Category Archives: Essays

Between the Walls: Insanity as Form

Written by . Posted on February 12, 2012. Filed under Essays. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

Editor’s note: excuse the academic flavour of this brief essay originally written for a Japanese Cinema course last year. While I tend to side on not sharing much of my academic work online, I can’t resist bringing some attention to a criminally under-seen silent gem like A Page of Madness

As a medium with intangible, transcendent qualities that express unhindered emotion, cinema has always excelled as a vessel through which to explore insanity. Such an extreme psychological state, in its’ horrible allurement, is best dealt with by cinema which can use mise-en-scène and formal techniques to capture delusional and/or demented perspectives. The tradition of insanity in cinema traces back nearly a hundred years, and some of the most timeless silent films remain fascinating in part for their portrayal of psychotic characters. A Page of Madness (original title: Kurutta Ippêji, Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1926) is one of the most effective treatments of this subject matter, eighty-five years after its’ creation. Kinugasa utilizes a plethora of cinematic techniques in order to capture a subjective experience of madness. A Page of Madness has clear traces of German Expressionism, a movement that was in full swing at the time, as well as the frenetic montage one would find in contemporary Soviet films, like those directed by Sergei Eisenstein, whose works established defining principles of editing. A Page of Madness does not neatly fit into either of these categories, but shared attributes with both styles are undeniable. Commonly, it is likened to the classic German film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, (1920, Robert Weine). This is an apt comparison, but only if we go so far. A Page of Madness is a wholly unique and enigmatic work of art that achieves its’ power through a combined application of aspects from the aforementioned styles.

There are many ways to represent insanity in film. As far as portraying a subjective experience of a psychotic point of view, the two ways to express this formally are with mise-en-scène and montage. However, within each of these broad formal categories are infinite stylistic strategies. Caligari almost exclusively uses mise-en-scène, while A Page of Madness straddles both. By 1926, many Japanese viewers would have already been familiar with German Expressionism, which had been received successfully in Japanese cinemas (Ritchie, 86). The movement is defined by its’ favouring of emotional truth, rather than realism, established by overtly stylized sets and lighting. In the film’s opening, the most Expressionist sequence, we observe a woman dancing in front of a mysterious spinning cylinder and a surrealistic background. She gracefully moves about in a beautiful cloak in this spacious room. Then the camera tracks back to reveal bars and it fades to a cramped cell in an asylum, revealing the dancer to be a mental patient. As we move from the dancer’s subjective perspective to “reality” we tap into one of the driving undercurrents of the film. In her mind, she appears content and there is something almost precious about her delirious vision whereas the cell is a harsh reality of imprisonment. In other words, we see her in a state of free expression and then in a state of oppression, suggesting an allegorical entry point into the film. Even scarier than the mentally ill is the institution that imprisons them, something you cannot quite put your finger on that makes the “status quo” a larger threat than the riotous chaos of the patients. This definitely draws a direct comparison to Caligari, not only in terms of style but also theme.

In From Caligari to Hitler, it is argued that Caligari expresses anxieties about German authoritarian society (Kracauer, 67). In 1925, the Japanese government introduced the Peace Preservation Law in order to prohibit dissent. A Page of Madness taps into the Japanese collective unconscious, and is a product of this repression. This makes the film’s conclusion especially haunting, when the protagonist, a custodian at the asylum, seems to simply accept his position, continuing to wipe the floor. Thus, the relationship with Caligari is thematic, even more so than stylistic.

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage has little concern for spatial and temporal logic and is invested in generating meaning through the juxtaposition of images and their rhythmic succession. This strategy can be observed in every sequence of A Page of Madness in which rhythm and tone take precedence over traditional continuity. Kinugasa applies this method to create a disturbing tempo and an intensely emotional experience that places the viewer in an empathic relationship with the characters. The succession of super impositions, the rapid cutting, the considerable range of angles, the highly conceived framing and the mobile camera which frequently tracks and pans all place an emphasis that actually establishes a deeper relationship with Soviet montage theory than with German Expressionism, which tinges rather than permeates the film.

In conclusion, A Page of Madness has such a potent effect because of its’ uses of Expressionism and Soviet montage theory, a combination which makes it a more fulfilling artistic work of cinema than the somewhat comparable Caligari. Kinugasa’s film is a testament to film form’s ability to express subjective, psychologically damaged perspectives. The asylum has been a ubiquitous locale in movies, and between the walls we find dark mysteries that compel us and can express our inner anxieties. It remains a popular and engrossing subject as the cinema continues to find new ways to explore it—although, looking back at A Page of Madness, it crosses one’s mind that perhaps Kinugasa found the purest way to approach insanity, in which form and madness are so intertwined that they become difficult to separate.

Crossing Boundaries: The Movie Event of the Year

Written by . Posted on January 8, 2012. Filed under Best of the Year, Essays, Guest Contributions. Tagged , , . No comments.

