tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82578993256511479062024-03-19T04:15:46.297-07:00leyendocineLos materiales que aquí aparecen son recursos bibliográficos de varias materias sobre cine.
Los textos están organizados de acuerdo a estas asignaturas.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-24013799271746781532009-07-08T12:47:00.001-07:002009-07-08T12:47:57.261-07:00Definición de cine moderno por E. RussoCine moderno<br /><br />Los indicios de modernidad en Orson Welles surgieron a través de los que podría considerarse sus características barrocas y lo hicieron mucho antes de que ellas se instalaran como una corriente identificable en distintas cinematografías. En los filmes modernos lo clásico se reconoce como algo previamente consumado. Sólo resta iniciar una nueva etapa de renovación, a contrapelo de la tradición: aunque aquella pueda ser asimilada en el aprendizaje, deberá ser transformada en la nueva función.<br />Es su gestación durante la posguerra y su lento crecimiento en la década siguiente el cine moderno se propuso diferenciarse de los modelos clásicos a través de las barrocas maniobras citadas o por medio de tajantes distinciones a la manera romántica, tratando lisa y llanamente de aniquilar el pasado, pensando como un condicionamiento claustrofóbico. También en el cine la tradición de la modernidad es una tradición de ruptura.<br />El cine moderno supo articular el tiempo y espacio narrativo de un modo inverso al clásico. Si aquél trataba de instalar al personaje como sujeto de una acción, ahora se lo ubicaba en posición de espectador de un mundo que se armaba o revelaba ante sus ojos. A la vez la crisis comenzó a separar el ser y el parecer de un modo dramático (…)<br />En ese contexto de transición, La ventana indiscreta (1953) se sostiene en una condición doble. Un estilo clásico sustentando una ficción moderna, donde su protagonista debe decidir el sentido de lo visto, armarlo según un saber que le es escaso, no podía sino se anticipatorio de eses sentido incómodo, de necesidad de lo nuevo, que funda la modernidad en el cine.<br />La guerra había puesto límites a la representación que debió se relanzada bajo nuevas convenciones. En el cine moderno la conciencia de estar asistiendo a una ficción supo imponerse como mandato ético, frente al viejo requisito de la transparencia, considerado desde los nuevos conceptos como hipnótico y falaz. En caso de optar por el realismo debió investírselo de nuevos códigos, ajenos a las convenciones tradicionales.<br /><br />Russo, Eduardo, Diccionario de cine, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1998.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-7912778815012745222009-03-26T11:59:00.000-07:002009-03-26T12:35:49.205-07:00Nuevas tendencias en el cine documental.En el texto al que remite el link podrán encontrar breves comentarios de algunos de los realizadores contemporáneos más interesantes, filmografías y reseñas de algunas de sus películas.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/3511835/Cine-Documental-6-NuevasTendencias">http://www.scribd.com/doc/3511835/Cine-Documental-6-NuevasTendencias</a>marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-20394820258349426912008-04-26T09:21:00.000-07:002008-04-26T09:25:26.522-07:00French Silent Cinema, por Richard AbelNATIONAL CINEMAS<br />French Silent Cinema<br />RICHARD ABEL<br /><br /><strong>THE GREAT WAR: COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY<br /></strong>The general mobilization orders in early August 1914 brought all activity in the French cinema industry to an abrupt halt. Until recently, it has been customary to use the war to explain the decline of the French-vis-à-vis the American cinema industry. Although there is some truth to that claim, the French position had been weakening before the war began. By 1911, for instance, under pressure from MPPC restrictions and the 'independent' companies' expansion, Pathé's portion of the total film footage released in the USA had dropped to less than 10 per cent. By the end of 1913, in both numbers of film titles and total footage in distribution, the French were losing ground to the Americans on their own home territory. The war simply accelerated a process already well under way, and its most devastating effect, other than cutting off production, was severely to restrict the export market on which the French companies so heavily depended for distributing their films.<br />Although Pathé, Gaumont, Éclair, and Film d'Art all resumed production in early 1915, wartime restrictions on capital and material forced them to operate at a much reduced level and to rerelease popular pre-war films. Furthermore, they faced an 'invasion' of imported American and Italian films which quickly filled French cinemas, one of the few entertainment venues to reopen and operate on a regular basis. And many of those films were distributed by new companies, some with American backing. First came a wave of Keystone comedies, most of them distributed by Western Imports/ Jacques Haik, which had become a crucial foreign distributor just before the war. By the summer and autumn, through Western Imports and Adam, the films of Charlie Chaplin (nicknamed Charlot) were the rage everywhere. Next came Les Mystères de New York ('The mysteries of New York'), a compilation of Pearl White's ' first two serials, produced by Pathé's American affiliate and distributed by Pathé in France, and its only rival in popularity was the Italian spectacular Cabiria ( 1914). By 1916, through Charles Mary and Monat-Film, it was the turn of Triangle films, especially the Westerns of William S. Hart (nicknamed Rio Jim), and Famous Players adaptations such as Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat ( 1915)), which ran for six months at the Select cinema in Paris.<br />Despite contributing to the onslaught of American films, as well as losing critical personnel like Capellani and Linder to the USA, Pathé remained a major distributor of French product. Not only did the company support feature-length productions from SCAGL (Leprince, Monca) and Valetta (Morlhon), but it sought out new film-makers, notably the famous theatre director André Antoine. Pathé also provided financial backing to Film d'Art, where Henri Pouctal was joined by young Abel Gance. Gaumont, by contrast, had to cut back its production schedule, especially after Perret left to work in the USA. Yet it maintained a strong presence in the industry, largely through Feuillade's popular, long-running serials as well as its circuit of cinemas (the second largest after Pathé's). Although continuing to produce films, Éclair never fully recovered from the double blow of the war and a fire that destroyed its American studio and laboratories in April 1914. Eventually, the company reorganized into smaller components, the most important devoted to processing film stock and manufacturing camera equipment: Éclair's camera, for instance, competed with Debrie's 'Parvo' and Bell & Howell's for dominance in the world market. Eclipse survived largely on the strength of its new film-making team, Mercanton and René Hervil. In spite of the odds, independent production companies actually increased in number, and some (those of André Hugon, Jacques de Baroncelli, and Germaine Dulac) even flourished. That they could succeed under such conditions was due, in large part, to the relatively widespread distribution their films had in France, through AGC or especially Aubert, whose circuit of cinemas continued to expand.<br />The French films available to spectators between 1915 and 1918 were somewhat different from before. Perhaps because it was now difficult for the French to laugh at themselves, at least as they had been accustomed to, the once prolific comic series almost disappeared. Pathé kept up the Rigadin series, but with fewer titles; Gaumont went on making Bout-de-Zan films and then concocted a series with Marcel Levesque. Production of large-scale historical films was also curtailed, unless they were conceived within a serial format, as was Film d'Art's Le Comte de MonteCristo ('The Count of Monte-Cristo', 1917-18), directed by Pouctal and starring Léon Mathot. Given French budget restrictions and the success of Pearl White's films, the serial became a staple of production, especially for Gaumont. There, Feuillade turned out one twelve-episode film per year, returning to the crime serial in Les Vampires ('The Vampires', 1915-16), then shifting to focus on a detective hero (played by René Cresté) in Judex ( 1917) and La Nouvelle Mission de Judex ('Judex's new mission', 1918). Otherwise, patriotic melodramas were de rigueur, at least for the first two years of the war: perhaps the most publicized were Pouctal's Alsace ( 1915), starring Réjane, and Mercanton and Hervil's Mères françaises ('French mothers', 1916), which posed Bernhardt at Joan of Arc's statue before the ruined Rheims cathedral. Soon these gave way, however, to more conventional melodramas and adaptations drawn from the pre-war boulevard theatre of Bataille, Bernstein, and Kistemaeckers. Many of these films were now devoted to women's stories, in acknowledgement of their dominant presence in cinema audiences and of their ideological significance on the 'home front' during the war. Moreover, they gave unusual prominence to female stars: to Mistinguett, for instance, in such Hugon films as Fleur de Paris ('Flower of Paris', 1916), Grandais in Mercanton and Hervil's Suzanne series, and Maryse Dauvray in Morlhon films such as Marise ( 1917). But most prominent of all,. between 1916 and 1918, in more than a dozen films directed by Monca and Leprince for SCAGL, was the boulevard actress Gabrielle Robinne.<br />Out of such melodramas developed the most advanced strategies of representation and narration in France, particularly in what Gance polemically called 'psychological' films. Some, like Gaumont's one-reel Têtes de femme, femmes de tête ('Women's heads, wise women', 1916), directed by Jacques Feyder exclusively in close shots, nearly passed unnoticed. But others were celebrated by Émile Vuillermoz in Le Temps and by Colette and Louis Delluc in a new weekly trade journal, Le Film. The most important were Gance's own Le Droit à la vie ('The right to life', 1916) and especially Mater Dolorosa ( 1917), both much indebted to The Cheat and starring Emmy Lynn. Through unusual lighting, framing, and editing strategies, Mater Dolorosa seemed to revolutionize the stylistic conventions of the domestic melodrama, perhaps most notably in the way everyday objects, such as a white window curtain or a fallen black veil, took on added significance through singular framing (or magnification) and associational editing. These strategies were shared by a related group of 'realist' melodramas which Delluc saw as influenced by certain Triangle films but which also derived from an indigenous French tradition. Here, Antoine's adaptations of Le Coupable ( 1917) and Les Travailleurs de la mer ('Workers of the sea', 1918) were exemplary, especially in their location shooting (one on the outskirts of Paris, the other on the coast of Brittany). But Delluc also drew attention to the photogénie of the peasant landscapes in Baroncelli's Le Retour aux champs ('Return to the fields', 1918) as well as certain factory scenes in Henri Roussel's L'Âme du bronze ('The bronze soul', 1918), one of Eclair's last films. Both kinds of melodrama would provide the basis for some of the best French films after the war.<br /><strong>'LES ANNÉES FOLLES': FRENCH CINEMA REVIVED<br /></strong>By the end of the war, the French cinema industry confronted a crisis aptly summed up by posters advertising Mundus-Film (distributors for Selig, Goldwyn, and First National): a cannon manned by American infantrymen fired one film title after another into the centre of a French target. According to La Cinématographie française (which soon became the leading trade journal), for every 5,000 metres of French films presented weekly in France there were 25,000 metres of imported films, mostly American. Sometimes French films made up little more than 10 per cent of what was being screened on Paris cinema programmes. As Henri Diamant-Berger, the publisher of Le Film, bluntly put it, France was in danger of becoming a 'cinematographic colony' of the United States. How would the French cinema survive and, if it did, Delluc asked, how would it be French?<br />The industry's response to this crisis was decidedly mixed over the course of the next decade. The production sector underwent a paradoxical series of metamorphoses. The established companies, for instance, either chose or were forced to beat a retreat. In 1918 Pathé-Frères reorganized as Pathé-Cinéma, which soon shut down SCAGL and sold off its foreign exchanges, including the American affiliate. Two years later, another reorganization made Pathé-Cinéma responsible for making and marketing apparatuses and film stock and set up a new company, Pathé-Consortium (over which Charles Pathé lost control), which rashly began investing in big-budget 'superproductions' that soon resulted in staggering financial losses. After briefly underwriting 'Séries Pax' films, Gaumont gradually withdrew from production, a move that accelerated with Feuillade's death in 1925. Film d'Art also reduced its production schedule as its chief producers and directors left to set up their own companies. Only the emergence of a 'cottage industry' of small production companies during the early 1920s provided a significant counter to this trend. Joining those film-makers already having quasi-independent companies of their own, for instance, were Perret (returning from the USA), DiamantBerger, Gance, Feyder, Delluc, Léon Poirier, Julien Duvivier, René Clair, and Jean Renoir. Even larger companies were established by Louis Nalpas, who left Film d'Art to construct a studio at Victorine (near Nice), by Marcel L'Herbier, who left Gaumont to found Cinégraphic as an alternative atelier for himself and other independents, and by a Russian émigré film colony which took over Pathé's Montreuil studio, first as Films Ermolieffand then as Films Albatros. The two other principal producers were the veteran Aubert and a newcomer, Jean Sapène. Based on an alliance with Film d'Art, Aubert built up a consortium which, by 1923-4, included half a dozen quasi-independent film-makers. Sapène, the publicity editor at Le Matin, took over a small company named Cinéromans, hired Nalpas as his excutive producer, and set up an efficient production schedule of historical serials to be distributed by Pathé-Consortium. So successful were those serials that Sapène was able to assume control of and revitalize Pathé-Consortium, with Cinéromans as its new production base.<br />Although French production increased to 130 feature films by 1922, that figure was far below the number produced by either the American or German cinema industries, and French films still comprised a small percentage of cinema programmes. To improve its position, the industry embarked on a strategy of co-producing 'international' films, especially through alliances with Germany. This came after earlier repeated failures to create alliances with the American cinema industry or to exploit American stars such as Sessue Hayakawa and Fanny Ward; it was also impelled by Paramount's bold move to launch its own production schedule in Paris, resulting in such box-office hits as Perret's 'Americanized' version of Madame Sans-Gêne ( 1925), starring Gloria Swanson. Pathé, for instance, joined a new European consortium financed by the German Hugo Stinnes and the Russian émigré Vladimir Wengeroff (Vengerov), which initially backed Gance's proposed six-part film of NapoLéon and, through Ciné-France, managed by Noé Bloch (formerly of Albatros), underwrote Fescourt's four-part adaptation of Les Misérables ( 1925) and Victor Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff ( 1926). That consortium collapsed, however, when Stinnes's sudden death exposed an incredible level of debt. Further French-German alliances were then curtailed by heavy American investment, through the Dawes Plan, in the German cinema industry. The results of this co-production strategy were mixed. Although generally profitable, such films required huge budgets which, coupled with a high rate of inflation in France, reduced the French level of production to just fifty-five films in 1925 -- drying up funds for small production companies and driving most independent film-makers into contract work with the dominant French producers.<br />During the last half of the decade, every major French production company went through changes in management and orientation. After losing its Russian émigré base, Albatros secured the services of Feyder and Clair to direct films (especially comedies) that were more specifically French in character. Although Aubert himself began to take a less active role, his company's production level remained strong, especially through contracts with Film d'Art, Duvivier, and a new film-making team, Jean BenoîtLévy and Marie Epstein. Cinéromans launched a series of 'Films de France' features (by Dulac and Pierre Colombier, among others) to complement its serials; but when Sapène himself took over Nalpas's position as executive producer, the company's output generally began to suffer. Joining these companies were four others, all either financed by Russian émigré money or associated with Paramount. In 1923 Jacques Grinieff provided an enormous sum to the Société des Films Historiques, whose grandiose scheme was 'to render visually the whole history of France'. Its first production, Raymond Bernard's Le Miracle des loups ('The miracle of the wolves'), premièred at the Paris Opéra and went on to become the most popular film of 1924. In 1926-7 Bernard Natan, director of a film-processing company and publicity agency with connections to Paramount, purchased an Éclair studio at Épinay and constructed another in Montmartre in order to produce films by Perret, Colombier, Marco de Gastyne, and others. At the same time, Robert Hurel, a French producer for Paramount, founded Franco-Film, wooing Perret away from Natan after La Femme hue ('The naked woman', 1926) to deliver a string of hits starring Louise Lagrange, the new 'Princess of the French Cinema'. Finally, out of the ashes of Ciné-France arose the Société Générale des Films, which drew on Grinieff's immense fortune to complete Gance's NapoLéon ( 1927) and finance Alexandre Volkoff's Casanova ( 1927) and Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc ('The Passion of Joan of Arc', 1928). Against this tide of consolidation, a few lone figures maintained a tenacious, but marginal, independence, among them Jean Epstein and especially Pierre Braunberger (the former publicity director for Paramount), whose Néo-Film offered a 'laboratory' for young film-makers.