The Phantom Ride was one of the earliest popular treats of proto-cinema. The camera operator would attach the camera to the front of a train, trolley, or car and give the spectator the illusion of traveling. This "illusion", of course, was one of the reasons why cinema became the dominant art form during the 20th century in America and Europe. Depth of field and z-axis movement into time was quickly abandoned in favor of Edwin Porter's spatially contracting continuity cut--which became the basis of classical cinema.
With sound now added, we can begin to sense the power of this phantom ride through the streets of San Francisco, just four days before the great earthquake; for a fleeting moment, we are invited to travel back in time and live that world . . .
Here is another masterpiece from the golden age of Czech cinema posters and winner of the 1973 Cannes International Film Festival Grand Prix for the Best Poster. It was created by the Czech artist Olga Poláčková-Vyleťalová for Robert Bresson's A Gentle Woman (1969). The Czech title itself adds yet another layer of beauty and meaning . . . Něžná or Tenderly.
Bresson's first color film, A Gentle Woman—adapted from the Dostoevsky short storyA Gentle Creature—tells the heartbreaking story, in flashback, of Elle, the beautiful but smothered and disaffected wife of a Parisian pawnbroker. Told in the classic ascetic and expressionless style of Bresson with non-professional actors (includig the sad and beautiful Dominique Sanda), A Gentle Woman confounds attempts at communication and diversion. The film sutures the viewer into the perpetual state of Elle's ennui and growing sense of isolation and discontent.
The poster alone is a work of art: Magritte meets late-sixties ad art. It manages to simultaneously capture the moods of objectification and hiddenness; elegance and suffocation; radiance and impending doom. Moreover, the image does not simply attempt to "sell" the movie, but rather to convey the idea, the abstraction, of the film's tragic protagonist. This attests to Bresson's film being something more than a thing to be consumed; rather, it is an idea to be contemplated, a world to be experienced.
This treasure of a short film by David Lynch is part of a larger collection of film shorts made as a 100th-anniversary homage to to the Lumière Brothers, Lumière and Company. Shot on a Lumière camera, each directior edited in-camera and was constrained by three historical rules:
A short may be no longer than 52 seconds
No synchronized sound
No more than three takes
enjoy this short jewel and then make the jump for a short breakdown on how Lynch is able to show us the "infinite opening" of time . . .
David Lynch, Gilles Deleuze, and the infinite opening of aberrant movement . . . jump!
"Now, when my mother got to be eighty-five years old her memory failed her. She forgot little threads that hold life's patches of meaning together."—Mark Twain Morals and Memory 1906
This footage of Mark Twain, "Father of American Literature" according to Faulkner, is absolutely haunting and mesmerizing. Shot at his Stormfield home in 1909 by Thomas Edison and then slowed down to 12 frames per second (to approximate 'natural' movement), this silent film is far more Lumière Brothers in tone than what one might expect from early Edison reels—more documentary than "theatrical."
The first half of this short reel also happens to beautifully demonstrate the most basic elements of the Time-Image, as described by Gilles Deleuze—the basis of which is a foundational principle in a philosophy of the cinematic time-image.
Remember, what I'm about to describe are basic ontological truths (truths that deal with the basis of who we are and how we are built as human beings) rather than psychological truths (truths that deal with how we percieve, feel, and project ourselves and the world):
1) The initial shot of Mark Twain shows us the principle of self-contained framing, which—whether we are conscious of it or not—implies a continuation of the film frame to a richly broader out-of-field reality. Simply put, there is more to the world than just what we are seeing! As Deleuze says, "a more radical elsewhere" of both time and the spiritual. To Deleuze, this relationship between what is in the frame and its openness to what is outside the frame is akin to our own relationship—in time—to our ever actual present (our now) and our movement to the virtual (our memory). The framed image is not static but dynamic, then, because of its relationship, again, in-time, to that which is always outside its own limits.
2) The movement of Mark Twain towards the camera is another principle of the Time-Image. Watch again: the slow movement of Mr. Twain towards the camera. This principle of depth-of-field, which is missing in the work of someone like Georges Méliès, resists the flat pictoral and theatrical nature of the screen. It emphasizes a movement through time over and against a movement through space. As Deleuze says, it is a movement "where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space" (Time-Image p.37). This ever existing circuit between our present (O / A') and the ever-increasing virtual memories of that passage (B / B', C / C', etc.) is how we exist in-time. Delueze calls this circuit the crystal-image of time and looks something like this:
As Mark Twain travels towards us, he doesn't merely travel through space, he travels through time . . . From the shadows of the past into our present. The quality of which is never more apparent as when Mr. Twain seemingly and awkwardly cuts across the frame and away from the camera/viewer. There is something jarring, "un-natural," and "un-true" in that movement across the frame.
3) Finally, the seemingly strange in-camera and non-organic cut of Mr. Twain leaving the frame and re-imerging deep in field, which displaces our sense of the natural order of space-time, is the final principle to point out. The "cut" doesn't build meaning for us (in the traditional sense of editing, which desires to mimic how we perceive life) but, for a lack of a better term, accumulates meaning. There is no logic of cause and effect / action and reaction in that cut. We might be tempted to call it "weird." And it is, but it's also "true!" Being a human being is not simply about moving through space but is about being in time.
