoya Restaurants.  I had to make sure I got that in my belly.

The drive was seven hours of road. There’s nothing interesting to post about the drive. But it was relaxing for me. I spent some time with John Coltrane, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, and The Arcade Fire. They were good companions.

When I got to the Bay, I headed toward Hayward rather than San Fran. Wanted to drop off all my junk and spend some time with my cousin Wilson. Problem was, when I got to Wilson’s apartment, he was nowhere to be found. The person that lived there was the drummer of YEAH YEAH YEAHS. He was studying for the DATs.

It didn’t matter to me anyway. I could hang with him, I guess?  I settled in, and soon it was time for dinner.  I asked him if he wanted to go into the city to eat, ’cause I heard Hayward sucks.  He replied that “it’s not that bad” and suggested a Wings place. We drove around Hayward, and he was right, it didn’t seem as bad as people made it out to be- it’s probably just “bad” to suburbanites who think that any streets without McMansions and BMWs in the driveway are “ghetto.”  We got to the wings place, and we inhaled said wings along with BBQ ribs.  Those were fine, but what really spoke to me was the fact that they had bottomless milkshakes and one dollar beer.  Didn’t have any of the beer, but I snatched up that bottomless milkshake (same price as a soda, in fact, the bill makes no distinction, it’s merely a “drink”).

After WING FIESTA we walked around Hayward. This walk did kinda suck, the most exciting store we stopped in was Hayward Video. Exciting times…

Next day, Saturday, I wake up and it’s still the drummer from YEAH YEAH YEAHS that I’m staying with.  He suggests that we go to a place in Castro Valley for lunch called “Lucca’s Deli” which is supposedly famous and well regarded.  I ordered the Corned Beef sandwich, and let me tell you, it was DAMN GOOD.  I again, inhaled this meal, before Drummer could even finish half of his.

After lunch, we proceeded to San Francisco.

In San Fran, I wanted to go visit the sites that Vertigo was shot at. For those of you who are not familiar with that film, it’s an Alfred Hitchcock film from 1958, which some regard as a great film (I am one of these people). In prior visits, I did have the opportunity to visit some sites, but not all. I’m attempting to go to all of them this time around.

First stop: the restaurant where Jimmy Stewart first sees Kim Novak. In this scene, he falls in love, so it’s an important scene, so to speak. Unfortunately, the restaurant (“Ernie’s”) is long gone, and some other random business has taken its place. I wasn’t even paying attention to the type of business that has replaced important movie history, because whatever it is, it’s junk. At least Drummer helped me take a picture. I think that’s the same sidewalk that Jimmy Stewart walked on. 847 Montgomery.

Fortunately, the 2nd site for Vertigo movie history is an apartment complex called The Brockleback Apartments. 1000 Mason Street. This is the site where Jimmy Stewart starts to follow Kim Novak’s character throughout the city, and also the visual starting point of his character’s growing obsession. The building is classy and huge. Batman is a tiny speck in this next pic, see if you can find him.

The next site is Jimmy Stewart’s (or “Scottie’s”) Apartment. This scene is strange, as they (Scottie and Madeleine/Judy) start having a clear attraction to one another.  Is it real? Is it fake? For those of us who have seen the movie, it’s still a bit of a mystery. But that’s what this film is all about- things that happen in the dark, in the recesses of the heart, in the shadows. 900 Lombard.

We then went to the Palace of Fine Arts. In the film, this site is only featured very briefly, while Scottie and Judy are falling in love, walking the streets of San Fran. As a result, I attempted to mimic the “walking” aspect of the shot, but it didn’t work in a still, so here’s a picture of me staring at the building, trying to figure out what to do for the photo. There’s something particularly nice about this place: it’s populated with people who are in love. All over the grassy areas, couples are lying down, having picnics, holding each other, kissing, and all that beautiful junk. Gross, but it’s nice to see love in a world that’s dark and harsh. I’m all about that man. Love, sweet love. 3301 Lyon St.

After we got the shot, we walked through the building, and I saw something that I had to take a picture of: A couple was using this site to hold their wedding. I thought the idea was a great one, as it’s hard to find a place as beautiful, or grand, or elegant as this place. I wondered if they got a permit or if they just did it all “guerilla style.” Probably guerilla style, that’s definitely a cooler move. There seemed to be a small guest list- maybe five or six people? Nice move too, lovers. Five to six people is classy. A wedding, the beginning of a marriage, which is an institute of love and partnership, doesn’t need to be a big brouhaha. It’s really about the two people on that team. And I’m sure they felt like the only two people in the world. That’s the way you should feel on your wedding day. Dig that tattoo, lady.

This excursion that yeah yeah yeahs drummer and I went on wasn’t based on the chronology of the film.  Instead, we went the “optimal driving route” way, so our next stop, though later in the day for us, is featured earlier on in the film. Fort Point (below the south anchorage of the Golden Gate Bridge). It was a fortunate situation, however, because the fog started coming in and it felt “right.” Though you can’t really see it in the picture.

