I have to say, it was a pleasure watching Run Lola Run in class today.  Tom Tykwer takes us through an incredibly offbeat, intense and interesting ride that follows a young woman and her boyfriend’s struggle to return 100,000 marks to his boss to avoid getting killed.

Despite being made 17 years ago, the film is still refreshingly un-linear in its story telling, and involves a big of magical realism.  How many movies do you ever get to see where the main character is shot dead in the first 30 minutes? Surprising the viewer like this speaks greatly to a generational shift away from beginning-middle-end story telling and towards a style that defies rhetorical laws.  But laws are meant to be broken in the art world, and Tykwer couldn’t have accomplished this any better.  He plays with time through his exhaustingly intense montages of Lola running through streets in the city over and over and over again throughout the film, and leaves us with a constant sense of doubt about the re-vitalized future.

What I thought was the most interesting thing that Tykwer did, though, was his inclusion of conversations between Manni and Lola in bed after each one of them takes a turn dying as a result of miscues in their mission to reclaim 100,000 marks.  As each seem to be on the verge of dying, a slow zooming close up on the faces of the near-deceased results in a transition to the two of them lying next to eachother in bed, questioning each other’s dedication to each other.  Lola is interested in knowing if Manni really loves her, and Manni later wants to know if Lola would really care if he died.  The characters themselves are refreshingly realistic in their approach of their answers, and the dialogue is captivating as it does not glorify concepts of love and death, but rather demonstrates the deep fear associated with both topics.  The scene is lit with a deep, disturbing red color, and serves to heat up the angst that both feel as they converse.  Tykwer accomplishes an odd cinematic Purgatory here, which results in a final gasp for life that sends a bag of money falling to the earth, a phone falling onto its jack and a red-haired Lola once more sprinting from her home to try to save the day.

Further, Tykwer accomplishes an amazing affect in the way that he includes a lightening quick photo-montage of the seemingly uninteresting people that Lola runs into as she runs to Manni.  These people are characterized multiple times in multiple different ways through only a couple snapshots of their future or previous lives, leaving us with an odd connection to all of them, maybe even a certain sadness.  Tykwer show us his power as a film maker – he controls what we think of, what we see, what we care about.  We are in the midst of thinking solely of the lives of Lola and Manni as they face imminent death up until these points, and we are forced instead to give weight to the lives of trivial characters and their stories.  In under an hour and a half we see two main characters die twice, and in about 5 seconds we see the condensed story of a passing character’s death.  The power to create an emotional connection in only a couple of seconds is one that only film makers possess to this extent, as the assumption is that the viewer as bought into the entire experience from the very beginning.

Watching At Land (1944) by Maya Deren made me feel disoriented. One minute this woman is climbing up tree branches on the beach, and the next she is climbing across a table in a smoke filled room with people on both sides of her. There are many more examples of jumping from one place of scenery to the next which confuses the audience. This film plays with the idea of reality. The shots put together in the montage make it seem like two completely different objects are meant to go together. So after the disorientation, I suddenly understood. Deren put these images together, one after the other, to distort reality. And somehow the cuts made sense. The shots mirrored each other and made a nice story that actually included continuous themes and objects.

I realized the same thing during Run Lola Run (1989). The film was very disorienting. The blurry shots of people walking around in the beginning, not being able to see actual faces or scenery. Later on it would change from Lola in human form to Lola in cartoon form. I was just really confused during the whole film on what was real and what was a distortion of reality. Which scenario was the real outcome?

I guess both of these films were created to confuse the audience. To make them think in an artistic way and to think outside of the box. To think outside the realm of reality.

In At land (1994), encompasses the image of woman washed up on the sand by the waves of the ocean, though the film is silent, the action isn’t. There are different movements whether it’s the motion of the waves, the flying of birds. She holds onto a branch of wood which brings her to life (waken by nature). Then the Illusion of a climbing a branch, then leads to the climb of a table surrounded by men and women in conversation and smoking cigarettes. The fading of both scenes, climbing through nature and reality (a table surrounded by people who don’t even notice her) Leads to a man playing chess. The actress is always disappearing through holes and appears in different settings. Lots of going through, climbing up, climbing down, falling through, going up and moving through the scene from wide-shots and close-ups.

