On Hitchcock's ROPE and BLACKMAIL. Or, Technicist Dreams in Videographic Film Studies

Skipping Rope (Through Hitchcock's Joins)
A videographic assemblage by Catherine Grant of all the edits in Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948),
together with adjacent dialogue.

After completing his final film for [David] Selznick [...], [Alfred] Hitchcock filmed his first colour film, Rope (1948). Here Hitchcock experimented with marshaling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat (1943). Appearing to have been shot entirely in a single take, Rope (1948) was actually shot in 10 takes ranging from four and a half to 10 minutes each; a 10-minute length of film being the maximum a camera's film magazine could hold. Some transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place. Featuring James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of four films Stewart would make with Hitchcock. It was based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Somehow Hitchcock's cameraman managed to move the bulky, heavy Technicolor camera quickly around the set as it followed the continuous action of the long takes. [Alfred Hitchcock Wikipedia entry, May 2012]

Unavoidably perhaps, the critical discourse on Rope has mostly dealt with the legitimacy of Hitchcock’s formal option, about which most commentators have expressed more or less serious reservations (Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, the pioneers of Hitchcockian exegesis, were among the few who did not cavil). Hitchcock himself judged it very harshly, calling it a ‘stunt’ and telling François Truffaut in 1963: ‘I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.’ 

     Of course there would be no reason to grant any special importance to the director’s statement about a rather unloved picture were it not for the fact that it expresses the auteur’s symptomatic denial of an intense desire he had experienced fifteen years earlier – a desire all the more pressing that it appeared, to most observers, incomprehensible (and therefore perverted). ‘I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it’; ‘When I look back, I realise that it was quite nonsensical’  – what ‘victim’ of a former passion (whatever its object might have been) would not be tempted, in retrospect, to make similar remarks? But desire works in the present, and does not ‘reflect’. Nor can it be ‘explained’. It is its own, sole justification. Its subsequent denial by the desiring party (quite understandable: ‘Passion is a brief madness’) should not reflect on the effort spent to assuage it, an effort which in the present case has left an indelible trace: Rope, a film that wholly asserts itself as an act of desire. [Jean-Pierre Coursodon, 'Desire Roped In: Notes on the Fetishism of the Long Take in Rope,' Rouge, 4, 2004]

"[Serious minded criticism of Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope] may be considered almost definitively shaped by a ritual of recounting and assessing the director's desire to do the film, as he put it, 'in a single shot,' or at any rate, as nearly without the benefit of montage as the state-of-the-art allowed in 1948, when a camera held only ten minutes worth of film. [Yet this technicist bias] has hardly managed to generate a single accurate account of the technique in question. […] [For Rope's] irregularities and inconsistencies [its film critics] substitute a programmatic perfection that better supports the dream of a continuous film […] than Hitchcock's actual shooting practice." [D.A. Miller, 'Anal Rope,' in Diana Fuss [ed.] INSIDE/OUT: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Routledge, 1991) PDF: 119]

Skipping ROPE, the new video essay above, may be considered almost definitively, and certainly perversely, shaped by its own technicist dream: that of generating an accurate account in motion pictures of the minimalistic editing technique and related shooting practices of Hitchcock's 1948 film. 

This assemblage, created through postproduction rituals of excision and transition, follows on from another videographic experiment embedded below: Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison. 

Both works entertain the same kind of phenomenological possibility. They offer viewers the ability to experience synchronous, or even linear, moving image and sound juxtapositions in real, or near real, time. We can feel, as well as know about, the comparisons these videos make.

In other words, unlike written texts, these studies don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us.

Garden of Forking Paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs by Catherine Grant

A real-time space for comparison, for scholarly purposes, of a sequence in the silent and sound versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929). Read more about the above video and the films it features here. And you can find more about sound in Hitchcock's cinema here.

These video essays were produced partly to support the "For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon," May 13-18, 2012. This year, this Blogathon will raise funds to finance the online streaming of, and recording of a new score for, The White Shadow (1923), directed by Graham Cutts and with everything else done by Alfred Hitchcock:

The film was long thought to have be a lost film. In August 2011, the National Film Preservation Foundation announced that the first three reels of the six-reel picture had been found in the garden shed of Jack Murtagh in Hastings, New Zealand in 1989 and donated to the NFPF. The film cans were mislabled Two Sisters and Unidentified American Film and only later identified. The film was restored by Park Road Studios and is now in the New Zealand Film Archive [The White Shadow Wikipedia entry] 

Please consider supporting this cause by making a donation-- however small or large -- at this link. Thank you!

Touching the Film Object? Notes on the 'Haptic' in Videographical Film Studies

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? On Haptic Criticism
A video collage by Catherine Grant.

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? offers a brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity or contact in experiencing or studying films - what theorist Laura U. Marks called 'hapticity'. It quotes from Marks' 2004 essay 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes' and meditates upon a slowed sequence from a video copy of Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film Persona (its cinematography by Sven Nykvist). The music is excerpted from Robert Lippok and Beatrice Martini's 2009 collaboration 'Branches' (available at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License). 

