During today’s Q&A hosted in the FAMS building, the director of Dear White People (2014, Justin Simen answered audience questions regarding his film and his process. He talked about a variety of things, one including about Auteurship.  Simen argued that although it is a collaborative process  it is important that you realize as a director that you might be able to fit in 70% of your whole work into the frame (maybe), but that it is okay because you should come to the set with a plan and be willing to allow it to change. As a director you will ask questions about details, changes, additions and alterations that may make your work better.

But he mentioned that he is a true believer of auteurism because it is something that he values in a filmmaker. It is the way a filmmaker displays his/her intentions and some of his favorite filmmakers are auteurs. A filmmaker should be able to claim that they are the authors of their own work because if not it takes away from the notion that it is in fact their vision, Simen said “It’s important to craft the vision of the artist as they see it because if not, then what makes them different from just a robot or a machine.” Embracing their vision is to embrace their craft as artists and authors of their creative work.

Another topic of his conversation was how he mentioned that he loves when a movie is a movie. By this he means he likes the precise cuts, framing, elements of a film that make it appear as a movie. He mentioned being a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Wes Anderson. His fantascism for these directors was very relevant to the production of his film.

In the first couple pages, Robert Stam asks if strict fidelity is possible? He also asks what part of literature should film makers be faithful to?

I also had a question about the middle paragraph on page 546 — what does the whole “original” vs. “copy” section mean?

And what are the differences between the five types of transtextual relations?

I’m sure a lot of you guys have seen this video that was posted on YouTube two days ago. I thought it really related to our discussion of auteur theory. For one, many of the elements employed, especially the camera work, was spot-on for Wes Anderson films. It was so interesting to see a premise that distinctly fit the sci-fi/action genre be completely transformed to the point where I wondered if this was made into a feature length film, would it still be considered in the action genre? Or would conventions that are so typically used in Wes Anderson films cause it to fall under a different genre?

More interestingly, at the end, I was reminded of the fact that Wes Anderson himself wasn’t actually involved in making this parody trailer. The fact that someone who had clearly watched a ton of Wes Anderson films could not only identify what elements make something so characteristically “Wes Anderson” and then apply them to something completely unrelated points the signature style Wes Anderson has created for himself. Auteur theory for sure has many problems, some of which we addressed in class. But, as this parody trailer demonstrates, elements of auteur theory, such as the ability to identify a director’s signature style, are clearly active in the film industry today.

For me, if I hadn’t been told that Maqbool was an adaptation of Macbeth before watching the film, I would never have realized; I think this speaks to a certain tension in film adaptations that Stam suggested but did not explicitly state. I believe, though may not have much evidence to back it up, that adaptations that are explicitly named after the novel and seek to follow the novel as closely as possible in terms of setting, time period, character names, etc. are the adaptations that cannot move past the “fidelity” comments. Those are the adaptations that people lament did not stick close enough to the book. Major blockbuster franchises like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter fall into this trap.

However, if one were to take the narrative structure of those films (a la Tordorov) and change the setting, characters, time period, etc., then I believe they would not face nearly as much criticism. Before reading the Stam piece, I didn’t even realize that Clueless was a modern-day adaptation (at least at the time of release) of Jane Austen’s Emma. Admittedly, I have never read Emma, so I wouldn’t be prone to identifying it as such. But, the reviews of Clueless don’t focus on the fact that it’s a loose adaptation; they instead focus more on the film itself. If someone were to do an analysis of Clueless vs. Emma or Maqbool vs. Macbeth, I think people would be more likely to focus on the transformation and transmutation elements that Stam discusses just by virtue of the fact that the books and movie adaptations do not share the same name. Instead of lamenting the fact that a film adaptation skipped over a specific plot point or wrote out a character, those that do not share the same name of the books they are adapted from can instead be seen as interesting takes on a story; they are less tied to the spatiotemporal bounds of the book and instead can showcase how a specific narrative is transformed and mutated when basic elements such as character names, time, space, and culture are changed. In short, I believe film adaptations can best succeed when they rely more on the themes of a certain novel than a straight interpretation of that story.

A film adaptation of literature is successful if it has stayed faithful to the novel. Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation by Robert Stam points of that fidelity is key, but he questions if this is even possible in adaptations. Fidelity is when a film stays true to the most important components and fundamentals of the novel. Even if a director is “faithful” to what is being adapted, there is always going to be a difference. Stam says, “an adaptation is automatically different because and original due to the change of medium” (Stam 543). The mise-en-scene, lighting, and editing changes everything. He goes on to discuss different approaches of adaptations. A film can just capture the essence of the film, or it can be translated and transformed into a whole new twist. The plots and characters can be used from a literary text and transformed into a whole new world in a film.