<br />During the 1920s the distribution sector of the industry faced an even more severe challenge. One after another, the major American companies either set up their own offices in Paris or strengthened their alliances with French distributors. In 1920 came Paramount and Fox-Film; in 1921 it was the turn of United Artists and First National; in 1922 they were joined by Universal, Metro, and Goldwyn, the latter two signing exclusive distribution contracts, respectively, with Aubert and Gaumont. That this could happen so easily was due not only to the Americans' economic power but also to the French government's inability either to impose substantial import duties on American films or to legislate a quota system restricting their numbers vis-à-vis French films. The American success stood in stark contrast to the French film industry's failure to rebuild its own export markets lost in the war. In the United States, for instance, no more than a dozen French films were exhibited annually from 1920 to 1925, and few reached cinemas outside New York. By the end of the decade, the number had increased only slightly. The situation was different in Germany, where a good percentage of French production was distributed between 1923 and 1926, in contrast to the far fewer German films imported into France. That too changed, however, when ACE began distributing German films in Paris, bypassing French firms altogether. By 1927 the number of German titles released in France surpassed the total production of the French cinema industry.<br />That the French distribution market did not capitulate completely to the Americans and Germans was due in large part to Pathé-Consortium. Whatever its internal problems and shifts in production, Pathé served, much as it did before and during the war, as the major outlet not only for its own product but also for that of smaller companies and independent producers. Cinéromans serials played a decisive role precisely at the moment when, in 1922-3, fresh from their conquest of the British cinema market and just before their intervention in Germany, American companies seemed ready to impose a block-booking system of film distribution within France. According to Fescourt, the serials functioned as a counter system of block booking in that, for at least nine months, they guaranteed exhibitors 'a long series of weeks of huge returns from a faithful public hooked on the formula'. Having taken over the contracts of AGC and negotiated others with Film d'Art and independents such as Feyder and Baroncelli, by 1924-5 Aubert complemented Pathé efforts as the second largest French distributor. Yet, even though other companies emerged, such as Armor (to distribute Albatros films), there were never enough independent French distributors, nor was there a consortium or network which could distribute the great number of independent French films. As the decade wore on, the French resistance to foreign domination began to weaken: Gaumont came under the control of MGM, while Aubert and Armor gradually moved within the orbit of ACE. However successful Pathé, Aubert, and others had been, the Americans and Germans secured a foothold within the French cinema industry at the crucial moment of the transition to sound films.<br />Compared to the rest of the industry, the exhibition sector remained relatively secure throughout the 1920s. The number of cinemas rose from 1,444 at the end of the war to 2,400 just two years later and nearly doubled again to 4,200 by 1929. At the same time, box-office receipts increased exponentially, even taking into account a short period of high inflation, going from 85 million francs in 1923 to 230 million in 1929. This occurred despite the fact that the vast majority of French cinemas were independently, even individually, owned (the figure was perhaps as high as 80 per cent), few of those had a capacity of 750 seats or more, and less than half operated on a daily basis. That the exhibition sector did so well was due partly to the enormous popularity of American films, from Robin Hood (with Douglas Fairbanks) to Ben-Hur. Yet French films, and not only the serials, also contributed: Feyder's costly L'Atlatitide ( 1921), for instance, played at the prestigious Madeleine cinema for a whole year. Equally important, however, the luxury cinemas or palaces, most of them constructed or renovated by Aubert, Gaumont, and Pathé as 'flagships' for their circuits, generated an unusually high volume of receipts. There were Aubert-Palaces in nearly every major French city as well as the 2,000-seat Tivoli in Paris. As its interests shifted to distribution and exhibition, Gaumont acquired control of the Madeleine, which, with the Gaumont-Palace, served to anchor its Paris circuit. Pathé renovated the Pathé-Palace into the Caméo, constructed the Empire and Impérial, and formed an alliance with a new circuit in the capital, Lutetia-Fournier. Only a few Paris palaces remained independent: the Salle Marivaux, constructed in 1919 by Edmond Benoît-Lévy, and the Ciné Max-Linder. Yet even the exhibition sector was not safe from American intervention. In 1925 Paramount began buying or building luxury cinemas in half a dozen major cities, culminating in the 2,000-seat Paramount-Palace, which opened in Paris for the 1927 Christmas season. By that time, the major French cinemas had long established a programme schedule which featured a single film en exclusivité along with a serial episode and/or a newsreel or short documentary. The Paramount-Palace introduced the concept of the double-bill programme. Furthermore, it was prepared to spend lavishly on advertising; within less than a year it was taking in nearly 10 per cent of the total cinema receipts in Paris.<br />Although Delluc abhorred them, serials were a distinctive component of the French cinema, remaining popular well into the late 1920s. Initially, they followed the pattern established by Feuillade during the war. In TihMinh ( 1919) and Barrabas ( 1920), Feuillade himself returned to criminal gangs operating with almost metaphysical power in a world described by Francis Lacassin as a 'tourist's nightmare of exotic locales'. Volkoff's adaptation of Jules Mary's La Maison du mystère ('The house of mystery', 1922) focused instead on a textile industrialist (Ivan Mosjoukine) falsely imprisoned for a crime and forced to exonerate himself in a series of deadly combats with a devilish rival. Another pattern began to develop out of films like Diamant-Berger's Les Trois Mousquetaires ('The three musketeers', 1921) and Fescourt's Mathias Sandorf ( 1921): the costume or historical adventure story which Sapène and Nalpas seized on as the basis for the Cinéromans serials. War heroes and adventurer-brigands from the period either before or after the French Revolution were especially popular. Fescourt's Mandrin ( 1924), for instance, depicted the exploits of a Robin Hood figure (Mathot) against the landowners and tax collectors of the Dauphiné region, while Leprince's Fanfan la Tulipe ( 1925) staged one threat after another to an orphan hero (nearly executed in the Bastille) who finally discovered he was of 'noble blood'. By resurrecting a largely aristocratic society and celebrating a valiant, oppositional hero, who both belonged to a supposedly glorious past and figured the transition to a bourgeois era, the Cinéromans serials also played a significant role, after the war, in addressing a collective ideological demand to restore and redefine France.<br />That ideological project also partly determined the industry's heavy investment in historical films. Here, too, the often nostalgic resurrection of past moments of French glory -- and tragedy -- contributed to the process of national restoration. Le Miracle des loups, for instance, returned to the late fifteenth century, when a sense of national unity was first being forged. Here, the bitter conflict between Louis XI (Charles Dullin) and his brother Charles the Bold was mediated and resolved, according to legend, by Jeanne Hachette -- and ultimately by a code of suffering and sacrifice. Espousing a similar code, Roussel's Violettes impériales ('Imperial violets', 1924) transformed the singer, Raquel Meller, from a simple flower-seller into a Paris Opéra star and a confidante of Empress Eugénie, all within the luxurious splendour of the Second Empire.<br />Later French films tended to focus either on one of two periods of French history or else on subjects involving tsarist Russia. Some took up the same era favoured by the Cinéromans serials, as in Les Misérables or Fescourt's remake of Monte Cristo ( 1929). Others followed the example of Le Miracle des loups, as in Gastyne's La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc ('The marvellous life of Joan of Arc', 1928), starring Simone Genevois, or Renoir's Le Tournoi ('The tournament', 1928). The most impressive of the French subjects were Napoléon and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. In Napoléon, Gance conceived young Bonaparte ( Albert Dieudonné) as the legendary fulfilment of the Revolution, a kind of Romantic artist in apotheosis, which others like Léon Moussinac read as proto-Fascist. Everyone agreed, however, on the audacity of Gance's technical innovations-the experiments with camera movement and multiple screen formats, most notably in the famous triptych finale. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, by contrast, deviated radically from the genre's conventions. Dreyer focused neither on medieval pageantry nor on Joan's military exploits, showcased in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, but on the spiritual and political conflicts marking her last day of life. Based on records of the Rouen trial, Dreyer's film simultaneously documented Falconetti's ordeal playing Jeanne and created a symbolic progression of close-up faces, all within an unusually disjunctive spacetime continuum.<br />Several of the most successful historical productions, however, permitted the Russian émigrés to celebrate-and sometimes criticize -- the country from which they had fled. Michel Strogoff, the Impérial cinema's inaugural film, adapted Jules Verne's adventure novel about a tsarist courier who successfully carries out a dangerous mission in Siberia. By contrast, Bernard's Le Joueur d'échecs ('The chess player', 1926), which set box-office records at the Salle Marivaux, represented the triumph of Polish independence from the Russian monarchy, just prior to the French Revolution. More fantastical in style than either was Casanova, one of whose episodic series of adventures had Casanova meet and befriend Catherine the Great. All three of these films showcased magnificent set décors and costumes (by either Ivan Lochakoff and Boris Bilinsky or Robert Mallet-Stevens and Jean Perrier) as well as marvellous location shooting (by L.-H. Burel, J.-P. Mundviller, and others), whether in Latvia, Poland, or Venice.<br />The boulevard melodrama continued to serve as an important asset to the industry for several years after the war. Tristan Bernard's plays, for instance, helped to secure his son Raymond's initial reputation as a film-maker. The more 'artistically' inclined film-makers also continued to work within the bourgeois milieu of the domestic melodrama, extending the advances made during the war, often by means of original scenarios, in what Dulac was the first to call 'impressionist films'. In J'accuse ('I accuse', 1919) and La Roue ('The wheel', 1921), Gance experimented further with elliptical point-of-view shot sequences, different forms of rhythmic montage (including rapid montage), and patterns of rhetorical figuring through associational editing. Dulac did likewise in a series of films which focused predominantly on women, from La Cigarette ( 1919) to La Mort du soleil ('The death of the sun', 1922) and especially La Souriante Madame Beudet ('Smiling Madame Beudet', 1923), whose central character was inescapably trapped in a provincial bourgeois marriage. Perhaps the high point of this experimentation came in L'Herbier's 'exotic' El Dorado ( 1921), which deployed a remarkable range of framing and editing strategies (along with a specially composed score) to evoke the subjective life of a Spanish cabaret dancer, Sybilla (Eve Francis), and culminated backstage in a stunning 'dance of death'.<br />By the middle of the decade, the bases for film melodrama had shifted from the theatre to fiction, and across several genres. Some followed the path of L'Atlantide, drawn from a popular Pierre Benoit novel, by adapting either 'exotic' Arabian Nights tales or stories of romance and adventure in the French colonies, usually in North Africa. The latter were especially popular in films as diverse as Gastyne's La Châtelaine du Liban ('The chatelaine of the Lebanon', 1926) and Renoir's Le Bled ('The wasteland', 1929). Others exploited the French taste for fantasy, particularly after the success of 'Séries Pax' films such as Poirier's Le Penseur ('The thinker', 1920). These ranged from Mosjoukine's satirical fable Le Brasier ardent) ('The burning brazier', 1923) or L'Herbier's modernist fantasy Feu Mathias Pascal ('The late Mathias Pascal', 1925), to refurbished féeries, Clair's Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge ('The ghost of the Moulin Rouge', 1925), or tales of horror, Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher ('The Fall of the House of Usher', 1928).<br />The major development in the melodrama genre, however, was the modern studio spectacular, a product of the cultural internationalism which now characterized the urban nouveau riche in much of Europe and a new target of French investment in international co-productions. According to Gérard Talon, these films represented the 'good life' of a new generation and helped establish what was modern or à la mode in fashion, sport, dancing, and manners. Perfectly congruent with the ideology of consumer capitalism, this 'good life' was played out in milieux which tended to erase the specificity of French culture. Elements of the modern studio spectacular can be seen as early as Perret's Koenigsmark ( 1923), but the defining moment came in 1926 with a return to theatrical adaptations in L'Herbier's Le Vertige ('Vertigo') and Perret's La Femme nue, with their fashionable resorts and chic Paris restaurants. Thereafter, the modern studio spectacular came close to dominating French production. Yet some films cut against the grain of its pleasures, from L'Herbier's deliberately 'avant-garde' extravaganza, L'Inhumaine ('The inhuman one', 1924) to his updated adaptation of Zola, L'Argent ('Money', 1928), whose highly original strategies of camera movement and editing helped to critique its wealthy characters and milieux. A similar critique marked Epstein's 6½ x 11 ( 1927) and especially his small-budget film La Glace à trois faces ('The three-sided mirror', 1927), which intricately embedded four interrelated stories within just three reels.<br />The 'realist' melodrama, by contrast, sustained its development throughout the decade and remained decidedly'French'. Two things in particular distinguished these films. First, they usually celebrated specific landscapes or milieux, as spatial co-ordinates delineating the 'inner life' of one or more characters and, simultaneously, as cultural fields for tourists. Second, those landscapes or milieux were divided between Paris and the provinces, privileging the picturesque of certain geographical areas and cultures, often tinged with nostalgia. The Brittany coast provided the subject for films from L'Herbier's L'Homme du large ('The man of the high seas', 1920) and Baroncelli's Pêcheur d'Islande ('Iceland Fisherman', 1924) to Epstein's exquisite 'documentary' Finis terrae ( 1929), and Jean Grémillon's extraordinarily harrowing Gardiens du phare ('Lighthouse keepers', 1929). The French Alps dominated Feyder's exceptional Visages d'enfants ('Children's faces', 1924), while the Morvan provided a less imposing backdrop for Duvivier's Poil de carotte ('Ginger', 1926). Barge life on French canals and rivers was lovingly detailed in Epstein's La Belle Nivernaise ('The beautiful Nivernaise', 1924), Renoir's La Fille de l'eau ('Water girl', 1925), and Grémillon's Maldone ( 1928). The agricultural areas of western, central, and southern France were the subject of Feuillade's Vendémiaire ( 1919), Antoine's La Terre ('The land', 1920), Robert Boudrioz's L'Âtre ('The hearth', 1922), Delluc's L'Inondation ('The flood', 1924), and Poirier's La Brière ( 1924).