HopkinsCinemAddicts

Defiance - An Adventure in Transmedia

Transmedia, specifically transmedia storytelling is the art of telling a single story or exploring a single world across different media. It is closely associated with the idea of a story world, a more abstract concept referring to a single narrative world that exists across different works of narrative art.

 

In the summer of 2011, Syfy announced an upcoming transmedia collaboration with gaming company Trion Worlds. The result is a two-part project that premiered this year in April with a long-form TV science-fiction political action drama and a corresponding multi-platform MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game).

 

    This is the background of the world they share. In the year 2046, arks carrying survivors of a dying alien solar system carrying an entire ecosystem arrive on Earth, causing war and a complete restructuring of the planet’s surface, society, and biosphere. The show takes place after this, in a town called Defiance, following the myriad political and social struggles resulting from the mix of alien and human cultures and agendas. To some degree, the show relies on tried-and-true plot tropes, such as Romeo and Juliet-style love stories, cultural and spiritual tensions, and classic science fiction elements like alien-on-alien battles, spacecrafts, blue glowy things, and futuristic energy weapons which account for most of Syfy’s budget on the show.

 

    The goal of the project was to extensively link the shared world of the game and the show. They take place in the same area at the same time, and the two branches of the project promise future crossovers, ranging from the ability of the player’s character in the game to appear in the show to large scale players’ actions influencing the show’s narrative future. At the moment, however, the crossover is limited to similar storylines and characters and timed missions in the game that must be completed by the next episode’s airing. The two development teams both made concessions for such a project to become a reality. While, for example, the gaming team thought the alien races known as “Voltan” should bring with them flying car technology, Syfy’s television crew told them that was right-out too expensive.

 

    Meanwhile, Syfy’s conceptual team thought horses or similar pack animals would fit the setting. The logistical team for the video game informed them that pack animals interfere with combat in games like the one they were designing. I admit to having not played the game, but I do have exposure to both television and games of this genre – and the mutual influence is clear.

 

    The TV show brings several well-recognized actors, including Grant Bowler, (known for his previous work in Ugly Betty and True Blood,) and Julie Benz, from (Angel and Dexter). Of course, the television actors served as the live models for their digital doubles in the game. The actors, along with the visual decisions for the various races in the world, had to be decided on several years in advance than they would have been for a typical science fiction show for like this without a collaborating video game team. On the other hand, while video games can relatively easily create very non-human aliens, a TV show has more limitations, meaning Defiance’s aliens look remarkably human. The collaboration has a kind of lowest common denominator effect, where both media have to take into account the limitations of the other.

 

However, transmedia collaboration is not without its strengths. Despite several obvious archetypes and standard genre elements, the extensive world-building is obvious from the very first episode. Because the show is free to tell for of its mythology in the setting of the game, the world feels like it has even more depth. There are two complete languages for the show and game, constructed by David J. Peterson, who also worked on Dothraki, the constructed language from Game of Thrones. Though we don’t see much of some of the alien races, as not all are represented in the main cast, each has distinctive cultural characteristics, evident in their speech patterns, dress, and attitudes, even in minor roles.

 

The races are also original in that the cultures seem to have been built from the ground up, rather than borrowed from Earth cultures and pasted onto alien species, a welcome relief to a veteran viewer of the genre (though some play it a little close at times).

    The show promises a world full of conflict and tensions, some which are more television arc-worthy, others of which could easily permeate throughout the show and game worlds (such as racial tension and environmental dangers). The show has recently been renewed for a second season, hopefully bringing the promised crossovers closer to reality.

It's not over 'til it's over

Over the past few weeks, my group and I have been working very hard to piece our film together smoothly and succinctly. We had a slight problem exporting our footage during last week’s critique and that presented a problem. There was no way for our professors to give us feedback without us having something to present. Our professors were concerned that we would not have time to incorporate their suggestions.

But it all worked out fine. It took us a while to get our footage into the hands of our professors, but overall they really liked what they saw. Matt Porterfied (name dropping) said that our film was “well directed” among other great things. That was the highlight of class for me! Everything that we have worked so hard to accomplish is finally almost ready to be exhibited. Sure, there are things (minor things) that still need to be worked on, but we are well on our way to completion -- very soon.

We are currently in the process of color correcting our footage and we are also sound mixing and incorporating our score into the soundtrack. Color correction is a very time consuming process. Our DP has his hands full applying his corrections to each and every scene. Thankfully, he’s almost done. Our score was composed and performed by our writer’s father. We were also able to get a student from Peabody to accompany his pre-recorded tracks. Together, their music sounds phenomenal! Her father began composing a few piano melodies after reading his daughter’s script, which is based on the passing of her great-aunt. As a group, we wanted to hear another artist respond to and accompany his music to give it more depth. I can’t wait for people to hear it!

