The Cult of Distraction

In his essay, The Cult of Distraction, Siegfried Kracauer delves into how the new, extravagant movie palaces in Berlin and the films shown in them relate to the growing mass audience in Berlin. He describes the buildings as such, "The large picture house in Berlin are palaces of distraction; to call them movie theaters would be disrespectful." (323). That is how he opens the essay. Clearly he is interested in the opposition between what the presence of a simple movie theater says about a society and what an over-the-top palace theater says. He writes about how seeing a movie has become an event (similar to what happened in America right before the rise of classical Hollywood) which was an all out attack on the sense of the viewer. He then gets into how these distractions are working and how he feels they should be working. He says, rather fascinatingly, "Distraction-which is meaningful only as improvisation, as a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world-is festooned with drapery and forced back into a unity that no longer exists. Rather than acknowledging the actual state of disintegration that such shows ought to represent, the movie theaters glue the pieces back together after the fact and present them as organic creations." (327-328). The seemingly obvious subtext here is that Kracauer is calling the entire mode of operation for these distractions completely fake. The palaces, the lights, the marquees, the films; they are all simply, "surface splendor." (323). Which, again, screams superficiality. Kracauer finishes the essay by seemingly understanding that the objective of movies and the theaters they are shown in is to make money, as opposed to, "refining applied art." (328). So I wonder what he is saying here about film in a modern world. Is this essay an attack on the cult of distraction, or an admittance of defeat to it?

Bazin: The Ontology of the Photographic Image

In his essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" Andre Bazin explores the creation of the photographic image and its relations to other plastic arts, specifically painting. He theorizes that plastic arts spawned from a mummy complex, or an obsession with preserving a reality without having time to burden it. He calls this, "the preservation of life by a representation of life." (10). He then describes the two different "ambitions" of painting that came about: "one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside." (11). He separates these as a need for illusion and a need for reality. He then goes on to say that paintings, because of their subjective nature, were forced into a world of illusion and could never be taken as true reality. This did not satisfy, "our obsession with realism." (12), as Bazin puts it. This obsession wouldn't be satisfied until the invention of the camera and with it, the photograph, which was completely free from the influence of man, at least in its actual reproduction, which meant it had to be taken as reality. These then freed up other plastic artists to drop the obsession of perfectly producing reality, an important happening no doubt. In fact, Bazin says, and I'm not sure if I believe him, "photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts." (16). It's possible that he isn't being disingenuous when he says this, but it's hard to get a good read on him. I think the key to this entire essay lies in the last line. "On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language." (16). This metaphor would suggest that, like a language, cinema is totally different depending on where you are, who you're talking to, what you're talking about, etc. which would then imply that Bazin is purposely discrediting his interpretation. Having said that, if it is all just an interpretation (it is), then it shouldn't carry any weight in terms of being fact, because it's just an opinion. I'm very troubled/intrigued by this line. Why the hell is it there?

The Myth of Total Cinema

In his essay "The Myth of Total Cinema" Andre Bazin explores questions around the invention of cinema and the "guiding myth"(21) which inspired it, courtesy of Villiers de I'sle-Adam's science fiction novel L'Eve Future in which de I'sle-Adams envisioned a woman dancing a traditional Mexican dance, with her movements and sounds being recorded.  Bazin then gets into how this myth was the "accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century," (21).  It was a myth portraying a realistic depiction of life, "unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time." (21). If we take this origin myth as a true inspiration of the invention of cinema, then the inclusion of color and sound in the description of the Mexican dancer must be taken as crucial to cinema. Bazin argues that this is reason enough to consider the silent and colorless film era as a mere development on the path to what cinema truly aimed to achieve. I found this interesting, because we just familiarized ourselves with Arnheim and this is a direct contradiction to his beliefs on the silent film. Also, total cinema really seems like it could be playing on Arnheim's theory of the complete film. Bazin elaborates, "It is understandable from this point of view (the myth inspired the invention of cinema) that it would be absurd (emphasis mine) to take the silent film as a state of primal perfection which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and color." (21). Before moving to his closing arguments Bazin makes the statement that "cinema has not yet been invented!" (21). Using context clues from "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" and information from Bazin's life it seems reasonable to guess he wrote this statement sometime between the late 1940's and early 1950's. Now that we are able to replicate nature in film to near perfection I wonder what Bazin would say about the invention of cinema. Has cinema been invented yet?

Arnheim and the Complete Film

In his essay "The Complete Film" Rudolph Arheim projects the technical development of film as it pushes, "the mechanical limitation of nature to an extreme." (212). He outlines how the addition of sound to film, the addition of color to film and the eventual push to stereoscopic film will stunt the growth of the silent film before it could even begin to truly explore its possibilities and in the process diminish film's ability to be art. He also believes this will be a continuous problem will film as technology develops at exponentially greater paces. He says so much when he writes, "We shall have color films and stereoscopic films, and the artistic potentialities of the sound film will be crushed at an even earlier stage (than the silent film) of their development." (212). This sentiment is delivered early in the essay, quickly establishing the thesis of the essay and at first read I felt a strong disagreement with everything Arnheim was saying mainly because I disagreed with the above quote. I felt he would feel differently about the artistic qualities of film if he could have seen Avatar, Gravity, or the upcoming Interstellar all of which feature stunning visuals best seen on a massive Imax screen (growing screens being another concern of Arnheim's). Film and movies made from it are much more narrative nowadays, especially in the public domain, which has resulted in a perceived diminishing importance of film form, something clearly important to Arnheim, with film form and its limitations being the source of film's art. But I still felt his pessimistic view on the future of film was way off base. Sure, movies are different now, but there is still a massive amount of attention paid to film form, it's just now focused on special effects. It was this thought that made me realize Arnheim was right. We live in a time in which film is dying and dying fast. Movies aren't dying. Movies will live much longer than we ever will, but the use of film to make movies is an art with one foot in the grave. Because of this it would be disingenuous to refer to nearly all contemporary movies as films. Sure, some stout supporters of film still use it, but the number of these types of people is shrinking. There is little reason to believe that soon nobody will use film to make movies. Then film will die. But we'll still have movies. Will all the things that do into making movies: the sets, actors, costumes, lighting, music, stories; will all of that be enough to consider movies, not films, as a new art? Wouldn't digital movies just be the next progression in the world of graphic art, much in the same way the film developed from the photograph?