In Meshes of The Afternoon (1943), the protagonist who is played by Deren is the central focus through her silhouette casted on the wall as she picks up the flower from the floor. At the beginning of this short experimental film there is some secrecy to  it because we have no idea who the lady in the shadow is. The interaction between the shadows and life were great towards the beginning of the film. As the film continues we don’t know its dreamlike quality until the scenes, mise-en-scene and sounds are familiar to things we recognize in the film earlier on. (i.e., The knife, the telephone, the flower, the protagonist chasing a black figure in the distance, the record player, the bed, the key, the door, the couch of the woman sleeping and the stairs) The play on these aspects of the film are what reveal its overall focus is to reveal a dream, which are confusing, nonrealistic and repetitive in this case. Overall, her film plays on the subconscious level of self and discusses even further the capturing of reality with a tie on exposure to the non-realistic parts of life our dreams onscreen.

Both short films seem dreamlike and as if Maya Deren is going through the different types of herself? Through her effects and edits  in her short films.

Maya Deren makes a metaphor on page 153 where she compares the parts to a film to those of a table.   She states that there are a multitude of characteristics to the table that different people would appreciate more such as an artist would appreciate its color, an antiques dealer its age, and a child “its inaccessible height.”  She goes on to say that, if the table were in a scene and it were to break, only one of its characteristics might be appreciated, it’s age (due to frailty), and all other information about that table would be useless.  The color had no role in its destruction and neither did its height.  This point resonated with me because, without the consideration of metaphor, in any scenario where you know the outcome, you can exact what piece of information is the most important and determine that the rest of the information is useless in terms of progressing a story.  Within the metaphor, it brings film to a point of definition.  You can interpret frames of a film in a multitude of ways but when it comes to the contextualization of those frames, as the film moves forward, there are less interpretations that can be made because most of the given information begins to be stripped away and meaning begins to reveal itself.

I found this point to be so interesting because I rationalize it as like trimming fat from an essay or removing filler from a story.  To have this applied to the idea that films are forms of art fueled by ideology, it makes sense that in the same way we try to wrap up a persuasive essay, we want to go from broad to specific, and I can see how that can be done in film from plot, to production, to ideology.

The above quote, from Gastby but appropriate for our discussion of Day for Night, is pretty perfect for Truffaut’s thesis. The dream scenes really stuck out to me… I loved the fact that we journey inside the director’s head for three vignettes and discover his inner psychological desires. For Truffaut, a cinematic masterpiece is his green light. And when we finally discover that the child is walking towards Citizen Kane posters (and struggles to reach for the posters of the masterpiece), we see that Truffaut desperately wants to make a piece of art that will allow us to see the world through his lens. I think it’s interesting to compare a man like Gatsby (a man made entirely from his own imagination) and Truffaut who is creating an entire world from his own imagination.

So to jump to a new topic regarding idealogical cinema apparatus – perhaps Baudry is completely right. All film is idealogical. There is no way for a film to be real. Truffaut confirms this with his behind the scenes look at the filmmaking process. But can’t life be purely idealogical? Can’t film not offer a better glimpse at reality than some people who choose to be alternative versions of themselves? Or is the alternative versions of ourselves merely alternate realities we create and thus all of reality is true verisimilitude, but art can never accomplish this due to the means of artistic communication may it be a brush, a guitar, or a camera. I’ve often found film to be far more educational regarding human interactions and communication styles than real life. Film paints life in an understandable way. I love that film is idealogical. It is a fantasy a collaborative group of artists create to help explain reality (when the film is trying to recreate life through a story).

I think all of us, may it be Gatsby, Truffaut, or anyone in the class, is in some way an idealogical version of themselves. That is how we see the world. It is natural. What Baudry argues is that film takes our idealogical lens and turns it into reality… Perhaps that’s the greatest mystery of them all. We all want to attain what is out of reach. We all want to secure our idealogical vision for our future. Sometimes it is so close we can hardly fail to grasp it. Film is our way of dissecting that inner quest – a quest that through cinema can bring us all together over a common ground, whether we read the film in similar ways or not.

I noticed several connections in the two short films we watched and the readings we’ve had. The idea of the montage was used throughout these films. Combining images to create a new narrative. When the protagonist of At Land climbs up driftwood roots to find herself on a dining room table, crawling through vegetation and along the table, and several other possible examples utilized this effectively to move the film forward. In addition to this I recall reading about a similar idea in which the camera, while in motion, is blurred to simulate a quick pan, and in the blur is the cut that was made from some sort of tower back to the protagonist on the beach.

Many of these ideas were utilized in Meshes of the Afternoon as well. But sometimes instead of using a montage or way to cover up a change, cuts were used instead. With keys turning into knifes right on screen.

I do not know if this is a popular opinion, but I disliked both these films very much, and while I see how they connect to our discussions and readings, I found them dull and difficult to get through.