[Laura] Marks derives [the concept of] haptic visuality, from the art historian Alöis Riegel’s “distinction between haptic and optical images.” ([The Skin of the Film,] 162). But how does cinema appeal to senses it cannot technically represent, such as smell and touch, that is, what does haptic visuality ‘look like’? Marks defines haptic visuality as containing some of the following formal and textual qualities: grainy, unclear images; sensuous imagery that evokes memory of the senses (i.e. water, nature); the depiction of characters in acute states of sensory activity (smelling, sniffing, tasting, etc.); close-to-the-body camera positions and panning across the surface of objects; changes in focus, under- and overexposure, decaying film and video imagery; optical printing; scratching on the emulsion; densely textured images, effects and formats such as Pixelvision [...]; and alternating between film/video. The haptic image is in a sense, ‘less complete’, requiring the viewer to contemplate the image as a material presence rather than an easily identifiable representational cog in a narrative wheel [...]. [Donato Totaro, 'Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film', Off Screen, June 2002]

[W]hen our eyes move across a richly textured surface, occasionally pausing but not really focusing, making us wonder what we are actually seeing, they are functioning like organs of touch. Video, with its low contrast ratio, capacity for electronic and digital manipulation, and susceptibility to decay, is an ideal haptic medium, its graininess a lure for the roving gaze Marks describes.
     Film, however, may also invite a haptic look by speeding up or slowing down imagery, enlarging grain, or deliberately enhancing already deteriorating nitrate. [Melinda Barlow, '[Review of] Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003]

Haptic criticism keeps its surface rich and textured, so it can interact with things in unexpected ways. It has to be humble, willing to alter itself according to what it is in contact with. It has to give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface. [Laura U. Marks, 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes', Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82, 80]

Marks's notion of haptic visuality as a *non-instrumental* way of seeing is important for visual theory as well as for work on the senses more broadly. [Melanie Swalwell, 'The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema', Film Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 32, October 2002]

As a longtime devotee of observing from a scholarly distance, I had never been grabbed before -- or, indeed, 'clasped' or 'fastened' (the original meanings of the Ancient Greek verb haptein) -- by Laura Marks' notion of 'haptic visuality'. But after I had made some video essays about films, the desire to explore hapticity and its workings took hold. This is how the above video/text collages and the below notes came into being.

While I still believe that Marks' concept could benefit from a more thorough thinking through in relation to audiovisuality, hapticity -- a grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it -- seems to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what can take place in the process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced themselves.

In the old days, the only people who really got to touch films were those who worked on them, particularly film editors. As Annette Michelson (1990) and others have argued, the democratization of the 'heady delights' of editing (Michelson, 1990: 22) was brought about by the introduction of video technology in the 1970s and 80s. Now, with the relatively wide availability of digital technology, we can even more easily share 'the euphoria one feels at the editing table [...] a sharpening cognitive focus and [...] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence " [Michelson, 1990: 23].

But, are there other ways in which 'touching film' is just a fantasy? In videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the real matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film experience? Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of, or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic projections?

These questions may not flag up significantly new limitations. Film critical video essays do seem to work, it seems to me, in the same 'intersubjective' zone as that of written film criticism. As Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, 'we are immersed in the film as the critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply involved perspective' (2011: 9).

Yet, in videographical criticism, is there not a different intersubjective relation, a more transitional one, to the physicality or materiality of the objective elements of films that the video essays reproduce? Like written essays, video essays may well '"stir our recall"' (Klevan and Clayton, 2011: 9) of a film moment or sequence, but they usually do this by confronting us with a replay of the actual sequence, too. How might this difference count?

If nothing else, this confrontation with, or, to put it more gently, this inevitable re-immersion in the film experience, ought to make videographic critics pursue humility in their analytical observations with an even greater focus, make them especially 'willing to alter [their analyses] according to what [they come into] contact with [...] give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface' (Marks, 2004: 80).

A further, built-in, random element in non-linear digital video editing -- the fact that this process frequently confronts the editor with graphic matter from the film (e.g. thumbnails) that s/he may not specifically have chosen to dwell on -- may also encourage a particularly humble, usefully (at times) non-instrumental form of looking that Swalwell (2002) detects in Marks' notion of hapticity.

As Marks writes, 'Whether criticism is haptic, in touch with its object, is a matter of the point at which the words lift off' (2004: 80). Haptic criticism must be what happens, then, when the words don't lift off the surface of the film object, if they (or any of the other film-analytical elements conveyed through montage or other non-linear editing techniques and tools) remain on the surface of the film object, as they often do in videographic film studies. In addition to this, video essays on films may often be an especially 'superficial' form of criticism, frequently using slow motion or zoom-in effects to allow those experiencing them to close in on the grain or detail of the film image.

