Roland Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” and Leo Braudy’s “The Open and the Closed” have at least one primary focus in common: they are each concerned with details, objects, descriptions that do not carry apparent meaning for the narrative of a story. The presence of these “useless details,” to borrow Barthes’ term, lends a given work—novels for Barthes and films for Braudy—the illusion of reality. Barthes makes this point when he returns to examples of useless details in Madame Bovary cited at the beginning of the piece to arrive at his conclusion: “…Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced…” (148). In humbler terms, if a detail is noted but that detail does not signify some deeper meaning with the other elements of the story, it’s inclusion now serves no other purpose but to represent reality.
Along the same lines, Braudy uses the inclusion of details like this as the basis for his distinction between two kinds of film, the open and the closed. A closed film contains nothing that does not signify, connect, or relate to something else: “In a closed film the world of the film is the only thing that exists; everything within it has its place in the plot of the film—every object, every character, every gesture, every action” (46). The details in the films Braudy describes here are never useless; they all carry meaning, and they are all created by the filmmaker within the self-sufficient world of the film. An open film, by contrast, suggests that a world exists outside the film and that not everything included in the gaze of the camera is tied to the story. Braudy writes, “In an open film the world of the film is a momentary frame around an ongoing reality… unlike the objects and people in a closed film, the story of the open film does not exhaust the meaning of what it contains” (46-47). (Even though I don’t do it here, I hope we get into the Mungiu film in terms of a world that goes on before and after the film, especially given Mungiu’s comments in the contextual interview about the camera and the characters.)
Returning to useless details, I’m interested in the term reality effect because it already acknowledges the deception or illusion involved in representing reality. This language reminds me of the André Bazin reading because he too is interested in illusion and deception, but I get the feeling that, based on “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he might object to my outright comparison of Barthes’ reality effect in a novel and the realism of an open film according to Braudy. This objection, in my mind, would stem from the perceived difference in the act of reproducing reality between a writer and a cameraperson. Bazin writes in his article that an image of reality produced by a painter is fundamentally different than an image produced through the technology of a camera: “No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image” (161). He goes on to propose a relative effect of the personality of the artist on the image being reproduced and the importance of the technology of a camera in limiting that effect. “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings on in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.” Suppose I were to extend this from painter to writer: is it necessary that a novelist leaves some mark on a useless detail contributed in the name of realism in a way that a filmmaker would not by choosing what to include in a shot? If so, we have an important distinction based on the difference between the means of reproduction and the alleged objectivity provided by the camera.
The lines in the above discussion are blurry to me already, but my grasp on the concepts become even more muddled when I attempt to apply these theories to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or to distinguish between useless and useful details. For some details I am more or less confident of their uselessness, such as the fact that Palmolive soap gives Gabita dandruff. (A corresponding useful detail from Deadwood would be the fact that Jane has a connection with the little girl that later survives the attack on her family). I see direct parallels between this inclusion of the soap brand and Barthes analysis of a useless detail: “…and in Michelet’s sentence, we have the same difficulty in accounting structurally for all the details: that the executioner came after the painter is all that is necessary to the account; how long the sitting lasted, the dimension and location of the door are useless (but the theme of the door, the softness of death’s knock have an indisputable symbolic value)” (142). Just like the theme of the door, the necessity of a black market in the co-ed dorm for items like soap and cigarettes has symbolic value. But the exact brand of soap, like the “length of the sitting” and the “dimension and location of the door,” signifies nothing except reality.
Specifically, I am confused over a category of details including things like the plastic sheet, the knife, the presence of the police in the hotel lobby, and the fact that the doctor left his ID card at the desk. All of these are details that could have had meaning but didn’t. I’m sure I’m not alone in immediately thinking of Chekhov’s gun when Otilia stole the doctor’s knife from his bag. However, rather than signifying reality and nothing else, this category of details seems to signify the goal of the film as articulated by director Cristian Mungiu in the contextual interview provided alongside the readings and viewings: “Everything we put in the film in terms of style was to show the inner state of mind of this main character. The film is not about what happened: It’s about what could have happened—if the abortionist doesn’t show up, if the police show up. It’s a film about Otilia’s fears. It’s a film about someone with empathy for someone else.” If the point of the film is to tell a realistic story, if a primary goal is to achieve the reality effect, now it seems like this category of details does carry specific meaning for the narrative. Mungiu’s knife is an anti-Chekhov’s gun because, though it doesn’t reenter the plot, it is still a crucial aspect of the narrative about Otilia’s fears that Mungiu sought to capture.
Before wrapping up, I’d like to return to the differences rather than similarities between the Barthes and Braudy readings. Whereas the category of details mentioned above that relate to what didn’t happen seem not to match Barthes definition of details that do not signify, it is this category that to me best matches Braudy’s characterization of an open film. Specifically, I am reminded of Braudy’s competing imagery between the role of the open and closed filmmaker as different kinds of Gods: “If Lang’s films express a world of totally enclosed and self-sufficient meaning, Renoir’s exhibit a garden of potential flowers and weeds alike. Lang is God as the head of the spy ring and Renoir is God as the chief gardener” (49). Mungiu seems to have intentionally placed himself as the second sort of God, where things like his knife and forgotten plastic sheet are weeds, but they are, somewhat ironically, weeds that have been carefully cultivated. And yet, even as I make this distinction between Barthes and Braudy, the idea of carefully cultivated weeds seems to harken back to Barthes emphasis on the illusion of reality rather than reality itself, perhaps almost collapsing the distinction I’ve been trying to draw.
In turning towards class discussion, I have a few discussion questions/thing to bring up. I hope we spend some time on Deadwood and 4 Months comparatively, especially examining the aspects of the first episode of Deadwood that seem to match (or not) the closed film description. I’d also like to bring up the ending of 4 Months and to what degree it feels like Braudy’s assertion that: “The open film ends instead by focusing on the irresolvable in relationships and stories.” We can also bring in what the Ebert contextual review has to say about the ending as either “inevitable” or “anticlimactic.” I have a few additional questions that go beyond what I was able to touch on in the blog post, but I doubt we would be able to/want to get to all of them. What are the implications of the “closed” and “open” discussion on our viewing experience according to Braudy and how does that apply to what we’ve watched so far? How do you reconcile Bazin’s insistence on the mechanical objectivity of the camera with photography and the addition of dialogue or other elements of film (before editing) in cinema that seem more like a painting than a photograph? Can we frame some of the early film viewings we saw as examples of Bazin’s claim that “cinema is objectivity in time”? And can we also explore his suggestion that “the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence” (194)? Is it fair, for example, to say that we could consider the mis-en-scène as the photograph in this comparison and the film in total as the painting?