Note from the editor: Mike wrote on The Tree of Life last year for Cinémezzo, this piece acts as a sort of sequel

2011 was a great year for new movies. As a fortunate Vancouverite−i.e. someone with access to one of the world’s best film fests, the Vancouver International Film Festival−I usually have good years for new movies, albeit ones with the manna packed into a frenzied, exhausting compact of three weeks. I see great films every year at VIFF, many of them radical art films from Europe and Asia never to be seen again in North American theatres. The dream of an uncompromising crossover art cinema that animated the late 60s and 70s often seems gone; commercial and mainstream-critical conformism have created a rarefied ghetto for international art cinema, with only the odd Weinstein-backed mediocrity breaking through the walls. VIFF packs the houses for films by Jia Zhangke, Jafar Panahi and others, but they rarely show up at local commercial theatres.

What’s up with that? Is the interest so minor that in can be crammed into a few screenings once a year? Should we blame the media-industrial complex exclusively? Were the 60s and 70s a lucky anomaly that we should get over already? Is the majority-white audience in North America too parochial? I think about this stuff every time I watch a Bergman, Fellini (not often these days), Antonioni or 60s Godard film; every time I read Davids Denby and Thomson, every time I come out of a masterpiece like Syndromes and a Century and it occurs to me that only a sliver of an audience will have- take?- the chance of seeing it. I can’t stop believing in the dream of Uncompromising Crossover Art Cinema (why not coin a phrase? UCAC hereafter), and it’s this dream that made the mainstream-critical and relative commercial success of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life the movie event of 2011 for me.

I still can’t believe that Hollywood backed a film so antithetical to its conventional practice. TTOL is as arty (that’s not a term of abuse for me!) as it gets: massively pretentious, unashamedly poetic, radically associative and discontinuous. It’s not just anomalous in relation to the mainstream, though: TTOL is also an exception to the contemporary arthouse standard of anti-dramatic stasis. It’s as excessive as any tentpole blockbuster and as emotional as any melodrama; Malick deserves a Nobel Prize for folding those elements into one of the most unconventional films ever made. This movie is as cerebral as it is moving, as generous as it is mysterious, as viscerally pungent as it is abstract.

Getting back to parochialism for a second, I have to concede that the film’s ethnic makeup and thematics, its relatively high marketing budget (trailers in multiplexes, etc.), and its Pitt-power (star and co-producer) probably have more than a little to do with its success. But I also want to stress that in no way do those things entail compromise. Malick was able to live the dream of millions: making a deeply radical narrative film with generous commercial backing and distribution. The cinema(s) of static sensual indulgence practiced by Joe, Kiarostami, Hou, Jia and all their compatriots and clones is often wonderful, but what’s missing from the festival circuit styles is something that would push them beyond the…festival circuit. Exuberance, interiority, lyricism, excess, speed, emotionalism, verbosity−by and large, these have been missing from art cinema for decades (exceptions like Wong Kar-Wai prove the rule), and I think that does relate to its commercial marginalization. (Obviously this isn’t the filmmakers’ fault, or even responsibility, and there are other, more significant, cultural and economic factors at work. But still…) TTOL is as intellectually and formally challenging as almost any work of narrative cinema, and it’s also powerfully emotional and spectacular: Malick’s combination of intense drama and formal radicalism is rarer than it should be. I don’t think every radical cineaste should aim to break into the multiplex. I don’t think that popularity is legitimacy. But it’s surely a sign of health and hope for culture when a film like TTOL can barge into the multiplex without dumbing down for what that audience is supposed to want. Sure, there were boos and walkouts, but there were also people I turned onto the film that responded with awe, rapture, tears. Surely that matters more. The last thing I’d want to do is hold up Malick’s achievement as a standard. But a standard and an inspiration are two different things, and it’s not too much to hope that this example of UCAC will give similarly ambitious filmmakers hope.

The film has a lot of detractors. On the one hand, there are the intelligent and principled demurrals of cinephiles like Robert Koehler and Dave Kehr. On the other hand, there are the people who walked out twenty minutes into the movie at the first of three multiplex screenings I attended, and the guy who muttered “What the fuck was that?” at the end of same showing. Some non-cinephiles presumably felt suckered, thinking that the presence of Brad Pitt on the poster and the film’s presence in a multiplex augured a more conventional experience; all I can say is, let’s give them more films this radical and change their expectations! Some people dislike the Christian thematics of the film, but to me they’re tinged with agnosticism (the for-many-disappointing beach finale of the film registers to me as totally hypothetical−the none-too-original dream of an unexceptional man). Some people dislike the rapid, discontinuous editing and the lack of narrative clarity, but to me it’s just part and parcel of the film’s oneiric, memory-evoking vibe. Some people dislike the way it mixes intimate particularization with the creation of the universe, but I see the mixture as a way of humbling the human situations as much as inflating them.

The mixture of grandiosity and intimate subjectivity in TTOL is entirely winning for me; each puts the other in perspective. Malick’s film is about confronting, and trying to bridge, the fundamental contradictions of human existence, including contradictions of scale: between the personal and cosmic, a gap which−tragically, as Malick surely acknowledges−can’t be either ignored or fully bridged. It’s a movie that defies the restrictive adage, cited by Koehler, about finding the universal in the particular. Malick is brave enough to start from the universal; the miracle of the film is that he’s able to establish this priority without diminishing the human element in the slightest. Brad Pitt, Hunter McCracken and Laramie Eppler are some of the most powerful presences I’ve ever seen and heard onscreen; they share the stage with dinosaurs, space vapour and a hypothetical God, and Malick has room for all of them.

