“We all know a genre when we see one,” (552) writes Rick Altman to convey the ambiguity of genre theory (while implicitly referencing Justice Stewart’s comment on whether Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1958) is pornographic or not – “I know it when I see it”).

Altman pinpoints at three contradictions within the existing literature of genre theory. Firstly, the way films are categorized into designated genres, namely, inclusive and exclusive lists. The former refers to when “tautological definition of the genre” (553) sets the standards for thinking about genre such as Western as “film[s] that takes place in the American West,” and the latter is those lists where the genre conventions are dissected from the films. In this sense, while one lacks detailed distinctions and presents a checklist for categorizing a film, the other picks quintessential examples and revolve the category around them – but it is not clear how that exclusive list has become the “quintessential” one: how film A is regarded as better at capturing the genre conventions and not film B, for instance, if we are not defining the genre from a pre-set understanding of motifs.

As inclusive and exclusive lists are the basis of these contradictions, it is better to present Altman’s intervention first and then show how it solves others. Briefly going over semantic and syntactic approaches, Altman takes Western as an example and presents various definitions for the genre. While some focuses on semantic elements such as “traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like” and defines Western in a set of spatial and temporal aspects the story sets in, others focus more on the “relationship linking lexical elements” (557) and argue that “vocabulary is . . . generated by this syntactic relationship, and not vice versa” (557). Altman’s intervention comes with Pennsylvania westerns: he asks if “these films construct plots and develop a frontier structure clearly derived from decades of western novels and films” but does not follow others in the genre spatially and temporally, are they considered westerns?

Altman’s formulation of semantic/syntactic argues that favouring one sort of definition over other creates the problem as these approaches are in fact complementary. Thus, the first contradiction is addressed by bringing “explanatory power” of the inclusive lists and structural focus of the exclusive ones as Altman states that “we need to recognize that not all genre films relate to their genre in the same way or to the same extent” (558). This takes us to the second contradiction, which is the semiotic approach’s failure to address the historical foundations of a genre. Altman proposes two ways for how a given genre emerges: “either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements” (558). In this sense, instead of treating genres as Platonic categories, Altman considers them historically and accounts for the industry’s impact.

This is where the third, and final, contradiction Altman discusses comes into play: two strands of genre criticism, the ritual and the ideological approaches. Stemming from Levi-Strauss, the former emphasizes “on the mythical qualities of Hollywood genres” and the way the audience forms a ritual bound with the movies. In this sense, they argue, “by choosing the films it would patronize, the audience revealed its preferences and its beliefs, thus inducing Hollywood studios to produce films reflecting its desires” (555). The ideological approach, on the other hand, argues that the audience does not have the authorship power and they, in fact, “are manipulated by the business and political interests of Hollywood” (555). Altman states how two opposing camps of theory usually cite the same group of films to support their arguments because of “the fundamentally bivalent nature of any relatively stable generic syntax” (559). He thus argues that “Hollywood does not simply lend its voice to the public’s desires, nor does it simply manipulate the audience. On the contrary, most genres go through a period of accommodation during which the public’s desires are fitted to Hollywood’s priorities (and vice versa)” (559).

Then how do we distinguish between semantic and syntactic elements? Altman writes that we need to distinguish between “the primary, linguistic meaning of a text’s component parts and the secondary or textual meaning that those parts acquire through a structuring process internal to the text or to the genre. Within a single text, therefore, the same phenomenon may have more than one meaning depending on whether we consider it at the linguistic or textual level” (561).

Following Altman, the obvious destination for us would be discussing Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and David Milch’s Deadwood and comparing their different genre sensibilities. As they are different forms of storytelling, textual elements differ accordingly. However, a technical aspect of both stands out: as if addressing Anne Friedberg’s call for film studies to account for different screens, the TV series uses 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio while the film uses 4:3 aspect ratio. Both are outside of conventional cinematic aspect ratio (I mean for contemporary films since 4:3 is technically the Academy ratio), but it still is curious that the TV series opts for a widescreen considering that anamorphic formats (2:1 to 2.76:1) were first used by the industry to differentiate movie theatre screens from televisions. So, my questions are: What kind of difference does this make for our perception of genre conventions in both? Considering the character archetypes Deadwood employs in portraying women, for instance, does Meek’s Cutoff’s aspect ratio makes any difference if we are to consider Emily Tetherow as the protagonist of the film? Or more generally, what does Meek’s Cutoff’s choice of aspect ratio, among many others, tell in terms of storytelling in comparison to the epic ethos of westerns-at-large?

While the Academy ratio of 4:3 used by contemporary films for various reasons (stylistic concerns, to convey a sense of being trapped, authenticity for the setting) Reichardt’s aesthetic choice also brings to mind the question of realism (as a sort of revisionist-“Revisionist-western,” Meek’s Cutoff is more concerned with everyday reality than its genre counterparts, and not using a widescreen aspect ratio helps to give it a more “real” feeling as opposed to cinematic grandeur in terms of depicting vast, open spaces): Where the audience is positioned within the film? Or, in other words, how the suture works when a film chooses a more realistic approach of storytelling as opposed to established genre conventions? Moreover, how should we conceptualize the film’s realism considering the distinction Manovich makes between realism and photorealism (“the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image” [791])? Are genres, in this sense, mere commercial storytelling styles? If so, as a film more concerned with day-to-day life, how could we position Meek’s Cutoff among other films we have seen this year? From a “genre perspective,” is it more close to, for instance, Stagecoach (1939) or 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007)?

Altman, Rick. 2009. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film .” In Film Theory and Criticism , edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 552-563. Oxford University Press.

Friedberg, Anne. 2009. “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change.” In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 802-813. Oxford University Press.

Manovich, Lev. 2009. “From the Language of New Media.” In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 777-794. Oxford University Press.

If it please the seminar: let us direct our attention to a conjoined pair of scenes from “Sold Under Sin,” the twelfth episode from the first season of the American television drama Deadwood, which first aired on Home Box Office (HBO) in 2004. The scenes in question begin at 18:51 of the copy hosted online by the Secured Media Library of The Ohio State University (as of November 2020); they end at 27:46 of the same. The scenes carry into roughly the middle of the episode, which also serves as the finale of the first season. They depict protagonist Seth Bullock as he first confronts Otis Russell (father to main ensemble character Alma Garret); witnesses a speech by US Army General George Crook, announcing a defeat of the Sioux and proclaiming vengeance for the death of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn; then confronts Con Stapleton, a dubious supporting character who had recently gotten himself appointed Sheriff of Deadwood.[1] Not least for how one flows into the next, these are to be suggested as a single passage in which the simultaneous presence of “cinematic” and “televisual” structural elements can be discussed. 

At the outset of the first scene, Seth Bullock arrives at the hotel managed by E. B. Farnum to confront Otis Russell, who recently turned up in Deadwood for the first time. By this time, it has been demonstrated that a plot of land left to Garret by her deceased husband is rich with gold. Garret herself and Bullock, who has since agreed to represent Garret’s interests, have realized that Russell intends to swindle his daughter. Finding him at the hotel, Bullock is led by Russell to the Bella Union, a saloon, gambling parlor, and brothel operated by Cy Tolliver. Here Russell intends to play craps. As they walk, Bullock makes clear his intentions. 

A surge of dramatic energy overcomes the scene. In addition to Garret, whose connection to the situation is obviously more personal, Farnum drops what he is doing and rushes after Bullock and Russell to catch sight of what will happen. 

Then, over the throwing of dice at the Bella Union, Russell threatens to implicate Bullock in the suspicious death of Garret’s husband should Bullock lay a hand on him (Mr. Garret was in fact murdered by an employee of primary antihero Al Swearengen, himself a saloon owner and pimp). 

By now, the camera has noted the rapt interest of several established characters positioned about the scene—such as Tolliver, Charlie Utter, Sol Star, and A. W. Merrick, besides Garret and Farnum. These observances are interspersed between close-ups of Russell and Bullock, as the former attempts to back down the latter.

Bullock ultimately swings and beats Russell bloody, and dares him to “draw a map” for anyone who might return on his account seeking reprisal. Lying on the floor, Russell spits out his own teeth. 