<br />Another group of 'realist' films focused on the 'popular' in the socio-economic margins of modern urban life in Paris, Marseilles, or elsewhere. Here, for flâneurs of the cinema, were the iron mills and working-class slums of Pouctal's Travail ('Work', 1919), the claustrophobic sailor's bar of Delluc's Fièvre ('Fever', 1921), the street markets of Feyder's Crainquebille ( 1922), and the bistros and cheap amusement parks of Epstein's Cōur fidèle ('Faithful heart', 1923). Although their numbers decreased during the latter half of the decade, several achieved a remarkable sense of verisimilitude, notably Duvivier's Le Mariage de Mlle Beulemans ('The marriage of Mlle Beulemans', 1927), shot in Brussels, and the Benoît-Lévy/Epstein production of Peau de pêche ('Peach-skin', 1928), which juxtaposed the dank, dirty streets of Montmartre to the healthy air of a Charmont-sur-Barbuise farm. Perhaps the most 'avantgarde' of these later films were Dmitri Kirsanoff 's brutally poetic Ménilmontant ( 1925), with Nadia Sibirskaia, and Alberto Cavalcanti's documentary-like stories of disillusionment and despair, Rien que les heures ('Only the hours', 1926) and En rade ('Sea fever', 1927).<br />One last genre, the comedy, also remained solidly grounded in French society. The 1920s at first seemed no less inauspicious for French film comedy than had the war years. Le Petit Café ('The little café, 1919), Bernard's adaptation of his father's popular boulevard comedy, starring Max Linder (recently returned from the USA), was a big success, yet failed to generate further films. There was Robert Saidreau's series of vaudeville comedies, of course, and Feuillade's charming adaptation Le Gamin de Paris ('The Parisian boy', 1923), but not until 1924 did a significant renewal of French film comedy get under way, ironically from the Russian émigré company Albatros. The initial model of comedy construction was to update the figure of the naïve provincial come to the sophisticated capital, as in Volkoff's Les Ombres qui passent ('Passing shadows', 1924). Another was to transpose American gags and even characters into an atmosphere of French gaiety, as in the Albatros series starring Nicholas Rimsky, or in Cinéromans's Amour et carburateur ('Love and carburettor', 1926), directed by Colombier and starring Albert Préjean. The real accolades, however, went to Clair for his brilliant Albatros adaptations of Eugène Labiche, Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat, 1927) and Les Deux Timides ('The timid ones', 1928), with ensemble casts featuring Préjean, Pierre Batcheff, and Jim Gerald. Accentuating the original's comedy of situations, Clair's first film thoroughly mixed up a wedding couple and an adulterous one to produce an unrelenting attack on the belle ipoque bourgeoisie through a delightful pattern of acute visual observations. Almost as successful was Feyder's Les Nouveaux Messieurs ('The new gentlemen', 1928), which provoked the ire of the French government, not for its satire of a labour union official (played by Präjean), but for its so-called disrespectful depiction of the National Chamber nto an exuberant social satire, pitting a blithely assured but ineffectual bourgeois master against his bighearted, bumbling servant, played with grotesque audacity by Michel Simon.<br />By the end of the decade, the French cinema industry seemed to evidence less and less interest in producing what Delluc would have called specifically French films. Whereas the historical film was frequently reconstructing past eras elsewhere, the modern studio spectacular was constructing an international no man's land of conspicuous consumption for the nouveau riche. Only the 'realist' film and the comedy presented the French somewhat tels qu'ils sont -- if not as they might have wanted to see themselves -- the one by focusing on the marginal, the other by invoking mockery. With the development of the sound film, both genres would contribute even more to restoring a sense of 'Frenchness' to the French cinema. Yet would that 'Frenchness'be any less imbued with nostalgia than was the charming repertoire of signs, gestures, and songs that Maurice Chevalier was about to make so popular in the USA?<br />Bibliography<br />Abel, Richard ( 1984), French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929.<br />--- ( 1988), French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 19071929.<br />--- ( 1993), The Cinf Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914.<br />Bordwell, David ( 1980), French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory and Film Style.<br />Chirat, Raymond, and Icart, Roger (eds.) ( 1984), Catalogue des films français de long métrage: films de fiction, 1919-1929.<br />--- and Le Eric Roy (eds.) ( 1994), Le Cinéma français, 1911-1920.<br />Clair, René ( 1972), Cinema Yesterday and Today.<br />Delluc, Louis ( 1919), Cinéma et cie.<br />Epstein, Jean ( 1921), Bonjour cinéma.<br />Guibbert, Pierre (ed.) ( 1985), Les Premiers Ans du cinéma français.<br />Hugues, Philippe d', and Martin, Michel ( 1986), Le cinéma français: le muet.<br />Mitry, Jean ( 1967), Histoire du cinéma, i: 1895-1914.<br />--- ( 1969), Histoire du cinéma, ii: 1915-1923.<br />--- ( 1973), Histoire du cinéma, iii: 1923-1930.<br />Moussinac, Léon ( 1929), Panoramique du cinéma.<br />Sadoul, Georges ( 1951), Histoire générale du cinéma, iii: Le cinéma devient un art, 1909-1920 (l'avant-guerre).<br />--- ( 1974), Histoire générale du cinéma, iv: Le cinéma devient un art, 1909-1920 (La Première Guerre Mondiale).<br />--- ( 1975a), Histoire générale du cinéma, v: L'Art muet (1919-1929).<br />--- ( 1975b), Histoire générale du cinéma, vi: L'Art muet (1919-1929).<br /><br />en: The Oxford History of World Cinema, EDITED BY GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH<br />Hay traducción castellana de este texto en: PALACIOS, Manuel y Julio PÉREZ PERUCHA coords., Europa y Asia (1918-1930) (Historia General del Cine Vol. 5), Madrid, Cátedra, 1997.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-50604057985414095882008-04-24T07:57:00.000-07:002008-04-24T08:03:47.735-07:00Cine temprano, por Robert Pearson<span style="font-size:130%;">Early Cinema</span><br /><strong>ROBERT PEARSON </strong><br /><strong><br /></strong>In the first two decades of its existence the cinema developed rapidly. What in 1895 had been a mere novelty had by 1913 become an established industry. The earliest films were little more than moving snapshots, barely one minute in length and often consisting of just a single shot. By 1905, they were regularly five to ten minutes long and employed changes of scene and camera position to tell a story or illustrate a theme. Then, in the early 1910s, with the arrival of the first 'feature-length' films, there gradually emerged a new set of conventions for handling complex narratives. By this time too, the making and showing of films had itself become a large-scale business. No longer was the film show a curiosity sandwiched into a variety of other spectacles, from singing or circus acts to magic lantern shows. Instead specialist venues had been created, exclusively devoted to the exhibition of films, and supplied by a number of large production and distribution companies, based in major cities, who first sold and then increasingly rented films to exhibitors all over the world. In the course of the 1910s the single most important centre of supply ceased to be Paris, London, or New York, and became Los Angeles -- Hollywood.<br />The cinema of this period, from the mid- 1890s to the mid-1910s, is sometimes referred to as 'pre-Hollywood' cinema, attesting to the growing hegemony of the California-based American industry after the First World War. It has also been described as pre-classical, in recognition of the role that a consolidated set of 'classical' narrative conventions was to play in the world cinema from the 1920s onwards. These terms need to be used with caution, as they can imply that the cinema of the early years was only there as a precursor of Hollywood and the classical style which followed. In fact the styles of filmmaking prevalent in the early years were never entirely displaced by Hollywood or classical modes, even in America, and many cinemas went on being pre- or at any rate non-Hollywood in their practices for many years to come. But it remains true that much of the development that took place in the years from 1906 or 1907 can be seen as laying the foundation for what was to become the Hollywood system, in both formal and industrial terms.<br />For the purposes of this book, therefore, we have divided the period into two. The first half, from the beginnings up to about 1906, we have simply called early cinema, while the second half, from 1907 to the mid-1910s, we have designated transitional since it forms a bridge between the distinctive modes of early cinema and those which came later. Broadly speaking, the early cinema is distinguished by the use of fairly direct presentational modes, and draws heavily on existing conventions of photography and theatre. It is only in the transitional period that specifically cinematic conventions really start to develop, and the cinema acquires the means of creating its distinctive forms of narrative illusion.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>INDUSTRY<br /></strong>Various nations lay claim to the invention of moving pictures, but the cinema, like so many other technological innovations, has no precise originating moment and owes its birth to no particular country and no particular person. In fact, one can trace the origins of cinema to such diverse sources as sixteenth-century Italian experiments with the camera obscura, various early nineteenth-century optical toys, and a host of practices of visual representation such as dioramas and panoramas. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, efforts to project continuously moving images on to a screen intensified and inventors/entrepreneurs in several countries presented the 'first' moving pictures to the marvelling public: Edison in the United States; the Lumière brothers in France; Max Skladanowsky in Germany; and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain. None of these men can be called the primary originator of the film medium, however, since only a favourable conjunction of technical circumstances made such an 'invention' possible at this particular moment: improvements in photographic development; the invention of celluloid, the first medium both durable and flexible enough to loop through a projector; and the application of precision engineering and instruments to projector design.<br />In spite of the internationalization of both film style and technology, the United States and a few European countries retained hegemony over film production, distribution, and exhibition. Initially, French film producers were arguably the most important, if not in terms of stylistic innovation, an area in which they competed with the British and the Americans, then certainly in terms of market dominance at home and internationally. Pride of place must be given to the Lumière brothers, who are frequently, although perhaps inaccurately, credited with projecting the first moving pictures to a paying audience. Auguste and Louis Lumière owned a photographic equipment factory and experimented in their spare time with designing a camera that they dubbed the Cinématographe. It was first demonstrated on 22 March 1895 at a meeting of the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale. Subsequent to this prestigious début, the Lumières continued to publicize their camera as a scientific instrument, exhibiting it at photographic congresses and conferences of learned societies. In December 1895, however, they executed their most famous and influential demonstration, projecting ten films to a paying audience at the Grand Café in Paris.<br />Precisely dating the first exhibition of moving pictures depends upon whether 'exhibition' means in private, publicly for a paying audience, seen in a Kinetoscope, or projected on a screen. Given these parameters, one could date the first showing of motion pictures from 1893, when Edison first perfected the Kinetoscope, to December 1895 and the Lumières' demonstration at the Grand Café.<br />The Lumières may not even have been the 'first' to project moving pictures on a screen to a paying audience; this honour probably belongs to the German Max Skladanowsky, who had done the same in Berlin two months before the Cinématographe's famed public exhibition. But despite being 'scooped' by a competitor, the Lumières' business acumen and marketing skill permitted them to become almost instantly known throughout Europe and the United States and secured a place for them in film history. The Cinématographe's technical specifications helped in both regards, initially giving it several advantages over its competitors in terms of production and exhibition. Its relative lightness (16 lb. compared to the several hundred of Edison's Kinetograph), its ability to function as a camera, a projector, and a film developer, and its lack of dependence upon electric current (it was hand-cranked and illuminated by limelight) all made it extremely portable and adaptable. During the first six months of the Lumières' operations in the United States, twenty-one cameramen/projectionists toured the country, exhibiting the Cinématographe at vaudeville houses and fighting off the primary American competition, the Edison Kinetograph.<br />The Lumières' Cinématographe, which showed primarily documentary material, established French primacy, but their compatriot Georges Mélièlis became the world's leading producer of fiction films during the early cinema period. Mélièlis began his career as a conjurer, using magic lanterns as part of his act at the Théâtre RobertHoudin in Paris. Upon seeing some of the Lumières' films, Mélièlis immediately recognized the potential of the new medium, although he took it in a very different direction from his more scientifically inclined countrymen. Mélièlis's Star Film Company began production in 1896, and by the spring of 1897 had its own studio outside Paris in Montreuil. Producing hundreds of films between 1896 and 1912 and establishing distribution offices in London, Barcelona, and Berlin by 1902 and in New York by 1903, Mélièlis nearly drove the Lumières out of business. However, his popularity began to wane in 1908 as the films of the transitional cinema began to offer a different kind of entertainment and by 1911 virtually the only Mélièlis films released were Westerns produced by Georges's brother Gaston in a Texas studio. Eventually, competitors forced Mélièlis's company into bankruptcy in 1913.<br />Chief among these competitors was the Pathé Company, which outlasted both Mélièlis and the Lumières. It became one of the most important French film producers during the early period, and was primarily responsible for the French dominance of the early cinema market. PathéFrères was founded in 1896 by Charles Pathé, who followed an aggressive policy of acquisition and expansion, acquiring the Lumières' patents as early as 1902, and the Mélièlis Film Company before the First World War. Pathé also expanded his operations abroad, exploiting markets. ignored by other distributors, and making his firm's name practically synonymous with the cinema in many Third World countries. He created subsidiary production companies in many European nations: Hispano Film ( Spain); Pathé-Russe ( Russia); Film d'Arte Italiano; and PathéBritannia. In 1908 Pathé distributed twice as many films in the United States as all the indigenous manufacturers combined. Despite this initial French dominance, however, various American studios, primary among them the Edison Manufacturing Company, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company of America (after 1909 simply the Biograph Company), and the Vitagraph Company of America (all founded in the late 1890s) had already created a solid basis for their country's future domination of world cinema.<br />The 'invention' of the moving picture is often associated with the name of Thomas Alva Edison, but, in accordance with contemporary industrial practices, Edison's moving picture machines were actually produced by a team of technicians working at his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, supervised by the Englishman William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. Dickson and his associates began working on moving pictures in 1889 and by 1893 had built the Kinetograph, a workable but bulky camera, and the Kinetoscope, a peep-show-like viewing machine in which a continuous strip of film between 40 and 50 feet long ran between an electric lamp and a shutter. They also developed and built the first motion picture studio, necessitated by the Kinetograph's size, weight, and relative immobility. This was a shack whose resemblance to a police van caused it to be popularly dubbed the 'Black Maria'. To this primitive studio came the earliest American film actors, mainly vaudeville performers who travelled to West Orange from nearby New York City to have their (moving) pictures taken. These pictures lasted anywhere from fifteen seconds to one minute and simply reproduced the various performers' stage acts with, for example, Little Egypt, the famous belly-dancer, dancing, or Sandow the Strongman posing.<br />As with the Lumières, Edison's key position in film history stems more from marketing skill than technical ingenuity. His company was the first to market a commercially viable moving picture machine, albeit one designed for individual viewers rather than mass audiences. Controlling the rights to the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, Edison immediately embarked upon plans for commercial exploitation, entering into business agreements that led to the establishment of Kinetoscope parlours around the country. The first Kinetoscope parlour, a rented store-front with room for ten of the viewing machines each showing a different film, opened in New York City in April 1894. The new technical marvel received a promotional boost when the popular boxing champion Gentleman Jim Corbett went six rounds against Pete Courtney at the Black Maria. The resulting film gained national publicity for Edison's machine, as well as drawing the rapt attention of female viewers, who reportedly formed lines at the Kinetoscope parlours to sneak a peek at the scantily clad Gentleman Jim. Soon other Kinetoscope parlours opened and the machines also became a featured attraction at summer amusement parks.