Like many American films these days, Malick’s film is slowly paced and rapidly cut. What separates it from the pack−okay, one of several dozen things−is the combination of familiarly propulsive editing and non-narrative film strategy. TTOL pretty much rejects conventional storytelling−it’s as close to an avant-garde film as has ever been made with a 30 million dollar budget. Things are arranged with a rough consequential logic in the largest, middle section of the film, but in terms of regular cause-and-effect film plotting we get very little for our time. The film is intensely focused, at the expense of narrative progression, while also having a scatterbrained wealth of incident. The minimum of cause-oriented story progression evokes stasis, while the rapid cutting registers a sense of impermanence and plenitude. The film’s memory-like quality comes from its vividness, its breaks in sequence, and its lack of suspense. There’s a sense of foreclosure that registers from the very beginning and contrasts with the prolific imagery in fascinating ways.

Malick creates a near-equalization of things that usually contrast in most films: past and present, material and spiritual, individual and universal. He seems to be trying to triangulate extremes, except there’s no definitive third element that comes from it. Every paradox in the film goes unresolved. People scoff at the dichotomy of “the way of nature” and “the way of grace” outlined in Sean Penn’s voiceover narration. I’d have scoffed too if Malick had left it at that, but he didn’t. The film clearly shows Brad Pitt’s character, the obvious representative of “nature,” as having many of the traits that the voiceover groups under “grace”; the same could even be said of the now-infamous dinosaurs- clearly a part of “nature.” The dichotomy is complicated through dozens of incidents, and Malick’s style—in which the rapid cutting violates continuity while uniting contrasts in a blurry, stream-like proliferation—speaks to the slippery give and take between unity and contrast. It’s this give and take that defines Jack’s struggle within the film and Malick’s struggle in making it.

In Stanley Fish’s wonderful little book How To Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, he talks about Gertrude Stein’s strategy of dropping punctuation to create a continuous flow: “[L]ikeness and difference, the basic constituents of a discourse that anatomizes and ranks, change places, go in opposite directions, come together again, are in the end made one. By insisting on the alikeness in value of every word, Stein also insists on the difference or uniqueness of every word.” It seems to me like Malick is doing something similar with his lack of continuity in regards to storytelling, editing and imagery. TTOL is disjunctive and fluid at the same time, each in different ways. The montage is often radical, but it’s so steadily−and, eventually, predictably−prolific that the impact of each shot becomes equal while the visual content is often radically contrasted. The relentless pace of quick cutting turns it into a flowing stream of different colours; equality and difference come as close to merging as is possible. It’s like Malick wants to achieve the ultimate reconciliation, and is smart enough to know that he can’t. He hasn’t discovered a language that will express a unified sense of the world, probably because one doesn’t exist and can’t exist. TTOL is the record of a struggle to build a whole out of fractures, and the failures and successes of that struggle. That’s the reason I balk at my temptation to use the word “hubris” in relation to this movie: it’s ambitious as hell, but it deliberately incorporates a sense of incompleteness. That’s what makes it an agnostic film for me. Think of the grand-scale classics of the cinema: how many of them project anything near this level of uncertainty and irresolution?

When I try to articulate the sense of miraculous in a film I love, I usually come down to the same thing: the instructive commingling of opposites. The opposites here are massive-scale ambition and intense personal interiority. If there’s any didacticism in this film, it’s not to be found in Penn’s highfalutin voiceover, which is really a mere starting point; it’s in the lesson that the microscopic and the massive, the spectacular and the intimate, can belong together onscreen, even if they’re fighting an endless battle with each other. Malick’s fusion of scales, and of industrial contexts, is, if not sui generis, at least a history-making transgression. I can only hope that it’s quickly outstripped. Fingers crossed.

For the Love of Movies: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo

Written by . Posted on December 18, 2011. Filed under Essays. Tagged , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment.

“…The train in the La Ciotat station still keeps arriving, a century later. It’s still possible to put oneself in the position of the frightened spectator, which means that there is something in cinema that is of the past but not past” –Serge Daney

Cinema is always in a state of change. Consequences of this constant flux become more obvious in retrospect, as movements come and go and film form evolves. One of the clearest indications of cinema’s major shifts lies in its technological advancements. Today’s changes are anything but subtle—we can notice them as they occur before us. Regardless of where one stands on the topic of cinema’s health as an art form, it can be agreed that it is going through some of its most monumental changes. Indeed it is even technically switching mediums, as the digital revolution is rendering celluloid obsolete. The utterances of “the death of cinema” seem to come in greater number as a result, but maybe it is yet another case that illustrates people fear what they do not understand. In Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), new technology is revealed to be not a danger but a challenge, and an opportunity to explore new potential in filmmaking. The essentials of film form established over a century ago remain intact, and Hugo acknowledges this while also expanding cinema’s capabilities. In the film, Scorsese interlaces the history of silent cinema with what is one of his most personal stories.