As Bullock finishes with this, the sound of marching band music becomes audible in the background. Bullock then steps outside the saloon. He is breathing heavily and is wide-eyed, as though bewildered by what he had himself just done.

He turns toward the diegetic source of the music, which has grown louder: a detachment of United States Army soldiers marching into camp. 

He turns again, and witnesses as Sheriff Con Stapleton comes upon where a white resident and has just stabbed a Chinese washerman. Tolliver looks on all this with a knowing glance. In the background, an employee of Swearengen’s named Johnny Burns drags the ailing Rev. Smith down the muddy street on a sled. 

Bullock turns back and now witnesses as General George Crook recounts that his troops had come upon the Sioux who defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn. The Sioux, he announces, had been vanquished, avenging “valiant Custer.” Given this development, Crook informs those gathered of his confidence that Deadwood was soon to be annexed by the United States government. 

Meanwhile, Stapleton finds his way to Bullock, the former expressing his appreciation that the latter could bear witness to his encounter “amongst the Celestials.” Bullock denounces Stapleton, who all along as Sheriff has been double-dealing and agitating against the Chinese in the employ of Tolliver. Bullock tears the badge off Stapleton’s lapel and tosses it into the mud.

After Stapleton storms off, Bullock retrieves it and glances up—catching the eye of Swearengen.

As the scene winds down, Crook’s quartermaster discusses the provisioning of supplies with Farnum, while Tolliver convinces Crook to lodge at the Bella Union. 

These nine minutes of run-time stand out for the criss-crossing web of narrative threads strong across them. Yet more noteworthy, this passage witnesses pivotal moments in multiple plotlines. At least two seem to reach their end—Otis Russell’s designs on his daughter Alma’s gold claim, and Con Stapleton’s career as Sheriff of Deadwood. At least two more begin—Seth Bullock inclining toward adopting the role of lawman, and the presence of United States troops in Deadwood. Meanwhile, we simply remain somewhere in the middle of others—the development of Deadwood as a settled community; Deadwood’s political status relative to the United States of America; the fate of indigenous peoples in the American West, and the settlement of “Old World” populations in that region; the social position of the ethnic Chinese living in Deadwood; Cy Tolliver’s schemes in Deadwood; Alma Garret’s place in Deadwood and her future there; Seth Bullock’s relationships to Garret, to Tolliver, and to Al Swearengen; the place of various other recognizable characters, and their varying relationships to each other; and, finally, the slow death of Rev. Smith. 

Intentional or otherwise, the moment of transition from Bullock’s confrontation with Russell to the rest of the sequence is an instance of remarkable symbolism. To reiterate, sound of marching music becomes audible just before Bullock is finished with Russell inside the Bella Union. As he moves to exit the building, the sound becomes louder. When he does emerge outdoors, we are torn between two pieces of visual information—the expression on Bullock’s face, and the formation of troops who are seen over his shoulder and are the source of the song. Bullock quickly thereafter is shown turning toward the soldiers, whose presence dominate the scene even when visual focus shifts to Sheriff Stapleton and his doings. Before Bullock steps outside, Otis Russell looms large over this episode; after he steps outside, Russell is a minimal factor in the drama. But there is no hard cut from the decisive moment in which Bullock beats and dares Russell to whatever comes after. There is instead the bridge provided by the arrival of the soldiers. Through it we are confronted with a lack of finality in the experience of Deadwood. One thing spills over into another, or multiple things converge before going back on their separate ways. Even much of what seems to end really is nested into something larger. And, in this season finale of all episodes, the conscious viewer understands that what begins will likely not be soon resolved. 

Thus we might step back and reflect on a larger permeable boundary, one which overarches all of this—that between the “cinematic” and the “televisual.” In her essay “The End of Cinema” (2000), media scholar Anne Friedberg argues that “the differences between the media of movies, television, and computers are rapidly diminishing”[2] following on successive innovations in media technology over the twentieth century. Key among these were (and have been) the diffusion of affordable consumer access to home video and to broadened line-ups of broadcasting channels. In a moment still prior to YouTube, iPhone, Netflix, Instagram Stories, or Roku, she observes how the spread of videocassette recorders and coaxial cable had remarkably enlarged the range of what an average viewer could watch, and what they could be provided to watch. For scholarly purposes, both developments have proven consequential for the kinds and quantities of audiovisual cultural products that can be isolated for study.  

To be sure, Friedberg acknowledges that film-going as an activity occurring in external social space had not disappeared at the turn of the third millennium A.D. It has since slowed to a crawl in the moment of COVID-19, but there is every reason to believe it will survive this pestilence. What Friedberg finds reflected in market research information through the 1990s however, is the balance of mass audience attention shifting from the “cinematic” in favor of “the “televisual.” By her title, then, she does not mean to suggest the metaphoric light of something understood as “cinema” has gone out in the world. Rather, she argues that the boundaries separating what counts as cinema from whatever appears on television have become fluid. In light of this, it becomes necessary for her that the intellectual project called “film studies” to reconsider “what constitutes the size, shape, and scope of the discipline’s objects.”[3]

If we tentatively accept the “cinematic” as a mode given to discrete, self-contained expression, and the “televisual” by contrast as an episodic, ongoing (sometimes meandering) format, Deadwood becomes an interesting lens through which to examine the landscape of audiovisual narrative media in this young century. Without extending our scope too far beyond that series, we might briefly observe a perceptual shift through which dominant cinematic offerings have become more televisual since the 1970s, and especially since 2000. More recently, one need only consider how the Star Wars Saga or the Marvel Cinematic Universe—franchise properties which collectivity generate inconceivable amounts of dollars in revenue—utilized the site of “the cinema” as a space to unfurl multi-installment, high-impact spectaculars.[4] Both are noteworthy in that they have done well to also intertwine their showings in the cinema with more traditional television programming.[5] All else need be said here is that these properties merely are two which have been franchised to immense commercial success. 

Coincident with this turn in the history of the movies, the more classically “televisual” medium has apparently matured and become more “cinematic.” As much has been captured in ongoing discourse around “prestige television”[6] in the age of “Peak TV.”[7] For its own part, Deadwood first appeared just few years after “The End of Cinema,” and features prominently among the canonical HBO “texts.” As a collective, the earliest of these slightly predate Friedberg’s essay, and they form something of a vanguard in the history of “prestige” programming. More specifically, Deadwood exemplifies a kind of series that takes full advantage of television’s capacity for long-form storytelling, but also operates within bounds that respect the limits of an organic creator’s artistic vision. It should be noted that Deadwood ran for three seasons, each comprised of a dozen episodes, and ended when creator, co-executive producer, and sometime writer David Milch turned down a commission for an order of even half as many further installments. 

This makes Deadwood structurally quite unlike a more classical broadcast network narrative series, which would have been commissioned for closer to a couple dozen episodes each season, and been egged-on to run for as long as agreeable audience share held out.[8] Provision of capital to realize Deadwood surely was conditional upon audience-generation as well, but HBO practices a model television service that does not idealize saturation the same as the foundational broadcast networks historically have. The HBO model privileges notions of artistic quality and creative freedom, guided by the logic that such will draw a subscriber base sufficient to fill-out a schedule over time and maintain the revenue stream. (Hence one way of reading the “premium” in “premium cable.”) Through the present, this has done the enterprise well. 

It seems reasonable to speculate that the creative freedom afforded by the likes of HBO follows directly from the panoply of possibility for viewership that Friedberg writes of being opened by VCR and the cable lines. Operating in that landscape, Deadwood is a series that restrains the capacity of the “televisual” for meander. If a more classical long-order series invents a multiplicity of stories within concepts or procedures returned to over-again indefinitely, in Deadwood there is a clearer sense that a narrower-range of stories are being unrolled to something more like an end. Unitary narratives of this nature include Deadwood’s development from prospecting outpost to incorporated organ of civilization, or Seth Bullock’s assumption of an assertive public role in community life. For their scope and sense of direction, these narratives could be discussed in terms of the “cinematic,” even as they explore detail the cinema can hardly reach. Nested within them are intraseasonal narratives that land within range of feature length; the last days of “Wild Bill” Hickok, as depicted in the first season, comes to mind. 