With so many words, or other filmanalytical strategies, simultaneously available to be sensed on the surface of the image and, in terms of sound strategies (such as voiceovers or other added elements), seeming to emanate from it, videographical film studies may be curiously haptic objects, then. It is useful to remember that the art historical concept of haptic visuality emerged from the scholarly and artistic traditions of formalism, which made procedures such as defamiliarization central to their practice. Defamiliarization -- the uncanny distancing effect of an altered perspective on (such as a hyper-proximity to) an otherwise familiar object -- may be one of the greatest benefits of the particular hapticity of videographical film criticism.

Finally, does TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? practice what it preaches? Or, does it only practice one of the things it preaches? It isn't, primarily, a piece of haptic film criticism produced in close contact with the film. Instead, it's a film-theory object which 'grabs' from it, transforms what it grabs, and lifts off, or not, from there. 

Persona doesn't exactly disappear, though, either from the literal or metaphorical frames of the collage. Like many of Ingmar Bergman's works, this 1966 film treats (and inhabits) the perilous zone of borderlines between one person and another, its characters act out extreme forms of projective identification and introjection. Indeed, Persona explores some of the real psychological dangers of 'hapticity', of not being able to separate, or to see others detachedly - 'optically'. Some of those perils still find themselves evoked in the elements I selected for inclusion.

But, by selecting one sequence from others, by slowing it, and by replacing the film's soundtrack, the video collage does mitigate those dangers. It suspends them in order to close in on a visual track which simultaneously presents a 'haptic image' (the blurry, interchanging faces - made more haptic, possibly, by the slowed motion and zoom in) and an 'optical', or more clearly defined one (the Rückenfigur-esque image of the boy, who is himself pictured having a haptic experience). The combination of these images may well hint at Laura Marks' (and my) ideal critical frame. Marks writes,

'I take advantage of this moment to beseech those who are newly encountering haptic thinking to keep alive the dialectic with the optical! [...]The goal of haptic and sensuous criticism is to enhance our human capacities, rather than entirely replacing critical distance with haptic intimacy. I suggest we embrace and cultivate all our perceptual and cognitive and feeling capacities, keeping in mind the meanings that motivate them' (Marks, 2004: 82).

Selected online bibliography:

• Melinda Barlow, '[Review of] Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003
• Catherine Grant, 'Deleuzian Film Studies in Memory of David Vilaseca', Film Studies For Free, March 13, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'Sensing cinema: phenomenological film and media studies', Film Studies For Free, October 26, 2009
• Laura U. Marks, 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes', Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004 (large pdf - scroll down to p. 79)
• Claire Perkins, 'This Time It’s Personal: Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media by Laura U. Marks', Senses of Cinema, Issue 33, 2004
• Melanie Swalwell, 'The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema', Film Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 32, October 2002
• Donato Totaro, 'Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film', Off Screen, June 2002
• Emma Widdis: Muratova's Clothes, Muratova's Textures, Muratova's Skin Kinocultura, Issue 8, April 2005
• Donald W. Winnicott, 'The Location of Cultural Experience', Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005)

Offline bibliography:

• Christian Keathley, 'La Camera-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia', in Clayton, Alex and Klevan, Andrew (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011 
• Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, 'Introduction', in Clayton and Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011
• Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. London: Duke University Press, 2000
• Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. trans. by Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press, 1962 
• Michelson,  Annette, 'The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System,' October 52 (spring 1990)
• Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992
• Sobchack, Vivian. ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic “Presence”’, in Materialities of Communication, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrechts and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, 83-106. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994
• Sobchack, Vivian. ‘Phenomenology and the Film Experience’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, 36-58. New Brunswick: New Jersey, 1997
• Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
• Winnicott, D.W, 'The Location of Cultural Experience', Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 2005

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in August 2011. 

Establishing Split: Requiem 102 Project #2

This is a FILMANALYTICAL, REQUIEM // 102 and FILM STUDIES FOR FREE video essay by Catherine Grant. It is inspired by a screen capture from 02:09 minutes into REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) and it explores in general the use of split screens in the early sequences of this film.  
     The essay was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License in November 2010.

Filmanalytical brings you the second entry in the Requiem for a Dream // 102 Project, conceived by its inventor Nick Rombes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Detroit, Mercy, as a form of "collective, distributed film criticism".

Requiem // 102 is modelled loosely on Rombes' ongoing 10/40/70 project, in which he “reads” three screen captures from a film taken at the 10, 40, and 70 minute marks.

In this case, Nick has invited 102 contributors from across the film criticism spectrum to look at, or otherwise be inspired by, one frame from each minute of Darren Aronofsky’s 102 minute-long film Requiem for a Dream (2000), a movie that unsettled many audience members when it was first released in cinemas ten years ago.

To learn more about Requiem // 102, check out the 102 Project’s “About” page and follow it on Twitter. Chuck Tryon's first post on the film is here.

For more on Aronofsky's film and, especially, on the use of split screens in cinema, visit Filmanalytical's sister site Film Studies For Free.