Maqbool (2003) is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After watching this film, I would say that it didn’t say 100% faithful or truthful to the novel, which I think is completely impossible to do anyways. It was a transformation, where the film took the plot, characters, and themes, into a whole new setting/time. The themes of death, tragedy, paranoia, and guilt, were very apparent in the film, which is what themes were essential to the novel. The director, Bhardwaj, stayed true to Maqbool and Nimmi seeing blood that wasn’t actually there- showing the guilt of being murderers. If I had watched this prior to knowing it was an adaptation of Macbeth, I would have never known.

I think most film adaptations of literature are failures. I always hear people ask, “Which did you like better- the movie or the book?” Almost always, the response is the book. I believe that this is true because people who read the novels have created their own images. Reading allows someone to explore their own imagination and create their own world during the novel. When watching the film adaptation, you are watching someone elses interpretation of what that world looks like. It’s disorienting and honestly disappointing. Some adaptations are successful and some are not, and I think Maqbool can be up for debate.

When we watch a film, looking for melding of multiple film types and cultural inspiration, we can fall into the trap of looking for this in characters and themes. We look and see stereotypical Italian-American mobsters in a film starring a samurai and think that is were the combinations end. We can, however, look further into a piece of film and find that it draws inspiration in areas such as writing styles and character types. Having watched a decent amount of Japanese films, not even samurai films, such as Juzo Itami films and Masayuki Suo films. Watching these and then seeing Ghost Dog it is very difficult to not notice deliberate similarities in dialogue structure. In other words, a lot of the conversations and joke in Ghost Dog are very goofy. The one character acting cooky or strange (singing rap lyrics or making a buffalo noise) while the other characters give him deadpan stares back is a convention seen over and over again in Japanese films and it is shown off in Ghost Dog. Even the man dying of a heart attack rather than a gun shot is something that would be loved in Japanese cinema while maybe getting some looks of confusion from an average American crowd of movie goers. These inspirations are just as over the top as the portrayal of its Italian American Robert DeNiro lookalike Goodfellas impersonators.

Now, I don’t consider myself very knowledgeable on Todorov or Narrative, I read the article, probably not closely enough as I couldn’t contribute much to discussion in class, but I’ll talk about what I can here.

From what I understood while reading, narrative is the way a story is told, and changing the narrative will change how the story is perceived.  Todorov gives several examples of similar situations; people getting caught in inappropriate sexual situations. And each differed from the one before it, but retained some of the same, more central information. Each one of these stories are told from a different narrative about a similar idea.

Todorov’s style an organization on narrative reminded me a lot of Aristotle and Poetics. Where Aristotle talked about tragedy, Todorov discussed narrative, I like this type of organization.

Timothy Corrigan sums up Richard Dyer’s “Entertainment and Utopia” excellently in the quote:

Dyer’s essay, “Entertainment and Utopia,” originally published in Movie in 1977, spells out in clear terms with concrete examples that the Hollywood musical is less concerned with what utopia looks like (although certain movies attempt to depict ideal societies) than with what utopia feels like, and this is conveyed primarily through musical numbers that obey rules different from those of ordinary life. (466)

This plays on the absurdity of the musical. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone break out into a song about doing dishes or starting homework. Similarly, I’ve never seen someone unscriptedly sing about love or ephemerality. It’s just not natural. And that’s exactly it: utopia, in both the political and artistic sense, is not natural. It usually feels good, but it almost never looks “right”. Utopia is unnatural and absurd.

(Un)fortunately,  Ghost Dog (Jarmusch, 1999) is not a musical. How do we relate it to the article? Well, for starters, it’s definitely absurd. The samurai overtones: absurd. The bumbling, child-like, idiotic gangsters (whom we have been conditioned to register as manly and intimidating): absurd. Urban isolationism: perhaps it’s not absurd to some people, but the fact that he can’t talk to his “best friend” is certainly absurd. In this way, Ghost Dog fits the bill of a utopian film; however, utopia is really a subjective term. Whose utopia is it? Not mine. Here’s why:

Like I said, it has samurai overtones. The “code” intertitles, the undying dedication to a master as a theme, and the holstering swishes all point to the samurai films of the past. These gestures are just as out of place as musical numbers are in musicals — the mob bosses even express this absurdity in their first round-table discussion. Yet, in my opinion, Jarmusch doesn’t go far enough in demonstrating his allusion to samurai film because the genre generally utilizes choreographed hand to hand combat and several wide angle and telephoto shots of nature and he does not do this in his film. Ghost Dog doesn’t look like a samurai film and therefore it doesn’t feel absurd like a samurai film should. It’s a boring hardwood film lacking the necessary veneer. As such, Ghost Dog doesn’t do it for me.