But for all that, the structure of Deadwood is seasons of episodes. No matter what each does to advance larger narratives, episodes and seasons conform to internal plot structures and terminate with relative degrees of resolution. Across episodes and between orders of magnitude, many narratives move, but not always move at the same speed or in the same order. Even though ultimately subordinated to the larger vision of a particular creator—in this case, David Milch—different episodes are products of different writers and directors in combination. These are calling-cards of the “televisual.” So we return once more to the bridge between scenes in “Sold Under Sin” provided by the arrival of US Army soldiers in Deadwood. Over it, neither the depth of overlapping story-threads, nor the way they subsume into each other, can be ignored. As Deadwood plotlines are subsumed into each other, the “cinematic” is subsumed into the “televisual.” It is not unlike Friedberg writing that “the cinema…has become embedded in—or perhaps lost in–the new technologies that surround it.”[9]  

Questions for Discussion:

1. Does Deadwood qualify as “cinema.” Are elements of it merely “cinematic”? What determines this? How porous is the boundary? 
2. Besides the taxonomy proposed above, how else can the “cinematic” and the “televisual” be classified in distinction from each other? 
3. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich contrasts the view of André Bazin that film history is a relatively linear progression towards better capture of visual reality with that of Jean-Louis Comolli or of David Bordwell and Janet Staiger, who offered a couple variations of an argument that cinematic techniques are introduced over time in a process of “substitution” meant to sustain illusion or interest. To what extent does the emergence of outlets like HBO or the phenomena of “prestige TV” realize Bazin’s narrative, and to what degree do they realize Comolli or Bordwell and Staiger’s narratives? 
4. Can Deadwood be usefully described as realizing conventions of “art cinema,” such as outlined by David Bordwell in “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” or even by Peter Wollen in “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent D’Est”? Can any overlap be dismissed as by-product of the structure of televisual narrative, or does the format of long-form televised storytelling lend itself well to art cinema? 

Notes:

[1] Deadwood Season One, Episode Twelve: “Sold Under Sin”. Accessible with a valid Ohio State University log-in here: https://drm.osu.edu/media/Media/Play/5983?format=High 

[2] Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016), 802 

[3] Ibid, 813

[4] That interest among the major American networks in staging “spectaculars” is traceable to the early history of commercial television may be noteworthy here. (See: James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961 (2007).) Of course, Tom Gunning’s work on the “cinema of attraction,” which precedes television, ought be kept in mind. (See: Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde” (Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4), 1986.) 

[5] See: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s Daredevil, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, or The Mandalorian. 

[6] Kathryn Vanarendonk, “Why ‘One Big Movie’ Isn’t the Best Model for Prestige TV” (Slate, Slate.com), 3-17-2017. https://slate.com/culture/2017/03/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-prestige-tv-is-like-a-10-hour-movie.html .

[7] See: Meg James, “Peak TV Hits Another Peak With 495 Original Scripted Shows; Streaming Services Produce More Than Broadcast and Basic Cable” (Los Angeles Times, LATimes.com), 12-13-2018. https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-peak-tv-fx-2018-report-20181213-story.html . 

Further conversation centers around whether “Peak TV” has in fact already peaked, or yet has room to grow. See: Jean Bentley, “Has Peak TV Reached Its Summit? Industry Insiders Weigh In” (The Hollywood Reporter, HollywoodReporter.com), 2-14-2020. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/has-peak-tv-reached-summit-industry-insiders-weigh-1279196 and Adam Epstein, “Thanks to Streaming, We May Never Reach the Peak of ‘Peak TV’” (Quartz, QZ.com), 1-10-2020. https://qz.com/1783165/thanks-to-streaming-we-may-never-reach-the-peak-of-peak-tv/ . 

[8] Among many others, the likes of Cheers, Dallas, and M*A*S*H each ran in excess of ten seasons and in excess of 250 episodes; such ongoing series as Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and NCIS actually have each exceeded such pre-digital achievements. By contrast, such longer-lived landmark HBO series as The Sopranos and Game of Thrones respectively ran for 86 episodes over six seasons and 73 episodes over eight seasons.

[9] Friedberg, in Braudy and Cohen, 802 

This week’s readings are united by two things. On one hand, they recognize that the films under discussion reject Classical Hollywood cinema and the familiar formulae of cinematic realism. On the other hand, the readings all try to supply an account that helps viewers make sense of the (sometimes) senseless—or at least radically different—priorities of the films and their directors.

I’ll begin with Sitney’s Visionary Film (1979) because I think it may help bring some order to this motley collection of films and videos. Sitney identifies the structural film as an important development in American avant-garde cinema (369). In his view, structural film, which “insists on its shape” (369) rather than content, has four key characteristics:

1. “fixed camera position”;
2. “the flicker effects”;
3. “loop printing”; and
4. “rephotography off the screen.” (369-70)

But instead of investigating these characteristics in detail, Sitney turns to Andy Warhol as the most important precursor of structural film. In Sitney’s account, Warhol demolished a whole series of film-making myths about, inter alia, narrative, duration, attention, and directorial agency (371). Among other strategies, Warhol “simply turned the camera on and walked away” (371-72). He made films of “normal” length in which very little happens. He also made very, very long films in which literally nothing happens. Sitney calls this Warhol’s “temporal gift”: “duration” (374). In a more philosophical register, Warhol—cast in the role of mindfulness meditation guide—forced the viewer to attend to attention, which may “trigge[r] ontological awareness” (374). Both duration and “ontological awareness” on the viewer’s part are antithetical to traditional cinematic norms, where the goal is typically immersion in the world on the screen rather than a reflection on the conditions of viewing itself.

Thiher’s (1977) essay on Un Chien Andalou situates the film in relation to the codes of silent cinema. According to Thiher, silent film’s syntactical developments were largely aimed at rivaling the realist novel from a narrative perspective (38). Surrealists like Buñuel and Dalí rejected this “bourgeois ideology of realistic mimesis” (39) and developed a whole range of alternative strategies around the axiom of “ludic activity . . . that attempts systematically to subvert the rules of the game” (39), including:

1. Attacking spectatorial passivity (this is how Thiher interprets the famous gesture of slicing the eyeball) (39);
2. Rejecting linear chronology (39-40);
3. Disturbing the causality implied in “conventional filmic syntax” (40);
4. Employing black humor “to abolish the distinction . . . between the repressive working of the reality principle and the pleasure principle” (42);
5. Rejecting meaning in narrative (even if there is still “sense”) (42); and
6. Substituting mimetic logic with (Freudian) dream logic (but ultimately asserting that “film can be a mimetic means for representing the world of repressed desire”). (46)

In Thiher’s estimation, Un Chien Andalou amounts to a critical intervention within film—one that subjects it “to the same kind of self-criticism and ironic subversion that the modernist notion of self-consciousness had already subjected literature and painting” (48).

In her essay on the Akerman-chamber/-bedroom, Ivone Margulies (2007) does two helpful things. First, she orients us to the milieu of feminist cinema in the 1970s, and she situates Ackerman’s work in the broader context of video art, a related medium that we might do well to investigate alongside our videos for this week. In terms of the working principles of Akerman’s cinema, Margulies identifies the following strands:

1. Focus on everydayness;
2. Centrality of social reproduction (i.e., domestic labor, care work);
3. Anti-psychological orientation that blocks the representation of interiority (this works as a double rejection of Classical Hollywood and of the distortion of women’s subjectivity in Freudian accounts);
4. Spatial relationality (Akerman’s rooms are simultaneously agoraphobic and in dialogue with the outside world);
5. Hyperattentiveness to mise en scène and the tableau;
6. Performativity over interiority or self-exposure (in terms of Akerman’s own presence in the films).

In the course of situating Akerman’s preoccupation with small domestic spaces, Margulies mentions two video artists working around the same time: Martha Rosler and Vito Acconci. Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” is a send-up of cooking instruction videos, in that nothing is cooked. Instead, Rosler creatively repurposes kitchen utensils to stage an aggressive performance that rejects the idea that women’s place is in the kitchen. Acconci’s creepy, compulsively watchable 1973 video “Theme Song” is probably the better video to put in conversation with Akerman’s (rather than the one Margulies discusses). In both Acconci and Akerman, we find the artist reclining in a domestic space, addressing the viewer, although the similarities end there. I bring up the work of these two video artists because, although it started much later than experimental film (the Portapak video recorder wasn’t widely available until 1967-68), video art developed parallel critiques of conventional cinema and television, such that it may make sense to consider the two media and their critical discourses together.