Please watch the above video essay before you read its expanded transcript below:

The first split screen in Requiem for a Dream -- the film's establishing split, as it were -- follows a full-screen image of Sara Goldfarb shutting the closet door to keep out her heroin addict son Harry.

It is made very clear, from everything that happens here and elsewhere in this film, that this is not the first time that Sara has locked out her voraciously needy son; and it is very obviously not the first time that what he chooses to take from her fortress is what she most needs: her television set. (The film vertiginously repeats acts of slamming, locking, and shutting out throughout its narrative: indeed, its own title is delivered in this way at the end of these opening sequences in Sara's apartment).

[The first] split screen appears, then, to issue directly from Sara's characteristic act of self-enclosure. Interestingly, in Hubert Selby Jnr.'s novel, published in 1978, it is Harry who first locks Sara in the closet, a scene omitted from Selby's own adaptation of his work, co-scripted by director Darren Aronofsky. (Does the film put more of the "blame on Ma[me]", as a result? That's certainly a question that bears further examination in relation to its narrative as a whole.)

This visual splitting finds a psychological match in both characters' dialogue:

You tryin' to get me to break my own mother's set?

["You" = Harry's "Ma" AND not "my own mother"]
 

The chain isn't for you. It's for the robbers. 

["You" = the son to whom  Sara gives a key AND the robber she locks out]

Harry and Sara are both shown to split and project their "Good" and "Bad" self-objects and they are also both shown simultaneously holding seemingly incompatible beliefs:

e.g. "This isn't happening" AND "...this should be happening"

Paranoid? Schizoid? Paranoid-Schizoid?

As well as simultaneity of action, the vertically split screens in these early sequences of Requiem for a Dream, then, also repeatedly help to represent the simultaneous holding of "true" and "false" beliefs:

"I know very well, but all the same..."

Such formulations are well-known traces of the psychological defence of disavowal, a [...] state in which split-off, archaic self-object relationships seem to be maintained thus forming a central element in what self-psychologist Heinz Kohut called the "vertical split".

Far from a gratuitous stylistic flourish, Requiem's split-screens are established from the beginning as central to [the film's] figuration of its "vertically split" protagonists. They also prove central to any argument about whether or not the film regards the seemingly different addictions and psychic disorders of this mother-son dyad in exactly the same (eternal) light.

Further Reading:

• Jim Bizzocchi, 'The Fragmented Frame: The Poetics of the Split-Screen', [Draft] MIT 6, 2009
• Dave Boothroyd, 'Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity', Symbolism: Journal of Critical Aesthetics Vol.VII , 2007 
• Lionel Corbett, 'Kohut and Jung: A Comparison of Theory and Therapy', Self Psychology: Comparisons and Contrasts, eds. Douglas W. Detrick, Susan B. Detrick (Hillsdale, NJ, The Analytic Press, 1989)  
• Sergio Dias-Branco, 'The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Paul Eisenstein, 'Devouring Holes: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and the Tectonics of Psychoanalysis',  International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.3, Autumn 2007
• W.R.D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytical Studies of Personality (1952)
• Catherine Grant, 'Split Screen Studies', Film Studies For Free, November 2, 2010 
• Andrew Grossman, 'Finding Unlikely Ideology in Prokofiev: Polyphonic and Anti-Authoritarian Gestures in The Gambler', Bright Lights Film Journal, No. 62, 2008
• Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations, and the Self (Karnac Books, 1992)
• Sigmund Karterud, '[Review of Arnold Goldberg's] Being of Two Minds: The Vertical Split in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy', Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 9:257-258, October 2000 
• Craig B. Knowles, 'The Temporal Image Mosaic and its Artistic Applications in Filmmaking', MSc Thesis, Queen's University, Ontario, December 2003
• Megan Ratner, 'Requiem for a Dream', Senses of Cinema, Issue 12, 2001
• Jeffrey Stern, 'Tony Soprano and "The Vertical Split"', Self Psychology News, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003
• Maria Walsh, 'The Double Side of Delay: Sutapa Biswas’ film installation Birdsong and Gilles Deleuze’s Actual/Virtual Couplet', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Birk Weilberg, 'Beyond Interactive Cinema', Keyframe, August 2002 

The Dark Compartment: On Sarah Turner's Perestroika

Image from Perestroika (©2009 Sarah Turner) - used with permission

[Note: As the musings below take as their subject a film made by a former colleague and friend, they attempt to remain in the realm of a filmanalytical discourse rather than an evaluative one. But, do see Perestroika if you can] 

An epigraphic journey

By forgetting her past trauma and refusing to incorporate it into her subjectivity in her present life, the [female protagonist of Hiroshima mon amour] creates a distinction between her two selves: the one that experienced the trauma in the past and the one that exists independently of the trauma in the present. [Sarah French, 'From History to Memory: Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour', Melbourne Art Journal, Issue 3, 2008, p. 6]

In these images, I haunt a time and a place I find it hard to imagine belonging to but [to] which I very certainly did. [Stuart Jeffries] 

[P]hotographs promote forgetting…It’s a confirmation of death. [Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Duras Speaks to Michel Beaujour, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 89. Quoted in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20.]

