Reading the auteur theory chapter in “Understanding Film Theory” brought me back to several childhood memories. Tim Burton was a favorite of my brother’s. I remember him telling me about the sort of triangle that Tim Burton had with Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp. He loved Johnny Depp and this got him hooked on Tim Burton films. Meanwhile my father was not a fan of Tim Burton in the least bit. He disliked Johnny Depp’s characters and the gloomy and gruesome plots that Tim Burton tended to lean towards. Although I have always been aware of the clear correlation between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp (if you put the two together there will be some kind of depressing story, lots of black, and emphasis on night and blood) I didn’t recognize these to be Tim Burton’s stylistic traits and why he was drawn to them. This explained to me why my brother had a strong liking to all of his films while my dad was the complete opposite.

This chapter explains in great detail each technique and choice Tim Burton makes. As a director, he consistently falls between Horror and Fantasy which in turn requires shadows, curves, angular objects,  and a surreal nature of storytelling. The use of Johnny Depp in both Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd draws a direct parallel between the two stories and stems the latter film as sort of a ghost of the former. The costuming and makeup also remains consistent with a feel of dishevel, chaos, and death, but also sympathy for the outcast. Digging into Burton’s childhood tells us that he had a period of his life that he was a loner and where he found himself lost in an imagination where he related to the monster, the outcast, and saw the monster as having a bigger heart than what appears. Sweeney Todd is one of my favorite films. Even though he is a serial killer, I find  a connection with Johnny Depp’s character because of the way the film is set up and the message portrayed by Burton. There are series of flashbacks where we see a man of political power stealing Depp’s love from him unjustly. Instead of completely rejecting Depp’s character as being a psychopath, we relate to him because he feels love, a natural emotion that we all have felt. Without this connection, the film’s message would be much different and it would be received much differently.

In my presentation for today’s class I discussed the following:  Siegfried Kracaucer was one of the firsts to emphasize the value of the study of everyday life and was an author of German expressionist cinema. He felt that there was something beautiful about mirroring everyday life.  Overall, the main idea of his article was to express how the nature of the film is the intervention of the filmmaker’s formative energies in all dimensions in addition to creative efforts. The cinematic approach can work together to benefit the medium of film with its concern on the visible world.

Introduction: He discussed in his essay how the photographic film came to be and the craft behind it. (When reading this I thought of the film we watched in class-Man with a Movie Camera) He introduces the idea of recording real life events which is known today as documentaries or newsreels. There were also two tendencies to which he refers to: Realistic and formative. These tendencies must operate in both the medium of film and photography.  The realistic tendency discusses the ways the camera doesn’t have to be still because now they are now moving and editing devices are being used to help get the message across. It has been argued that staging a real life event would be more interesting than filming it as it happens because there is a stronger illusion of reality. The formative tendency discusses how films extend the dimensionality of characters and objects in ways that photography can’t. It explores the physical reality in front the camera, but also on the outset as well as the story and non-story film.

There can be clashes between these two tendencies when a director creates an imaginary universe from freely staged material and obligated to draw on camera reality. However, they are very inter-related because they need to be balanced when worked into a film.  Both tendencies shouldn’t overwhelm one another, but instead “follow the lead.”

Lumiere and Melies: These two directors pictured everyday life after photographs. Lumiere believed that cinematography was meant for scientific curiosity and didn’t focus on the artistic aspects of film. On the contrary, Melies began to make more artistic driven films that changed the everyday life genre. He focused on the attractive compositions and not the explorations of nature.

Kracauer notes that “everything depends on the ‘right’ balance between the realistic tendency and the formative tendency; and the two tendencies are well balanced if the latter does not try to overwhelm the former but eventually follows its lead” (298).  It is with this notion that I can understand the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it blends the realistic with the formative, but does so that the fantasy aspects never overtake the realistic aspects and keeps the universe it is building confined to the measurement of reality: science.

Every Marvel movie explains the uncanny in terms of science, which is a familiar concept to the layman which attempts to maintain a level of verisimilitude that can keep an audience grounded.  It is only after the scientific world is established that the audience can find themselves prepared to face the formative tendencies of creative control.  It’s at this point where Marvel introduces the fantastic powers that define the superhero genre, but only in small doses.  The first of the Marvel movies, Iron Man (2009), centered around an industrialist who found himself in a real-world captive situation.  The world has established that it is mostly like our own reality, maintaining the realistic tendencies of film, and then introduces the formative aspect of the Iron Man armor, which begins to uneven the scales of the balance of the cinematic approach.  It is through the slightest of fantastic teases that keeps the real and unreal balanced, and the audience entranced.