Questions:

1. Is it still correct that “the precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film is one of radical otherness”? Do “they operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other”? (Sitney 1979, viii)
2. Should we consider experimental film and video art together?
3. From an auteurist perspective (or not), how do we think about directors, like Greenaway, who make highly experimental work, but who also make avant-garde films (“The Pillow Book,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover”) and somewhat (somewhat!) more conventional Hollywood films (“Eisenstein in Guanajuato”)?
4. I’m not sure how others feel, but I break out in a sweat every time I watch “This Is America,” but I keep going back to it. I’ve been trying to think about the video in terms of Black cultural production and what it means for the video to be directed by a non-Black person. (Could 12 Years a Slave have been directed by a non-Black person? How would that have changed its conditions of reception? The viewer’s interpretation of the spectacles of Black suffering depicted in that film?) I’m wondering whether the fact of Murai’s non-Blackness affects the formal and aesthetic choices made in the video. I’m not sure how one would go about answering that question, except by comparing it to music videos made by Black video- and filmmakers self-consciously working in that tradition, like Arthur Jafa (Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky”) and Kahlil Joseph (Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes”).

***

Bibliography

Margulies, Ivone. “La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator.” Rouge 10 (2007). http://www.rouge.com.au/10/akerman.html.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde. 2^nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Thiher, Allen. “Surrealism’s Enduring Bite: ‘Un Chien Andalou.’” Literature/Film Quarterly 5, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 38-49.

I have this sneaking suspicion that I may have picked a terrible week to do a scrutiny. The reason for this suspicion is that ultimately, that what I’m looking at is not any shots from a film in their own context but a remix of these images used for different rhetorical purposes. So, at the risk of bending the rules of the assignment description a bit I’m going to engage in a brief generic exercise and then talk about the outlier in the bunch, the videos of Catherine Grant.

There seem to be three genres of video in this weeks set of viewings. They are the essayic, the observational, and Catherine Grant.

The Essayic

Essayic videos tend to work as what is effectively a supped up version of a traditional academic essay. The author develops a thesis, as in the case of de Fren’s argument that the fembot in a red-dress is a movie trope stretching back to Metropolis that deserves a feminist reading. The author then continues on in a  more-or-less traditional academic mode. Within this genre multimedia elements such as video and music tend to be simply representative of what the author is discussing.

The Observational

Observational videos rely on the ability to show multiple shots at the same time for a particular rhetorical affect. Exactly what that affect is exactly is described well by Jordan Schonig. The goal of their observational “video essay is not so much to solve this mystery (that is the mystery of the follow shot in two films both titled Elephant) but to dwell within it.” The observational video like the essayic video’s goal is analysis, where they differ is their position in the analytic process. The essayic video attempts to answer a question about a phenomena, whereas the observational video offers a new way of looking at a phenomena. As a metaphor, an essayic video is a report from a biology lab, whereas the observational video is a new type of microscope. 

Then there’s Catherine Grant

As I motioned toward in my title, I don’t really get what Catherine Grant is doing. With that said, I like what she’s doing. The video of hers which I will focus on is “Carnal Locomotive.” In “Carnal Locomotive,” Grant overlays quotations by Claude Levi-Strauss and Steven Shaviro over a video from the film Le Jour et l’heure. On top of all this she mixes in an industrial music track. The effect is striking.

What Grant seems to be doing is attuning the viewer to information in a particular way which a reading of the primary texts from which the quotations are drawn does not. Thomas Rickert describes a concept called “ambient attunement” in his book Ambient Rhetoric. Simply put, Rickert argues that the the environs around an actor attune (or even directly constitute) the ontology of that actor. Grant seems to be doing something similar to this. In this remix she brings multiple streams of audio visual information, with the intention of inflecting the viewers understanding of the core information (the quotations).

Grant’s project is exciting. It raises interesting questions about epistemology. Within multimodal texts what ways do the different modes change the epistemological content of the a text? As an experiment my self, I’ve made my own remix of “Carnal Locomotive” which you can see here.

What I hoped to highlight is a way that the video essay allows for a more precise control of the affective response of the the viewer of content than in a traditional academic essay.

In Engaging Cinema, Bill Nichols uses the chapter, “Documentary Film,” to focus on identifiable elements of the genre. Nichols explains how the purpose of a documentary directly informs its technical and stylistic choices. He begins by highlighting some of the differences documentary films possess from that of narrative cinema, particularly in their respective goals. Nichols notes that documentaries, “typically seek to engage the viewer in relation to some aspect of the world in which we live,” as opposed to “an imaginary or fictional world” (Nichols 99). Of course, this also stresses the significance of point of view and just whose world we are introduced to. Nichols expands upon documentary’s tendencies to also include those which “make frequent use of poetic and narrative storytelling techniques as well as rhetorical ones” (Nichols 99). We see these modes employed by Sarah Polley in her personal narrative and poetic rendering of her documentary Stories We Tell (2012). I’m particularly interested in how Polley uses these modes to evoke an emotional response within her viewers as a form of persuasiveness. In my own viewing, I was greatly moved by the exposure of process and the collage-like building of memory or imaginings of the past.

One element that seems important to Nichols, is the relationship between perspective and persuasion associated with the genre of documentary. Nichols clarifies that “persuasiveness is not necessarily identical to persuasion: a documentary may move viewers or arouse feelings more than persuade them of the soundness of a specific argument” (Nichols 100). This is something we are made well aware of as elements of production and the inner workings of filmmaking (actors, crew, equipment, and process) are made visible throughout Stories We Tell. This impulse can appeal to the viewer’s emotions as we are exposed to, immersed in, or connect with the viewpoint of the world the documentary is guiding us through. Nichols cites two goals of documentary film when he writes, “engaging the viewer in a distinct perspective emotionally or persuading the viewer of a particular perspective intellectually go hand in hand in documentary, even though different films vary the balance between these two goals” (Nichols 100). In this way, Nichols also argues that these goals are privileged over “the narrative emphasis on telling an engaging story or the avant-garde stress on the form of the work itself” (Nichols 100).

Emotions are not the only mode a film can appeal to in efforts to incite change or effect. Nichols draws attention to documentary’s relationship to “reason or logic” as tools utilized by filmmakers (Nichols 100). However, logic alone may not move a viewer towards a drastic shift in opinion or perspective. Nichols explains its rather nuanced use: “for rhetorical purposes the appearance of logic may do the job as well as actual logic” (Nichols 101). This, I find particularly interesting in its connection to film as a medium, one that employs appearances by its innate connection to visuality. Nichols spends quite a bit of the chapter discussing how rhetoric influences documentary film’s purpose of persuasion and also identifies it as a means of dislodging documentary from a finite understanding of “truth.” He explains, “the anecdotes, impressions, or proofs may, in fact, be true, but most important for rhetorical discourse is that they convey the impression of truthfulness” (Nichols 102). This makes me wonder, how significant is an individual’s own criticality in watching documentary different from watching classic narrative cinema? Or is it different at all?

When discussing images used in Pare Lorentz’s 1936 film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, Nichols explains, “the images have a powerful impact” and that they “fulfill [their] persuasive purpose” whether they are “truly from the American Midwest in the early 1930’s” or not (Nichols 103). But is the viewer aware of this possible discrepancy while viewing the film–both the 1936 audience or the audience of today? Later, Nichols continues, “the purpose of the film is not to provide documents and evidence as such but to shape a documentary experience that uses such material to make a moving, affecting case from a particular perspective” (Nichols 103). Are there some documentaries where the “impression of truthfulness” feels more fitting or comfortable than others in that we accept a degree of manipulation for the greater effect of emotional and intellectual persuasion necessary? How might we catalog “truth” or “truthfulness” in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell in comparison to Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016)?