Where images disappear, they must be replaced by images; if not, loss threatens. [Ernst Jünger]

The image has shown us that we are a mutant species. We are, and have been since the first projected image, the real impossibility of men-images. They have since multiplied: they are occupying the surface of the world. [Jean Louis Schefer]

The uncanny describes a zone of indiscernibility between fact and fiction, reality and artifact. Its destabilising and upsetting potential relies on the very uncertainty of the correct appraisal of a stimulus as accidental (natural) or intentional (artificial). [Jan Niklas Howe, 'Familiarity and no Pleasure. The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Emotion', Image and Narrative, 11.3, 2010, p. 58]

Reconstruct, she says

La chambre noire (the camera obscura, or 'dark chamber') was one of writer-director Marguerite Duras's key metaphors for her writing process and the solitary space of literary creation, the place in which she struggled to project her 'internal shadow' onto the blank page.

In Sarah Turner's most recent film Perestroika, the metaphorical 'dark chamber' is conjured -- mostly offscreen but very cinematically nonetheless -- as an unlit compartment on a Trans-Siberian train travelling from Moscow to Irkutsk. It is from this confined and over-heated space that an amnesiac and sleep-deprived narrator (a fictionalized version of the filmmaker herself) projects her own 'internal shadow', reluctantly recording an audio-diary recounting her struggle to remember making, and filming, the same journey twenty years earlier.

Identical journeys, different motives: the first a youthful adventure, the return journey a search to unearth and reclaim emotional and visual memories. Her close friend Sian Thomas, who later died in a cycling accident, was on the first journey; prior to the second journey, ['Turner'] herself was badly injured in a cycling accident, suffering retrograde amnesia. The second trip became a re-enactment of her past, [to be] achieved through the process of filming the present. [kultureflash]

Image from Perestroika (©2009 Sarah Turner) - used with permission

In the video footage and the animated still images from both train journeys, the cameras are almost always pointing out of the window. We only ever catch fleeting glimpses of the compartment itself in the reflection of its window, along with evanescent flashes of the ghostly images of those inside it. By fixing its gaze at the informational vastness of the changing landscapes outside, the film only deepens our desire to see more inside the compartment, to know more about the relationships, and the micro-politics, therein.

This sustained perspective (in the long middle section of the film) -- evoking at all times an agent who has to look outside even as they try to look in -- not only serves to remind us that the 'visual experiences of train travel and cinema spectatorship are, after all, strikingly similar, an immobile spectator watching the unfolding of a moving image through a window-like frame'.* The visual fixity and our complete aural envelopment by the disembodied vocalist (and the voices and noises (old and new) that resound in the imaginings of that character) place us much more firmly than is easily bearable, at times, in the relational space of the acousmatic:

This relationship, a structured scenario wherein "we don't see the person we hear" despite the fact that this voice emanates with an authority from the screen is, for [Michel] Chion, cinema's acousmetre [ a compelling part of cinema's] game of present/absent signification [...]. It is this absent vocalist but ever present voice that presents a number of powers, many of which are authoritative in their accent and force. Our desire is to assign a body to these voices [...].** 

Our intense curiosity is not always matched by the character who speaks. While the film begins in a cooler frame, with a prologue in which the filmmaker's voice reflects on her process of reconstruction well after the therapeutic journey has taken place, the first words uttered, suitably, over the imaging of mists rising from Lake Baikal, the journey's end, are, nonetheless: "I hadn't wanted to comment". Indeed, the unseen vocalist often rails against the investigative process throughout her recordings as she gives evidence of her wilful and childlike disobedience ('cheating') of an all-powerful 'you' addressee, who, in the narrator's account, seems to be forcing her to undertake both the journey and the therapeutic memory work to recover from her amnesia.

The flashes of paranoia and insecurity voiced about 'you', and expressed more generally throughout the film, though, artfully echo and retroactively inform some of the spectators' own cognitive frustrations. In this way, and many others, the film both fruitfully narrativizes, and provides for the spectator, a perceptual and affective experience of "afterwardsness".

Perhaps most strikingly, the film dramatises the breakdown of psychic and other borders between inside and outside. While the official therapeutic goal of the journey undertaken appears to be a recovered recognition of "me-ness" using a variety of visual prompts and stagings (an actual journey and footage of an earlier actual journey), at times much less rational experiences take over. The film and its protagonist are assailed by haunting sensations and memories, and an uncanny play with the 'zone of indiscernibility between fact and fiction, reality and artifact' ensues.