Kracauer's Inherent Affinities

In Siegfried Kracauer's essay Inherent Affinities he lays out the five affinities of film and photography, examining, "their extended scope and their specifically cinematic implications." (299). Four of the five affinities, which seem to be characteristic of film should be identical with those of photography." (299). Those four affinities are as follows: The Unstaged: "film, notwithstanding its ability to reproduce, indiscriminately, all kinds of visible data, gravitates toward unstated reality." (300) The Fortuitous: Film and photography are attracted by the fortuitous, such as Keaton narrowly avoiding being crushed by the wall of his flimsy self-assembled house in One Week. Endlessness: Film and photography's ability to record almost everything put in front of it. The Indeterminate: The notion that what is being filmed or photographed transcends singular meanings, depending on context, culture or any other number of influences. The fifth affinity is what Kracauer calls The "Flow of Life" which is specific to cinema because of photography's inability to show movement. I am interested in how this "flow of life" truly distinguishes film from photography, aside from the obvious animation of pictures created when film is played. The four affinities listed above all factor into creating cinematic films that, "evoke a reality more inclusive than the one they actually picture."(304) He then talks about the "flow of life" in relation to the street, an idea both Kracauer and Eisenstein are quite fond of, with its numerous people, cars, signs, buildings and movement which make it "the scene of life." (305). In the background of a film (take your pick) a man walking down the street through throngs of people has an untold story of untold possibilities and that story will forever remain untold, which is an odd thing to think about. It's why a passerby completely uninvolved to the narrative of the film is what stuck with Eisenstein twenty years after last seeing Intolerance. This is what I understand to be "the flow of life" that cinematic films depict. My question is what really distinguishes the "flow of life" as being purely cinematic? Couldn't the same type of sentiment Eisenstein found so lasting in the passerby in Intolerance be attributed to somebody in the background of a photograph?

Eisenstein's Montage Trope

Eisenstein covers a ton of ground in his essay "Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today," but for my IQ I'm going to focus on the sections in which he critiques the montage in films made by D.W Griffith and uses it to explain the differences between Soviet and American montage. After acknowledging Griffith as one of the, "genuine masters of the American cinema." (234) he begins to criticize Griffith's idea of montage by saying, "The structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith montage is the structure of bourgeois society." (234). He then compares his montage to bacon with lines of red and white, representing the haves and have-nots respectively, running parallel to each other; never coming in conflict. And we all know how important conflict is to Eisenstein's montage. He then gets into the differences between the American close-up and the Soviet large scale shot, claiming that "Among Americans the term (close-up) is attached to viewpoint. Among us (Soviets)- to the value of what is seen." (238). Essentially Americans use it to show something and Soviets use it to give meaning to something. He then goes on to write what I'm going to assume is his most important sentence in the chapter, "To the parallelism and alternating close-ups of America we offer the contrast of uniting these in fusion; the MONTAGE TROPE." (240). This montage trope is the key to obtaining new understandings through juxtapositional metaphors; the path to a higher ideological form of film. My question is very simply, what is the montage trope? How is it achieved? Is it simply through the effective juxtaposition of two montage cells (shots) to the ultimate goal of a profound metaphor?

Eisenstein: It's All Montage

In his essay "The cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," Eisenstein claims that montage is specifically the result of and characterized by the "collision" of two opposite pieces. We know this because he says, "By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell-the shot? By collision." (37). So montage is conflict and as we discussed on Tuesday, art is conflict. If we are to believe the transitive property of equality (and I'm sure Eisenstein, a man of science does) the montage must equal art. So montage is art. It would be too simple to classify montage as strictly the physical editing of a film: the cuts, dissolves, tints, etc. but that is the literal definition of the word, so making that assumption wouldn't be totally out of line. Eisenstein clarifies (remember, montage is conflict), "the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film. Conflict within the frame." (38). What he is doing here is comparing montage to an engine in that they both push their devices (film and a tractor) forward. He then describes the numerous types of conflicts that take place within the frame in every single shot. So these shots are full of conflicts, whether they be literal conflicts in the dialogue, conflicts in lighting, conflicts in blocking of the actors and other aspects of the mis-en-scen, which to me would indicate that these shots, the conflicts within them and the meanings derived from it all are indeed montage. But Eisenstein started this whole spiel off by saying, Conflict within the shot is potential montage," (38) which seems to rebuff the claim I just made. So I'm wondering what the difference is? Wouldn't the moods, tones and emotions established by the culmination of the entire diegetic world have to be, by Eisenstein's logic, montage?