<br />Until the spring of 1896 the Edison Company devoted itself to shooting films for the Kinetoscope, but, as the novelty of the Kinetoscope parlours wore off and sales of the machines fell off, Thomas Edison began to rethink his commitment to individually oriented exhibition. He acquired the patents to a projector whose key mechanism had been designed by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins, who had lacked the capital for the commercial exploitation of their invention. The Vitascope, which projected an image on to a screen, was advertised under Edison's name and premièred in New York City in April of 1896. Six films were shown, five produced by the Edison Company and one, Rough Sea at Dover, by the Englishman R. W. Paul. These brief films, 40 feet in length and lasting twenty seconds, were spliced end to end to form a loop, enabling each film to be repeated up to half a dozen times. The sheer novelty of moving pictures, rather than their content or a story, was the attraction for the first film audiences. Within a year there were several hundred Vitascopes giving shows in various locations throughout the United States.<br />In these early years Edison had two chief domestic rivals. In 1898 two former vaudevillians, James Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith, founded the Vitagraph Company of America initially to make films for exhibition in conjunction with their own vaudeville acts. In that same year the outbreak of the Spanish-American War markedly increased the popularity of the new moving pictures, which were able to bring the war home more vividly than the penny press and the popular illustrated weeklies. Blackton and Smith immediately took advantage of the situation, shooting films on their New York City rooftop studio that purported to show events taking place in Cuba. So successful did this venture prove that by 1900 the partners issued their first catalogue offering films for sale to other exhibitors, thus establishing Vitagraph as one of the primary American film producers. The third important American studio of the time, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, now primarily known for employing D. W. Griffith between 1908 and 1913, was formed in 1895 to produce flipcards for Mutoscope machines. When W. K. L. Dickson left Edison to join Biograph, the company used his expertise to patent a projector to compete with the Vitascope. This projector apparently gave betterquality projection with less flicker than other machines and quickly replaced the Lumières as Edison's chief competitor. In 1897 Biograph also began to produce films but the Edison Company effectively removed them from the market by entangling them in legal disputes that remained unresolved until 1902.<br />At the turn of the century, Britain was the third important film-producing country. The Edison Kinetoscope was first seen there in October 1894, but, because of Edison's uncharacteristic failure to patent the device abroad, the Englishman R. W. Paul legally copied the non-protected viewing machine and installed fifteen Kinetoscopes at the exhibition hall at Earl's Court in London. When Edison belatedly sought to protect his interests by cutting off the supply of films, Paul responded by going into production for himself. In 1899, in conjunction with Birt Acres, who supplied the necessary technical expertise, Paul opened the first British film studio, in north London. Another important early British film-maker, Cecil Hepworth, built a studio in his London back garden in 1900. By 1902 Brighton had also become an important centre for British filmmaking with two of the key members of the so-called 'Brighton school', George Albert Smith and James Williamson, each operating a studio.<br />At this time, production, distribution, and exhibition practices differed markedly from those that were to emerge during the transitional period; the film industry had not yet attained the specialization and division of labour characteristic of large-scale capitalist enterprises. Initially, production, distribution, and exhibition all remained the exclusive province of the film manufacturers. The Lumière travelling cameramen used the adaptable Cinématographe to shoot, develop, and project films, while American studios such as Edison and Biograph usually supplied a projector, films, and even a projectionist to the vaudeville houses that constituted the primary exhibition sites. Even with the rapid emergence of independent travelling showmen in the United States, Britain, and Germany, film distribution remained nonexistent. Producers sold rather than rented their films; a practice which forestalled the development of permanent exhibition sites until the second decade of the cinema's history.<br />As opposed to the strict division of labour and assemblyline practices that characterized the Hollywood studios, production during this period was non-hierarchical and truly collaborative. One of the most important early film 'directors' was Edwin S. Porter, who had worked as a hired projectionist and then as an independent exhibitor. Porter joined the Edison Company in 1900, first as a mechanic and then as head of production. Despite his nominal position, Porter only controlled the technical aspects of filming and editing while other Edison employees with theatrical experience took charge of directing the actors and the mise-en-scène. Other American studios seem to have practised similar arrangements. At Vitagraph, James Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith traded off their duties in front of and behind the camera, one acting and the other shooting, and then reversing their roles for the next film. In similar fashion, the members of the British Brighton school both owned their production companies and functioned as cameramen. Georges Mélièlis, who also owned his own company, did everything short of actually crank the camera, writing the script, designing sets and costumes, devising trick effects, and often acting. The first true 'director', in the modern sense of being responsible for all aspects of a film's actual shooting, was probably introduced at the Biograph Company in 1903. The increased production of fiction films required that one person have a sense of the film's narrative development and of the connections between individual shots.<br /><br /><strong>STYLE</strong><br />As the emergence of the film director illustrates, changes in the film texts often necessitated concomitant changes in the production process. But what did the earliest films actually look like? Generally speaking, until 1907, filmmakers concerned themselves with the individual shot, preserving the spatial aspects of the pro-filmic event (the scene that takes place in front of the camera). They did not create temporal relations or story causality by using cinematic interventions. They set the camera far enough from the action to show the entire length of the human body as well as the spaces above the head and below the feet. The camera was kept stationary, particularly in exterior shots, with only occasional reframings to follow the action, and interventions through such devices as editing or lighting were infrequent. This long-shot style is often referred to as a tableau shot or a proscenium arch shot, the latter appellation stemming from the supposed resemblance to the perspective an audience member would have from the front row centre of a theatre. For this reason, pre-1907 film is often accused of being more theatrical than cinematic, although the tableau style also replicates the perspective commonly seen in such other period media as postcards and stereographs, and early film-makers derived their inspiration as much from these and other visual texts as from the theatre.<br />Concerning themselves primarily with the individual shot, early film-makers tended not to be overly interested in connections between shots; that is, editing. They did not elaborate conventions for linking one shot to the next, for constructing a continuous linear narrative, nor for keeping the viewer oriented in time and space. However, there were some multi-shot films produced during this period, although rarely before 1902. In fact, one can break the pre-1907 years into two subsidiary periods: 18941902/3, when the majority of films consisted of one shot and were what we would today call documentaries, known then, after the French usage, as actualities; and 19037, when the multi-shot, fiction film gradually began to dominate, with simple narratives structuring the temporal and causal relations between shots.<br />Many films of the 1894-1907 period seem strange from a modern perspective, since early film-makers tended to be quite self-conscious in their narrative style, presenting their films to the viewer as if they were carnival barkers touting their wares, rather than disguising their presence through cinematic conventions as their successors were to do. Unlike the omniscient narrators of realist novels and the Hollywood cinema, the early cinema restricted narrative to a single point of view. For this reason, the early cinema evoked a different relationship between the spectator and the screen, with viewers more interested in the cinema as visual spectacle than as story-teller. So striking is the emphasis upon spectacle during this period that many scholars have accepted Tom Gunning's distinction between the early cinema as a 'cinema of attractions' and the transitional cinema as a 'cinema of narrative integration' ( <a href="http://www.questia.com/97708181">Gunning, 1986 </a>). In the 'cinema of attractions', the viewer created meaning not through the interpretation of cinematic conventions but through previously held information related to the pro-filmic event: ideas of spatial coherence; the unity of an event with a recognizable beginning and end; and knowledge of the subject-matter. During the transitional period, films began to require the viewer to piece together a story predicated upon a knowledge of cinematic conventions.<br /><br /><strong>1894-1902/3</strong><br />The work of the two most important French producers of this period, the Lumières and Mélièlis, provides an example of the textual conventions of the one-shot film. Perhaps the most famous of the films that the Lumières showed in December 1895 is A Train Arriving at a Station (L'Arrivé d'un train en gare de la Ciotat), which runs for about fifty seconds. A stationary camera shows a train pulling into a station and the passengers disembarking, the film continuing until most of them have exited the shot. Apocryphal tales persist that the onrushing cinematic train so terrified audience members that they ducked under their seats for protection. Another of the Lumières' films, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Sortie d'usine), had a less terrifying effect upon its audience. An eye-level camera, set far enough back from the action to show not only the full-length figures of the workers but the high garage-like door through which they exit, observes as the door opens and disgorges the building's occupants, who disperse to either side of the frame. The film ends roughly at the point when all the workers have left. Contemporary accounts indicate that these and other Lumière films fascinated their audiences not by depicting riveting events, but through incidental details that a modern viewer may find almost unnoticeable: the gentle movement of the leaves in the background as a baby eats breakfast; the play of light on the water as a boat leaves the harbour. The first film audiences did not demand to be told stories, but found infinite fascination in the mere recording and reproduction of the movement of animate and inanimate objects.<br />work, which depicted events that might have taken place even in the camera's absence, this famous film stages action specifically for the moving pictures. A gardener waters a lawn, a boy steps on the hose, halting the flow of water, the gardener peers questioningly at the spigot, the boy removes his foot, and the restored stream of water douses the gardener, who chases, catches, and spanks the boy. The film is shot with a stationary camera in the standard tableau style of the period. At a key point in the action the boy, trying to escape chastisement, exits the frame and the gardener follows, leaving the screen blank for two seconds. A modern film-maker would pan the camera to follow the characters or cut to the offscreen action, but the Lumières did neither, providing an emblematic instance of the preservation of the space of the pro-filmic event taking precedence over story causality or temporality.<br />Unlike the Lumières, Georges Mélièlis always shot in his studio, staging action for the camera, his films showing fantastical events that could not happen in 'real life'. Although all Mélièlis's films conform to the standard period tableau style, they are also replete with magical appearances and disappearances, achieved through what cinematographers call 'stop action', that is, stopping the camera, having the actor enter or exit the shot, and then starting the camera again to create the illusion that a character has simply vanished or materialized. Mélièlis's films have played a key part in film scholars' debates over the supposed theatricality of early cinematic style. Whereas scholars had previously thought that stop action effects required no editing and hence concluded that Méliès's films were simply 'filmed theatre', examination of the actual negatives reveals that substitution effects were, in fact, produced through splicing or editing. Mélièlis also manipulated the image through the superimposition of one shot over another so that many of the films represent space in a manner more reminiscent of photographic devices developed during the nineteenth century than of the theatre. Films such as L'Homme orchestre (The One-Man Band, 1900) or Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac, 1903) showcased the cinematic multiplication of a single image (in these cases of Mélièlis himself) achieved through the layering of one shot over another.<br />Despite this cinematic manipulation of the pro-filmic space, Mélièlis's films remain in many ways excessively theatrical, presenting a story as if it were being performed on a stage, a characteristic they have in common with many of the fiction films of the pre-1907 period. Not only does the camera replicate the proscenium arch perspective, but the films stage their action in a shallow playing space between the painted flats and the front of the 'stage', and characters enter or exit either from the wings or through traps. Mélièlis boasted, in a 1907 article, that his studio's shooting area replicated a theatrical stage 'constructed exactly like one in a theatre and fitted with trapdoors, scenery slots, and uprights'.<br />For many years film theorists pointed to the Lumière and Mélièlis films as the originating moment of the distinction between documentary and fiction film-making, given that the Lumières for the most part filmed 'real' events and Mélièlis staged events. But such distinctions were not a part of contemporary discourse, since many pre-1907 films mixed what we would today call 'documentary' material, that is, events or objects existing independently of the film-maker, with 'fictional' material, that is, events or objects specifically fabricated for the camera. Take, for example, one of the rare multi-shot films of the period, The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison ( Edison, 1901), a compilation of four self-contained individual shots dealing with the execution of the assassin of President William McKinley. The first two shots are panoramas of the exterior of the prison, the third shows an actor portraying the condemned man in his cell, and the fourth re-enacts his electrocution. Given films of this kind, it is more useful to discuss very early genres in terms of similarities of subject-matters rather than in terms of an imposed distinction between fiction and documentary.