All we, and the narrator, have to go on is our ability to recognise visual and aural patterns, and interpret meaning from them on the basis of the film's painstakingly palimpsestic rhetoric, which builds slowly towards an apocalyptic climax.***

Excerpt from Perestroika (Sarah Turner, 2009)

Perestroika is to begin a short run at London's ICA cinema, 

and also to be crowned as Sight and Sound's October 'Film of the Month'

*Douglas Morrey, 'Jean-Luc Godard and the Other History of Cinema, p. 68.

**Tim Anderson, '[Review of] The Voice in Cinema. By Michel Chion', Echo 2.1, 2000
***I was pleasurably struck by some of the resonances with the plot of one of my favourite books, Adolfo Bioy Casares's La invención de Morel/The Invention of Morel (1940), one of the probable inspirations for Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad, as well as some of Chris Marker's films, including La Jetée. In Bioy's science-fiction novella, a narrator is trapped on an island and falls in love with a woman he then discovers exists only as part of a holographic film track. Even though it will cause his death, he chooses to insert himself into the holographic recording to be with her always. In Perestroika, fascinatingly, we may be witness to the narrator's psychic attempt to be inserted newly into old screen memories in which the old/dead 'she' already exists.

Further Reading (updated: October 17, 2010):

• Chris Darke, 'Film of the month: Perestroika',  Sight and Sound, [online] October 2010
• Sophie Mayer, 'The tracks of time: Sarah Turner’s 'Perestroika"', Sight and Sound, [online] September 2010
• 'Sarah Turner on Perestroika', APEngine, October 16, 2009
• 'PERESTROIKA by Sarah Turner', Artist's Statement, University of Kent, 2009
• Gillian McIver, 'Sarah Turner / Rosalind Nashashibi', Interface, a-n, 2009
• Frances Guerin, 'Perestroika, Dir. Sarah Turner, 2009', Fx Reflects, October 15, 2010
• Helen de Witt, 'Perestroika', BFI website, 2009
• Susan Robinson, 'Re-narrating the past with Sarah Turner', Edinburgh Film festival website, June 26, 2010 
• Catherine Grant, 'Déjà vu: 'uncanny recognition' or 'perpetual return'?', Anagnorisis, May 31, 2008

True likeness: Peeping Tom and Code inconnu/Code Unknown

True likeness by Catherine Grant

A filmanalytical exploration of some of the obvious, as well as the more obscure, similarities between two films: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages/Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Michael Haneke, 2000). It was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License in June 2010.

What interests me most in academic study is the exploration of what Gérard Genette called "transtextuality", that is to say, "everything that brings the text into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts" (Genette, Palimpsestes, 1992: 81). Sometimes this interest alights on matters of cultural influence and film authorship (see here, for example), but often it focuses itself on the issue of the recognition of cinematic interconnectedness.

Now, in an age of digital and multimedia scholarship, how better to explore filmic connections of different kinds than to use the format of the video mashup? The above essay is, then, the first in a series of "scholarly mashups" here at filmanalytical, examining the obvious and obscure connections between particular films in ways that are both striking and, hopefully, more precisely illuminating with regard to their form as films, than comparisons performed purely in non-audiovisual formats might be.

"Cryptanalytical"

The form finally taken by True likeness, the video embedded above (please watch it first; then read this), was very much inspired by a reading of Brigitte Peucker's great chapter "Games Haneke Plays: Reality and Performance" which has just been published in the excellent collection On Michael Haneke, edited by Brian Price and John David Rhodes.

I had been thinking for a long time about Haneke's films in general, and Code Unknown in particular, in relation to their representation of filmmaking and performance. Peucker's article opens by setting out, very powerfully, some thoughts on those topics that coincided with my own starting point on this film, as well as with that of others.*

She writes,

What is the boundary between real emotion and mimed emotion, between life and performance, between reality and illusion? The film's movement from what appears to be reality -- in [one] case, a frightened little girl -- to its acknowledgment as a diegetic performance is a strategy central to Haneke's film. Time and again Code Unknown presents us with sequences that promote confusion between the diegetic reality of the film and a performance within it, sequences that promote the spectators' uncertainty about the status of the image. Since the action of such sequences always involves emotional pain, the sequences promote strong affects in the film's audience, feelings followed by relief that such actions are doubly distanced from the diegetic real, that even in the fictional reality of the film the sequence is "only a performance". [...] 

In moving between illusion and diegetic truth, Code Unknown provokes in its spectator an uncertainty that is decidedly disturbing: its ludic dimension crosses over into sadistic tricking. But then the film's compelling images catch us up again - at least until we play the spectator game of assembling its narrative fragments, until we try to decipher the film's governing code. This code too remains unknowable. [pp. 16-17]

Peucker argues, effectively, that this unknowability begins with the import or meaning of the little girl's charade at the beginning of Haneke's film.

Later in her chapter, though, she introduces her highly original argument that, at least in some of the above concerns, Haneke's film "borrows" from Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom.

For her, this is especially the case with regard to Code Unknown's "French New Wave-story" [p. 19]. This story, one of a number of the multiprotagonist strands in Haneke's film, features Juliette Binoche as Anne, an actress with a live-in partner, Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a war photojournalist who takes hidden camera shots of metro passengers (in an echo of Walker Evans' "Many Are Called" project).