Perhaps it is significant to look at the ways Nichols identifies “the six modes of documentary film” in order to ground a conversation around how each of these documentaries appeals to emotional and intellectual persuasiveness. The six modes Nichols spots are expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflective, and performative. Nichols notes that multiple modes may be functioning within one documentary at a time, and it is less of an either/or than a means to locate “a set of conventions for representing reality” (Nichols 114). The fact that there are many modes only further confirms the subjectivity of perspective in regards to a depiction of reality or experience: “Although there may be only one historical world, and even if certain facts about it can be agreed upon as objectively true, the ways of seeing and representing that world, like the ways of interpreting it, vary considerably” (Nichols 114).

In relation to this week’s viewings, I’m particularly curious how the intersection of these modes helps to serve the emotional effect created in Sarah Polley’s film. Nichols considers different techniques used by documentary filmmakers to elicit various reactions from an audience such as voice-over and interviews, both of which we encounter in Stories We Tell. Early on in the film, we are made aware of the documentary itself with the inclusion of the boom, the lights, the process of setting up for interviews, and Sarah Polley’s voice and face as both filmmaker and subject. This choice seems to be in conversation with a few different modes. It is poetic, in its stressing of “form or pattern over an explicit argument, even though it may well have an implicit perspective on some aspect of the historical world” (Nichols 116). But it is also greatly participatory in that “the filmmaker interacts with subjects–probing, questioning, challenging, perhaps even provoking” (Nichols 119).

Because this documentary’s intentions appear to lie in its emotional connections, one way of eliciting such emotion from the viewer is by exposing the elements of process. The searching for “truth” (a word mentioned in the film—particularly of significance to Harry Gulkin in relation to art’s purpose and possibly his own) is being documented by the very act of making this film. Or as Nichols writes, “the film becomes a record of the interactions of subjects and filmmaker” (Nichols 116). Of course, this is also an aesthetic decision made as well. A sense of humor arises within this film from its level of awareness and self-referentiality. This seems to bring a closeness between the medium and the viewer, the participants and the viewer, and ultimately a degree of kinship felt with the filmmaker. This sense of connectivity and tenderness appears to be Polley’s goal (or one of her goals) in creating this film–allowing the viewer to feel with her alongside her discoveries of self and within the filmmaking process.

In her article “The Vulnerable Spectator: Vagaries of Memory, Verities of Form,” Amelie Hastie speaks to this transformation of expectations. She writes, “if we ‘‘cooperate’’ with this film, we enter into the possibility of seeing it first as one thing, then as another. And in that active transformation— first the film’s and then our own—we witness the complexity of memory, narrative, and belief layering and unraveling before us” (Hastie 59). Later she continues to examine Polley’s specific choices as a filmmaker that “reveal[s] the past not as ‘‘truth,’’ as some might prefer it, but as imagination and re-creation” (Hastie 60). If Polley, as her voice-over explains, really is uncertain about the ultimate outcome of this film or in some ways its purpose, a part of her must understand the significance of including herself as one of the “storytellers” in the film. Her uncertainty calls upon our empathy, evokes a human connection we might locate within ourselves. The interview style relies on the interpersonal relationships of family. This allows for moments of humor and moments of deep sadness. The drive to reconstruct a past, a person, an unanswerable or perhaps unknown question, sets the documentary out on a poetically ambivalent quest, one that allows for many diversions, anecdotes, reenactments (that surprised me–might this be the use of a reflexive mode?), and moving interviews. Hastie describes this outcome beautifully when she writes, “the very chronology of the film, in its interweaving between past and present, both real and imagined, suggests that this compassion was always possible; our working through of these past experiences lays it bare” (Hastie 61). This makes me wonder, in what ways do Sarah Polley’s choices as a documentary filmmaker draw attention to the process of thinking, creating, and editing this documentary shift the focus and conversation from her specific family story to that of a larger question around the act of storytelling?

Hastie, Amelie. “The Vulnerable Spectator: Vagaries of Memory, Verities of Form.” Film Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, pp. 59–61. University of California Press, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.59.

Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.

Stories We Tell. Dir. Sarah Polley. Mongrel Media, 2012. OSU Secured Media Library. Web. 1 November 2020.

For this week’s scrutiny, I would like to use Bill Nichols’ writing in Engaging Cinema as a lens through which to dig deeper into a moment from Stories We Tell. This same moment was discussed on page 60 of Amelie Hastie’s The Vulnerable Spectator piece, centering around the clip from 1:26:56 to 1:28:11. As Hastie describes, this sequence uses a voice-over technique in which we hear Sarah read an e-mail to Harry about her vision for the film and what its core messages would be about: namely, the “discrepancies of stories,” “the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral,” and that stories usually “end up with shifts and fictions in them, mostly unintended” (Hastie 60). As this voice-over plays, the viewer is finally given a transparent look at the fictional visual elements of the documentary that were previously implied to be truths or at least much more subtly incorporated into the film’s narrative. We see the younger Polley family eating at the dinner table through the lens of a “home video,” followed immediately by an outside view of adult Sarah directing the camerawoman where to move and how to shoot. We see young actors prepping for their scenes and, poignantly, Sarah in the same room as the actor playing her deceased mother, speaking with her directly and revealing the depths of the fabrication.

Some may feel deceived by this decision, the rug pulled out from under them in the last third of the film as many of the “home videos” they believed in and connected with emotionally are revealed to be fake. While watching the documentary, I had doubts early in the film that any family did so much filming around the home, especially when video cameras were heavy and unwieldy, let alone that they captured such beautifully composed and Normal Rockwell-esque moments so consistently, yet I still felt a strange sense of betrayal when the true mechanisms of the fabricated “home video” moments were revealed. In a way, I think this is a fair reaction. Most people go into a documentary about actual events expecting to be told the truth, facts and objective perspectives. Having it shown so plainly near the end of the film that this is not strictly true can be upsetting, not because we aren’t aware of the tricks of the trade behind even “factual” films, but because we want to believe in the illusion created by the filmmaker, even if we are aware of our own willful naivety.

However, this is by no means a condemnation of using purposefully-crafted, fictional elements such as fake “home videos” in order to better convey a story or message. This is where I would like to bring in Nichols’ piece in order to better examine why exactly this technique not only works, but is a valid form of “documentation” that is, at times, more “truthful” than objective fact.

As the very core of the documentary itself seems to point out, the “truth” can become a bit tricky when the very human element of memories comes in. No one person will remember the exact same things about an event, person, or time after all. For example, nearly every account of Diane’s reaction to her pregnancy with Sarah contradicts each other, with some claiming she was ecstatic while others claim she was distraught. However, this doesn’t mean that any account was necessarily right or wrong. Maybe some people misunderstood Diane’s emotions but believe entirely that they correctly interpreted her reaction. Maybe Diane herself fluctuated between excitement and dread, warring between having a child with someone she loved and having a child with a man who wasn’t her husband. Maybe some people are simply misremembering after many years of separation from the moment. Maybe Diane allowed different facets of herself to be revealed at different times, to different people. The point is that as the documentary says, each individual has a unique perspective on any event, has their own truth, and in combining all of these truths into one overarching narrative you will inevitably get something that is both entirely truthful and entirely false. In a way, this is exactly the same balance taking place in the visuals of the documentary, including the use of directed, scripted videos in place of actual home movies.

It makes sense for a documentary about the conflicting personal truths and falsehoods of an event to embrace the same thought for its visuals. It does utilize actual photos and videos of Diane and Sarah’s family throughout, keeping that core element of factual, objective truth. However, what the fake home movies add to the documentary is a visual enforcement of the words spoken throughout, a fantasy of what the stories told actually look like in the mind of Sarah. In imagining the scene of a memory told by another person, we are left with a video that is both “truth” at its heart—in both the memory and in Sarah’s emotional vision of it—as well as a lie completely fabricated and inherently different from that memory, since it could never be perfectly replicated, let alone by someone who was either very young at the time or not yet born at all. However, I suppose my argument regarding all this is if that actually matters to the impact of the film?