<br />Many turn-of-the-century films reflected the period's fascination with travel and transportation. The train film, established by the Lumières, practically became a genre of its own. Each studio released a version, sometimes shooting a moving train from a stationary camera and sometimes positioning a camera on the front of or inside the train to produce a travelling shot, since the illusion of moving through space seemed to thrill early audiences. The train genre related to the travelogue, films featuring scenes both exotic and familiar, and replicating in motion the immensely popular postcards and stereographs of the period. Public events, such as parades, world's fairs, and funerals, also provided copious material for early cameramen. Both the travelogue and the public event film consisted of self-contained, individual shots, but producers did offer combinations of these films for sale together with suggestions for their projection order, so that, for example, an exhibitor could project several discrete shots of the same event, and so give his audience a fuller and more varied picture of it. Early film-makers also replicated popular amusements, such as vaudeville acts and boxing matches, that could be relatively easily reenacted for the camera. The first Kinetoscope films in 1894 featured vaudeville performers, including contortionists, performing animals, and dancers, as well as scenes from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Again, the shots functioned as self-contained units and were marketed as such, but exhibitors had the option of putting them together to form an evening's entertainment. By 1897 the popular filmed boxing matches could potentially run for an hour. The same was true of another of the most popular of early genres, Passion plays telling the life of Christ, which were often filmed recordings of theatrical companies' performances. A compilation of shots of the play's key events could last well over an hour. A third group of films told one-shot mini-narratives, most often of a humorous nature. Some were gag films, resembling the Lumières' Watering the Gardener, in which the comic action takes place in the pro-filmic event, as for instance in Elopement by Horseback ( Edison, 1891), where a young man seeking to elope with his sweetheart engages in a wrestling match with the girl's father. Others relied for their humour upon trick effects such as stop action, superimposition, and reverse action. The most famous are the Mélièlis films, but this form was also seen in some of the early films made by Porter for the Edison Company and by the film-makers of the English Brighton school. These films became increasingly complicated, sometimes involving more than one shot. In Williamson's film The Big Swallow ( 1901), the first shot shows a photographer about to take a picture of a passer-by. The second shot replicates the photographer's viewpoint through the camera lens, and shows the passerby's head growing bigger and bigger as he approaches the camera. The man's mouth opens and the film cuts to a shot of the photographer and his camera falling into a black void. The film ends with a shot of the passer-by walking away munching contentedly.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>1902/3-1907</strong><br />In this period, the multi-shot film emerged as the norm rather than the exception, with films no longer treating the individual shot as a self-contained unit of meaning but linking one shot to another. However, film-makers may have been using a succession of shots to capture and emphasize the highpoints of the action rather than construct either a linear narrative causality or clearly establish temporal-spatial relations. As befits the 'cinema of attractions', the editing was intended to enhance visual pleasure rather than to refine narrative developments.<br />One of the strangest editing devices used in this period was overlapping action, which resulted from film-makers' desire both to preserve the pro-filmic space and to emphasize the important action by essentially showing it twice. Georges Mélièli's A Trip to the Moon, perhaps the most famous film of 1902, covers the landing of a space capsule on the moon in two shots. In the first, taken from 'space', the capsule hits the man in the moon in the eye, and his expression changes from a grin to a grimace. In the second shot, taken from the 'moon's surface', the capsule once again lands. These two shots, which show the same event twice, can disconcert a modern viewer. This repetition of action around a cut can be seen in an American film of the same year, How They Do Things on the Bowery, directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. An irate waiter ejects a customer unable to pay his bill. In an interior shot the waiter throws the man out and hurls his suitcase after him. In the following exterior shot, the customer emerges from the restaurant followed closely by his suitcase. In a 1904 Biograph film The Widow and the Only Man, overlapping action is used not to cover interior and exterior events but to show the same event a second time in closer scale. In the first shot a woman accepts her suitor's flowers and smells them appreciatively. Then, rather than a'match cut', in which the action picks up at the beginning of the second shot from where it left off at the end of the first, as would be dictated by present-day conventions, a closer shot shows her repeating precisely the same action.<br />While overlapping action was a common means of linking shots, film-makers during this period also experimented with other methods of establishing spatial and temporal relations. One sees an instance of this in Trip to the Moon: having landed on the moon, the intrepid French explorers encounter unfriendly extraterrestrials (who remarkably resemble those 'hostile natives' the French were encountering in their colonies at this very time!). The explorers flee to their spaceship and hurry back to the safety of Earth, their descent covered in four shots and twenty seconds of film time. In the first shot, the capsule leaves the moon, exiting at the bottom of the frame. In the second shot, the capsule moves from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame. In the third the capsule moves from the top of the frame to the water, and in the fourth the capsule moves from the water's surface to the sea-bed. This sequence is filmed much as it might be today, with the movement of the spaceship following the convention of directional continuity, that is, an object or a character should appear to continue moving in the same direction from shot to shot, the consistent movement serving to establish the spatial and temporal relationships between individual shots. But while a modern film-maker would cut directly from shot to shot, Mélièlis dissolved from shot to shot, a transitional device that now implies a temporal ellipsis. In this regard, then, the sequence can still be confusing for a modern viewer.<br />Linking shots through dissolves was not in fact unusual in this period, and one can see another example in Alice in Wonderland ( Hepworth, 1903). However, another English film-maker, James Williamson, a member of the Brighton school, made two films in 1901, Stop Thief! and Fire!, in which direct cuts continue the action from shot to shot. Stop Thief! shows a crowd chasing a tramp who has stolen a joint from a butcher, motivating connections by the diagonal movement of characters through each of the individual shots; the thief and then his pursuers entering the frame at the back and exiting the frame past the camera. The fact that the camera remains with the scene until the last character has exited reveals how character movement motivates the editing. Film-makers found this editing device so effective that an entire genre of chase films arose, such as Personal ( Biograph, 1904), in which would-be brides pursue a wealthy Frenchman. Many films also incorporated a chase into their narratives, as did the famous 'first' Western The Great Train Robbery ( Edison, 1903), in which the posse pursues the bandits for several shots in the fllm's second half.<br /> In Fire!, Williamson uses a similar editing strategy to that employed in Stop Thief!, the movement of a policeman between shots 1 and 2 and the movement of fire engines between shots 2 and 3 establishing spatial-temporal relations. But in the film's fourth and fifth shots, where other film-makers might have used overlapping action, Williamson experiments with a cut on movement that bears a strong resemblance to what is now called a match cut. Shot 4, an interior, shows a fireman coming through the window of a room in a burning house and rescuing the inhabitant. Shot 5 is an exterior of the burning house and begins as the fireman and the rescued victim emerge through the window. Although the continuity is 'imperfect' from a modern perspective, the innovation is considerable. In his 1902 film Life of An American Fireman, undoubtedly influenced by Fire!, Porter still employed overlapping action, showing a similar rescue in its entirety first from the interior and then from the exterior perspective. A year later, however, Williamson's compatriot G. A. Smith also created an 'imperfect' match cut, The Sick Kitten ( 1903), cutting from a long view of two children giving a kitten medicine to a closer view of the kitten licking the spoon.<br />During this period, film-makers also experimented with cinematically fracturing the space of the pro-filmic event, primarily to enhance the viewers' visual pleasure through a closer shot of the action rather than to emphasize details necessary for narrative comprehension. The Great Train Robbery includes a medium shot of the outlaw leader, Barnes, firing his revolver directly at the camera, which in modern prints usually concludes the film. The Edison catalogue, however, informed exhibitors that the shot could come at the beginning or the end of the film. Narratively non-specific shots of this nature became quite common, as in the British film Raid on a Coiner's Den ( Alfred Collins , 1904), which begins with a close-up insert of three hands coming into the frame from different directions, one holding a pistol, another a pair of handcuffs, and a third forming a clenched fist. In Porter's own oneshot film Photographing a Female Crook, a moving camera produces the closer view as it dollies into a woman contorting her face to prevent the police from taking an accurate mug shot.<br />Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction, and which are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, were then there more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information. In yet another example of the innovative film-making of the Brighton school, Grandma's Reading Glasses ( G. A. Smith, Warwick Trading Company, 1900), a little boy looks through his grandmother's spectacles at a variety of objects, a watch, a canary, and a kitten, which the film shows in inserted close-ups. In The Gay Shoe Clerk ( Edison/ Porter, 1903) a shoeshop assistant flirts with his female customer. A cut-in approximates his view of her ankle as she raises her skirt in tantalizing fashion. This close-up insert is an example not only of the visual pleasure afforded by the 'cinema of attractions' but of the early cinema's voyeuristic treatment of the female body. Despite the fact that their primary purpose is not to emphasize narrative developments, these shots' attribution to a character in the film distinguishes them from the totally unmotivated closer views in The Great Train Robbery and Raid on a Coiner's Den.<br />The editing strategies of the pre- 1907 'cinema of attractions'were primarily designed to enhance visual pleasure rather than to tell a coherent, linear narrative. But many of these films did tell simple stories and audiences undoubtedly derived narrative, as well as visual, pleasure. Despite the absence of internal strategies to construct spatial-temporal relations and linear narratives, the original audiences made sense of these films, even though modern viewers can find them all but incoherent. This is because the films of the 'cinema of attractions' relied heavily on their audiences' knowledge of other texts, from which the films were directly derived or indirectly related. Early film-makers did learn how to make meaning in a new medium, but were not working in a vacuum. The cinema had deep roots in the rich popular culture of the age, drawing heavily during its infant years upon the narrative and visual conventions of other forms of popular entertainment. The pre-1907 cinema has been accused of being 'non-cinematic' and overly theatrical, and indeed film-makers like Mélièlis were heavily influenced by nondramatic theatrical practices, but for the most part lengthy theatrical dramas provided an inappropriate model for a medium that began with films of less than a minute, and only became an important source of inspiration as films grew longer during the transitional period. As the first Edison Kinetoscope films illustrate, vaudeville, with its variety format of unrelated acts and lack of concern for developed stories, constituted a very important source material and the earliest film-makers relied upon media such as the melodrama and pantomime (emphasizing visual effects rather than dialogue), magic lanterns, comics, political cartoons, newspapers, and illustrated song slides.<br />Magic lanterns, early versions of slide projectors often lit by kerosene lamps, proved a particularly important influence upon films, for magic lantern practices permitted the projection of 'moving pictures', which set precedents for the cinematic representation of time and space. Magic lanterns employed by travelling exhibitors often had elaborate lever and pulley mechanisms to produce movement within specially manufactured slides. Long slides pulled slowly through the slide holder produced the equivalent of a cinematic pan. Two slide holders mounted on the same lantern permitted the operator to produce a dissolve by switching rapidly between slides. The use of two slides also permitted 'editing', as operators could cut from long shots to close-ups, exteriors to interiors, and from characters to what they were seeing. Grandma's Reading Glasses, in fact, derives from a magic lantern show. Magic lantern lectures given by travelling exhibitors such as the Americans Burton Holmes and John Stoddard provided precedents for the train and travelogue films, the lantern illustrations often intercutting exterior views of the train, interior views of the traveller in the train, and views of scenery and of interesting incidents.<br />In addition to mimicking the visual conventions of other media, film-makers derived many of their films from stories already well known to the audience. Edison advertised its Night before Christmas ( Porter, 1905) by saying the film 'closely follows the time-honored Christmas legend by Clement Clarke Moore'. Both Biograph and Edison made films of the hit song 'Everybody Works but Father'. Vitagraph based its Happy Hooligan series on a cartoon tramp character whose popular comic strip ran in several New York newspaper Sunday supplements. Many early films presented synoptic versions of fairly complex narratives, their producers presumably depending upon their audiences'pre-existing knowledge of the subject-matter rather than upon cinematic conventions for the requisite narrative coherence. L'Épopée napoléonienne ('The Epic of Napoleon', 1903-4 Pathé) presents Napoleon's life through a series of tableaux, drawing upon well-known historical incidents (the coronation, the burning of Moscow) and anecdotes ( Napoleon standing guard for the sleeping sentry) but with no attempt at causal linear connection or narrative development among its fifteen shots. In similar fashion, multi-shot films such as Ten Nights in a Barroom ( Biograph, 1903) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (Vitagraph, 1903) presented only the highlights of these familiar and oftperformed melodramas, with shot connections provided not by editing strategies but by the audiences' knowledge of intervening events. The latter film, however, appears to be one of the earliest to have intertitles. These title cards, summarizing the action of the shot which followed, appeared at the same time as the multi-shot film, around 1903-4, and seem to indicate a recognition on the part of the producers of the necessity for internally rather than externally derived narrative coherence.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>EXHIBITION<br /></strong>Cinema initially existed not as a popular commercial medium but as a scientific and educational novelty. The cinematic apparatus itself and its mere ability to reproduce movement constituted the attraction, rather than any particular film. In many countries, moving picture machines were first seen at world's fairs and scientific expositions: the Edison Company had planned to début its Kinetoscope at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair although it failed to assemble the machines in time, and moving picture machines were featured in several areas of the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.<br />Fairly rapidly, cinema exhibition was integrated into pre-existing venues of 'popular culture' and 'refined culture', although the establishment of venues specifically for the exhibition of films did not come until 1905 in the United States and a little later elsewhere. In the United States, films were shown in the popular vaudeville houses, which by the turn of the century catered to a reasonably well-to-do audience willing to pay 25 cents for an afternoon or evening's entertainment. Travelling showmen, who lectured on educational topics, toured with their own projectors and showed films in local churches and operahouses, charging audiences in large metropolitan areas the same $2 that it cost to see a Broadway show. Cheaper and more popular venues included tent shows, set up at fairs and carnivals, and temporarily rented store-fronts, the forerunners of the famous nickelodeons. Early film audiences in the United States, therefore, tended to be quite heterogeneous, and dominated by no one class.<br />Early exhibition in Britain, as in most European countries, followed a similar pattern to the United States, with primary exhibition venues being fairgrounds, music halls, and disused shops. Travelling showmen played a crucial role in establishing the popularity of the new medium, making films an important attraction at fairgrounds. Given that fairs and music halls attracted primarily working-class patrons, early film audiences in Britain, as well as on the Continent, had a more homogeneous class base than in the United States.