Towards the end of class, we started discussing the barrier of the fence that restricted the young Truffaut from reaching images of the movie Citizen Kane. I believe this barrier represents the problems that went into the making of his film “Meet Pamela”. Truffaut runs into problems left and right. One of the actresses needs to be in a bathing suit but refuses because she is pregnant. Another actress is too drunk to perform her lines. The main character dies and the script needs to be rewritten. Alfonse and Julie are both on the verge of mental breakdowns which makes it impossible to keep shooting.

As the director, Truffaut has to deal with all of these problems. It gives him severe anxiety throughout, which explains his reoccurring dream as a young boy on the street. In both the dream and real life, Truffaut gets around these barriers. As a young boy he reaches through the fence and slyly grabs the images of Citizen Kane. As a director, he fixes all the problems he encounters some way or another.

I believe these barriers are true to what happens with film making. It is a challenge and directors, as well as actors, are always being tested. Barriers symbolize the difference between reality and make believe in films. The actors in La Nuit Americane get mixed up with what is real life and what is acting. For example, Julie and Alfonse, characters of love interest in the film, end up together in bed even though Julie is happily married. Boundaries were broken, and the actors often said they were quitting films, it was just too hard. I think there is a constant struggle with people involved with films, going back and forth between these boundaries (or barriers) of reality and film.

Reflecting back on our class discussion today, I kept thinking about what was said about Kuleshov’s piece on montage and how he believes cinema can define reality. The point was made that perhaps the reality Soviet’s sought to portray was more mundane than that of the bourgeoisie American reality, with the in class comparison being Soviet photography in the 1970s that showed people standing in a field. Thinking about it more, and at the risk of sounding overly pretentious and critical, I think it is important for us to consider what “reality” means to an author when they write about cinema’s relation to it. Additionally, I think it is important for us to keep both the time period and place that a piece of film theory was written. Surely Baudry, Mayne, and Kuleshov would all agree that cinema works within an ideological framework. However, Kuleshov distinguishes himself from the rest of the authors we are reading because he does not criticize exclusively American films. The issues that Baudry and Mayne seek to address, as well as their shared point about cinema’s inability to portray reality, focus only on how it applies to classic Hollywood films.

Kuleshov, on the other hand, addresses American, European, and Soviet films. When speaking about the reality that film can portray, I believe he is speaking exclusively about Soviet film’s ability to do just that; given his background and the analogy he used about the capitalist vs. communist newspapers in the beginning of the piece, I think it is logical to conclude that he writes from a pro-Soviet, anti-capitalist perspective, and therefore believes that only Soviet films are rooted in any sort of reality. Additionally, I think it is important to remember the time period that he is writing in: 1935. During this time in the Soviet Union, socialist realist was the predominant genre of art, whether it was painting, literature, or film. Socialist realism as a genre sought to show the bright “reality” that the future held once communism became fully entrenched in society. Thus, art that fell under the socialist realist genre, which was most art that was available to the public at this time, created a reality that people believed was achievable, but did not necessarily reflect the reality that they were experiencing at the time. I would argue, therefore, that by asserting that cinema reflected reality, Kuleshov was not employing the same definition of reality as those who examined exclusively American cinema.

I’m not entirely sure what this rant all adds up to, but I think it speaks to the importance of keeping both the author’s mindset and the period each piece was written in in mind.

After reading  Paradoxes of Spectatorship Judith Mayne points out that cinema as an emerging discipline the “responses to appartatus theory are founded on a gap between the ideal subject postulated by the apparatus and the spectator who is always in an imperfect reation tothat ideal” (9). She used the “ideal romance reader” example as a way of explaining this relationship with the intentions of showing the veiwer, as a spectator, that they should be aware of this relationship.  This argument was no doubt very dense and abstract and I found myself understanding her argument better when I thought of a small anectdote from literary history, specficially fairty tales. In Jack David Zipes author of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion he explains the universality of fairy tales with the purpose of soothing “the anxieties of children or help them therapeuticallly to realize who they are” (Zipes 6).  During Louis XIV’s reign the french began designing their folk tales into literary fairy tales,  including Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood.  But these literary fairy tales were “designed to rearragne the motifs, character, themes, functions, configurations in such a way that they would address the concerens of the educated and ruling lcass of late feudal and early capitalist societies” (Zipes 6).  Keeping Mayne’s argument in mind the french arisotcrats were trying manipulate the gap between specatator and the apparatus in order fix imperfect relation and create their “ideal citizens.” This historical anectdote in conversation with Mayne’s article, for me, gives an idea of what the possible consequences of homogeneity.