We stopped our Vertigo trip at that point. I think I’m gonna try to finish it up tomorrow. We then decided to do the tourist thing and head to Fisherman’s Wharf, have some crab at The Crab Station, walk around. A few people from LA suggested that I try “Blue Bottle Coffee” while I’m up here, so YYYs drummer proceeded to lead me from the Wharf to the Ferry Station. Um, thanks guy. It was like an hour walk. Dude said it would be real quick, and then halfway through the walk he’s like “Naw it’s not that close.” And when we got there, the Blue Bottle Coffee Shop place was closed. I was about ready to dropkick this foo, but I like YYYs, so I decided to let him live. We took a trolley back to FW. Here’s a random seagull.

We then went to North Beach, had some gelato that Gerald recommended. Took in some street art, walked by all the seedy strip clubs. Funny thing is, all those clubs had a well dressed bouncer asking people to come in. I mean, these cats looked like businessmen. But, they spoke like sailors. In the three seconds that it took us to pass by each doorway, the bouncer would spew all sorts of degrading stuff. I can’t lie, I laughed each time, these cats were too funny.

We then went back to Hayward. That was Saturday.

This post is getting long, so I’ll keep the descriptions for Sunday Shorter.

7:30 Woke up.

8:30 drove to Oakland, attending service at Urban Grace. Kevin, my man, is the pastor there. Small church-plant dedicated to urban ministry. Awesome stuff they’re doing. After service, I had a chance to sit and talk with one of my favorite girls.

Sorry ladies, little Chloe won my heart this weekend.

After service, lunch. After lunch, Kevin and Connie (his awesome wife) had naptime, so I played outside with Chloe while another friend, Laura, was helping with some gardening at their house.  We played like 50 games of “Peter and the Wolf” and 50 games of “Goldilocks and the Bears.” Admittedly, I don’t know these stories very well, so Chloe had to teach me how to play. She was way patient. Then came snack time.

Left to right: Connie (mom), Christian (son), Sydney (neighborhood friend), Chloe (daughter), Laura (friend).

Once snacks were over, play resumed.

That face cracked me up all weekend.  Funny thing about Chloe, it’s not even like she seems childish. I just talked to her like an adult, and for a tiny one, she communicates back like an adult (with, of course, a less developed vocab and some baby mumbling). She even read some books to me. I think I mentioned the family in my previous post, but man, it was good spending extended time with them and the kids.

Cedric (another neighbor friend) and Christian. Christian is still on the younger side, but man, does he have some pipes! Kid is like “Banshee” from X-Men.  Even got the green and yellow color scheme going on. And that hair. Dude is killing all the ladies. Every other second I see a different girl pick him up.

Playtime over, Dinner. We had Shandong style food AKA “Best” style food. After dinner, it got close to bed time for the kids, so Kevin led a little Bible Story time, a little prayer time, we even sang a hymn together. After that, the kids got in their PJs and then us, the big kids, started having our own fun.

Left to right: Darryl (friend), Kevin, and Mark (friend).

I felt like a total nerd playing this game. Ticket to Ride, Europe edition (or some junk like that). What solidified this feeling is that I absolutely loved the whole thing (though I hate to admit it). I loved building railroads, digging tunnels, and trying to establish the longest track. It’s lame, but man, it’s too damn fun.

Sleep.

Monday.

Woke up in the morning and had FREE BREAKFAST AT IKEA. WHAT, YOU SAY? WHAT IS THIS “FREE” CONCEPT? I don’t know how they do it man, but on Mondays at that Ikea in their town, a “small breakfast” is free. So we ordered like 8. Free = best. thing. ever. You can’t see it but the “small breakfast” was decent, with eggs, hash browns, bacon. We ordered some extra “frakin franch toast” and Meat-a-ballsa.

We didn’t stay at Ikea long- like vultures, we ate and took off, haha.

Afterwards, we went to the Emeryville Marina. These kids man, made me into a cheese sandwich. And Chloe, she’s the ham.

We went back to their place. Mark (second from left in above pic) took off, and I decided to follow suit. I had a wonderful time with Kevin and Connie and the kids this weekend. I wasn’t sure if I was going to spend much time with them- after all, Kevin is a preacher, and Sunday is a busy day for them. But no, there was plenty time spent, and though it was sorta unexpected (I was thinking that I’d probably have to let them do their ministry stuff and meet up with them for short pockets of time) it was a refreshing time with an old friend. And new ones, too.

After I left, the rest of Monday was pretty straightforward. Went back to the city, hung out in Ghirardelli Square a bit, a coffee shop by there called Blackpoint Cafe, the Beach just down the street, then went to the financial district to get some Blue Bottle Coffee. Even though they were closed, they made a cup of drip coffee for me. LA cats are wrong- this coffee didn’t change my life. I mean, it was good, but “best coffee ever” wasn’t my initial thought. Maybe my coffee palate isn’t strong enough.

Went to mission district for dinner, at this place called El Farolito. There were like, a thousand hipsters and a thousand Mexicans here, so I figure it was worth waiting in line for a super carne asada burrito. Check my instagram for a photo of this place, standing room only. No space to eat, so I took it back to my car and listened to some Patsy Cline while I scarfed down some of the burrito. Prettay, prettay, prettay, prettay good. I didn’t finish. Drove back to Hayward, Wayward, Homeward, whatever it’s called, and will crash again on YYYs drummers’ futon, right about now.

And I don’t care if you guys think there are too many picture of these kids. Y’all just jealous that Crazy Uncle Mike is their favorite, and you’re not. Below photo by Mom Connie.