<br /> Wherever films were shown, and whoever saw them, the exhibitor during this period often had as much control over the films' meanings as did the producers themselves. Until the advent of multi-shot films and intertitles, around 1903-4, the producers supplied the individual units but the exhibitor put together the programme, and single-shot films permitted decision-making about the projection order and the inclusion of other material such as lantern slide images and title cards. Some machines facilitated this process by combining moving picture projection with a stereopticon, or lantern slide projector, allowing the exhibitor to make a smooth transition between film and slides. In New York City, the Eden Musée put together a special show on the Spanish-American War, using lantern slides and twenty or more films from different producers. While still primarily an exhibitor, Cecil Hepworth suggested interspersing lantern slides with films and 'stringing the pictures together into little sets or episodes' with commentary linking the material together. When improvements in the projector permitted showing films that lasted more than fifty seconds, exhibitors began splicing twelve or more films together to form programmes on particular subjects. Not only could exhibitors manipulate the visual aspects of their programmes, they also added sound of various kinds, for, contrary to popular opinion, the silent cinema was never silent. At the very least, music, from the full orchestra to solo piano, accompanied all films shown in the vaudeville houses. Travelling exhibitors lectured over the films and lantern slides they projected, the spoken word capable of imposing a very different meaning on the image from the one that the producer may have intended. Many exhibitors even added sound effects -- horses' hooves, revolver shots, and so forth-and spoken dialogue delivered by actors standing behind the screen.<br />By the end of its first decade of existence, the cinema had established itself as an interesting novelty, one distraction among many in the increasingly frenetic pace of twentieth-century life. Yet the fledgeling medium was still very much dependent upon pre-existing media for its formal conventions and story-telling devices, upon somewhat outmoded individually-driven production methods, and upon pre-existing exhibition venues such as vaudeville and fairs. In its next decade, however, the cinema took major steps toward becoming the mass medium of the twentieth century, complete with its own formal conventions, industry structure, and exhibition venues.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>Bibliography<br /></strong>Balio, Tino (ed.) ( 1985), The American Film Industry.<br />Barnes, John ( 1976). The Beginnings of the Cinema in England.<br />Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema.<br />Chanan, Michael ( 1980), The Dream that Kicks.<br />Cherchi Paolo Usai, and Codelli, Lorenzo (eds.) ( 1990), Before Caligari.<br />Cosandey, Roland, Gaudreault, André, and Gunning, Tom (eds.) ( 1992), Une invention du diable?<br />Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) ( 1990), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative.<br />Fell, John L. ( 1983), Film before Griffith.<br />--- ( 1986), Film and the Narrative Tradition.<br />Gunning, Tom ( 1986), "The Cinema of Attractions".<br />Holman, Roger (ed.) ( 1982), Cinema 1900-1906: An Analytic Study.<br />Low, Rachael, and Manvell, Roger ( 1948), The History of the British Film, 1896-1906.<br />Musser, Charles ( 1990), The Emergence of Cinema.<br />--- ( 1991), Before the Nickelodeon.<br /><br />En: The Oxford History of World Cinema EDITED BY GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITHmarianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-23170679598082820382008-04-24T07:50:00.001-07:002008-04-24T07:56:41.660-07:00The Early Years, por Cherchi Usai<span style="font-size:130%;">THE EARLY YEARS<br />Origins and Survival<br /></span><strong>PAOLO CHERCHI USAI</strong><br /><br /><strong>PRE-CINEMA, FILM, TELEVISION</strong><br />The history of cinema did not begin with a 'big bang'. No single event -- whether Edison's patented invention of the Kinetoscope in 1891 or the Lumière brothers' first projection of films to a paying audience in 1895 -- can be held to separate a nebulous pre-cinema from cinema proper. Rather there is a continuum which begins with early experiments and devices aimed at presenting images in sequence (from Étienne Gaspard Robertson's Phantasmagoria of 1798 to Émile Reynaud's Pantomimes lumineuses of 1892) and includes not only the emergence in the 1890s of an apparatus recognizable as cinema but also the forerunners of electronic image-making. The first experiments in transmitting images by a television-type device are in fact as old as the cinema: Adriano de Paiva published his first studies on the subject in 1880, and Georges Rignoux seems to have achieved an actual transmission in 1909. Meanwhile certain 'pre-cinema' techniques continued to be used in conjunction with cinema proper during the years around 1900-5 when the cinema was establishing itself as a new mass medium of entertainment and instruction, and lantern slides with movement effects continued for a long time to be shown in close conjunction with film screenings.<br />Magic lantern, film, and television, therefore, do not constitute three separate universes (and fields of study), but belong together as part of a single process of evolution. It is none the less possible to distinguish them, not only technologically and in terms of the way they were diffused, but also chronologically. The magic lantern show gradually gives way to the film show at the beginning of the twentieth century, while television emerges fully only in the second half of the century. In this succession, what distinguishes cinema is on the one hand its technological base -- photographic images projected in quick succession giving the illusion of continuity -- and on the other hand its use prevailingly as large-scale public entertainment.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>THE BASIC APPARATUS</strong><br />Films produce their illusion of continuous movement by passing a series of discrete images in quick succession in front of a light source enabling the images to be projected on a screen. Each image is held briefly in front of the light and then rapidly replaced with the next one. If the procedure is rapid and smooth enough, and the images similar enough to each other, discontinuous images are then perceived as continuous and an illusion of movement is created. The perceptual process involved was known about in the nineteenth century, and given the name persistence of vision, since the explanation was thought to lie in the persistence of the image on the retina of the eye for long enough to make perception of each image merge into the perception of the next one. This explanation is no longer regarded as adequate, and modern psychology prefers to see the question in terms of brain functions rather than of the eye alone. But the original hypothesis was sufficiently fertile to lead to a number of experiments in the 1880s and 1890s aimed at reproducing the so-called persistence of vision effect with sequential photographs.<br />The purposes of these experiments were various. They were both scientific and commercial, aimed at analysing movement and at reproducing it. In terms of the emergence of cinema the most important were those which set out to reproduce movement naturally, by taking pictures at a certain speed (a minimum of ten or twelve per second and generally higher) and showing them at the same speed. In fact throughout the silent period the correspondence between camera speed and projection was rarely perfect. A projection norm of around 16 pictures ('frames') per second seems to have been the most common well into the 1920s, but practices differed considerably and it was always possible for camera speeds to be made deliberately slower or faster to produce effects of speeded-up or slowed-down motion when the film was projected. It was only with the coming of synchronized sound-tracks, which had to be played at a constant speed, that a norm of 24 frames per second (f.p.s.) became standard for both camera and projector.<br />First of all, however, a mechanism had to be created which would enable the pictures to be exposed in the camera in quick succession and projected the same way. A roll of photographic film had to be placed in the camera and alternately held very still while the picture was exposed and moved down very fast to get on to the next picture, and the same sequence had to be followed when the film was shown. Moving the film and then stopping it so frequently put considerable strain on the film itself -- a problem which was more severe in the projector than in the camera, since the negative was exposed only once whereas the print would be shown repeatedly. The problem of intermittent motion, as it is called, exercised the minds of many of the pioneers of cinema, and was solved only by the introduction of a small loop in the threading of the film where it passed the gate in front of the lens (see inset).<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>FILM STOCK<br /></strong>The moving image as a form of collective entertainment -what we call 'cinema' -- developed and spread in the form of photographic images printed on a flexible and semitransparent celluloid base, cut into strips 35 mm. wide. This material -- 'film' -- was devised by Henry M. Reichenbach for George Eastman in 1889, on the basis of inventions variously attributed to the brothers J. W. and I. S. Hyatt ( 1865), to Hannibal Goodwin ( 1888), and to Reichenbach himself. The basic components of the photographic film used since the end of the nineteenth century have remained unchanged over the years. They are: a transparent base, or support; a very fine layer of adhesive substrate made of gelatine; and a light-sensitive emulsion which makes the film opaque on one side. The emulsion generally consists of a suspension of silver salts in gelatine and is attached to the base by means of the layer of adhesive substrate. The base of the great majority of 35 mm. films produced before February 1951 consists of cellulose nitrate, which is a highly flammable substance. From that date onwards the nitrate base has been replaced by one of cellulose acetate, which is far less flammable, or increasingly by polyester. From early times, however, various forms of 'safety' film were tried out, at first using cellulose diacetate (invented by Eichengrun and Becker as early as 1901), or by coating the nitrate in non-flammable substances. The first known examples of these procedures date back to 1909. Safety film became the norm for non-professional use after the First World War.<br />The black and white negative film used up to the mid1920s was so-called orthochromatic. It was sensitive to ultraviolet, violet, and blue light, and rather less sensitive to green and yellow. Red light did not affect the silver bromide emulsion at all. To prevent parts of the scene from appearing on the screen only in the form of indistinct dark blobs, early cinematographers had to practise a constant control of colour values on the set. Certain colours had to be removed entirely from sets and costumes. Actresses avoided red lipstick, and interior scenes were shot against sets painted in various shades of grey. A new kind of emulsion called panchromatic was devised for Gaumont by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1912. In just over a decade it became the preferred stock for all the major production companies. It was less light-sensitive in absolute terms than orthochrome, which meant that enhanced systems of studio lighting had to be developed. But it was far better balanced and allowed for the reproduction of a wider range of greys.<br />In the early days, however, celluloid film was not the only material tried out in the showing of motion pictures. Of alternative methods the best known was the Mutoscope. This consisted of a cylinder to which were attached several hundred paper rectangles about 70 mm. wide. These paper rectangles contained photographs which, if watched in rapid sequence through a viewer, gave the impression of continuous movement. There were even attempts to produce films on glass: the Kammatograph ( 1901) used a disc with a diameter of 30 cm., containing some 600 photographic frames arranged in a spiral. There were experiments involving the use of translucent metal with a photographic emulsion on it which could be projected by reflection, and films with a surface in relief which could be passed under the fingers of blind people, on a principle similar to Braille.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>FORMATS<br /></strong>The 35 mm. width (or 'gauge') for cellulose was first adopted in 1892 by Thomas Edison for his Kinetoscope, a viewing device which enabled one spectator at a time to watch brief segments of film. The Kinetoscope was such a commercial success that subsequent machines for reproducing images in movement adopted 35 mm. as a standard format. This practice had the support of the Eastman Company, whose photographic film was 70 mm. wide, and therefore only had to be cut lengthwise to produce film of the required width. It is also due to the mechanical structure of the Kinetoscope that 35 mm. film has four perforations, roughly rectangular in shape, on both sides of each frame, used for drawing the film through the camera and projector. Other pioneers at the end of the nineteenth century used a different pattern. The Lumière brothers, for example, used a single circular perforation on each side. But it was the Edison method which was soon adopted as standard, and remains so today. It was the Edison company too who set the standard size and shape of the 35 mm. frame, at approximately 1 in. wide and 0.75 in. high.<br />Although these were to become the standards, there were many experiments with other gauges of film stock, both in the early period and later. In 1896 the Prestwich Company produced a 60 mm. film strip, an example of which is preserved in the National Film and Television Archive in London, and the same width (but with a different pattern of perforations) was used by Georges Demený in France. The Veriscope Company in America introduced a 63 mm. gauge; one film in this format still survives -- a record of the historic heavyweight championship fight between Corbett and Fitzsimmons in 1897. Around the same time Louis Lumière also experimented with 70 mm. film which yielded a picture area 60 mm. wide and 45 mm. high. All these systems encountered technical problems, particularly in projection. Though some further experiments took place towards the end of the silent period, the use of wide gauges such as 65 and 70 mm. did not come into its own until the late 1950s.<br />More important than any attempts to expand the image, however, were those aimed at reducing it and producing equipment suitable for non-professional users.<br />In 1900 the French company Gaumont began marketing its 'Chrono de Poche', a portable camera which used 15 mm. film with a single perforation in the centre. Two years later the Warwick Trading Company in England introduced a 17.5 mm. film for amateurs, designed to be used on a machine called the Biokam which (like the first Lumière machines) doubled as camera, printer, and projector; this idea was taken up by Ernemann in Germany and then by Pathé in France in the 1920s. Meanwhile in 1912 Pathé had also introduced a system that used 28 mm. film on a non-flammable diacetate base and had a picture area only slightly smaller than 35 mm.<br /> An alternative to celluloid film, the Kammatograph (c. 1900) used a glass disc with the film frames arranged in a spiral<br />The amateur gauge par excellence, however, was 16 mm. on a non-flammable base, devised by Eastman Kodak in 1920. In its original version, known as the Kodascope, this worked on the reversal principle, producing a direct positive print on the original film used in the camera. Kodak launched their 16 mm. film on the market in 1923, and around the same time Pathé brought out their 'PathéBaby', using 9.5 mm. non-flammable stock. For many years 9.5 was a fierce competitor with 16 mm., and it survived for a long time as a reduced projection gauge both for amateur film-making and for the showing of films originally made on 35 mm.<br /> Filoteo Alberini, unidentified 70 mm. film ( 1911). Frame enlargement from a negative in the film collection at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY<br /> There were also more exotic formats, using film divided into parallel rows which could be exposed in succession. Of these only Edison's Home Kinetoscope, using 22 mm. film divided into three parallel rows with an image-width of just over 5 mm., each of them separated by a line of perforations, had any significant commercial application.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>COLOUR<br /></strong>As early as 1896, copies of films which had been handcoloured frame by frame with very delicate brushes were available. The results achieved by this technique were often spectacular, as in the case of Georges Méliès's Le Royaume des fées ( 1903), whose images have the glow of medieval miniatures. It was very difficult, however, to ensure that the colour occupied a precise area of the frame. To achieve this, Pathé in 1906 patented a mechanical method of colouring the base called Pathécolor. This method, also known as 'au pochoir' in French and stencil in English, allowed for the application of half a dozen different tonalities.<br />A far less expensive method was to give the film a uniform colour for each frame or sequence in order to reinforce the figurative effect or dramatic impact. Basically there were three ways of doing this. There was tinting, which was achieved either by applying a coloured glaze to the base, or by dipping the film in a solution of coloured dyes, or by using stock which was already coloured. Then there was toning, in which the silver in the emulsion was replaced with a coloured metallic salt, without affecting the gelatine on the film. And finally there was mordanting, a variety of toning in which the photographic emulsion was treated with a non-soluble silver salt capable of fixing an organic colouring agent. Tinting, toning, mordanting, and mechanical colouring could be combined, thus multiplying the creative possibilities of each technique. A particularly fascinating variation on tinting technique is provided by the Handschiegl Process (also known as the Wyckoff-DeMille Process, 1916-31), which was an elaborate system derived from the techniques of lithography.