“But wait, I thought Dyer said it doesn’t matter what utopia looks like!” Dyer did say this, but I have to disagree with him almost entirely in this case. Jarmusch can tell his viewers a million times over that Ghost Dog is a samurai film — and believe me, he says it as many times as he can– but that doesn’t make it a samurai film. In the case of the samurai genre and many other genres, look and feel undeniably go hand in hand.

Ghost Dog (1999) starring Forest Whitaker was a very interesting film to me. To be honest I didn’t particularly think it was all that great as far as story goes but it definitely contained things that I did enjoy and small subtleties that were very clever in their execution. One thing that I thought was great , which everyone keeps talking about, is how the cartoons actions are used as strong methods of foreshadowing in the movie. For example the ending, when the mobster is watching a cartoon character shooting through a drain pipe to attack another character and that exactly what Ghost Dog does to antagonist towards the end of the film. This was one aspect of the film that I really enjoyed. I feel that it was a strong element throughout the movie.

Another thing that I really like was how he was constantly followed by the pigeons and in almost ever shot there was a pigeon somewhere always kind of looking over him. When he is passing the other guy on the street who is wearing the camouflage outfit, there is a pigeon that is always above Ghost Dog no matter what. These pigeons played a large role and were symbols throughout the whole film. The pigeons weren’t the only symbols though many other animals including the dog and bear. Animals in general played a role and they are very sacred to the samurai. One thing that I was reading about the film and trying to understand was when Ghost Dog and his friend go onto a roof top and see a man building a boat and I wondered why the boat scene was necessary for this movie? After some thought and seeing all of the animals in the movie, Im not sure why but I kept finding myself coming back to the story of Noah and his Ark. I dont really know how else to elaborate but Ghost Dog and his friend were talking about how he would get it down? and they joked about a flood and when they interrupted the man he just said he didnt understand and that he stressed how he needed to finish and how it seemed like he was in a rush to finish just like Noah. That was one part that I thought was interesting.

Finally, the question of genre kept getting throw into our class discussion and we were trying to find a set genre for the movie. Ghost Dog is in my opinion just another Crime Movie with aspects of a thriller. But we argued that the film contains many different aspects of other genres and I think its really important to be able to label a film with a set genre. The film could definitely be classified on many levels as a number of genres. One post I thought was interesting and liked to read was Chris Kelly’s blog and how he can see it as a western with various scenes that hint at that genre specifically the end when Ghost Dog and Louie are standing in the street. I couldn’t agree more with his post. Also I noticed that the movie was considered a Martial Arts film and in these films generally there are a lot of martial arts fighting but in this movie he just does all his fighting with a gun and there is maybe five seconds of actual martial arts when the mugger gets beat up by the elderly man bringing groceries to his car. I found this interesting and was just wondering if others believe this movie to be a “true” martial arts film. I know it had a lot of tendencies of many Japanese movies and I haven’t seen my far share of those so if someone could elaborate more on that then that would be cool.

I know we discussed the concept of tragedy last week, but while I was watching Birdman last night, the idea kind of came back to me. (I know we didn’t watch it in class, but I found it relatable). At the Golden Globes, Michael Keaton won Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, for his role as Riggan, but I didn’t reaaaally see it as a comedy, but I guess I could consider it a dark, dark, dark, dark, dark comedy.

****SPOILERS BELOW FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T SEEN IT****

In the final 20ish minutes of the film, the climax revolves around opening night of Riggan’s broadway debut. He had already spoken with a critic who told him she would tear his show a part, and to him, it seems like his life is falling apart. Cue the dramatic moment where he picks up a gun, instead of his prop gun, loads it, and walks on stage.

The scene continues and eventually ends with Riggan shooting himself, and supposedly killing himself. The following scene is choppy and drastically different from the rest of the seamless film, and I took it to be Riggan’s life flashing in his final moments. Then things get weird — I believe that when Riggan wakes up in the hospital, its the final moments of his dream-like state, or even his afterlife, where everything is just as it should be for him — a good relationship with wife and daughter, a good critique, an already fixed nose, and being able to actually fly out the window.

To me the ending, and movie as a whole, was a tragedy. It ended with the death of the lead, and the whole plot was about strained relationships, struggles with inner demons, and Riggan’s seemingly worthless life.  Though I found some of the dialogue comical, I don’t think I would ever jump to say that this film should be put in the “comedy/musical” category. To me it was very much a drama, and pretty much a tragedy — and I never realized that those could be intertwined.

So, I have a question about this: Is Birdman a tragedy? Can it be both a comedy and a tragedy? Or, does it have to do with hybridity in genres.