Notably, Scorsese is America’s foremost cinéaste. He is a hardcore cinephile, probably the most outspoken of the kind, who knows and deeply cares about the history of cinema. His cinema-centric documentaries and involvement with the Film Foundation attest to this. The story of this family fantasy film concerns a young orphaned boy living in a train station in Paris. It integrates the true story of Georges Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley)—the pioneer of fantasy and, even fiction, cinema—into its narrative. The history of early cinema becomes a key element of the movie, with references to the likes of the Lumière Brothers, Edwin S. Porter, Harold Lloyd, and D.W. Griffith, to name a few. This makes for a most peculiar marriage between form and content, in which the newest cinema technology—Hugo is shot in 3D on the Arri Alexa, a state of the art digital camera—is used to tell a story about the oldest. In doing this, Martin Scorsese is bridging the gap between the beginnings of cinema to now, as the aforementioned changes revolutionize the medium. Moreover, he is bridging the gap between the era of celluloid to the era of digital, and emphatically trying to establish and maintain cinema’s lineage in a new age.

At its core, Hugo is a love letter to the cinema in general: its magic; its intangibility; and its capabilities. However, the film is aggressive in integrating silent film history, making Hugo not just a love letter but also a plea. Scorsese wants to reintroduce these works into public consciousness, and to reinforce their integrality. There is a digression completely devoted to silent era history, during which Scorsese appropriates images from The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1920), The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921), The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926), and Pandora’s Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929), among others. To see these films on a big screen in a multiplex in 2011 is no less than a small miracle, and Scorsese’s insistence on explicitly sharing these films, their images, and their history, reveals that his intentions are more complex then just paying homage. The gesture is a noble one, unheard of in contemporary mainstream cinema, in which the history of movies forms the core of the film, and the audiences’ participation in appreciating this history is an experience built into the narrative. This is a bold artistic decision. Hugo is no small film: at a budget estimated at 170 million dollars, it is Scorsese’s most costly film. Surely, fellow cinephiles will revel in Hugo’s ciné-centric content, but Scorsese clearly hopes to convert those less familiar with cinema. In wrapping this dose of cinephilia in the context of a whimsical, adventurous film, Scorsese actually may succeed in this ambition. In one sequence, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and his friend Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is the goddaughter of Méliès in the picture, uncover a book on early cinema history at the Film Academy Library, and an astonishing montage of the aforementioned films flashes by. The two young characters are dazzled by what they have unearthed, at the history at their feet. The effect had on them by the book is in essence had on the audience by Scorsese’s intense editing. The sequence evokes Woodrow Wilson’s supposed quote upon seeing Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1914), in which he remarked that the film was “like writing history with lightning”. Here, Scorsese seems to be doing just that­—a lightning history montage.

Hugo accurately traces Méliès’ history with cinema, beginning with his days as a magician at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin who attended the first Lumière Bros. screening in Paris in 1895. Méliès tried to acquire a cinématographe, the all-purpose movie-creating device that the Lumière Brothers invented. It could film, print, edit and project (with slight modifications), and was the most impressive early motion picture camera. Scorsese portrays Méliès’ first encounter with cinema, as he discovers Arrival of a Train at a Station (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895), and immediately is drawn to this new medium—right then and there an artist and his art form are bound (look for a cameo from Michael Pitt in this scene). Determined, Méliès created his own camera by modifying a projector, although, for metaphorical purposes, Scorsese changes this detail. He saw film as a new sort of magic, and was the first to explore its possibilities of making the impossible possible. He is rightly linked to contemporary filmmakers like James Cameron, for being the pioneer of camera tricks and special effects, but that attribution is too limiting. Disparate viewers, such as popular audiences, science-fiction fanatics, surrealists and avant-gardists have revered Méliès—a testament to his legacy. Notably, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage claimed ”I took my first senses of the individual frame life of a film from Méliès”1. Ultimately, Méliès was cinema’s first storyteller, and many of his innovative techniques forwarded film form, regardless of genre. Hugo lovingly recreates his Star Films Studio, which along with Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, was the first of its kind. Its greenhouse like design made it possible to film with natural light, but notably, by 1897, Méliès “may have been the only filmmaker in the world to have photographed under artificial light”2.  He “was responsible for the development of the cinematic tradition of the trick film”3, but his innovations were instrumental in the early exploration of the medium, and all filmmakers, not just those whose specialty is in the fantastic, are ancestors of Méliès. Scorsese uses this notion to make Méliès into a metaphorical presence in Hugo.

