Change Your Image
mats_big_thingy
Reviews
Éloge de l'amour (2001)
Philosophy or socioeconomic critique? Godard's eloge de l'amour
Critic Douglas Morrey says Godard's cinema is not simply about philosophy or cinema with philosophy, rather it is cinema as philosophy. The question is whether the film is concerned with philosophical issues, or a more simple polemic of how love is failed by the capitalist machine? Philosophy or socio-economics?
Filmmaker Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) pitches an idea for a project about love. When casting for the female antagonist, he meets a girl who he thinks he has met before. He later finds out that she has died. He soon realises where he had met her before in a flashback from two years before to when he was working on a production of suffering during WWII. The film is a critique on Hollywood and how capitalism is destroying cinema and love.
As for Socio-economics, (Late) Capitalism strives to be the End of History and would consequently maintain freedom of capital over the freedom of mankind (Demonstrable in the film where Edgar wants his film to be history not Hollywood)
The film succeeds in offering a philosophical problem, but demonstrates philosophy's inability to enter into any realm other than the abstract.
Godard here follows Marx' dictum: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it'.
Le retour à la raison (1923)
Man Ray's Le Retour à la Raison, and the child's conception of 'the uncanny'
Man Ray's film, made in France 1923, eats up the stuff of semi-consciousness and delivers them in a high-speed furore. If we can at least consider that the semi-conscious image that is being divulged is indeed that of a child's, we can identify those notions of terror that are archetypical to the psychological horror of, say, H.P Lovecraft or F.W Murnau. Common is the view that 'the fantastic' is, like Freud's 'uncanny', an instance of simultaneous familiarity and non-familiarity that toys with the subject. The horror image or text itself toys the reader with the familiar and the non-familiar. The subject may well become de-sensitised to the horror image or text if it is set from without of the familiar; in space or in the future. But the kernel of passing fear into the mind's of others is to infiltrate their comfort zone. Is this not the plan of the Big Bad Wolf to woo by means of calm the innocent girl into submission. Indeed the Mythological qualities of the Big Bad Wolf descend from its various attacks on European settlements.
A human quality for Freud is repressing what meaning (or lack of) we attached to certain objects as a child. Of course at times these repressed meanings present themselves to us; certain "childish" jokes make us laugh. Indeed Freud thought that what made a joke funny was its revisiting the meaning that the child attaches to things the bouncing and the lacking of concern for self-preservation found in the comedy of Buster Keaton, for example.
Of course what is repressed in a child is not the fear imagery of pre-sleep semi-consciousness, but simply how canny the uncanny was to him or her. On revisiting these nonsensical images in Man Ray's film we take them as almost without foundation. Quite literally they appear from nowhere and with no explanation. On later analysis of the film, in a pseudo-academic way, we see the film is designed so each appearing image stems from nowhere. It is without the safety net of cause and effect. Selected individually we see that some images in the film will be familiar to the child before sleep. The distortion, the gravel-like textures, the swinging light bulb, long tubes emanating from the walls or the ceiling, the shadows behind hanging objects.
Is it not interesting that these images that appear from nowhere are not uncanny enough. Mostly because the image is precisely how they appeared at one time when we were not so equipped to attach such a meaning to them as uncanny or fantastical. Without the appropriate net of symbolic attachment readily available to describe such raw phenomena, things were simply things. We now turn what it is to be uncanny on its head; to a child in those terrifying moments before sleep, when the walls have shadows and objects are moving independently, it is not that these things which are uncanny; i.e. objects in an ordinary capacity doing something extraordinary, because to a child this is not unusual. It would be unusual to an adult who discovers that objects which don't move independently, are. This is uncanny. To be sure the 'uncanny' only works in the symbolic order - the negation of the real of an object for its symbolisation. To the child nothing is uncanny because if things are simply just things, anything goes.
More literally, what is frightening for the child is that it is likely these objects on the wall are alive, conscious and vengeful. At their most alarming moments before semi-consciousness turns to sleep. A 'return to the repressed' in this formal sense is a return to the canniness of the independently moving object without the slightest notion of its fantastical qualities.
L'homme à la tête en caoutchouc (1901)
Technological Advancements on the modern audiences' rubber heads
In Georges Melies film 'The Man With the Rubber Head', what is it that is suspended? Our belief or our disbelief? The modern audience is desensitised to what is witnessed, which to the films modern audience would have seemed particularly, lets say 'futuristic'. If technological advancements have affected the way in which we apprehend phenomena on-screen, does it affect the way in which we apprehend further life? Is it possible that life in a technological advanced society is less real than before? However, will the 'real' and the 'possible' be "more" as technology advances?
What this film does more than any other in the digital age is demonstrate artistic creativity. The illusion which (really) exists before us was not borne by the touch of a button, but crafted with a patience, that is rare in our postmodern dullness.
La pianiste (2001)
Self-denial as a feminine law of orgasm
Self-denial as a feminine law of orgasm. What does this mean in La Pianiste: the spectator is given a crash course in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in 131 minutes, averting our concept of Erika from simply sexually cold, or merely fetishistic, to her as active sexed subject. This specifically feminine notion of what is sexual has been termed jouissance by Jacques Lacan - the term is to be contrasted with plasir (pleasure) but rather evokes the subject as proprietor of enjoyment, also attaining the pun jouir (in French to come or orgasm).
Erika's task then is to achieve jouissance by means that do not represent in any way the power and signifier of the Father (who is present in his absence - consider the scenes of Erika's aggression towards her Mother). She has to commit herself to self-denial in the form of what Freud called the Death Drive. This often misused and misunderstood term is justified in Lacan's Freudianism as the rejection of the symbolic realm - this meaning the striving for a self that is not in the Paternal world of discourse. In this specific sense Erika rejects penetrative sexual intercourse and embarks in various other forms of enjoyment out of the typical penis centred sexual arrangement.
La Pianiste is an example of a theoretically aware film and seems to write its own symptomatic readings for us, which in this way is very significant to academic endeavours in film, though most importantly for the perversity in the cinematic experience, which of late has been somewhat lacking in substance.