Film Theory 2 – Flashcards

Baudry, Bazin, Brakhage, Deren, Kracauer

Benjamin, Diawara, Metz (neo), Modleski, Mulvey, Stam and Spence, Parker Tyler

"The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema" 1975

Parallel between dream and cinema: "More than real" result of viewing is produced; a state in which mental perceptions are taken for perceptions of reality. Actions in the film are "experienced" by the viewer only through some kind of identification.

Dream is `an hallucinatory psychosis of desire'-- that is, a state in which mental perceptions are taken for perceptions of reality."

Compare to Althusser's "reality effect" and "knowledge effect" as well as Deren (in the sense that film can show you the "more than real")

"What is Cinema, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image' and 'The Myth of Total Cinema' " 1940s and 1950s

Film's ability to record reality of the world as it truly is. Film reality is not created, it is recorded. An image can be formed automatically without the creative intervention of man. Records reality, not interpret it like a painting. Photography embalms time. Determinant: deep focus.

"For the first time [with film], between the originating object [what is being filmed] and its reproduction [as cinema] there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man." "Photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. . . . Film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. . .Now for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were

"The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction" 1936

Film has enriched our field of perception. "The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." In the cinema, masses come face to face with themselves for the first time. The AUDIENCE holds the power. He links the "mode of human sense perception" to "humanity's entire mode of existence.

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. . .The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence . . .[leading] to a tremendous shattering of tradition. . . " "The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. . 'Characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of the apparatus, man can represent his environment. . .The film has enriched our field of perception." "The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." "Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art."

Kracauer

"Metaphors on Vision; Tests of LIght" 1963

Wants to show more that "reality" has conventionally understood. Purpose of film is to free the eye, create acts of seeing not defined by social conventions of representation. Conventional reality is "a contemporary mechanical myth" which should be replaced by magic through the medium of film.

"Imagine an eye unruled by manmade laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." "The `absolute realism' of the motion picture is unrealized, therefore potential, magic"

Neo Metz in that reality of images is illusion. Believes film can show you the more than real (like Baudry or Deren) and believes in contemporary mechanical myth (Parker Tyler also believes in some level of myth).

"Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality" 1960

Accidental convention--surrealist in a way. "An image is "the creative action of the imagination realized by the art instrument which is a reality in its own right." "Only in photography—by the delicate manipulation which I call controlled accident—can natural phenomena be incorporated into our own creativity, to yield an image where the reality of a tree confers its truth upon the events we cause to transpire beneath it. . .The invented event which is then introduced, though itself an artifice, borrows reality from the reality of the scene"

"The images with which the camera provides him [the artist] are like fragments of a permanent, incorruptible memory; their individual reality is in no way dependent upon their sequence in actuality, and they can be assembled to compose any of several statements. . . All invention and creation consists primarily of a new relationship between known parts" "A radio is not a louder voice, an airplane is not a faster car, and the motion picture (an invention of the same period of history) should not be thought of as a faster painting or a more real play. All of these forms are qualitatively different from those which preceded them. They must not be understood as unrelated developments, bound merely by coincidence, but as diverse aspects of a new way of thought and a new way of life--one in which an appreciation of time, movement, energy, and dynamics is more immediately meaningful than in the familiar concept of matter as a static solid anchored to a stable cosmos."

Similar to Baudry in terms of the 'more than real' experience (in a dream) but different because Deren believes film can show you the reality of another world. Similar to Metz in that he sees film as having an intangible reality because it is made up of lights and shadows and film as a type of memory.

"Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identity and Resistance" 1988

Spectators need to be aware of the racist issues in films. Resistant spectator: rejects the (racist) ideology that the film uses to represent the spectator. Dominant cinema situates black characters for the pleasure of white spectators. White domestication of black customs and culture--a proccess of deracination and isolation--or by depicting blacks as playing by the rules of white society and losing.

"What is at issue...is the contradiction between the rhetorical force of the story—the dominant reading compels the black spectator to identify with the racist inscription of the black character—and the resistance, on the part of Afro-American spectators, to this version of US history, on account of its Manichean dualism" "Spectators are socially and historically as well as psychically constituted . . .the components of 'difference' among elements of race, gender and sexuality give rise to different readings of the same material."

Similar to Stam and Spence. But different because he asks the spectators to be aware of the issue and be resistant to racism in the cinema.

"Basic Concepts" 1960

Reality can be destroyed or represented accurately. Believes in the power of film to capture the physical and social world as it is or distorted in some way and thereby shape the ways people behave culturally. Film has a clear obligation and special privilege to record, reveal, and redeem reality. Everything depends on the right balance between the realistic tendency (Lumiere Bros) and the formative tendency (Melies). The latter has to follow the former's lead and not overwhelm it.

"Truly 'cinematic' films—[are] films that is, which incorporate aspects of physical reality with a view to making us experience them. . . .Even the most creative filmmaker is much less independent of nature in the raw than the painter or poet; that his creativity manifests itself in letting nature in and penetrating it." "In the realistic tendency, films go beyond photography is two respects. First, they picture movement itself, not only one or another of its phases. . . .Second, films may seize upon physical reality with all its manifold movements by means of an intermediary procedure which would seem to be less indispensable in photography—staging. . .This recourse to staging is most certainly legitimate if the staged world is made to appear as a faithful reproduction of the real one. The important thing is that studio-built settings convey the impression of actuality. that the spectator feels he is watching events which might have occurred in real life and have been photographed on the spot. . . .