Sadly, there is a fall that followed Méliès’ rise, when his films were neglected after WWI and he destroyed much of his equipment in a fit of despair, turning his back on the cinema. A sequence in which Méliès recounts the details of his life and career creates some of the film’s most emotional moments, and it is where one of Scorsese’s central ideas is located. The majority of Méliès’ films (he made hundreds) were lost, and after he gave up filmmaking he opened a toyshop in Gare Montparnasse, where Hugo is set. In the film, Méliès desperately tries to forget the past, but Hugo and Isabelle discover his identity. This rediscovery of his past and his work rejuvenates him and restores meaning to his life. Méliès, who symbolizes cinema’s past, is used to illustrate the dire importance of appreciating the history of filmmaking and therefore in film preservation. Scorsese articulates the need to preserve film in a literal sense, but also in terms of restoring it to public consciousness. The fragility of celluloid has always made it a vulnerable material, but fragile also are the memories of cinema, with an equal need of protection. In Hugo, initially A Trip to the Moon (1902) is the only film of Méliès remaining­—he had sold many of his prints, which were made into shoe heels, and the rest were thought lost. At the end of the film, after Méliès is rediscovered, over eighty of his films are found. He presents an evening of his newly found films to an appreciative audience and then a montage of his works ensues. Scorsese pays tribute to Méliès not just by showing his films, but in a generous gift renders the montage in 3D, with countless Méliès films shown in a way like never before, including A Nightmare (1896), The Music Lover (1903), and of course, A Trip to the Moon, with the iconic shot of the rocket hitting the man in the moon’s eye wonderfully reinvented. The sequence is another small miracle, and a deeply moving gesture. Doubtlessly, Méliès, would have been delighted to see his films in this way, and to know that he was being appreciated and discovered by audiences so many years after his time. As far as being a tribute to Méliès, Hugo is most successful for being made with his spirit of invention and imagination. In a broader sense, Hugo is impressive for balancing this intention with different allegorical layers.

Film history lives and breathes in the compositions of Hugo, whether Scorsese is explicitly appropriating images from other films, or more subtly quoting them. The mesmerizing shots of 1930s Paris are a digital channeling of Rene Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (1930). The image of Hugo hanging from a clock hand, now made iconic by the film’s poster, is an obvious quotation of Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923). At one point of the film, Hugo and Isabelle actually sneak into a screening of the Harold Lloyd classic. These references are woven into the language of the film. At one point, when Scorsese wants to communicate the devastation of WWI and a sense of hopelessness, he cuts to a Max Linder movie poster in the rain, evoking the iconic silent star’s post-war depression and suicide. Scorsese exploits the famous anecdote of how the first cinema audiences reacted to Arrival of a Train by gasping and trying to move out of the way. Using the 3D effect, he revives this sensation for 21st century audiences when a train comes charging towards Hugo and barrels through Gare Montparnasse. Simultaneous with this reverence for early cinema is Scorsese’s exuberant, even experimental, exploration of new technology.

Hugo reveals 3D’s ability to strengthen and expand film form with new possibilities of depth and movement. Indeed, Hugo is by far the most sophisticated 3D film yet made, but Scorsese finds himself in a position not so dissimilar to Méliès, in which he has the opportunity to invent new ways to make movies and to tell stories. Thus, the film’s retrospective concerns are beautifully melded with Scorsese’s willingness to explore cinema’s future. This gap bridging of early to new cinema and from old to new technology in effect transcends these very conceptions. The changes undergone by cinema do not separate it from its past—It is almost a Malickian notion, but applied to the whole of cinema rather than the whole of existence. The essence of cinema that was birthed in the flickering light of Arrival of a Train exists in Scorsese’s digital, 3D images of a different train arriving, over a century later.

Two examples of 3D effects in particular find Scorsese not just modifying form but also adding to the vocabulary of film. In one unsettling close-up of Sacha Baron Cohen, as the Station Inspector, his face slowly moves closer and closer to the camera, and consequently closer to the audience. His face intrudes a zone of space normally left free between viewer and film. The effect is discomforting, and completely new. Calling it a close-up does not suffice. It is a new shot in film grammar, an “extreme foreground close-up”. Another example of 3D innovation comes in the application of a dolly zoom. The effect of a dolly zoom, depending on its execution can be subtle or pronounced. Take for instance its original usage in Vertigo (1958), in which it is a shocking gesture meant to communicate the vertigo experienced by the film’s protagonist. Next, consider the more subtle usage in Scorsese’s own Goodfellas (1990), in the wide two-shot that slowly dolly zooms in on Robert de Niro and Ray Liotta at a diner table. In Hugo, Scorsese uses a relatively slow dolly zoom towards the end of the film, for a shot of Méliès on stage. The effect of the camera move is transformed. Nowhere near subtle, it actually provokes a physical response to the confusing distortion of planes of vision, as the foreground and background interact with greater prominence. 3D does indeed add a new dimension to filmmaking, and Scorsese’s innovative use of 3D form could be used for any type of film, be it a family film like Hugo or a serious adult drama. When asked whether he would like to make movies in 3D for now on, Scorsese said:

“Quite honestly, I would. I don’t think there’s a subject matter that can’t absorb 3D; that can’t tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique. We view everyday life with depth.  I think certain subject matters aren’t meant for 3D but you have to go back to Technicolor; when it was used in 1935 with Becky Sharp, [directed by Rouben Mamoulian], for about 10-15 years, Technicolor was relegated to musicals, comedies and westerns. It wasn’t intended for the serious genres, but now everything is in color.  And so it’s just a different mindset. Granted once the technology advances and you can eliminate glasses that are hindrances to some moviegoers, so why not? It’s just a natural progression.”4

With all these innovative touches, Hugo is nevertheless easily identified as a “Scorsese Picture”. Several recurring motifs from his work are present, the film’s overt stylization link Hugo to the creative peak Scorsese reached during the early nineties, from Cape Fear (1991), through The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), to Kundun (1997). Arguably, this streak of films makes for the most robust demonstration of formal excellence in Hollywood filmmaking history. That Hugo is a family film should be not a deterring factor. Scorsese has always worked with different genres, oftentimes blending different ones together. Undeniable in Hugo is Scorsese’s personal stamp, and what lies at its very heart, his quasi-autobiographical presence within the film.