In my previous blog post I mentioned some of the unavoidable hardships that are a part of the collaborative process, but all’s well that end’s well. And the hardships that we’ve endured have made our project and us stronger.

 

This is my final blog post. My journey here and this particular project is drawing close to an end. But I shall leave you with one final exciting update. Upon completion, we will begin looking into local and big name festivals into which we’d like to submit our short film. Sundance, SxSW, and Cannes –here we come! (Maybe… hopefully…)

See you in the movies!  

Are Films a Pretext for Social Dialogue?

Until recently, film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good.

                                "Towards a Third Cinema," a manifesto

 

Paris is Burning is a 1990 documentary film by Jennie Livingston. This documentary explores the gay ballroom, drag culture in Harlem. Most of the people interviewed in the film achieved a fair degree of celebrity after its release. In the April of 1993 following the death of the mother of the house of Xtravaganza, Angie Xtravaganze, the New York Times ran a piece titled "Paris Has Burned," an essay about Angie. Here is a paragraph from the essay that is worth quoting at length,

Though she was only 27, Angie had been a mother more than a dozen times. Not in the usual way; she was biologically male. "But a mother is one who raises a child, not one who borns it," Hector [a member of the house of Xtravaganza] pointed out. And as mother of the House of Xtravaganza, Angie had taken many rejected, wayward, even homeless children under her wing; she had fed them, observed their birthdays, taught them all about "walking the balls." Competing in categories like High-Fashion Eveningwear and Alexis vs. Krystle, Angie was legendary, a Queen among queens, achieving in fantasy what the world had denied her in reality.

The characters of these house mothers and the nature of the relations they foster within their houses are relevant to any reading of Paris is Burning. Angie died from an AIDS-related liver disease. She was on hormones to maintain a soft feminine appearance. In the film there is a scene in which a group of men, some of them drag queens but not all, suckle on her breasts. The camera captures a run-down, shabby neighborhood, and then a group of men proclaiming Angie their mother. In fact in Paris is Burning  Angie could easily be mistaken for a woman.

When I watched this film, I became really interested in the house of Xtravaganza because of Angie and also because of Venus Xtravaganza. Venus was killed during the period in which Livingston was making the film. She was a transgender in NYC  who worked as a prostitute in order to save enough money to undergo a sex-change surgery. She was found in a hotel room four days after her death. Livingston interviews Venus only once in the film. During this interview, Livingston asks Venus about her dreams for the future. Venus' reply is arguably understandable, but also surprising. Venus tells Livingston that when she is fully female, she wants to get married, live in the suburbs, have a washing machine. She dreams of the typical bourgeois life. The life-style that she is too different—as a transgender, poor, non-white—to embody.

Paris is Burning enters a space at the fringes of mainstream American society. The expected reaction to have as a spectator watching these atypical modes of existence unfold is to feel uncomfortable, find the images indigestible. The spectator should feel disturbed by sights of awkward bodies that cannot be defined,  movements and gestures that do not fall neatly into the repertoire of appropriate female or male movements and gestures. However, this is not the reaction one gets. It is likely that people come out of the movie-theater feeling that these black (or Latino) gay men are victims. In fact the undertone of the Livingston's remarks on the film reveals that she thinks she is doing them a service. Here is another quotation from the Times "drag queens can't. "If they wanted to make a film about themselves, they would not be able," said Ms. Livingston, who grew up in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Yale University." Livingston is a white lesbian film director. She, however, still has the white-man burden mentality as these comments reveal.

bell hooks wrote about Paris is Burning in her book Race and Representations. Here is one point hooks made about the film:   

 

Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates "whiteness." These folks left the film saying it was "amazing," "marvelous," "incredibly funny," worthy of statements like, "Didn't you just love it?" And no, I didn't just love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit.  (149)

hook's observations shed light on the meanings of Venus' dream of living the bourgeois life. Livingston's work in constructed in such a way that she does not "interrogate" whiteness. As such, Livingston does not completely oppose the System, the hegemonic modes of thinking. This is an important assertion in the face of the wide-held belief that Livingston is a radical filmmaker whose films testify to social injustices. This is not to discredit the film, however. Instead, it reveals a necessary aspect of cinema's function in society.

            The film interrogates gender in an interesting way, which undoubtedly has something to do with Livingston's own interests. It reveals some of the causes underlying social injustices. The film might have changed the trajectory of some people's lives by making them celebraties even if briefly. Yet, at the same time the film also has helped maintain a particular relation of power. As hook's comments reveal, this film reproduces ideology in an important way. Cinema's role in society is interesting to explore. Away from close text filmic analysis, it is rewarding sometimes to step away and ask how cinema contributes to the creation and maintenance of social power relations. Although this might not be the most interesting conclusion to some people, it is worth it to remind oneself of the necessary political and historical dimensions of film-making, and film distribution. Let me end with a quotation from Marx: "it is not sufficient to interpret the world; it is now a question of transforming it."