Similar to Bazin. It is the obligation of filmmakers not to misconstrue the film.

"Identification, Mirror" and "The Passion for Perceiving" 1975

Moved from pure structuralism view to psychological, phenomenological view of how cinema operates with spectators. Spectators are the creator of meaning. The spectator has to internally create the subject that transcends through the cinematic signifiers that were recorded. Projective and Introjective cones. Shadows/Plato's Cave. Spectators find meaning in perception and whether or not they connect with the film, they are constantly trying to process the projected information.

Cinema "is recorded as a memory trace, which is immediately so, without having been something else before." When a viewer watches a film, a double screening process actually occurs with two cones and two screens functioning. One cone is projected by the spectator onto the movie screen; the other cone is the "introjective" process of registering the cinematic signifier onto the screen of the spectator's mind. Cinema is not cinema (that is, it does not signify "cinema") until the "transcendental subject" of the spectator internally "creates" it from the internalized "cinematic signifiers" which are recorded on the internal screen of consciousness "two cones in the auditorium" and two screens; "All vision consists of a double movement: projective (the `sweeping' searchlight) and introjective: consciousness as a sensitive recording surface (as on a screen). . . .In order to understand the film (at all), I must perceive the photographed object as absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of this absence as signifying." "Every film is a fiction film."

Brakhage and Baudry

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" 1975

Active male/Passive female. Men narcissistically identify with male character. They possess the female character through their own gaze as well as the male character's gaze. Women are unable to return the gaze, they only receive pleasure from being looked at. Alternate cinema--desired change with a new language of desire. Unpleasure--desired outcome of her work. Effort to deconstruct voyeuristic, narcissistic pleasure of the "gaze". Determinent is gender. Reality congruent with conventional views of gender.

"Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. . ." "The alternative cinema will open the way for alternate forms of filmmaking that express other political and social realities [and] provides a space for a cinema to be born/which is radical: in both a political/ and an aesthetic sense/and challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream film." first gazing at the women on screen (through scopophilia or voyeurism) AND second actively identifying with the males on screen (through narcissism) who also "actively" possess women on screen, visually--through their own gaze--and narratively, through the action of the plot. Women are passive inthat they receive pleasure only in exhibitionism, in the quality of "to-be-looked-at-ness;" they are unable to return the gaze of the male or to initiate a gaze of their own.

Comparable to Modelski except Mulvey thinks film looks down on women.

"Colonialism, Racism and Representation" 1988

Creator needs to step up from racism and stereotypes. Hopes for the deconstruction of racist codes and feels that the creator has responsibility to stop pushing cliches and stereotypes to make them better. We need to be careful about how we perceive films, pay attention to mise en scene, character, and plot and how they shape how we view the film. The colonizer should not be the only perspective we see. As a spectator we watch from the barrel of the gun and we don't see the suppressive because they want to sympathize with the white man.

"The paradigmatic filmic encounters of whites and Indians in the western. . .typically involve images of encirclement. The attitude toward the Indian is premised on exteriority. . .In essence, the viewer is forced behind the barrel of a repeating rifle and it is from that position, through its gun sights, that he receives a picture history of western colonialism and imperialism. . .The spectator is unwittingly sutured into a colonialist perspective." An "insistence on 'positive images,' . . . obscures the fact that 'nice' images might at times be as pernicious as overtly degrading ones, providing a bourgeois façade for paternalism, a more pervasive racism" "at times the flaw in the mimesis derives not from the presence of distorting stereotypes by the absence of representation of an oppressed group;" omission of people of other cultures

Diawara, but stam and Spence ask the creators to change and be better.

"Introduction: Magic and Myth in the Movies" 1947

The truth which film embodies may be a timeless verity that is the same in every culture. He believes that myth is a basic prototypic pattern that can be varied when it operates in specific cultures. Filmmakers relate to timeless dimensions of human consciousness with some shaping by historic and cultural contexts. In a decentered society that no longer believes in a single religion or core of values, Tyler says people seek mythic satisfaction in popular culture, with celebrities filling archetypes, and films and live performances offering ritual enactment. "psychoanalyticmythological:" He saw film as a form of therapy AND as a link to our (collective) unconscious:

"The true field of the movies is not art but myth. . .Assuredly myth is a fiction, and this is its bare link with art, but a myth is specifically a free, unharnessed fiction, a basic prototypic pattern capable of many variations and distortions, many betrayals and disguises, even though it remains imaginative truth" "Hollywood is a vital, interesting phenomenon, at least as important to the spiritual climate as daily weather to the physical climate"

"The Master's Dollhouse: Rear Window" 1988

Women empowerment/argument against Mulvey. Creators are not necessarily evil. Films are more than just one view and some are more positive towards women. Spectators should recognie multiple points of view and look for different perspectives. Transcendence will happen when women can leave the dollhouse when they choose to. She sees film as a way to empower women.

"Those critics who emphasize the film's restriction of point of view to the male character neglect the fact that it increasingly stresses a dual point of view, with the reverse shots finding both Jeff and Lisa intently staring out the window at the neighbors across the way. It seems possible, then, to consider Lisa as a representative of the female spectator at the cinema. And through her, we can ask if it is true that the female spectator simply acquiesces in the male's view or, if, on the contrary, her relationship to the spectacle is different from his? (856) At the end of the film, "We are left with the suspicion (a preview, perhaps, of coming attractions) that while men sleep and dream their dreams of omnipotence over a safely reduced world, women are not where they appear to be, locked into male 'views' of them, imprisoned in their master's dollhouse."