Like with many of Scorsese’s films, he locates himself within it. Hugo is a lonely character, isolated from the vast Paris that surrounds him, rendered as an infinite cityscape in the film. Scorsese was also isolated as a young boy, stricken by asthma that kept him from playing outside with other children. He developed his relationship with the real world and the people around him through cinema much like how Hugo watches the lives in the train station as if they were stories unfolding just for him. The shots from his point-of-view as he watches people usually have a frame within the frame, giving us a sense of his viewpoint and its similarity to a movie frame. Some sort of revolving gear frames Hugo’s eyes in one instance, as he peers from behind a clock, as if to simulate the shifting from frame to frame of celluloid moving through a projector—his personal moving pictures. Hugo peering from behind the clock at the station recalls the image of the young Henry Hill watching the gangsters from his window in Goodfellas. Hugo has a special relationship with cinema. His father used to take him to movies on his birthday. When Hugo and Isabelle sneak into Safety Last, one image is just of the projector light, which in 3D radiates beyond the screen, basking the audience. Then in an image that has recurred in Scorsese’s films, such as The Aviator and Kundun, the characters are framed with the projector’s light radiating right behind them. Speaking of Kundun, it bears mentioning that that film was actually the first of Scorsese’s to feature images from Georges Méliès. In one sequence, the Dalai Lama’s first encounters with movies are portrayed, and he too forms much of his relationship with the world through the moving image.

A key element yet unmentioned in the film is the automaton that Hugo is trying to fix—A broken mechanical figure discovered by his father. When it is introduced in the film, Hugo sits down next to the automaton and a series of flashbacks explain what happened to him and his father. The distinct whirring of a projector running a film plays on the soundtrack, and light flashes on the automaton as Hugo remembers these moments, implying the figure’s figurative relation to cinema—ultimately it is articulated as an instrument that transcends isolation. The automaton links Hugo to his father; his memories; Isabelle, who possesses its key; and Méliès, its original maker. Essentially it establishes all meaningful connectivity he has to the people and world around him. The importance of relationships and their connection to movies is highlighted by warm gestures linked to cinema experience—when Isabelle places her hand on her Godmother’s shoulder after watching a film, or when she thanks Hugo for showing her Safety Last, referring to it as “a gift”. For Scorsese, cinema is everything, but nothing without people. Richard Brody of The New Yorker labels the automaton as “a kind of living cinema”, and like with Scorsese and cinema, Hugo “keeps and fixes” the automaton5. It is even with parts from the automaton that Méliès built his first movie camera. This object, then, is one of the principal metaphors of the film, and injects the final shot with mysterious power, as the automaton stares into the audience (framed not unlike the final shot of Casino, but with opposing emotional connotations), and the relationship between creator, viewer and cinema culminates with unification. The cinema is reborn here, but it is neither the first nor the last time. Cinema, as with art, as with life, is of a cycle without ending. Hugo is a marker of an immeasurable intangibility; it could be set at any point: cinema’s rebirth is a perpetual process. Like the automaton, it merely requires someone to tinker with its clockwork to keep it going. Be it through the eyes of the automaton or the eye left unmarked on the man on the moon, cinema and viewer watch one another, and through this mutual gaze form meaning. Such is Hugo, to make this dynamic explicit in its final moments. Although it is a film with several layers of meaning that contains within it cinema’s past, present and future, it is also a testament to the movies and how they matter to a man whose life intertwines with them, on screen and off.

It is also about cinema’s relationship to time. The machinery of the automaton, of cinema, is linked to the gears of clocks, and to the world as machine. Cinema is linked to memories, history and time. An important motif in the film is of the statues throughout the city. These works of art are foregrounded in the mise en scène as if they are watching over the film’s events. One statue points to the cinema as Hugo and Isabelle stand before it, and in one shot, Scorsese cuts from an extreme close-up on a pocket watch to a statue in the foreground that almost appears to be looking right at it. The link between art and time is expressed unequivocally.

In spite of its technological advancement and numerous transformations, cinema retains an essence and its connectivity to history. Hugo is a proclamation of cinema’s enduring power. Méliès’ films are still a pleasure to behold, and Scorsese wants to share this, both as a way of reintroducing early cinema into public consciousness and also to signal the need to preserve and honour these and other vulnerable works. As Scorsese himself says, “…Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive”6. Scorsese embraces the new digital era of filmmaking, but Hugo beckons for this new age to be film conscious even as cinema expands, worlds apart from its origins. By appropriating images from the works of Méliès, Porter, Griffith and others, the presence of early cinema in present cinema is literalized, and Scorsese sustains the century-spanning lineage of the art form. The integration of Méliès’ story into Hugo further solidifies the significance of the relationships between history, fiction, creator, and viewer in what could be called the sociology of cinema. Like with the automaton, the clocks at the train station, and how Hugo sees the world, every piece has a purpose in order to make sure everything functions as a whole. This is no more intricate than the construction of Hugo itself, a film made beautiful by its invention, reinvention and regard for a past that ceaselessly informs all that has and will come, in cinema or otherwise.