Ten Under 15

    I have a bit of a thing for people's top ten lists.  Favorite films (though I rarely read all the way through lists that include Avatar, The Boondock Saints, The Departed and other "meh" movies posing as triumphs), favorite travel destinations, sushi rolls, lipsticks--anything, really.  There's something appealing about the brevity and finality of such a limited list when "favorite" status is at stake.  But unlike most list-makers, I will endeavor to defend my top three choices, and perhaps the explanation will give a sense of how I chose the group and why each of these kids deserves multiple viewings.  So here is my ten-best list of children's performances in film (the eponymous Ethan of "Laughing Baby Ethan" was excluded solely because that's more of a documentary short):

I.  Quvenzhané Wallis – Hushpuppy, Beasts of the Southern Wild - age 6, first role

II.  Tatum O’Neal – Addie Loggins, Paper Moon – age 9, first role

III.  Jean-Pierre Léaud – Antoine Doinel, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) – age 14, first role

IV.  Henry Thomas – Elliott, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – age 10, third role

V.  Drew Barrymore – Gertie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – age 6, fourth role

VI.  Mary Badham – Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird – age 9, first role

VII.  Natalie Portman – Marty, Beautiful Girls – age 14, fourth role

VIII.  Shirley Temple – Marthy Jane, Little Miss Marker – age 4, twenty-fourth role

IX.  Hugh O’Conor – young Christy Brown, My Left Foot – age 14, fifth role

X.  Elle Fanning – Ruth Cole, The Door in the Floor – age 4, sixth role

I.   In this astounding film—the first for “Venzhané,” Dwight Henry (as her father Wink) and director Benh Zeitlin—the powerhouse performance by the absurdly cute Louisiana Kindergartener is a revelation.  While New Orleans pastry chef Dwight Henry’s debut performance is beautiful and heartrending, this is Hushpuppy’s tale and the preternaturally talented Quvenzhané never misses an opportunity to carry the film.  Hushpuppy is tough, but her lineless face is the hardened front that hides a child's curiosity, an artistic spirit and a fascination with animals.  Yet Hushpuppy rises to the tasks of bolstering her father’s declining health, weathering a devastating hurricane and flood, escaping the mandatory evacuation rescue center, staring down mythic beasts, sharing a hard-won, nostalgic last meal with her father and becoming an orphan in only a few days.  All the while, Quvenzhané rises to the even greater task of realizing Hushpuppy, the heroine of the decade.  (Extra points to her for how many times she’s had to spell her name for interviewers since the film’s release.)

II.   If Hushpuppy is tough, Addie Loggins is pure steel, ranking Tatum O’Neal a very close second to Quvenzhané.  Tatum’s groundbreaking Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress is one of the most deserved Oscars ever awarded (not that that’s saying much--and she definitely should have been considered lead actress), for in her first role ever she stars across from her real-life atrocious father Ryan O’Neal, playing somewhat atrocious father figure “Moses Pray” to her powerhouse orphaned heroine.  Her disapproving frown is so penetrating it makes you want to hide under a rock til the end of time, yet her constant squint makes it seem like she’s always on the verge of smiling, softening her flinty affect just a bit.  Though she learns the literal tricks of the trade from lost-boy conman Moses, Addie soon comes to beat him at his own game; her conning acumen and inexorable resolve to collect debts distinguish her as the savviest, least childlike kid in cinema.  She is an absolute wonder.  Too bad her parents didn’t appreciate her.

III.   I had a hard time ranking Jean-Pierre third here, because his first role is one of the most harrowing in all cinema and his face of abandonment is enough to break your heart, but perhaps the 14-year-old wouldn't mind taking bronze after a couple of elementary school girls (I think J-P would be un gentilhomme about it).  A misguided, mistreated boy with only one friend in all of Paris--René (played by the incredible one-film wonder Patrick Auffay, who should probably be on this list), Antoine's well-dressed, businesslike partner in cutting their punitive school and going to the movies.  Since Antoine Doinel is a vaguely autobiographical character for director/film devotee François Truffaut, the shot of the two boys gazing in wonder at the cinémathèque screen speaks volumes about Truffaut's childhood relationship with movie houses; but the image also reveals what a talent Jean-Pierre really is.  The utter fascination on his face, his obvious enthrallment with the film prove what a joy it is for Antoine to escape his own disheartening life for a few hours.  Berated on all sides, he has no respite from psychological torture, abusive hands or shrieked insults--all the world seems to raise one voice to tell him he's a failure.  So in the tragic, jarring final scene, when he runs away from his destructive "correctional" boarding school and makes it to the shore, in that last zoom towards his face as he recognizes that nothing has changed, that he still has absolutely nowhere to go, we see both Antoine's hopeless desperation and Jean-Pierre's outrageous thespian skill.  No wonder they put that shot on the poster.