<br />The first attempts (by Frederick Marshall Lee and Edward Raymond Turner) to realize colour films using the superimposition of red, green, and blue images date back to 1899. But it was only in 1906 that George Albert Smith achieved a commercially viable result with his Kinemacolor. In front of the camera Smith placed a semi-transparent disc divided into two sectors: red and blue-green. The film was then projected with the same filters at a speed of 32 frames per second, and the two primary colours were thus 'merged' in an image which showed only slight chromatic variations but produced an undeniable overall effect. Smith's invention was widely imitated and developed into three-colour systems by Gaumont in 1913 and the German Agfa Company in 1915.<br /> The first actual colour-sensitive emulsion was invented by Eastman Kodak around 1915 and shortly afterwards marketed under the trademark Kodachrome. This was still only a two-colour system, but it was the first stage in a series of remarkable developments. Around the same time a company founded by Herbert T. Kalmus, W. Burton Westcott, and Daniel Frost Comstock -- the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation -- began experimenting with a system based on the additive synthesis of two colours; disappointed by the results thus obtained, the three changed tack in 1919 and began exploring (still with two colours only) the possibility of using the principle of subtractive synthesis first elaborated by Duclos du Hauron in 1868. This worked by combining images each of which had filtered out light of a particular colour. When the images were combined, the colour balance was restored. Using the subtractive principle the Technicolor team were ready within three years to present a colour film -- The Toll of the Sea ( Chester M. Franklin, Metro Pictures, 1922) -created on two negatives and consisting of two sets of positive images with separate colours printed back to back.<br />The late 1910s and early 1920s saw many other inventions in the field of colour, but by the end of the decade it was clear that Kalmus and his associates were way ahead of the field, and it was their system that was to prevail for professional film-making throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile the great majority of films during the silent period continued to be produced using one or other of the methods of colouring the print described above. Literally black and white films were in the minority, generally those made by smaller companies or comic shorts.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>SOUND</strong><br />Almost all 'silent' films had some sort of sound accompaniment. Early film shows had lecturers who gave a commentary on the images going past on the screen, explaining their content and meaning to the audience. In a number of non-western countries this practice continued long beyond the early period. In Japan, where silent cinema remained the rule well into the 1930s, there developed the art of the benshi, who provided gestures and an original text to accompany the image.<br />Along with speech came music. This was at first improvised on the piano, then adapted from the current popular repertoire, and then came to be specially commissioned. On big occasions this music would be performed by orchestras, choirs, and opera singers, while a small band or just a pianist would play in less luxurious establishlnents. Exhibitors who could not afford the performance of original music had two choices. The first was to equip a pianist, organist, or small band with a musical score, generally consisting of selections of popular tunes and classics in the public domain ('cue sheets'), which provided themes suitable to accompany different episodes of the film. The second, more drastic, was to fall back on mechanical instruments, from the humble pianola to huge fairground organs powered by compressed air into which the 'score' was inserted in the form of a roll of punched paper.<br />Music was sometimes accompanied by noise effects. These were usually obtained by performers equipped with a wide array of objects reproducing natural and artificial sounds. But the same effects could be produced by machines, of which a particularly famous and elaborate example was the one in use at the Gaumont Hippodrome cinema in Paris.<br />From the beginning, however, the pioneers of the moving image had more grandiose ambitions. As early as April 1895, Edison put forward a system for synchronizing his twin inventions of phonograph and Kinetoscope. Pathé also seems to have attempted the synchronization of films and discs around 1896. All such systems, however, were hampered by the lack of amplification to project the sound in large auditoriums.<br />The alternative to synchronizing films and discs was to print the sound directly on the film. The first experiments in this direction took place at the beginning of the century, and in 1906 Eugéne-Auguste Lauste patented a machine capable of recording images and sound on the same base.<br />An early example of split-screen technique in an unidentified documentary on Venice. Title on print Santa Lucia, c. 1912<br /> It was only after the First World War that the decisive steps were taken towards the achievement of synchronized sound film. The German team of Vogt, Engel, and Massolle established a method of recording sound photographically by converting the sounds into light patterns on a separate film strip and their TriErgon system was premièred in Berlin in 1922. Kovalendov in the Soviet Union and Lee De Forest in the United States were also working in the same direction. De Forest's Phonofilm ( 1923) involved the use of a photoelectric cell to read a sound-track printed on the same strip of film as the image. Meanwhile the introduction of electric recording and the thermionic valve as an offshoot of radio technology solved the problem of amplifying the sound to make it audible in theatres.<br />In 1926 the Hollywood studio Warner Bros. presented Don Juan, with John Barrymore, using the Vitaphone system of sound synchronization. This was a sound-ondisc system, linking the projector to large discs, 16 in. in diameter, which ran at a speed of 33¼ r.p.m., with the needle starting at the centre and going outwards. The Vitaphone system was used again the following year for the first 'talking' picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, and continued in being for a few more years. Meanwhile a rival studio, Fox, had bought up the rights on the TriErgon and Photophone patents, using them to add sound to films that had already been shot. Fox's Movietone soundon-film system proved far more practical than Vitaphone, and became the basis for the generalized introduction of synchronized sound in the early 1930s.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>ASPECT RATIO</strong><br />The size and shape of the 35 mm. film frame remained virtually unchanged throughout the silent period, at about 23 mm. Oust under 1 in.) wide and 18 mm. (0.75 in.) high. The spacing of the frames meant each foot of film contained 16 frames. This too has remained unaltered, and continues to be the standard today. When projected, the ratio between width and height worked out at between 1.31 and 1.38 to 1. With the coming of sound the frame size was altered slightly to accommodate the sound-track, but the projection ratio remained roughly the same -- at approximately 4:3 -- until the arrival of widescreen processes in the 1950s. In the silent and early sound periods there were a few attempts to change the size and shape of the projected picture. The sides of the frame were occasionally masked out, to produce a square picture, as in the case of Murnau's Tabu ( 1931). In 1927 the Frenchman Henri Chrétien presented the first anamorphic system, known as Hypergonar, in which the image was 'squeezed' by the camera lens to accommodate a wider picture on the frame, and then 'unsqueezed' in the projector for presentation on a wide screen. This was an early forerunner of CinemaScope and the other anamorphic systems which came into commercial use in the 1950s. Other experiments included Magnascope ( 1926), which used a wide-angle projector lens to fill a large screen, and devices for linking multiple projectors together. As early as 1900 Raoul Grimoin-Sanson attempted to hitch up ten 70 mm. projectors to produce a 360-degree 'panorama' completely surrounding the spectator. More famous (though equally ephemeral) was the Polyvision system used in the celebrated 'triptych' sequence in Abel Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), where three strips of film are simultaneously projected alongside each other to produce a single image.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>PROJECTION</strong><br />The normal method of projection from the earliest times involved placing the projector at the back of the hall and projecting the image on to the screen in a cone of light over the heads of the audience. Occasional attempts were made to devise alternative spatial arrangements. In 1909, for example, the German Messter Company experimented with showing its 'Alabastra' colour films through a complex system of mirrors on to a thin veiled screen from a projection booth placed under the theatre floor. It was also possible to project on to the screen from behind, but this process (known as back-projection) took up a lot of space and has rarely been used for public presentation. It came into use in the sound period as a form of special effect during film-making allowing actors to perform in front of a previously photographed landscape background.<br />Throughout the silent years projectors, whether handcranked or electrically powered, all ran at variable speeds, enabling the operator to adjust the speed of the projector to that of the camera. For its part, camera speed varied according to a number of factors: the amount of available light during shooting, the sensitivity of the film stock, and the nature of the action being recorded. To keep the movements of the characters on the screen 'natural', projectionists in the years before 1920 showed films at various speeds, most often between 14 and 18 frames per second. (The flicker effect that these relatively slow speeds tended to produce was eliminated by the introduction early in the century of a three-bladed shutter which opened and closed three times during the showing of each frame.) The average speed of projection increased as time went on, and by the end of the period it had regularly reached a norm of 24 frames per second, which became the standard for sound film. Faster and slower speeds were occasionally used for colour film experiments or in some amateur equipment.<br />The quality of projection was greatly affected by the type of light source being used. Before electric arc lights became standard, the usual method of producing light for the projector was to heat a piece of lime or a similar substance until it glowed white hot. The efficacy of this method (known as 'limelight') was very dependent on the nature and quality of the fuel used to heat the lime. The usual fuels were a mixture of coal-gas and oxygen or of ether and oxygen. Acetylene was also tried, but soon abandoned as it produced a weak light and gave off a disagreeable smell.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>FROM PRODUCTION TO EXHIBITION<br /></strong>It is not known (and probably never will be known) exactly how many films of all types were produced during the silent period, but the figure is almost certainly in the order of 150,000, of which not more than 20,000 to 25,000 are known to have survived. With the rapid growth of the film business, films soon came to be printed in large numbers. For Den hvide slavehandel II ('The white slave trade II', August Blom, 1911) the Danish company Nordisk made no fewer than 260 copies for world-wide distribution. On the other hand many early American films listed in distributors' catalogues seem to have sold not more than a couple of copies, and in some cases it may be that none at all were printed, due to lack of demand.<br />Since the cinema was from the outset an international business, films had to be shipped from one country to another, often in different versions. Films might be recorded on two side-by-side cameras simultaneously, producing two different negatives. Intertitles would be shot in different languages, and shipped with the prints or a duplicate negative of the film to a foreign distributor. Sometimes only one frame of each title would be provided, to be expanded to full length when copies were made, and some films have survived with only these 'flash titles' or with no titles at all. Sometimes different endings were produced to suit the tastes of the public in various parts of the world. In eastern Europe for example, there was a taste for the 'Russian' or tragic ending in preference to the 'happy end' expected by audiences in America. It was also common to issue coloured prints of a film for show in luxury theatres and cheaper black and white ones for more modest locales. Finally, censorship, both national and local, often imposed cuts or other changes in films at the time of release, and many American films in particular have survived in different forms as a result of the varied censorship practices of state or city censorship boards.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>DECAY<br /></strong>In the early years of the cinema films were looked on as essentially ephemeral and little attempt was made to preserve them once they reached the end of their commercial life. The appeal of the Polish scholar Bolesław Matuszewski in 1898 for a permanent archive of film images to be created to serve as a record for future generations fell on deaf ears, and it was not until the 1930s that the first film archives were created in a number of countries to preserve surviving films for posterity. By that time, however, many films had been irretrievably lost and many others dispersed. The world's archives have now collected together some 30,000 prints of silent films, but the lack of resources for cataloguing them means that it is not known how many of these are duplicate prints of the same version, or, in the case of what appear to be duplicates, whether there are significant differences between versions of films with the same title. While the number of films collected continues to rise, the number of surviving films is still probably less than 20 per cent of those thought to have been made.<br />Meanwhile, even as the number of rediscovered films rises, a further problem is created by the perishable nature of the nitrate base on which the vast majority of silent (and early sound) films were printed. For not only is cellulose nitrate highly flammable, which may in some cases lead to spontaneous combustion: it is also liable to decay and in the course of decay it destroys the emulsion which bears the image. Even in the best conservation conditions (that is to say at very low temperatures and the correct level of humidity), the nitrate base begins to decompose from the moment it is produced. In the course of the process the film emits various gases, and in particular nitrous anhydride, which, combined with air and with the water in the gelatine, produces nitrous and nitric acids. These acids corrode the silver salts of the emulsion, thereby destroying the image along with its support, until eventually the whole film is dissolved.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>RESTORATION<br /></strong>The decomposition of nitrate film can be slowed down, but not halted. For this reason film archives are engaged in a struggle to prolong its life until such time as the image can be transferred to a different support. Unfortunately the cellulose acetate base on to which the transfer is made is itself liable to eventual decay unless kept under ideal atmospheric conditions. Even so, it is far more stable than nitrate and infinitely preferable to magnetic (video) tape, which is not only perishable but is unsuitable for reproducing the character of the original film. It may be that some time in the future it will prove possible to preserve film images digitally, but this has not yet been demonstrated to be a practical possibility.<br />The aim of restoration is to reproduce the moving image in a form as close as possible to that in which it was originally shown. But all copies that are made are necessarily imperfect. For a start, they have had to be duplicated from one base on to another, with an inevitable loss of some of the original quality. It is also extremely difficult to reproduce colour techniques such as tinting and toning, even if the film is copied on to colour stock, which, given the expense, is far from being universal practice. Many films which were originally coloured are now only seen, if at all, in black and white form.<br />To appreciate a silent film in the form in which it was originally seen by audiences, it is necessary to have the rare good luck of seeing an original nitrate print (increasingly difficult because of modern fire regulations), and even then it has to be recognized that each copy of a film has its own unique history and every showing will vary according to which print is being shown and under what conditions. Different projection, different music, the likely absence of an accompanying live show or light effects, mean that the modern showing of silent films offers only a rough approximation of what silent film screening was like for audiences at the time.<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong>Bibliography</strong><br />Abramson, Albert ( 1987), The History of Television, 1880 to 1941.