Citations

1. Hammond, Paul. Marvelous Méliès, London: Gordon Fraser, 1974.

2. Frazer, John. Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of George Méliès. Boston Mass: Hall, 1979.

3. Popple, Simon, and Joe Kember. Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory. London: Wallflower, 2004.

4. “‘Hugo’ Helmer Martin Scorsese Ponders 3D Future And How ‘Taxi Driver’ Would Have Benefitted.” Interview by Mike Fleming. Deadline New York.

5. Brody, Richard. “”Hugo“: Martin Scorsese’s Cybercinema.” The Front Row. The New Yorker.

6. The Film Foundation.

 

The Global Network: Information as Disease in Contagion

Written by . Posted on September 20, 2011. Filed under Essays, Reviews. Tagged , , , , , , . 7 Comments.

Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, is about a spreading epidemic and the large web of people and institutions that are forced to deal with its consequences, but this only represents the surface of what is the boldest exercise in Hollywood storytelling since The Social Network. It even feels as though it were made by someone who carefully studied David Fincher’s film’s principles and techniques, which makes quite a bit of sense, considering that Soderbergh watched it multiple times last year (twice in a single day at one point), according to his eccentric report of his “cultural diet”, which documents all that he watched and read in the period of a year. What made The Social Network one of the most memorable movies of last year was its’ progressive stylization (rather than Aaron Sorkin’s admittedly sharp Oscar-winning script), in which Fincher ennobled the digital camera at his disposal in the creation of a rich, unique aesthetic, and applying storytelling techniques that felt conducive to the film’s themes of disloyalty in a world with alienating media and shifting (degrading?) social relations. Complicated, sometimes elliptical editing, a ferocious pace, and a brilliant electronic score from Trent Reznor composed such a slick experience that perhaps it covered up what a daring piece of pop art The Social Network really was. If Fincher’s film took a microcosmic look at a changing world, Contagion takes the macro route, globalizing themes of alienation, paranoia and information in a world dominated by media and technology, and emphasizing details of a bureaucracy that can bring out the Josef K. in all of us. As far as stylization goes, Soderbergh doesn’t so much inherit aspects of The Social Network as it one-ups them, taking further steps with editing, digital aesthetic and doing so with a daring narrative structure.

With the opening shot of the film, which is preceded by the sound of a cough, Gwyneth Paltrow’s face is de-romanticized, as we can peer into her countless pores. Indeed, the film makes efforts to remove any of the associated glamour from its considerable assortment of Hollywood stars. The otherwise immersive experience of the film is interrupted by the casting of such recognizable figures, such as Paltrow, Matt Damon and Jude Law, which challenges our preconceptions of what role such actors should play. As the trailer itself reveals, Paltrow’s character is fated to exit the film relatively early on, subverting the Hollywood staple of hierarchical casting. However, it is not just with killing characters off that Contagion subverts the status quo, but in the film’s erratic distribution of screen time and virtual indifference to character development and emotional resonance. This is one of the key differences between Contagion and The Social Network: Fincher’s film had a core drama to rely on whereas Soderbergh depends almost entirely on his own creative agency for creating meaning and compelling filmmaking through his navigation of a cold, fact-obsessed narrative.

In the montage at the opening of the film, Soderbergh tracks the initial spreading of the mysterious disease that the plot revolves around. We follow Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, Beth, on her way home to the United States from Hong Kong, as she gets increasingly ill. This is crosscut with other victims of the disease, who are located in several places around the world. The sequence is clearly inspired by the what is probably the most memorable part of The Social Network, where Zuckerberg conceives of a web site from his dorm, and Fincher shows us various characters in different spots on campus that are immediately impacted. Cliff Martinez’s score for Contagion, while not derivative of Reznor’s, certainly has similarities with its’ electronic tinge and also with Soderbergh’s application of it. As we track the disease, however, we have no narrative based orientation, and we seamlessly jump across the map, from “character” to “character”. While the remainder of the film isn’t quite as abstract, it retains much of this approach, highlighting Soderbergh’s mastery of constructing unified ideas through disparate singular pieces. The film’s virtual evasion of individuals is appropriate in that this is not a film about an individual but rather of individuals absorbed into a mass. The MacGuffin of the disease offers Soderbergh the chance to examine humanity, who exist solely through “the machine”, on a global scale, without having to worry about adhering to the usual glue that holds a narrative together (if Nolan tried to make this film, he would break down in tears out of frustration).

Just as carefully as the film tracks the disease, it simultaneously is tracking how the world is handling it. We observe families, scientists and governmental suits reacting to the catastrophe. More so than the spreading of a disease it seems like we are observing the spreading of a different virus: information. By involving such a broad cross-section of the world, the film brilliantly examines how information is consumed; how it spreads; how it’s controlled, by who, and why; who is privileged to access it, why and why not, etc. Most importantly, the film focuses on the roles played by the media and the government—the suppression of information is one of the first instincts in the case of the latter.