Voyeurism in Cinema: Rear Window and The Conversation

The term ‘voyeurism’ originally means an act of “[gaining] sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity (Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press) However, it is often used to indicate a general interest in spying at other people’s private activities or moments. Voyeurism has often been a subject in cinema. In fact, watching a movie itself may also be a voyeuristic activity in its nature in that the audience seeks pleasure in looking at lives of other people.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation are two of many films that talk about voyeurism. In Rear Window, its main character Jeffrey seeks pleasure in looking at his neighborhood while sitting still in a chair all day long with his broken leg. In The Conversation, the protagonist, Caul takes part in a voyeuristic activity with his job as a surveillance expert. However, voyeurism is dealt in a significantly different way in each of these two films.

In Rear Window, Jeffrey’s voyeuristic activity is mainly engaged with vision. His sight is the primary sense that is used. The story evolves from what he ‘sees’. This visual aspect of Jeffrey’s voyeuristic experience is effectively shared with the audience throughout the film. The audience sees the neighborhood only through Jeffrey’s window, binoculars, or lenses, purely from Jeffrey’s point of view. This way, they automatically take his position as a voyeur, and become part of his voyeurism. This sharing also draws parallel with their voyeurism with the experience with cinema itself, in that the audience peeps at his personal life through the screen just like Jeffrey peeps at his neighborhood through his window. 

By sharing this voyeuristic activity with the audience, Rear Window shows Hitchcock’s view on voyeurism that it is a universal pleasure that all human beings pursue. In the story of the film, Jeffrey’s spying of his neighborhood starts off as his private hobby, but it eventually becomes a shared experience with his fiancé, Lisa, and his nurse, Stella. They are wary of the ethical issue with peeping at first, but later, they become more enthusiastic with finding out about Mr. Thorwald’s murder case than Jeffrey has been. Through this sharing, Jeffrey and Lisa even develop a fonder feeling with each other. Outside the story, Hitchcock further expands this excitement onto the audience and makes their interest in watching a film also a kind of voyeurism. Therefore, in Rear Window, voyeurism is not as much as an unhealthy desire, but a very natural one that normal people also can possess.

While the voyeuristic activity in Rear Window is mostly carried out by vision, it is mostly carried out by sound in The Conversation. Instead of looking at other people, the main character, Caul, secretly ‘listens’ to them. Again with The Conversation, the audience goes through Caul’s experience purely from his point of view. They therefore share his voyeuristic activity but at the same time also his faulty interpretation of the situation. To eavesdrop, Caul relies on technology and he never doubts its accuracy. Since the audience accesses the story only through his perspective, they also take in the information without any doubt. Thus, when the truth is revealed and it is found that the technology actually hindered Caul from gaining the right knowledge, it is striking both for him and for the audience. Regarding this, voyeuristic activity in this film is not a powerful tool that can take advantage of other people by prying on their secrets. It is rather a flawed, one-sided information with which it is very dangerous to make judgments based on it.

Voyeurism in The Conversation is therefore not a pleasure. It is depicted rather as a violation that acts as a burden for the protagonist. As a surveillance expert, Caul has been continuously haunted by his guilt that he has put people whom he eavesdropped in danger.  The guilt that spurs from his past deeds as a voyeur, pushes him forward to rise up and stop the mischief, but eventually fails him by making him oblivious to the fact that the information may be completely different from what he is already expecting. Through this voyeuristic activity, Caul only discovers the presence of a huge power in the society that he, as an individual, cannot simply defy, as opposed to Jeffrey, who overcomes a dead-end in his relationship with his fiancé and renews it successfully through his voyeuristic experience. Thus, while voyeurism helps the characters escape from immobility in Rear Window, it only defeats the protagonist even more and deprives of his ability to move forward in The Conversation. 

Just Keep Swimming...

We are still knee deep in editing, but as always, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve hit the point of no return in the semester and it is now crunch time to the 99^th power. Things are moving along nicely, but there is just an overwhelming concern time. While I understand these concerns, I expect and would appreciate patience on behalf of my other crewmembers. There was a great deal of patience displayed during our re-writing and shooting processes. What no one seems to realize though outside of his or her realm of specialty and responsibility is that each facet of this process is an artistic institution and deserves the appropriate amount of respect and time. (The composer analogy from my last post seems ever befitting right now). With this being said, it is very true that we have a very real deadline approaching in the next two weeks, but we’re honesty on target for the most part. I’m not worried because our rough cuts, which will be finished very soon, are polished and well conceived/received.

 

The filmmaking process, I imagine, is a lot different when it is not housed in an academic institution for a grade. It becomes more of a democracy than it should be because everyone’s grade is on the line. I’m not saying that the process shouldn’t be democratic in some regards, for it is nothing if not collaborative, but dangerous and unproductive to have too many opinions and requests floating around simultaneously all the time. Also we are granting liberties that don’t actually exist in real life industry situations. And for our purposes and limitations we’ve been very inclusive to everyone at every stage of the game – which in reality rarely happens. I also didn’t want to push my crew over the edge after our Spring Break marathon and we’ve slowly picked back up the pace – although I admit the speed should have been amplified a tad and I accept responsibility for that.