Peucker writes, "In Powell's film, the central character's sadomasochistic project is to capture on film the quintessential image of (female) fear, 'the true expression' of fear, as you will recall, this is what the psychopath -- or director -- wants from Anne [in Code Unknown]" [p. 21].

Peucker compellingly (and at length) argues that, apart from the above (and a few other) similarities in plot between Code Unknown and Powell's film, and in what she regards as the "detached, cold [and cruel] tone" of them both [p. 22], "Peeping Tom looms large" in Haneke's work as a whole. She writes that Powell's film functions as "more than a gloss on Haneke's films, serving as a possible source both for their mini-narratives of child abuse and for a modernist fascination with self-reflexivity and form" [p. 26].

When I started exploring both films in a video editor, suitably fired up by Peucker's argument, not only was I easily able to find some more audiovisual evidence for her observations about what Peeping Tom specifically "lends" Code Unknown, but I could also see that one could take these observations quite a lot further. 

Following through on the idea of Peucker's "gloss" (a kind of "invisible note in the margin" of Haneke's films), it struck me that Peeping Tom could also be deployed audiovisually, as a kind of cypher-machine through which one might perform a "cryptanalysis" of the enigmatic and incompletely told Code Unknown. Given that Peeping Tom's screenplay was itself written by wartime cryptographer Leo Marks, this would, of course, be a classic Hanekian funny game.

I don't want to go on to re-summarise in writing everything that the mashup already presents in sounds and images about the connections it makes between the two films: that would be a (hopefully unnecessary...) tautology.  But I finish this supplementary "Making Of" essay with the following further written observations:

• Sequences from Peeping Tom can very productively be deployed to begin, end, and even echo in reverse visual form, a number of Code Unknown's famously incomplete sequences. (I reversed the sequence of Mark as a boy mutely coming into say goodbye to his dying or dead mother in the silent-film-within-the-film to show the latter).

• The blocking in the two films is at times uncannily similar, and thus an uncanny effect can be achieved by making Peeping Tom irrupt in the later film, and vice versa. 

• Although I didn't include much of this in the final mashup, which I wanted to keep very short, I felt that Peeping Tom also cast a great deal of light on Code Unknown's constant play with muteness and sound through its various portrayals of audio and audiovisual recording equipment (the same can be said of the later film's portrayals of exposed and obscured vision, which echo Peeping Tom's representations of blindness, light and dark). One observation on sound that I wished I'd included, though, is an edit to show the striking similarity in rhythm and sensibility of Code Unknown's concluding drum band with the jazzy percussion music in Peeping Tom's screen test sequence.

• The experience of making the mashup leads me to disagree strongly with Peucker's argument that Peeping Tom has a "detached, cold [and cruel] tone" to match its cold and cruel narrative events. Being exposed so much to the remarkable musical score of Powell's film, as well as to its highly expressive visual design, revealed to me, at least, a deeply elegiac, although certainly also reflexive, film that succeeds in mourning the otherwise irreversible effects (in its plot) of parental sins being visited on children. Juxtaposing, or overlaying, some of the  expressive sensibility of Powell's film with Code Unknown's cooler, more 'documentary', aesthetic may work to supplement our experience of Haneke's film with a hitherto deliberately incomplete affect. This would be a provocative audiovisual accompaniment, indeed, for the later film's own stories of often weeping, frightened, bewildered, and inadequately recognised child and adult characters.

*Perhaps most notably Girish Shambu in his "Auto-Dialogue" on Code Unknown, Thomas Elsaesser in his chapter "Michael Haneke's Mind Games" (pdf) in Roy Grundmann's A Companion to Michael Haneke, and David Sorfa in comments on the "insecurity of the boundaries between the 'I' and the 'not I'" in his article on "Uneasy domesticity in the films of Michael Haneke" (see fn 7, pp. 100-1).

Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes (1960)

Unsentimental Education from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Les Bonnes femmes/The Good Time Girls (France/Italy, 1960), a French New Wave film directed by Claude Chabrol. 

The video was made in association with the non-commercial, scholarly film website Film Studies For Free. 

The above was my first, rather tentative attempt at a film-critical video essay. I completed it almost a year ago. I never knew that I would be able to create such an artifact when I started out as a jobbing Film Studies ('theory' not 'practice') academic many years ago. But what surprised me most about it, apart from how (relatively) straightforward it is to set about making such work now, given the proprietary editing software that comes free with most computers, was how much more I learned about the form of this film as a result of making it.  

Les Bonnes femmes was a movie I had taught many times and thought that I knew very well, which was why I chose to work on it. What I realised afterwards was that I had also been motivated by a desire to engage with this film's strangeness -- its beguiling yet disturbing affect -- which neither I nor my students had been able to articulate in words, in detail at least, in numerous individual sequence analyses in university seminars.