Contagion explores its themes through a network of figures—I find it difficult to cite them as characters when they have so little characterization although the exceptions may be Fishburne’s Dr. Cheever and Damon’s Mitch, who by the end of the films do fulfill an arc—and how they interact with each other and the disaster. The individuals in the film are all dependent on technology as sources for communication, be it with other individuals or with masses via media. For example, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslets’s characters are bound by cell phone, at once linked and disconnected from each other. Cheever is Winslet’s government liaison as she tracks down the disease and tries to isolate cases while investigating. Dr. Mears (Winslet) is committed to her job, but despite directly helping people she comes off as impersonal and detached. To emphasize her coldness, Soderbergh costumes her in thick sweaters and other androgynous clothing. She is invested in her task, which is inherently humane, but she neglects the human aspect of her job. This represents one of Soderbergh’s insights into the early 21st century human syndrome he is illustrating. An early image of the film articulates this in a more impressionistic manner, when a dying man is walking the busy streets of Hong Kong, we see a shot from his POV of the masses of people around him, blurred so as to subtract definition from the individual, all the while cross-cutting with street vendors handling meat, chopping and boiling flesh. In the film’s most poetic and abstract moments, it works as a study of our unconscious connections with those around us (it’s ironic that the disease is a universal event and confronts people with the reality of these connections, resulting in hysteria), our alienation from these connections, and the difficulty of interpreting masses as a mass of individuals rather than a single entity. That Contagion focuses mostly on highly populated cities emphasizes this symptom.

Some of the most biting material of the film is focused on Jude Law’s character, Alan Krumwiede, a popular rogue blogger, who is among the first sources to cover the disease in the news. As the world searches for a cure, Krumwiede claims to have found a natural one: forsythia. He posts a video of himself on his web site, wherein he appears to suffer from symptoms of the disease and takes forsythia to prove it works. He survives the disease, but there is no way to ensure he had it to begin with. Still, his blog has 12 million readers and forsythia becomes a desperately sought after item, driving people to fight each other over the precious available doses, showing us how the manipulation of information can be a tool for impacting industry. Krumwiede’s fame affords him face time on a major news show opposite Dr. Cheever in one of the film’s most avant-garde sequences. The two men are each merely a presence on a screen to the other. Dr. Cheever questions Krumwiede’s legitimacy and in turn Krumwiede accuses (accurately) Cheever of leaking information to a loved one. Soderbergh frames Jude Law from an awkward high angle, and then proceeds with a shot-reverse shot of Law with himself, alternating from each side of his face in rapid succession and emphasizing his distractingly bad tooth (which must be fake). What is being suggested? The figure of Krumwiede is presented here as almost maniacal: a man that couldn’t possibly be trusted, but is; at the same time, he is at least right in exposing some questionable practices on the government’s behalf, so in this case can either side really be trusted, or for that matter can any source?

I’d like to investigate all of the different figures in the film, but with such a wide array of them, it would require a painfully exhaustive treatment. What matters is that all these pieces fit together in a meaningful way and that Soderbergh, with his medley of plastic; metal; canted tech-screens; comically framed hazmat suits; and dystopian touches—people have to wear barcodes in a late section of the film—has crafted an exciting and disturbing picture of today. The final gestures of the film portray a reconciliation of the upper and lower class via Dr. Cheever and a custodian played by the wonderful John Hawkes, in which human intervention of information—and undermining of bureaucracy—represents a victory. This is similar to the series of denouements in Soderbergh’s Traffic, in which several of the characters break free of systematic restrictions and achieve a liberation of sorts. Contagion’s fixation with three different usages of a camera in the final moments—the film even ends with a camera flash—provides an ambiguous coda to the film’s portrayal of technology, demonstrating the different meanings of images and image-makers. There is an optimistic suggestion of transforming the coldness of technology through the imposition of humanity and sincerity.

The avant-garde touches that separate Contagion from The Social Network hasn’t given it a different status as a blockbuster. Not only did it have just as wide a release, but it’s even playing in IMAX, and made almost the exact same amount of money on its’ opening weekend (both made an est. $22.4 million). Soderbergh’s ability to maintain a mainstream status and to create popularized work without compromising what has been an incredibly explorative career is one of his most impressive achievements, and Contagion is the film that best combines all of Soderbergh’s facets, bridging the gap between his broad appeal as both an arthouse and Hollywood filmmaker. Soderbergh has consistently made relevant films, but Contagion is one of the first that feels ahead of its time, a masterpiece pertinent to current day but guaranteed to become increasingly so as time goes on. He has articulated our ambiguous and disconcerting relationship with information in the early 21st century, and equating it to a disease is the film’s most basic and effective poetic notion. It makes sense, doesn’t it? After all: whether true, false, manufactured, exposed, traded, bought or sold: information is contagious.

(un?)finished cinema.

Written by . Posted on July 13, 2011. Filed under Essays. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

The closed cinematic world of Christopher Nolan folding into a box.

Set in stone like math equations a la the Coen bros.

The antidote: Kiarostami’s unfinished cinema. The image is yours to complete…

…The viewer holds the key.

Nolan, guard of a safe wherein all images are sealed and protected from the viewer. There is no negotiating with the lock, to which there is no key. A finished cinema.

———————–

“…A cinema of such precise predetermination that the movies are in essence over before you even sit down to watch them.” –Daniel Kasman, MUBI.com (on the Coen bros.)