Right now, we are jumping over the final hurdles and I am trying to keep up the morale. But the sentiment for my group, on this day, is to have patience – with a dash of trust because that’s the only way this works. Again, I really appreciate their diligence, passion, and their concerns. We’re almost there and looking good! And yes, it’s all worth it!   

Points from a Screening

    John Huston's 1948 epic of avarice Treasure of the Sierra Madre felt like the fastest 2 hours and 6 minutes I've spent before a screen.  The film blew by in a sandstorm from one hopeless desert vista to the next, leaving me with only cursory first impressions and a total sense of wonder.  The film may have inspired too much awe for me to comprehend it after only one viewing, so for now here's what remained when the sand settled:

I.    Humphrey Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs follows a sordid trajectory unlike that of most morally compromised Bogart characters.  Dobbs is so far from heroic he barely passes for antihero before the gold quest, and once he starts mining he begins to tread a villainous path hitherto unknown to Bogey:  He goes insane and suffers an unavenged murder alone in the desert.  It is thrilling to see what Humphrey can do when he swaps his tux for filthy rags.  This is Bogart at his cruelest and most evil, his wildest and most deranged, and it is outstanding.  When he finally reveals his most hidden talent, that maniacal chuckle, it's hard to understand why this man was not simply typecast as a crazed villain--his mad cackle is the absolute archetype of evil laughs.

II.    The endlessly wise, affable Howard, played by the director's father Walter Huston, is a hugely successful instance of cinematic nepotism.  Whether the flashes of paternal nature in the old prospector stem from his thespian talents or the director's own experience, Howard emerges as the only truly grounded figure in the film, surviving the unfortunate Dobbs through vast knowledge of the terrain and man's psyche and a rare capacity for altruism.

III.    The shootout between the Americans on the train and the bandits by the tracks immediately recalls a similar general arrangement in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, released ten years earlier.  Though here the heroic marksman wears a sharp necktie instead of a soiled neckerchief, Michael Redgrave's Gilbert bears a striking resemblance to Dobbs in the wild-eyed delight he takes in picking off his enemies.  The train is no stranger to cinema, but here the traincar plays the unusual role of battlefield trench in both films, separating besieged passengers from very hostile environments while still immobilizing them on the tracks in an exceedingly easy target.

 IV.    Another influential desert saga, Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles from 1974 pays homage to Treasure during the recruitment of Mexican bandits for the enemy's forces.  "Badges?  We don't need no stinking badges!" the first bandit exclaims as Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) offers him an initiation pin, similar to El Jefe's (Manuel Donde) angry retort to Dobbs before their magnificent mountainside shootout. The villains in this desert are scarcely more comical than those galloping over the Sierra Madre, whose grotesque cartoonish faces grow even more perverse in sweaty, toothy low-angle close-ups; but the senseless acts of the cackling desert assassins who lay Dobbs and his treasure to waste elicit a different kind of laughter, less riotous guffaw than defeated, baffled chuckle.

    What a film!

The Night Porter: eroticism and sadomasochism

The Night Porter (dir. Liliana Cavani) is doubtlessly controversial. When it came out in 1974 it had a very positive reception in Europe, but in the US it was hailed as a piece of junk. For example, the great Roger Ebert started his essay in the Chicago Sun-Times on February 10^th, 1975 by writing

"The Night Porter" is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering. It is (I know how obscene this sounds) Nazi chic. It's been taken seriously in some circles, mostly by critics agile enough to stand on their heads while describing 180-degree turns, in order to interpret trash as "really" meaningful.

Ebert thought the film did not approach its subject matter in a very fruitful way. It was alarmingly reveling in sadomasochistic impulses and sadomasochistic scenes. According to Ebert, The Night Porter offered a dangerously romanticized view of doom and death. It was disturbing but with style—"Nazi chic" as Ebert puts it. I find The Night Porter confusing if nothing else. One aspect of the film that I find particularly confusing is the connection that the film draws between doom, death, suffering and eroticism.

            The Night Porter is a story about Max a previous S.S. concentration camp officer and Lucia a former prisoner at the camp where Max was stationed. When they were in this unidentified concentration camp, Max used to film Lucia often in extremely humiliating situations. Since it was prohibited that an officer would have any sympathy toward, let alone love, one of the inmates, Max repressed or tormenting denied his feelings toward Lucia. In one scene, Max wounds Lucia's arm using a surgical instrument. He does not sew up the cut, instead he licks it. It becomes the site of erotic bliss.  