Marvel introduces that fantastic aspects of their films in a way that doesn’t sway the viewer to realize how improbable the events actually are.  Only when there have been broad introductions of magic has Marvel struggled due to the unfamiliarity of what a reality that included such things would be like, making it hard to believe the science of those worlds and thus brings it to the forefront of consciousness that they may be plausible but ultimately, they are conspicuous manifestations of the creator’s imagination.

Beginning his essay, André Bazin dives right into the practice of embalming, how ancient Egyptians used to mummify bodies and keep them from decaying. He compares this practice to the birth of the plastic arts. He states that there is a basic psychological need in man to outwit time and preserving a bodily appearance is fulfilling this desire. Because, however, pyramids and labyrinths could be pillaged, statuettes were developed as substitute mummies in case anything were to come of the real one. This is the birth of the idea of “the preservation of life by a representation of life.” Rather than requesting to be embalmed, Louis XIV is an example of an eternal image that is set to survive via painting. Veering away from this, Bazin makes the assertion that within today’s society (keep in mind he is referring to the mind around 1945), we are no longer solely concerned with survival after death but also with the creation of an ideal world with its own temporal destiny.

In the fifteenth century, Western painting turned from a concern with spiritual realities and aesthetics to one in which spiritual expression is combined with an imitation of the outside world that is as close as possible to reality. The camera of Niepce was credited to be the invention of photography in the 1800s, meaning things could, and began to, exist as we see them in reality. This left painting torn between two ambitions–the expression of spiritual reality and symbol and the desire for duplication of the world around us. Bazin continues to explain that the desire to see reality, though it is merely an illusion created via painting, is a mental need and realism in art is caught between the aesthetic and a deception aimed at fooling the eye. This being said, photography and cinema have freed mankind from the obsession of illusion in painting because they themselves satisfy our obsession with realism.

Bazin compares two filmmaking styles, the style concerned with an image and the style concerned with reality. A photograph is of a specific moment in time and a specific place, while art can be of any moment in any place which is why Bazin argues that a painting is more eternal than a photograph. Photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. Thus, as a final blow, Bazin makes the assertion that photography is the most important event in the history of the plastic arts and then leads us into his article on the development of the language of cinema and how we analyze it.

Reading Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” it’s apparent that he’s talking about Deren’s controlled accident. On page 313, he says “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.” Of course, Deren says as much with the line on page 151, “the reality of a tree confers its truth upon the events we cause to transpire beneath it.”

Of course, Bazin also finds photography “objective.” As we’ve discussed in class, I think many of us would say “hardly so!” Kuleshov, certainly, would likely have a field day tearing into this argument, and I’m sure Bazin would have plenty to say to him, as well!

I don’t think I really have much of a point here (aside from vaguely agreeing as far as his argument relates to the controlled accident), but I had to write some thoughts out somewhere.

Today in class I had brought up a lot of similarities between Inception and Man With A Movie Camera. I went online just now to see if anyone else shared my thoughts and sure enough… they did.

The city landscape folding on itself, the constant references to trains, and the kicker… The director’s name, in Russia actually means “Spinning Top.” So, it’s safe to say that Nolan is pretty influenced by this film, which makes sense, since Inception is essentially a metaphor for the movie making process anyways. Pretty amazing what 80 years of technology can do to what boils down to the same concept: the magic of movie making and the foundations of dreams.

Looking at this film 86 years after its release is like looking at any classical piece of art. Is it truly enjoyable and fun to watch? Actually, yes, at parts it certainly is. Especially with the incredible score blasting in sync with the images. However, this is not a film meant to entertain. It is a film meant to experiment with a relatively new paint brush. If we were to really break down some of the editing/technical magic Vertov pulls off in this time period, we’d be talking for days. As someone who is not technical, the cutting of images was so precise and meticulous, it would be incredible to see what the man could do with modern technology.

The discussion in class of the film we watched today, “Man with a Movie Camera” by Vertov in 1929, brought attention to the main purpose of this film. When I was watching it, I wrote down in my notes, “camera is seeing”. That was my quick way of saying what Annie put brilliantly in class when she said, “the camera is an extension of your eye”. Vertov shows this when he puts the shot of an eye into the lens of the camera. He does this a couple times throughout the film. Also, when the woman wakes up and is opening the shades, Vertov cuts to the lens of a camera slowly closing. He mirrors images a lot in this film. I believe he does this to show what cinema can do. The camera can do so much more than just the human eye can.