Working on the film in an editing programme was very much like studying it frame by frame on a flatbed editing table (as in the Film Studies classes of a mostly bygone era), and that rendered a much better understanding, for example, of the film's constant moves from high to low, and its graphic matching of key shapes, like that of the statue at the beginning.

But it was the process of having to construct and then convey or perform a meaningful analysis by re-editing the film that completely convinced me of the merits of the video essay as an analytical, pedagogical, and creative process. How better to understand the intense affective charge of the moment in the film when a character breaks the film's fourth wall than to try to re-frame it, while retaining the feeling of that charge, in the form of a new (summarised? pastiched? bowdlerised?) transformative work?

A year ago, I didn't have the confidence in this process to let an intuitive, creative understanding of the film emerge, to be expressed through a new practice of montage. The essay is quite long at thirteen and a half minutes and even its fairly sparse voiceover commentary (which was largely improvised to accompany the re-editing, rather than pre-written) seems too wordy to me now. That commentary is reproduced below, along with some links to other, hopefully useful material.

This is all just to announce that my next, quite different, video essay will be posted here, with an accompanying post at Film Studies For Free (my other website), in the next few days...

Claude Chabrol's 1960 film Les Bonnes femmes/The Good Time Girls opens in the Place de la Bastille in central Paris. We see the statue erected to the Genie of Liberty: not a statue of Eros as many commentators on the film have thought. The film thus opens with an image of freedom, and it is freedom and tyranny that will be its central concerns.

We pass through the Arc de Triomphe and gaze for a while at the image of the Eternal Flame before moving down the Champs-Élysées to the first main location of the film. Here we find ourselves outside the Club Grisbi, the Grisbi striptease club on the Champs-Élysées .

We've gone from the height of the statue to the low level of the street. And in the distance Chabrol is signalling someone who will be a protagonist in the film. Through the window of an appliance store André Lapierre, the man of stone, has caught sight of what he seemed to have been waiting for. And the woman he was waiting for can also sense him - captured once again behind glass and taken by the feel of his tiger skin seat.

Jacqueline is the first of the four 'good time girls' we see in the film searching for love. During the day she works at a different electrical appliance store in a different part of Paris along with three other young women, all searching, like her, for excitement and love, as well as an escape from the tyrannies of time and commerce.
[...]
Even in these documentary scenes, André Lapierre still lies in wait.
[...]
Liberated once again, they escape into the Parisian night. And nocturnal Paris is the space in which the film is free to explore the distinction between watching and being watched.

The animal postures and attitudes of the nightclub scene are echoed in one of the most famous sequences in the film: the trip to the zoo. In this sequence, spectator and spectated upon are once again divided by a thin layer of glass. In this way, the film questions the distinction between 'captured' and 'captors', between 'predators' and 'prey'. And it traces the literal distance between those dangerously on the same side of the glass.

In the swimming pool sequence, two of the film's many male figures of black comedy subject all of the girls to tormenting. But it is Jacqueline, alone, who is singled out by the film for danger. Here, Les Bonnes femmes begins to explore the divide between life and death.

In another of the film's moves from high to low, Jacqueline's waiting 'protector' springs into action. Can she really be unaware, the film seems to ask us, that tall, dark strangers sometimes bring dangers of their own? It's not that film doesn't warn her, but rather that, like us, she seems to be dangerously drawn into its cautionary tale.
[...]
Here at this moment of physical intimacy and emotional trust, the film and André begin to explore the limits of his freedom and the potential for her acceptance of it. She passes his test with flying colours and we can see that both André and the film have successfully negotiated the distance between the two hand gestures that bookend this sequence, and which transport us, fatalistically, to the film's dénouement. And the beauty of this sequence, with its sweeping arch-like pan, might make us wonder about its creator: what does he want us to think as Jacqueline is led off, a virgin to be 'deflowered'? Or to be sacrificed?

His deed now done, and seen once again from on high, Lapierre seems more a mere tragic-comic mortal than some kind of almighty Genie of Liberty and death. The strange coda to Chabrol's film, which has so mystified critics, takes place in another nightclub. Another man waits and watches. Another woman waits and is watched.

Like the sequence in the zoo, the camera is tracking the distance between the two people. It's a slow to and fro motion which is underscored by the music of this final sequence of the film. To and fro. The 'pick up' here is depicted as a mutual process - a mutuality which makes everything which preceded the film's coda even more troubling.

Men of stone and women of glass? On high, the glitterball doesn't just glitter; it mirrors. It witnesses and fragments what lies beneath: the 'special occasion' that punctures the endless dull time which imprisons us all. But we are held by the spectacle, waiting for something to happen. And then it does: the troubling moment when the character - as in so many other New Wave films - returns our gaze. What does she want to happen? And what do we want to happen?

Useful Links:

• Discussion at Girish Shambu's blog on audio commentaries and video essays
• Big links and discussion post at Film Studies For Free on the merits of the video essay format