        Thirteen years after the end of the war, Max and Lucia run into each other in a hotel in Vienna. Max works in the hotel as a night porter. Lucia is now married to an American orchestra conductor, but she stays behind after her husband leaves. She moves into Max's apartment. One scene that is often cited in this part of the film is the one in which Lucia locks herself in the bathroom. She breaks a bottle of perfume and then invites Max in. He at first accidentally steps on the broken glass, but when Lucia puts her hands under his heel, he steps sharply on the glass. The camera shows Max taking pleasure in the pain and so does Lucia. In the apartment, Max and Lucia live the past. Eventually Max puts on his Nazi officer suite and Lucia puts on a pink dress so similar to the one Max had given her to wear in the camp, they go out of the apartment and are shot to death.  

            A scene which particularly brings up the relation between eroticism, suffering and sadomasochism is the cabaret scene from which the film's most popular poster image is taken. In this scene Lucia seems to enjoy her humiliation. She voluntarily exhibits herself and furthers her pain and victimization. She is half naked in the scene and moves around a room full of Nazi officers, including Max. After the dance is over, Max gives Lucia the head of another officer who bothered her earlier. Max has decapitated him for her sake. Eroticism, suffering, and violence all intersect in this scene.

            If you ever saw Gerhard Richter's Atlas and particularly panels 16-23, you know that he too, as did Liliana Cavani in this film, saw a relation between the horrors of Auschwitz and prostitution. In these panels, Richter combines dreadful photographs of people in concentration camps, starved and on the verge of death, with photographs of prostitutes (or at least women photographed as if they were). For me, the relation between the two is hard to figure out. Beside feeling stunned as my eyes scan the panels, it is hard to see the reason why Gerhard Richter chose to relate the two. Some say that in doing so he has feminized death and doom. 

        Maybe death is related to the feminine because of the trauma of birth. Famously, Otto Rank (1924) argued that the moment of birth is a separation from the perfect union with the mother and that the violent circumstances of the moment of birth make it traumatic. Death too represents a separation. I think, Richter's juxtaposition of images of death and prostitution might be a way of referencing the past state of harmony with the mother and the traumatic separation which is the basis of the human experience. Human life is truncated by two severely traumatic experiences of separation—birth and death. The view of life which this outlook creates makes it more understandable, perhaps, that people are sadomasochistic.

            Although Cavani creates an intentionally unrealistic space for the film, The Night Porter inhabits a space so similar to that of actual life. The film ends with death, and starts with a state which is comparable to the traumatic separation of birth. Lucia and Max were separated from each other for thirteen years after they had lived together in relative harmony with most basic needs gratified. Max and Lucia's nostalgic desire to return to the past motivates the whole film. Yet, this past might be in fact the moment before birth, before the original trauma. It might be a wish to live again in perfect harmonious unity with a protective mother (or whatever can stand for "mother"—for example a nation can be "mother"). 

Call of Duty

    My group and I decided that shooting over Spring Break was the most conducive option availble to suit our individual schedules – and it was the best decision we could have made. It is worth noting that our film was pseudo complex in nature, but our crew and our writer’s family donated a lot of time, energy, and talent into our project, which made life a lot easier!

    Our first day of shooting was probably the most complex of them all. This scene was shot in a forested area in North Point State Park. And one of the biggest obstacles that we encountered was managing time. We only had one of our actors (an eight year old superstar named Ava) for the duration of this one shoot because of scheduling conflicts – third grade is very difficult to reschedule. Although we made huge strides in staying on schedule, we lingered on too many individual shots, conversations about different techniques, and had too much down time in between set-ups. Although day one was one of our longest days, we collected a lot of good footage despite the many weather scares.

    For the most part, all of our shoots were for exterior scenes, which created some very interesting incidents. Most of them were altercations involving neighbors of the properties we were shooting, who were being unsympathetic, unreasonable, and belligerent. Mais c'est la vie – we had permission for each location! We shot quite a bit of establishing shots and driving scenes, which are difficult to manage. It is very hard to tame the area immediately surrounding your set when you are a small-scaled student production. But we certainly learned a lot! Also, the weather was very conducive to both our story and our shoots. The fluctuations of sunshine and overcast on various shooting days corresponded perfectly with the emotional appeal of the story. It was freezing though!

    Of all six of our shooting days, we only had one day of shooting interior scenes. They all took place in our writer’s grandfather’s home. (NOTE: Her grandfather is actually the main character of our film. Think the first four minutes of Up, but live action – that’s our film.) There were a lot of different scenes to shoot, many different angles, our film takes place during the course of one day and we only had during daylight hours to shoot, and a few of the interior scenes contained important dialogue and blocking. In addition to these things, there were many creative things that we wanted to try out. We played around with angles, depth of field, natural light, camera positions/movements, etc. And these things were very time consuming and began to steer us off schedule. During long shoots, people’s attitudes change and they become antsy and moody. And a huge part of my job was keeping people motivated, comfortable, and on task. One of the many things that we are very proud of from this shoot is that we manufactured the appearance of twilight through a window to extend our shooting time after the sun set. This worked out great and saved us an extra day of shooting.