Time-travel is something that happens in us rather than something that happens to us. Our experience of human existence is not simply narrative—building up experiences across a logical plane of space—but is about having time in us. As Mark Twain once reflected in a 1906 speech, memory is the thread that holds "life's patches of meaning together." We are memory machines who carry the burden of time, for good and God knows for ill, in us at all times. Memory is curious and strangely capricious, with no order, system, or notion of values, remarked Mr. Twain elsewhere. (Three Thousand Years among the Microbes)
This is the philosophical—and even religious—power/potential of truthful cinema . . . to reveal to us the scene of human living in way previously unimaginable in human history.
"Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished [...] because this film is really the world in an hour and a half." —Jean Luc Goddard
This new and ongoing series of posts will begin to reflect on the beauty and power of cinema posters as both aesthetic advertising tools and as another dimension in the reading of a film's meaning.
Upon seeing this 1966 poster for Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, I was particularly taken aback by how contemporary analysis of Bresson's film about the painful journey of Marie has been overshadowed by the parable of Balthazar—and worse, the idea that Balthazar is a kind of saint or Christ figure. And, whilst I am no Bresson scholar by any leap of imagination, perhaps this hermeneutic arises because of (a) the spiritualized mystique surrounding Bresson, (b) the American affect towards European cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century, and—more practically— (c) Balthazar's story's having a complete arc whilst Marie's fate is left open to the burdensome possibility of future living.
Case in point, two more contemporary DVD covers highlight Balthazar the donkey rather than Marie the accursed soujernor. If we reflect on the uncomfortably voyuristic and ultimately exploitative picture of a shamed young girl, however, it is clear that Bresson's intent is to tell Marie's tale. The donkey, Balthazar, is to be seen as being in service to Marie's tale—despite the film's name. It is the tale of the trials and travails of a girl becoming a woman in a cruel world, seeking to maintain her dignity and hope for both liberation and redemption.
Bresson tells Marie's story with grace and gravity by making the donkey Balthazar the object of wrath. His suffering is her suffering . . . not the other way around. And like the magi, his namesake, he is there to bear witness to Marie's divine suffering. He is both wandering magi and lowly livestock whose sole purpose and existence is to bear witness to the humble suffering of the divine in human form. Balthazar is there to show us the full extent of worldly cruelty on beautiful and nobel creatures such as the gentle Marie. That we see the donkey suffer cruelty as well should horrify us all the more at seeing Marie's suffering because what happens merely outwardly to the beast is happening inwardly to the soul of the human. Keeping all of this in mind is how we can connect to what Goddard (the French socialist materialist) observed about Bresson's film: that to see it is to see "the world in an hour and a half."
I didn't watch the superbowl, but this Dodge ad is one of the finest commercials I've seen since John Hilcoat's Levi's commercial a few years back (see it here) . . .
Whatever politicized dust up has occurred since its airing, the "Farmer" meditation is poetry. Yes, it is Lovemark 101 ("Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever."), but it's poetry nonetheless.
The subtle movement added to the still frames is haunting. The voice over—admittedly the weakest link in the production— is nostalgic without venturing (too far) into the sentimental. The riskier move would have been to allow the images to stand on their own accompanied by a brutally moving Max Richter score . . . but alas!
This is advertising working at its best . . . like Van Gogh's A Pair of Shoes (1886) there is an ever constant movement/exchange/negotiation of meaning throughout the commercial that keeps it from becoming simply trite propaganda.
It's truthful, meaningful, and I can't get it out of me . . . what are your thoughts on the matter?
There's perhaps no more everyday physical struggle tedium that the 21st century Westerner has to go through than the house move. All of ones wealth and possessions moving from one physical location to the next. Having just finished post-grad wok i had somewhere in the vicinity of 30 boxes of books. Not 30 boxes of paperbacks, but 30 boxes (50 lbs or more each) of dense reads.
Several people cheekily suggested that all of these books would easily fit on a Kindle. It would be the same thing only lighter.
My first thought was of the great Star Trek episode when Cpt. Kirk was on trial and was defended by the eccentric Samuel T. Cogley:
My second thought was, "Really? Is it really the SAME thing?"
Now, although passionate (as one would expect from an eccentric Romantic), Cogley doesn't give the most clear defense of why physical books matter, but he does gives clues:
This is where the law is. Not in that homogenized, pasteurized, synthesized...
Homogenization is the process of making a mixture the same throughout at high pressure. Think the mixture of syrup and carbonated water to make soda. It's the process of making things the same.
Pasteurization, of corse, is the super heating then cooling of food to keep it from spoiling quickly. Yes, computers keep books from decay (though this itself is an illusion). But we also now acknowledge that there is something lost in pasteurization. Beneficialy enzymes and microbes. Raw milk and pasteurized milk are not the same thing.