Sure, we may be left feeling betrayed and suspicious of the documentary’s factual merit once we realize that a large chunk of the visuals given as truth were actually fake, but until that point the fake clips do their job within the film. This is a story about stories, and a very personal narrative within a family, not a documentary claiming to have all the facts about an objective issue that can be followed with statistics and news reports like an opioid crisis or the devastation caused by a hurricane. It is inherently based in emotion and personal testimony, and the goal of the film seems to me to be an emotional, reflective one. As Sarah herself states, it’s a film made to bring her mother back to life, to learn about her and the decisions she made that so deeply affected their entire family and those around her. For viewers outside of that bubble, I would suggest that it is a film meant to impact emotionally, to prompt reflection on one’s own story, the stories of the people around them, and how the interplay of lies and truths are present in everything, particularly interpersonal relationships. In order to connect with the audience enough to achieve this goal, in order to prompt a genuine emotional response, scenes were fabricated to better illustrate the situations and persons involved, as well as their relationships. These scenes, fictional as they are, better humanize and endear the audience to the “players” in the story through rhetorical devices.

This is where Nichols’ own words really become relevant to this analysis of Stories We Tell. As he states in Engaging Cinema on page 99, “Like the classic art of oratory, rhetorical film discourse serves to move or affect, persuade or convince the audience. Persuasiveness is not necessarily identical to persuasion: a documentary may move viewers or arouse feelings more than persuade them of the soundness of a specific argument.” We as the audience are persuaded to feel a certain way about Diane, Sarah, and their family’s stories rather than to examine the factual “truths” of what happened. Nichols continues this train of thought on page 100, saying that these types of films “do not make literal arguments. They draw us into a particular perspective on the world and invite us to experience the world in a distinct way.” He continues later on the page to say that “often there is no clear-cut solution to a real-life problem, and logic alone cannot persuade. In this case, the premises or assumptions that lead individuals to take up different positions may derive from values and beliefs. Here, rhetoric takes priority over pure logic.” In this way, the “logic” or “facts” of this documentary are instead the values and beliefs of the family, the emotions conveyed, and the fabricated home movies are just another device in communicating these persuasive elements.

Nichols himself explains how this technique is so effective on page 101, when he states that “for rhetorical purposes the appearance of logic may do the job as well as actual logic.” He continues this thought on page 102 by saying that “the anecdotes, impressions, or proofs may, in fact, be true, but most important for rhetorical discourse is that they convey the impression of truthfulness.” This is exactly the phenomenon that the scripted “home videos” accomplish. Even after realizing that the videos are essentially fake, we still see the impression of truthfulness that they were created with and that they leave behind on the audience. We are being told a story. If the objective truth of the stories cannot be shown through actual home videos, a close approximation or visualized personal truth still makes a deeply emotional impact—in some ways, possibly even more so than actual videos of the moments would! The fabrications are purposefully directed, with intentional compositions and emotive actors all working towards a specific tone and message, and it could be argued that such an approach conveys the intended emotions of the memories better than hypothetical, actual home videos would have. After all, there’s a reason life lessons are often taught through fictional stories rather than retellings of actual events—sometimes the truth is more clearly found in fiction.

Questions:

• At what moment did you realize that fake “home movies” were being shown in the documentary? How did you feel when you realized this? Do you think this is an effective technique and is it “credible” in a documentary-style film?

• In what ways does Stories We Tell follow the three principles of good rhetorical discourse (credible, convincing, compelling)? In which ways does it intentionally break or challenge these principles?

• What six modes of organization from Nichols’ reading do you see most clearly in Stories We Tell? What about in Cameraperson? Do you think these chosen modes were the best choices for these particular narratives?

Sources:

Hastie, Amelie. “The Vulnerable Spectator: Vagaries of Memory, Verities of Form.” Film Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.59. Accessed 1 November 2020.

Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.

Stories We Tell. Dir. Sarah Polley. Mongrel Media, 2012. OSU Secured Media Library. Web. 1 November 2020.

The scene which I’d most like to discuss from Y tu mamá también runs roughly from 1:19:08 to 1:20:04. In this scene Chuy, Tenoch, and Julio play soccer on the beach. The sequence begins with Chuy, back to the camera, in the foreground as Julio and Tenoch wrestle for the ball in the waves. Although Chuy is stationary and not yet involved in the action of the game, he is in focus. Chuy provides commentary as the boys play but, because his back is to the camera, we are not able to directly connect his speech to the movements of his mouth. We then move to a wide shot that shows Chuy and the boys against the beach backdrop as Chuy yells, urging his opponents to shoot the ball. The next shot—a full shot—shows Julio and Tenoch setting up to shoot the ball. A single shot shows Chuy preparing for his save, jumping to catch the ball, and tumbling to the ground. Chuy celebrates, proclaiming himself/Campos (the soccer player who he is “playing”) a “national hero” as he kneels on the sand, ball in hand. Julio and Tenoch laugh and Chuy looks to them asking, “What? Don’t you like Campos?”

This scene stuck out to me for a number of reasons. In her article “Provincia in Recent Mexican Cinema, 1989-2004”, Emily Hind asserts the “usefulness of the provincia to stage national metaphors” (30). One of the ways in which this operates is to force proximity between otherwise disparate groups. In several of the frames from this scene, middle-class Julio, rich Tenoch, and poor fisherman Chuy appear all together, creating a sort of national microcosm. The feeling of national metaphor is strengthened by Chuy’s soccer commentary which imagines himself and the boys as Mexican national soccer players. I think that sports feature heavily in national imagination and that this moment serves to emphasize that. However, it also suggests that proximity isn’t enough to unite the three men from different backgrounds, something more must act on them in order for them to stand in for the nation. This seemed to me like an interesting extension of Anderson’s statement that the nation is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (7). This scene suggests that even in the unlikely instances where we meet our fellow country-men, there is still ideological work to be done in order to unite us with them. Y tu mamá también shows one of the ways in which this “communion” can occur.

I was also struck by the decision to open this scene with a shot of Chuy from behind. Because we are unable to see Chuy speaking, his voice is (at least momentarily) disembodied. This was interesting to me because of the role the omniscient narrator plays in Y tu mamá también. The narrator throughout the film provides and intertwines cultural and personal context for the images on screen—describing the political landscape as the characters move through the physical one. In the few seconds before we realize it is Chuy delivering the commentary, Chuy occupies the same aural position as this narrator. Hind understands the narrative voiceover in Y tu mamá también as one that “calls attention to misleading appearances” (39). This renders Chuy’s brief occupation of this space complex, especially when considering form and content together. Chuy’s commentary is decidedly invested in the imagination of nation (emphasized when he declares himself a “national hero” upon blocking the shot). While this does not stand in direct opposition to the role of the narrator, who often problematizes nation, it does have a very different feel. I think there is also a collapsing of appearances and reality at the moment in which Chuy challenges the boys’ laughter, asking them, “What? You don’t like Campos?” By inhabiting Campos without changing his appearance, Chuy draws further attention to the gap between things by deliberately collapsing it. This is very different from the work the narrator does throughout, which serves to highlight this gap by opening it wider.

I am curious about a number of other things—not all of them related to this specific scene.

I’m interested in how other people experienced the temporality of Y tu mamá también. There is an absence of flashbacks and a generally direct, linear chronology. However, the voiceover looks both forward and backward in time. Does this work to create a heightened awareness of the duality (perhaps multiplicity) of film chronology?

Some of the driving sequences were reminiscent of Godard’s Weekend—though with less honking, thank god—in that the passengers in both cars bear witness to a number of different violent scenes. How can we consider some of these moments together? Do they operate in the same way? Does the engagement/non-engagement of the passengers with the oftentimes violent scenery shape our reading?

Because the ocean was featured so heavily, I was also reminded of Atlantics. I am interested in the interplay between beaches and borders particularly in the context of Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson states that the nation is limited, encompassed by “finite, if elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations” (7). It seems to me that the beach serves to represent both this finitude and elasticity. How can we consider this in the light of the overall “quest” in Y tu mamá también or with specific reference to this beach soccer scene?

Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities defined a nation as “an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). They are ‘imagined’ as members will not know everyone in the community but perceive an image of intimate togetherness. ‘Limited’ as all imagined nations have borders since “no nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind” (7). Thirdly, ‘sovereign’ as nations want to be free and lastly, a ‘community’ as contrary to the inequality and exploitation in each nation, there is a deep sense of comradeship.