    From the beginning, we jumped right into logging and organizing video and audio files for editing. This is definitely coming in handy as we speak, for we are knee deep in the editing process. Working during Spring Break gave us a leg up. We had adequate time to shoot/reshoot and develop ideas and visions. But for me, this week was another bout with my old question of what makes a good director. Again it’s difficult to mimic a studio director because there are a lot of different tools and people that were not at our disposal. Our team was a lot more limited and we needed to double up on roles depending on the needs of the situation. But my question, if a good director like a composer, was heavy on my mind. The composer creates the structure of the music and steers it, he/she does not produce it themsleves -- the musicians do that. A great deal of my journey is learning to trust others with my vision. Is it my responsibility to acquire the best talents for the project and facilitate a space in which they can flourish in their individual roles/styles collectively? Or am I as the director supposed to be a lot more demanding, pushing my team towards a vision that is oriented in the ways in which I think, see, feel, dream?  Maybe to some extent, both? As a new director my greatest fear is being irreproachable to criticisms/suggestions and unsympathetic to the creativity of others. But I'm learning.

    Overall, our actors (all 5 of them) were absolute naturals and I am very fortunate to have such an amazing and extraordinarily talented crew. This was quite an experience and reaffirmed that directing is the path that I was to venture down. There are so many meticulous calculations, plans, and usage of imagination that goes into filmmaking and it is very refreshing – with childlike splendor. With a clear understanding of what we did exceedingly well, our faults, and the hunger I have for personal improvement – I am well on my way to finding my voice. This was an excellent opportunity from which we shall all learn and grow.    

 

Maya Deren's first film

Maya Deren is an Ukrainian-American filmmaker who died in 1961. She is often associated with avant-garde filmmaking and particularly the feminist avant-garde . Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was her first film. She was twenty six  years old when she made it, living in Los Angeles. She was married to Alexandr Hackenschmied. It is hard, if not impossible, to know exactly what was going on in Deren's mind when she made the film, yet there are some interesting historical developments from 1943.

Of course, WWII has not yet ended, and a number of battles took place in 1943. In early '43 bread is rationed in US. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto happens on January 19^th 1943, etc. Many developments are certainly meaningful in trying to reconstruct the socio-economic and political environment in which Maya Deren has worked. One development, though, is of particular relevance. The All-American Girls Softball League, then baseball league, came into existence in 1943. Among other similar developments in women's lives during the war, this type of expansion in women's engagement with society can only point toward a new social consciousness; particularly among young women at the time.

Several issues come to mind when thinking about Meshes of the Afternoon in relation to a newly discovered female consciousness toward the environment, society. Yet, I'll focus on just one: Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon  significantly blurs the line between the inner and the outer, the private and the public.

The film is a non-linear narrative about a woman who falls asleep in an armchair and dreams. She has a dream in which a character with a mirror as a face features repeatedly. Deren plays the role of the woman who falls asleep. The film repeats the act of entrance into the house again and again. Right before the woman enters for the second time, however, we see her observing her sleeping body, then looking outside the widow at the character with the mirror face, all dressed in black, and at herself speeding away from the house. The very famous Maya Deren portrait (below) comes from this scene.      

             MAYA DEREN. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.1943.

(Right after the frame from which this still is taken, the film cuts to the woman herself running after the character with the mirror face. )

This scene is a good illustration of how Deren blurs the line between the inner and the outer and attempts to merge the two spheres. In this scene the woman is both inside the house sleeping,  and outside the house running. Of course the mantra for second wave feminism was "the personal is political" which also blurs the distinction between the political/ the public/the outer and the personal/ the private/ the inner. Deren does seem to engage with this public-private binary, while attempting to situate the female within it. The woman, in this scene, appears as if she is both looking at herself running outside and looking at herself sleeping inside. She knows. She is offered a frame of reference from which she could take a distance and theorize about her position. 

The claim that she  could theorize about her position is problematic though. Looking at the still above, Deren, on the threshold looks, arguably, like a  mime. She can only gesture but not speak. She is able to point but not use language. Her allusion to mime acting helps emphasize her deep involvement with, if not entrapment within, her  body. There lies a paradox. She can look at herself, but at the same time cannot distance herself from her body. It is hard for me to make sense of what this paradox might mean, yet perhaps it is only meaningful within the context of the fantasy or  dream. The film might be postulating that distancing herself from her body, which seems to be a hindrance, is a female dream.

The female body is here situated on the line between the inner and the outer, making it the site of the struggle, or negotiation, between these two spheres. Although something similar could be said about all bodies it is especially true of  the female body which is often considered a matter of public discourse as females are the mothers who are traditionally seen as responsible for the propagation of the species. One could argue, therefore, that the dream of running away from the house in the above referenced scene is in fact a dream of breaking free of her body—a position to which the ending of the film gives credence.