Vertov’s film reminded me of a  Lumiere film because he shows a lot of events that are regular and happen during every day life. For example, he shoots people getting their hair done, their shoes shined, doing laundry, getting a manicure. These are normal events. However, the way he edits them together and mirrors  the events shows that he is creating a different kind of story line and meaning with the use of the camera and editing. He is definitely manipulating reality in this film, which in fact would be more like a Melies film. The camera stand appears to be setting itself up, with no people around. The chairs in the movie theater go down even though no one is there doing that action. In class, I said that it was showing the magic of cinema. But really it shows the manipulation of reality.

Something else that really interested me was the repetition use of transportation. Throughout the entire film, there were shots of trains, bikes, horse and buggies, cars, planes, and boats. I believe that Vertov used these images to represent the movement of film. It shows that it is a new art form that has sprung from the stillness of photography into this great new movement of images.

This fall I took a Social Theories class, which went over a bunch of the big names in sociological theory- including Marx, Gramsci, and Benjamin (as well as McLuhan, whom Corey has mentioned before- McLuhan is most famous for his idea of “the medium as the massage”).

I’m sure most of us have studied Marx in some form beginning in high school, but Gramsci, at least for me, remained unknown until this fall. Gramsci had a very interesting life, and because of his tumult, a very interesting perspective on social theory.

Gramsci was born to a poor family in Sardinia in the late 1800s. He was born with health problems, including a spine deformation, which doctors treated by hanging him upside down from the ceiling–he only grew to about five feet tall. Although most people from his town were illiterate, Gramsci earned a scholarship to the University of Turin. There, he founded a socialist newspaper that was a response to the growing socialist movement in Italy. The socialist party eventually folded into the communist party, and Gramsci was sent to Moscow as a representative of the Italian Communist party. While in Russia, Mussolini took over Italy with the Fascists and upon his return, Gramsci was arrested because as a communist he was viewed as a challenge to the Fascist regime. While in prison, Gramsci wrote his “prison notebooks”, which were written mostly in code, due to heavy censorship by the government and prison authorities. His notebooks were fragmentary thoughts that he eventually planned to create into a book, but he died in prison before his notes could be organized into a cohesive novel. Even so, his notebooks were published posthumously. They were snuck of out the prison by his sister-in-law, who knew the code words Gramsci used to speak about Marx, and other communist leaders. The notebooks outline his thoughts on why the Fascist party came to power, why the socialist revolution failed, and most importantly- what could the oppressed (subaltern) due to overthrow their oppressors (the hegemony).

Gramsci’s argument is complicated, and this is not made easier by the language he used to write his theories in order to avoid them being confiscated by prison guards. His basic argument, which I spoke briefly about in class, is this:

You have the hegemonic power (what Marx calls the bourgeoisie) and the subaltern (Marx’s proletariat). The hegemonic power maintains control of the subaltern either by force- what Gramsci calls “coercive power”, or spontaneous consent. Spontaneous consent is achieved when the hegemonic group convinces the subaltern that their lowly position in society is natural/deserved- Gramsci might say an example of this would be the “American Dream”, i.e. that anyone can succeed in American society if they pick themselves up by the bootstraps. This view, dictacted by those in power, clouds over the societal irregularities that perpetuate the wealth gap, keeping the “have-nots” poor in comparison to the “haves”, and instead places the blame on the “have-nots”.

Gramsci marries his theories of class struggle with culture via his theory of “folklore”. By folklore, Gramsci means pop-culture- the  music, film, advertisements, newspapers, etc. particular to a society. He sites folklore as the foundation of subaltern thought, that stands in opposition to “official” conceptions of the world- that being the ideology that the hegemonic power imposes on the subaltern. In layman’s terms: cultural expressions (pop-culture) are products of what the subaltern truly think and feel, without the total interference or censorship of the hegemony.

Gramsci narrows the idea of folklore further with his term “common sense”. Common sense is the cultural expressions particular to a certain time and people. Out of this common sense, there needs to be found “good sense”.