What I want to focus on in particular is the ‘limited’ quality of each imagined nation. As this opposition between nations works well to explain the context of Stephen Crofts’ article, Reconceptualizing National Cinema(s). Croft defines national cinema production as usually against Hollywood, particularly in the West. As Hollywood movies have become the standard form of cinema, being that the films were successfully exported and naturalized. In response, Croft identifies seven traits of national cinema going against Hollywood. However, he also clarifies that these borders are pliable, meaning national cinemas can fit into multiple categories as listed below:

1. Cinema that differs from Hollywood but does not compete directly as it goes for a different market. This is mostly seen as art cinema. Croft gives the example of France, which was considered the “most successfully nationalist of national cinemas” (855). In French cinema, like other nations, foreign movies were tariffed and taxed in order to promote and fund national productions. If we relate this to class, you might think of counter-Hollywood films like Jean-Luc Godard’s The Weekend as an example of national art cinema of France.
2. Cinema that is different from Hollywood but does not directly compete with it. However, it does directly critique Hollywood. As Croft explains: “Third Cinema 1960s–1970s opposed the United States and Europe in its antiimperialist insistence on national liberation, and in its insistence on the development of aesthetic models distinct from those of Hollywood and European art cinema” (856). However, later the definition of Third World cinema expanded as it now can be used to dismantle First World notions of national cinema. For example, the inability for British film culture to recognize the “plethora of ethnic, gender, class, and regional differences” in its own film industry (857). As another example, this could apply to African American cinema in the United States. Inherently putting down the notion of national cultural sovereignty. Or put in another way, rejecting the theory that nations endorse the many ways of life within a nation. Which brings us to the last point of Third World cinema, where “the easy Western assumption of the coincidence of ethnic background and home” is refuted (858).
3. European and Third World cinema that struggles against Hollywood with little to no success. European and Third World films struggle to get the global appeal compared to Hollywood films. Croft also puts European commercial cinema here.
4. Cinema that ignores Hollywood (this is accomplished by few). These nations have large domestic markets and/or effective trade barriers, i.e. India and Hong Kong.
5. English-speaking cinemas that try to beat Hollywood at its own game and have failed. Croft also mentions Hollywood’s tendency to steal foreign talent as well, ranging from directors, scriptwriters, to actors. In our case you might want to think about Alfred Hitchcock or the director of Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuaron, who goes back and forth from American to Mexican productions.
6. Cinemas that works within state-controlled and state-subsidized industries. This revolves around cinema that is used to convince the audience of the virtues of the political order. Examples range from “Fascist Germany and Italy, Chinese cinema between 1949 and the mid-1980s” and in my case of study, North Korea (861).
7. “Regional or national cinemas whose culture and/or language take their distance from the nation-states which enclose them” (854). This section looks at the forced homogenization of the nation-state cinema. In particular how “ethnic and linguistic minorities have generally lacked the funds and infrastructure to support regional cinemas or national cinemas distinct from the nation-states that enclose them” (861). We might be able to connect the regionalism and the political situation that is presented in Y Tu Mamá También. Emily Hind’s Provincia in Recent Mexican Cinema, 1989-2004 examines some of this discourse Croft briefly describes, bringing to the forefront the issues of how Provincia is viewed in Mexican cinema.

Questions:

• How can Deadwood, Episode 9 fit into this conversation? Would you consider the town to be an individual nation or an imagined community (especially when it comes to the events of this episode)?
• What about other films we have watched so far? Do you think that they fit into any of these categories?
• I mostly talked about Y Tu Mamá También as fitting mostly in the last category of national cinema. Do you think the film could fit in a different category?

References:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, Verso, 1991.

Croft, Stephen. “Reconceptualizing National Cinema(s).” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, pp. 853-864.

Hind, Emily. “‘Provincia’ in Recent Mexican Cinema, 1989-2004.” Discourse, vol. 26, no. 1-2, 2005, pp. 26–45.

Julian Bond, a leader and elder of the Civil Rights Movement, once described of a version of American history that he dubbed the Master Narrative. The Master Narrative teaches, among other things, that the Civil Rights Movement was short, lasting barely more than a decade from the 1950s to the 1960s, slavery was terrible and wrong but was a relic of the past whose tentacles do not reach into the present day, and that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the Movement’s sole leader.[1] The greatest misconception that the Master Narrative perpetuates is that African Americans acted as a monolith with no individual motivations guiding their everyday actions. The Master Narrative strips Black Americans of their agency and portrays a simplistic and easily digested, but inaccurate, history. Films which include African American characters have similarly obscures Black stories.

The question at the heart of this week’s readings is one of agency and representation. In his chapter, “Black Spectatorship” Problems of Identification and Resistance,” professor Manthia Diawara posits that “…the black male subject always appears to lose in the competition for the symbolic position of the father or authority figure. And at the level of spectatorship, the black spectator, regardless of gender or sexuality, fails to enjoy the pleasures which are at least available to the white male heterosexual spectator positioned as the subject of the films’ discourse. Moreover, the pleasures of narrative resolution—the final tying-up of loose ends in the hermeneutic code of detection— is also an ambiguous experience for black spectators.”[2] The biographical story of Solomon Northup presented in director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave challenges the limits imposed in Daiwara’s description by centering the story of a Black man, Solomon Northup. Solomon’s outcome is dependent upon his own actions within the confines of American chattel slavery. He maximizes every opportunity he has to advance the cause of his freedom within that system. The historical facts that limited those opportunities to one or two per decade do not diminish the ways in which he resisted his bondage and fought for his freedom.

There are several moments that stand out which could illuminate how 12 Years a Slave pushes against the tradition that Diawara describes, but one in particular caught my eye. The scene begins at 0:45:29 and concludes at 0:47:37. In it, Solomon is still living at the first plantation, Mr. Ford’s, after he was sold into bondage. During this sequence, after some initial set-up, Solomon refuses to be punished for doing exactly what his supervisor, Master Tibeats, instructed. Instead, Solomon turns the tables on Tibeats and beats him, momentarily usurping the role of authority. Embarrassed by the beating he received, Tibeats retreats, only to return and seek revenge later. It is likely that, as an enslaved person, Solomon knew this was unlikely to end well for him, but he refused to suffer the indignity. The unfortunate reality of Solomon’s resistance is that his victory is temporary, and his plight gets much worse.

Regardless of what was to come, Solomon is shown to resist the everyday atrocities and indignities that accompanied life as an enslaved African American. McQueen’s choice to highlight these small acts, and other acts of resistance, is a corrective action which responds to the to the overly sterilized depiction of Black life as described by Julian Bond. This particular act of defiance placed Solomon on a path that would eventually lead to his restoration as a literal father figure and tied up the loose ends of his story that Diawara criticized. Resolution like this was certainly not the case for more than a few enslaved African Americans. Northup’s story was unique, and McQueen’s depiction captures the events vividly, but 12 Years a Slave was not without its critics.

McQueen’s direction along with the performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon, Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey and many other black actors, worked to create fully formed and complex characters. Their motivations were clear, and their fears felt immediate and real. Their pain was evocative. Manthia Diawara’s critique of black representation and observation of black audiences has nothing to do with the realism of the characters’ pain and the audience reactions to it. His concern, instead, had to do with the lack of fullness of black representation on film and that, as a consequence, black audiences were unable to identify with characters on the screen, which resulted in a viewing experience the was not inclusive. McQueen’s choices about what to put on the screen solve that problem, but at a steep cost.

Film scholar bell hooks criticized 12 Years a Slave, “If I don’t see another Black woman naked raped and beaten as long as I live, I will be just fine because I want to see something else.” (46:00–46:21) She goes on to suggest that “seeing people doing what you want to do and doing it well, they’re good people to learn from.” (47:14-47:20)[3] Here, hooks is arguing for another form of spectatorship. To her, films that exhibit black suffering are excessive and possibly needless. She is calling for filmmakers to inspire spectatorship that is not rooted in pain, but rather one that is aspirational. This is an interesting point to ponder. Can an audience feel the weight of a character’s situation without seeing the depths of their despair?

Another film of recent vintage, Detroit, met with similar criticism because scenes depicting violence against black bodies were deployed relentlessly . hook bell’s criticism of 12 Years a Slave and the critical reception of Detroit encourage us to wrestle with whether or not spectatorship in which black audiences can identify with the characters on screen are worth the pain they might inflict. Honest history does not have to cause trauma. Has Steve McQueen caused undue distress to Black audiences with 12 Years a Slave? Has he succeeded in giving Black characters agency and has he given them fitting ends to their stories? Has he done so in a way that allows Black audiences to experience something more than Diawara’s resistant spectatorship?