This movement  outside of the body might mean a movement into a plentitude that exists outside of it —a space similar to that which the film creates in which even the law of gravity can be broken . Or if one emphasizes the process of movement toward an outside,  instead of the destination, Deren seems to be deliberately  bringing the public and private (the political and the personal) into dialogue. She is ultimately, thus, a dialectician. Woman is a dialectician. Her capacity to create and inhabit between seeming opposites, merging them within herself, to allow for the synthesis of something in can account for why Deren ensures that the woman observes herself both sleeping and running.

Meshes of the Afternoon has been read and re-read in so many different ways. Partly, perhaps, because in the many years after it was made and till now people, and particularly women's, experiences changed and therefore people saw different meanings in the film. This is one of its particular strengths as a text of course—it ages well. So for example tying the reading to second wave feminism is not an attempt to say that Deren foresaw the movements mantra or whatever. Instead it is an attempt to situate Deren within a larger historical tragectory.  

Dream in Cinema: Blue Velvet & Inception

 

Dreaming and watching a film share some common qualities. In a dream, we are staying still, asleep, likely surrounded by darkness, and are engaged with sensory images which, regardless of its probability in real life, appear emphatically real at the moment. Similarly in a movie theater, we are seated still, surrounded by darkness in which we are soon absorbed into a few hours of vivid sensory experience that is realistically alive to us even if we acknowledge that they are not happening in real life. Thus, both in a movie theater or a dream, the necessity of logic often fades away and we often develop a unique personal relationship between the images and our minds. Some films make use of this unique quality shared between dreaming and cinematic experience to engage the audience more to their ideas or themes. These two films which I will talk about from now, Blue Velvet and Inception, are excellent examples of such films.

 

In Blue Velvet, we follow a young man named Jeffrey through his discovery and engagement with the existence of abnormality such as violence, unhealthy obsession and distorted sexual desire not only in the other part of the world but also and more strikingly, inside himself. An object that leads Jeffrey and the audience into this journey is a severed human ear he finds in the field. This image is uncanny itself, but a zoom into this ear and out of another one even drags us to a completely surreal realm.

 

The realm is often, if not always, separated from the normal one. While the normal is set in the brightness of the day, this abnormal realm is set in the darkness. The chronological or logical link between the two is broken. For example, both of the most eerie scenes, Jeffrey’s first encounter with Frank and Dorothy and the mad car ride, are cut immediately to Jeffrey’s waking up in the next morning without any wrapped-up conclusion in between.  Such abruptness is very similar to dreams, which often lack of logic and which we often unexpectedly wake up from. With this fragmented link, the film then employs surrealistic images to further enhance its dream-like quality.  A severed ear in the field, a dancing woman on the top of the car regardless of an intense violence right next to her, and the dead body of the yellow man in an erect position, all illustrate the surreal. The images certainly have an absurdity, but when they are visually embodied on the screen, it fades away, just like the logic disappears in dreams.

 

Through these choices, David Lynch describes the abnormal world as a nightmare. However, that does not mean that he disregards it as unreal. In fact, by making it dream-like and surrealistic, he reminds us that in the very bottom of our unconscious minds, there always exist these repressed and distorted desires, and that they can never be completely apart from us, just as we live our real lives when we are awake but also live our dreams when we are asleep. Therefore, like an insect in the beak of a robin in Jeffrey’s restored peace, the presence of dark side of human nature that Blue Velvet has demonstrated, is still there in the awareness of the audience even after they wake up from this film.

 

Since dream is an actual subject matter in Inception, it has more prominent presence than it does in Blue Velvet. Nonetheless, the way Inception exploits the notion of dream to convey its theme is just as unique and creative. In Inception, the lack of logic in dream is also introduced, and is solved again with the ability of cinema to create vivid sensory images. The explosion of the streets in Ariadne’s first training, the world that bends and folds into half in her second training, and the abstract world if limbo, are all most effectively realized with cinema as their medium. Christopher Nolan has genuinely made use of these purely cinematic factors to create his world of dreams and present it as a new reality to the audience.

 

However, Nolan’s technical use of dreams shows its real worth at the end of the film. When the entire journey seems to have ended and when the audience is waiting for a final resolution, the film ends abruptly without any conclusion. The lights in the theater are turned back on and the audience wakes up from the film unexpectedly just like they are waking up from their dreams. The ending is almost a ‘kick’ that Nolan gives to his audience, with which the audience realizes that by watching this film, they have also gone through the process of inception. Just as the inception plants a new idea in Fisher’s mind, the film plants its whole new world in the audience’s mind, and in doing so, Christopher Nolan has smartly incorporated the shared qualities of dreams and cinema.