In order to explain good sense, it is first necessary to explain “organic intellectuals”. Organic intellectuals are people in society that are able to sift through the common sense of a particular society to find its oppositional characteristics (elements of culture that are counter-hegemonic). For example, an organic intellectual in present day American might read “The Hunger Games”, “Divergent”, or see the movie The Giver, and identify a common theme of oppression, or a desire to box people into categories which they are trapped in for their lifetimes. The recognition of the themes of oppression in culture would be “good sense”.

Having found good sense, it is the job of the organic intellectual to convince the rest of the subalterns of that society to rally against the hegemonic power in order to overthrow it. This is a long process, as all of society needs to be convinced of their “false consciousness” (that they have been presented a false reality by the hegemonic power, like the “American Dream” example). Unlike Marx, Gramsci did not think this was bound to happen, but thought under the right circumstances it was certainly possible.

This explanation does not do Gramsci any justice, and certaintly detracts from his argument by simplifying it so much…but he, along with Marx, are amazing intellectuals that are worth trying to understand.

And finally, to boil it down into the simplest terms possible:

You have the hegemonic power, and the subaltern. In order for the subaltern to escape their oppression, an organic intellectual from the subaltern group needs to sift through their society’s pop-culture, find cultural expressions that represent their lived reality, which stands in opposition to the ideologies the hegemonic power has been imposing on them, and unite all the other subalterns around the realization that they as a group are oppressed. Then the subalterns rise up and throw off the hegemonic power.

Once again, butchering Gramsci here but hopefully that provides some clarity!

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin is considered one of the most original and influential articles in the history of film criticism and theory. There was a lot that I took from his piece and I began to really agree with some of his points on how cinema has the technological ability to transform traditional art forms. One thing that I really liked to look more in depth at was sections ten and eleven (pgs. 238-240). These were the sections I was assigned in class and after reading them I really agreed with Benjamin. Basically the overall topic that these sections of the article discuss focus on actors and performances. Section ten discusses how test performance is an aspect of film production and film acting. He talks about the processes that have to be reproduced by film actors and how the film actor carries out an original performance for a “group of executives” instead of a stage actor who performs “in front of a randomly composed audience. ” He also compares film acting to sporting performances because they may at some point be intervened by a body of experts. Film gives actors the ability to exhibit test performances and gives these actors the opportunity to doing reshoots of scenes because they are performing in from of an apparatus, not a live audience.  For section eleven, Benjamin explains how the film and stage actor differ in performance. He writes “The stage actor identifies himself with a role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His performance is by no means a unified whole, but is assembled from many individual performances.” What I think he is saying here is that a stage actor has one chance to get it right. There are no takes or edits in stage acting. If a stage actor doesn’t have enough expression in his face or voice it could derail the emotion of a performance. For film actors, they have the opportunity and tend to be more genuine in their actions and expressions. Also how film makers have the ability to mash all of these “individual performances” through editing. The edits that go into the finished project contain the most genuine and expressive shots that will help the film succeed. Walter Benjamin’s take on performances in film and on stage are I think very accurate analysis’. I really enjoyed reading about it because I am interested in acting and think its a good thing to read if one wants to be a film actor.

For week three so far we’ve read Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibilty and Chapter 5 in UFT. Both of these I thought had a good class discussion that I may not have contributed to enough, so I thought I’d do so here, starting with Benjamin.

Chris and I were assigned to focus more on section VIII and IX (237,) which talked primarily about the “reproducibility” of ancient art vs. modern art. Benjamin writes that “Never before have artworks been technologically reproducible to such a degree and in such quantities as today.” Referring the fact that almost all art in modern times can be recreated. A movie is not shown once an discarded, it can go to VHS, DVD, and can be online as well. Reproduction is an incredibly important part of art now, which contrasts greatly with say, Ancient Greek art. Where works of art must embody the values of the time they were created in to form an accurate portrayal of the time, whereas film can be cataloged so easily to see the change in time. In addition to this, Benjamin writes that film can be improved in any desired way when ancient statues cannot be.  In section IX Benjamin writes about the impact photography had on art. Stating “the more fundamental question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed the entire character of art.” I think this even relates to the controlled accident in a way, as art was originally a metaphor for reality, when now it can be reality itself.

In chapter 5 of UTF, Marxism was discussed. I don’t know much about Marxism or comparative politics (I took a comparative politics course and we actually looked at Marxism a lot so that’s too bad) but I liked the connection that politics can have on the media industry. I guess a better way of saying that is it’s impressive what an impact it can have, not that I like it.

Nick Tassoni