[1] Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “Introduction,” in Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Hasan Kwame Jeffries (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 4–5.

[2] Manthia Diawara, ““Black Spectatorship” Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 771.

[3] “bell hooks + Chirlane McCray: Critical Thinking at The New School,” YouTube, accessed October 17th, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G16x0k0fNWU

[4] “Is Detroit’s Violence Gratuitous?” The New Republic, accessed October 18th, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/144246/detroits-violence-gratuitous

To say that cinema has been occupied with reality for all its history would seem fair. Much of the very earliest cinema—short, silent, black-and-white—simply captured reality as it happened, or at least operated from that pretense. The events caught on camera may sometimes have been staged to a greater or lesser extent, but it is worth emphasizing how great the novelty just of seeing persons and objects appear in motion itself once was. As the medium matured, it became more and more that film constructed reality (or realities) through increasingly complex processes of recording and manipulating footage. In varying exact forms, narrative construction–the presentation of scenarios as events bound by some continuity—has now dominated filmmaking for most of the years since moving pictures became a noteworthy attraction for mass audiences. 

But, even in an age where sound and color have long since come to the movies, Mary Anne Doane reminds us that the product of cinematic construction is “the ‘hallucination’ of a fully sensory world.” What is seen on film is not tangibly present on the screen, and, especially in fictional or dramatized narrative, may not tangibly exist anywhere once the film has gone to screen. Proximity and angle of camera serve to also distort the relative size of visible things. Sound and color can be manipulated in various ways, or withheld, further distancing what is seen and heard in film from what it would have looked like and sounded like to “really be there.” Most of all, again, in the realm of fictionalized cinematic narrative, it cannot be generally said that anything appearing on screen is passively captured or passively distributed. 

Excepting, perhaps, for very small children, what might be generalized is that viewing publics understand the constructedness of film, and even have a rough grasp on how the work of this construction is done. The commercial audience for cinematic and televisual motion-picture art is enormous anyhow, and that may be understating it. In the twenty-first century, to flat not engage in consumption of film art would seem more strange than the opposite by far. This brings us to the work in film theory that has been done on the matter of spectatorship—that is, the matter of how viewers interpret and relate themselves to cinematic art. Key work in this field includes Christian Metz’s writing on film as a “mirror,” whereby the viewer identifies themself with the screened material as they would with their own likeness. Laura Mulvey famously complicated this kind of thinking with her analysis of gender in “classical” narrative cinema, finding the construction of female roles there overwhelmingly reflective of an objectifying “male gaze.”

In parallel to such analysis of gender in film, we will focus ourselves here on analyis of race. In “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Manthia Diawara endeavors “to suggest that the components of ‘difference’ among elements of race, gender and sexuality give ruse to different readings of the same material.” While doing so, he develops a concept of spectator “resistance” to the “rhetorical force” of racially demeaning cinematic content. Taking up The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Color Purple (1985), seemingly such very distant pictures, as cinematic texts, Diawara finds in both instances of material where “the Afro-American spectator is denied the possibility of identification with black characters as credible or plausible personalities.” By consequence of that denial we might say the racially Black (or otherwise critically aware) spectator is “taken out of the movie.” Put another way, the “hallucination” of cinematic reality (to borrow again from Doane) is broken by it. 

Further, then, for Diawara, the denial of spectatorial identification along lines of race becomes the cause and the target of what he terms “resistance.” In his text, he argues “that the dominant cinema situates black characters primarily for the pleasure of white spectators (male or female).” (770)  As Diawara utilizes the term, “resistance” is to be understood as a refusal to identify with Black characters who are constructed in this war, and a drive to rebut that construction. By Diawara’s own description of the situation, it is worthwhile to observe that the “resisting” spectator in this context is not the initiator of opposition. Rather, through Diawara we see “spectator” already opposed by “author,” and thus see the spectator making that opposition between the author’s cinematic reality and their own lived reality mutual. 

Relative to Diawara, Michael Boyce Gillespie gives greater attention to authorship in his text Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016). Gillespie’s interest lies with the “how” of constructing a Black identity in film. In his characterization, “the idea of black film is always a question, never an answer.” Gillespie foregrounds here an important reminder of the nature of “race as a constitutive, cultural fiction.” On those grounds, he takes some issue with “hypostatic and canonical ideas of black film” or an overreliance on degree of origination from “a black means of production” for classifying what makes a “black film,” in that both would seem to promote the idea of a fixed character about what it means to “be Black.”  

Instead, Gillespie instead offers an understanding of “the idea of black film as a highly variable and finalizable braiding of art, culture, and history.” In such cinema he suggests we would find an “art of creative interpretation and not merely the visual transcription of the black lifeworld.” It is to be taken that such a “transcriptive” cinema would again imply something settled about the nature of blackness. When Gillespie writes that “black film is always a question, never an answer,” that “nature” is the subject of the question. The purpose given to Black film here is for “authors” to engage “spectators” in critical interpretation of what a “Black” racial identity means. By his thinking, we might fairly say that cinematic reality is not merely hallucinatory, but emphasized as highly subjective and continuously under construction. 

Director Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013) provides much material to place in conversation with these readings. Adapted from the 1853 memoir of the same title by Solomon Northup, it recounts his experience as a free African-American man from New York kidnapped and enslaved in the Antebellum South. Keeping Gillespie in mind, we can certainly trace through the film a treatment of race as “cultural fiction” that is actively being constituted before us. Repeatedly, it explores a tension between being a dark-skinned person of African descent and (in the language of Black and White characters, alike) and being a “nigger.” Even as much as that identity is imposed in 12 Years a Slave, we also find it often adopted. If “film blackness” should be thought of as “always question, never answer,” this is among the most interesting questions posed by the film. 

Meanwhile, it is very evident that the 12 Years a Slave means for the spectator to identify with Northup, as a Black character. Throughout Northup’s ordeal with White slavers, White plantation gentry, White overseers, White slave patrols, and so on, the satisfaction he seeks is the satisfaction we are to desire—that being flight to freedom and validation of personhood. Toward that end, Northup employs varying shades of resistance and deference to the circumstances of his enslavement and to the intense race prejudice that surrounds it. When it finally comes, Northup does not directly affect his own deliverance, but rather it comes to him through the beneficence of White people—crucially, through none other than a long-haired, bearded, wandering carpenter who speaks his mind freely even to unreceptive ears. 

This raises many questions. Referring to identity-of-spectator, who is this film for? What is the spectator to extract from this film? What is to be made of Northup’s agency in the film, in relation to the film’s project of reconstructing his “reality” as a true historical person? Why does it matter that this narrative should have been adapted to film? To what extent is this film “transcriptive,” and to what extent is this film a work of creative interpretation? Given that Northup’s enslavement lasted a dozen years, and that he lived an established adult life prior to this ordeal, what is implied by that which the film chooses to depict within the space of a couple hours on screen? 

After viewing 12 Years a Slave in conversation with Diawara and Gillespie, we might consider some broader questions as well. Is there a universal cinema, in that all spectators could identify with it? Is it possible to “author” a universal cinema? Could there be such as thing as a universal spectator? To what extent can cinematic reality be shared? What would be required of a “definitive” cinematic reality? Does authorship or spectatorship determine who cinema is “for”? Is the meaning of a film constructed by its author, by its spectators, by neither, or by both? How does the collaborative effort behind much of cinematic and televisual filmmaking complicate the determination of meaning?—or does it matter at all? How much bearing does author’s, or authors’, meaning-making have on the spectator’s meaning-making? 

[1] Mary Anne Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016), 327 

[2] Christian Metz, ”Identification, Mirror,” from The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016)

[3] Laura Mulvey, ”Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016)

[4] Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Eighth Edition (2016), 768 

[5] Ibid, 769

[6] Ibid, 771

[7] Ibid, 770

[8] Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016), 16

[9] Ibid, 2

[10] Ibid, 7

[11] Ibid, 10

[12] Ibid, 6

[13] Ibid, 5