This leads to the other clue, Cogley's concern that it is also synthesized ... synthetic. It is a new compound and different from the 'original'.
But then Cogley goes on what seem to be a non sequitur:
Do you want to know the law? The ancient concepts in their own language? Learn the intent of the men who wrote them? From Moses to the tribunal on Alpha III? Books.
This begs the questions: Why wouldn't you be able to do this with a computer? What does this have to do with the medium in which the artifact is presented? The key seems to be in a relationship between imaginative mediation of the artifact and use. Or more specifically, the way in which mediation has an affect on physical use as it makes the artifact known to us.
It's like the difference between a hot succulent fillet mignon and a freeze dried, or even space food steak. There is something ceremonial about the aesthetic details and the sheer physicality of the fillet that demands a different form of attention from our bodies. The space food is a tool in service of time that could just as well be a flavored pill. it presences the molecules in a reductionistict format so it can be more efficiently consumed. In fact, this is what Cogley says (although he is directly refering to the pressing matter of Kirk's court-martial, we can still apply the point):
If time wasn't so important I'd show you something. My library! Thousands of them.
In many ways this approximation of physicality reminds me of David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). On the verge of unlocking the secrets of teleportation, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) runs a final experiment:
Seth Brundle: [Seth and Ronnie try an experiment late at night. Seth takes a steak and cuts it in half. He cooks one half, and the other half is teleported then cooked. He hands one plate to Ronnie and cuts her a piece] Okay. Eat this, and I need an objective opinion. Seth Brundle: [Ronnie chews it and looks at Seth confused as to what he is doing] Yeah? Ronnie: Well, it could use some finesse, but um... it tastes like a steak. Seth Brundle: Mmm-hmm. [Cuts some steak] Seth Brundle: Now, I want you to try this... teleported half. Ronnie: Oh, are you serious? A monkey just came apart in there. Seth Brundle: Baboon... Eat. Ronnie: [Ronnie eats it] Oh... Oh, oh, tastes funny. [Spits it in a napkin] Seth Brundle: Funny? How? Ronnie: It tastes um... synthetic. Seth Brundle: [Seth smiles and takes the napkin] Mmm-hmm. Ronnie: [smiles with intrigue] So, what have we proved? Seth Brundle: The computer is giving us its interpretation... of a steak. It's, uh translating it for us; it's rethinking it, rather than *reproducing* it, and something is getting lost in the translation. Ronnie: Me... I'm lost. Seth Brundle: The flesh. It should make the computer, uh crazy. Like those old ladies pinching babies. But it doesn't; not yet because I haven't taught the computer to be made crazy by the... [smiles at Ronnie] Seth Brundle: flesh. The poetry of the steak. So, I'm gonna start teaching it now.
Of course, one of the dreams of technology is in unlocking the "poetry" of physicality. In our own time think of the endless quest for artificial intelligence and the fascination with Human +. But the cost seems to be that we are required to give up, or limit, the depths of what makes us human in order to reach that goal. Technology demands this abdication. Tools are not benign, they change us.
Returning to Samuel T. Cogley, then, we can say that there is a physicality to reading that goes far beyond the inputting of data into a machine. The ancient Christian monks used to read out-loud because they would hear with their eyes and read with their ears. Every person of substance that I know vociferously marks and makes annotations on any text they read.This only further enhances the physical interaction and hermeneutical interaction of the reader and writer of the text. These books aren't just oversized data disks, they are worlds that demand exploration; they are angels that bid us to wrestle with through the night. And maybe this is what Samuel T. Cogley was trying to say?
This, of course, posses particularly interesting possibilities and problems when we consider (the physicality of) cinema and the 'virtual' in the 21st century ...
I just stumbled across this jewel. This is the island of my ancestors. The Greeks called it Pithekoussai home of Typhoeus the volcano maker and father of Cerebus the three headed gatekeeper to the underworld.
These are a strange mix of propaganda, advertisement, and documentary newsreel shaped by a post-war cinematic sensibility. There is something hypnotic and neo-realist in the way these vignettes are shot and cut, but maybe I'm feeling a twinge nostalgic because I can see my father running the streets as a little boy. How strange are memory and the moving image. I was never meant to experience these images. As though the shadowy images of my fathers memory are now mine too ...these scenes of living in another age. The time is out of joint.
Cinema Out of Joint is an ongoing reflection on films that best describe the mood, situation, and going-on in Time Out of Joint. It's a glimpse into the films I wrestle with, that have gotten into me and I can't shake ... or don't ever want to.
Cinema Out of Joint is intended to serve as an ongoing guide of landmarks as the soul wayfares through the wondrous and perilous landscape of cinema:
trace n. A visible mark, such as a footprint, made or left by the passage of a person, animal, or thing. Evidence or an indication of the former presence or existence of something; a vestige. // trac-es v. tr. To follow the course or trail of: trace a wounded deer: tracing missing persons. To locate or discover by searching or researching evidence. / v. intr. To make one's way along a trail or course. To have origins; be traceable.
