Wednesday, November 19, 2014

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?

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

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?

Monday, November 3, 2014

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?