<br />Cherchi Paolo Usai ( 1994), Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema.<br />Hampton, Benjamin B. ( 1931), A History of the Movies.<br />Liesegang, Franz Paul ( 1986), Moving and Projected Images: A Chronology of Pre-cinema History.<br />Magliozzi, Ronald S. (ed.) ( 1988), Treasures from the Film Archives.<br />Rathbun, John B. ( 1914), Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting.<br /><br />En: The Oxford History of World Cinema EDITED BY GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITHmarianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-74741530589752449032008-04-24T07:41:00.000-07:002008-04-24T07:43:14.870-07:00El concepto del Modo de Representación Primitivo<span style="font-size:130%;">Síntesis por Ricardo Parodi</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Concepto de M.R.P.</span><br /><br />El concepto de Modo de Representación Primitivo (M.R.P.) lo tomamos de Noël Burch (op. Cit.). Éste opone el M.R.P. al Modo de Representación Institucional (M.R.I.), abandonando la idea de que el cine no es un lenguaje, sino un sistema organizado de representaciones que en su nacimiento, en su génesis, no presupone necesariamente la narración.<br />La narración es sólo una posibilidad, uno de los caminos posibles de la Representación, una consecuencia de la influencia de múltiples factores culturales y sociales, no un presupuesto, o una condición necesaria.<br />En el período 1895 / 1917, muy aproximadamente, se constituiría el núcleo del M.R.P. y su tránsito hacia la constitución de un M.R.I.<br />Por M.R.I. entendemos toda una serie de tópicos, normativas y convenciones que regulan el conexionado, la forma de funcionamiento y producción de las representaciones cinematográficas. Tales regulaciones se extienden desde la llamada "escala de planos", que normativiza, esto es legaliza, la forma en que ha de realizarse un Primer Plano, un plano General, etc., hasta la forma en que habrá de representarse el Estado, la Policía, la familia, etc.. El M.R.I. es la consolidación, a nivel simbólico - representacional, de un cierto Imaginario, de un cierto ordenamiento narrativo del mundo.<br />El M.R.P., en cambio, presentifica aún un elevado grado de "caos" o anarquía en la regulación de las imágenes, dicho esto sin ningún tono peyorativo o afán de establecimiento de un escalafón jerárquico- evolucionista.<br />El M.R.P. no es un grado inferior o no evolucionado del M.R.I.. Por el contrario, es otra forma de organización, todavía no regulada por las formas de producción industriales de la representación.<br />El M.R.P. posee algunos rasgos principales:<br />1. Autarquía del cuadro: Cada cuadro es relativamente independiente de su antecedente y su consecuente. Todavía no está plenamente asegurada la continuidad (raccord) de un mismo movimiento de un cuadro al otro, por ejemplo. Toda acción comienza y termina dentro del mismo cuadro, no se prolonga de uno a otro.2. Posición horizontal y frontal de la cámara: la cámara siempre esta ubicada en forma perpendicular a la escena representada. Se trata siempre de un plano amplio que cubre la totalidad de la escenografía delante de la cual se desplazan horizontalmente los actores.3. Conservación del plano de conjunto: a cada escena le corresponde un único plano ("de conjunto" diríamos hoy en día). Se opera así sobre la lógica 1ª escena = 1 Cuadro. En un filme ya institucional, por ejemplo, a cada escena le corresponderán varios planos que se dedicarán a mostrar diferencialmente aquellos gestos o acciones importantes para el progreso de la acción. <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase1.htm#a13#a13">(13)</a><a name="13"></a>marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-67906530826970888362008-04-24T07:37:00.000-07:002008-04-24T07:38:46.675-07:00Sobre el comentario de Burch sobre cine temprano5. A Parenthesis on Film History<br />But first, he's going to examine the process by which 19th century ideologies of representation came to determine the representational modes of Western film. This is probably the most important chapter of the book, as it constitutes a radical repositioning of the major figures at the dawn of cinema by looking at them from the ground of Japanese cinema. Nearly all narratives of the invention of cinema identify Lumiere with non-fiction and Melies with fiction. Burch intends to switch the historical division in film to Lumiere & Melies vs. Americans Dickson & Raff & Gammon et al."I regard the work of Melies and Lumiere, however, as two aspects of the same phenomenon. Conversely, the contradiction between the films shot by the Lumieres and their cameramen, and some of those produced for the Edison company during the first few years by Dickson and Raff and Gammon is I believe absolutely fundamental" (p. 61).The people working for Edison were interested in the "total reproduction of life," an "essential aspiration of the bourgeoisie with regard to representation." (p. 61). The Lumieres were still the direct heirs of Muybridge and Co., as they were interested in the silent reproduction of perceptual movement. Burch describes the Lumiere's work as non-centered spacially (not guiding the gaze of the spectator) and temporally (often having no beginning or end). The films were also non-linear viewing experiences, since the clips were often showed more than once. Burch compares these early films to recent modernist films.Burch also points out differences in their methods (Edison and Dickson put the camera in their Black Maria, prefiguring the sound stages of the 30's) while Lumieres set it up outside, recording things with an almost scientific impulse. Melies worked in a studio, but to "construct a world as radically and avowedly artificial as possible." (p. 62) Even the language they used reveals the difference: "The neologisms coined by Edison (Vitascope) and the Lumiere brothers (Cinématographe) are also emblematic of their antithetical positions: a 'vision of life' as opposed to 'an inscription of movement'."(p. 62) Burch places Porter in a middle ground between the "Lumiere/Edison contradiction", citing the medium close-up of The Great Train Robbery (1903) (which could be tacked on either the beginning or end) and the bedroom rescue in The Life of an American Fireman (1902) (shown two times from inside and outside) as impulses toward the Lumiere mode of representation. At the same time, Porter's work in the development of reverse field, cross-cutting and ellipsis places also puts him on the Edison side as they were to constitute the future Hollywood style. By WWI, the adoption of reverse field editing and the eyeline match were the last steps in breaking down the barrier of 'alienation' which informed the relationship between the early film and its essentially working-class audience. With the search for a better audience (which brought middle-class norms into the mode of representation) and the coming of sound, the project initiated by Smith, Porter, Griffith and Co. was completed.Burch takes on previous film historians, who describe Japanese cinema as constantly catching up to the rest of the world until its "golden age" in the 1950s. He asserts that the creative lag most experts see in the silent Japanese film is based on an ideological assumption, a "fundamental incompatibility between the West's developing 'codes of illusionism' and Japanese indifference to 'illusionism' in the Western sense." (p. 66) At the end of the chapter, he once again draws a line between the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Shimizu, and Naruse and the most radical films of the 60's and 70's (including Godard and Warhol). Before tracing the development of Japanese separation from Western codes, however, he wants to look for its origin.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-82696003768487373262008-04-24T07:32:00.000-07:002008-04-24T07:36:10.693-07:00Texto sobre Porter por Musser<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Innovators 1900-1910: Time After Time</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><strong>We've all heard of D. W. Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa and Disney, but who really made a difference to film history? Was it the technicians, the hustlers or the artists? In the first of a new series highlighting one key innovator from each decade of the twentieth century, <em>Charles Musser</em> looks at the storytelling achievements of editing pioneer Edwin S. Porter</strong><br /><strong><br /></strong>Renowned as the maker of The Great Train Robbery, Edwin Stanton Porter has sometimes been called the "father of the story film" and the "inventor of editing". Such reductive claims ignore the contributions of his contemporaries - many of whom have been credited with the same achievements by rival historians. Nonetheless, Porter can with reasonable accuracy be called "America's first major film-maker".<br />Born on 21 April 1870 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the future film-maker was named Edward by his parents. A pudgy boy known as "Betty", he had changed his name to Edwin Stanton after Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, by the time he joined the US Navy in 1893. In the 1890s he worked as an exhibitor and equipment manufacturer and enjoyed considerable success as an operator at the Eden Musee entertainment complex - the leading showcase for motion pictures in New York City. Operators in those days were responsible for acquiring films from an array of often obscure sources and assembling them into individual programmes - what we now call post-production. Porter's programme The Passion Play of Oberammergau, for instance, integrated magic-lantern slides and some 23 short films into a coherent show that lasted 40 minutes or longer, accompanied by a lecture and music sung by a choir. Another favourite, Panorama of the War, offered a historical account of the Spanish-American War through a wide range of news films and re-enactments.<br />In the summer of 1900, as motion pictures were reaching a new low point in popularity, Porter tried his luck as a travelling showman. A fire at his New York City workshop further added to his woes. Meanwhile, inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison was having his own difficulties and came close to selling his motion-picture interests to the rival American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. In the end Edison renewed his commitment to the film business, and a few days before Thanksgiving hired Porter to improve the Edison Manufacturing Company's equipment (notably its Projecting Kinetoscope projector). Edison had built a glass-enclosed rooftop studio at 41 East 21st Street in New York City; Porter was asked to outfit the studio and then stayed on to work in the company's production unit as principal cameraman alongside actor and scenic designer George S. Fleming.<br />Porter and Fleming were typical of the collaborative production teams working in the US before 1908-09. As cameraman, Porter was responsible for all the filmic elements: not only cinematography but developing the negative and editing, which at first was little more than "trimming" the individual shot which constituted the film as a whole. In addition he worked with Fleming on the selection of subject matter and on story development. The Porter-Fleming team demonstrated a fiair for making comedies and other acted films. Kansas Saloon Smashers (February 1901) re-enacted and lampooned the widely reported antics of Carrie Nation and her brigade of hatchet-wielding prohibitionists. The women in this film were played by men in drag. Somewhat later, when Nation's husband was reported to be demanding a divorce, they made the obvious sequel, Why Mr Nation Wants a Divorce (May 1901), in which Carrie catches her husband taking a drink and treats him the way her brigade treated the saloon. These topical films fitted into a general conception of cinema as a visual newspaper.<br />Between 1899 and 1903 responsibility for key aspects of post-production shifted from exhibition services to production companies, making possible a new kind of storytelling. Those most responsible for this shift were a handful of men who had experience in film exhibition and film-making but were increasingly committed to the latter, including Edwin Porter in the US, James Williamson and G. A. Smith in Britain and Georges Méliès in France. Porter enjoyed a virtually unique position: Edison had sued all his rival production companies for violating his motion-picture patents, putting many of them out of business. So the Edison Manufacturing Company enjoyed total hegemony from mid-July 1901, when his patents were upheld in the circuit courts, to March 1902, when they were declared invalid on appeal.<br />In the first part of 1901 Porter and Fleming made a number of two-shot films. Terrible Teddy the Grizzly King (February 1901) burlesqued president elect Theodore Roosevelt's media-conscious activities on a hunting trip. The first shot of The Finish of Brigit McKeen (February 1901) shows a thick-headed Irish servant girl pouring kerosene into a stove and blowing herself up (ethnic gags permeate many of these early comedies). In the last shot a painted backdrop displays a tombstone, on which is inscribed: "Here lies the remains of Brigit McKeen who started a fire with Kerosine." The first shot imitated the Biograph film How Brigit Made the Fire (June 1900); the last literalised the ditty on which both films were based.<br />Having worked as a film editor for a number of years, I have always found Porter's surviving productions from 1901-02 - in which we can trace his evolving understanding of film editing, his unfolding approach to the temporal and spatial organisation of shots - deeply moving. In The Sampson-Schley Controversy (August 1901), based on an incident in the Battle of Santiago Bay during the Spanish-American War, Porter depicted the temporal relationships between three shots all taken in the studio. The opening scene represents Commodore Winfield Schley on the bridge of the battleship Brooklyn directing gunfire against the Spanish enemy. The second is of a gun crew on the Brooklyn firing their cannon at the same distant ship. The third, added a few weeks after the initial release, shows Admiral William Sampson sipping tea with a group of old ladies. Although Sampson was apparently at a tea party while the Battle of Santiago Bay was fought, he received credit for the victory - a fact Schley (a populist hero) and his fans resented. This film thus consists of three successive shots showing actions occurring more or less simultaneously in three different locations. But this simultaneity is clear only to audiences who know about the underlying political controversy. Like Griffith in the post-1908 period, Porter was interested in exploring ways of depicting simultaneous actions in different shots, in different locations and/or from different perspectives. But their solutions were radically different.<br />The Execution of Czologosz (November 1901) was one of many films made around the assassination of President William McKinley. His assassin, Leon Czologosz, was executed on 29 October 1901 at Auburn State Prison. According to Edison advertisements, Porter filmed two exterior shots of the prison that morning, using sweeping camera pans. Back at the New York studio he and Fleming filmed two more 'scenes', of Czologosz being led from his cell to the execution chamber and of the condemned man's electrocution. This film involved a sustained spatial progression from outside to inside the prison and then to a confrontation with the electric chair and deadly justice. In the interior scenes the action moves between two contiguous spaces, though the precise spatial relationship of cell to execution chamber is evident only from a reading of the newspapers. Since The Execution of Czologosz could be purchased with or without the opening panoramas, one question had been raised but not fully resolved: could the production company dictate the terms of the larger narrative unit or was editing the final responsibility of the exhibitor?<br />Despite the groundbreaking achievement of these two films Porter and Fleming undertook nothing as ambitious for another six months. They were employees, and it may have been that company executives - given their monopoly - wanted to curtail unnecessary production costs. But once Edison lost his patent-infringement case, renewed film-making at rival US companies sparked production at the Edison studio as well. Appointment by Telephone (2 May 1902), Jack and the Beanstalk (20 June 1902), How They Do Things on the Bowery (31 October 1902) and Life of an American Fireman (21 January 1903) each represented an impressive step forward. With editorial control more firmly located in the production company, the storyline could unfold in more coherent and unified ways.<br />How They Do Things on the Bowery and Life of an American Fireman are fascinating primarily for their ways of depicting time. Life of an American Fireman contains a number of shots which have overlapping action: firemen wake from their beds and go down the firepole in the third shot; in the fourth we again see them come down the firepole, then get on to their fire engines and drive off. In the fifth the door of the fire station opens and the fire engines come out and race off to the fire. From the point of view of classical Hollywood cinema this creates a kind of stutter that made Porter's work seem awkward and old-fashioned. From a different perspective, however, we can see how Porter treated each shot as a self-contained unit that was also part of a larger film. As No'l Burch described him, Porter was a two-headed Janus who looked backwards (editing the film as if he was still an exhibitor) and forwards (taking advantage of centralised creative control to plot continuity of action across shots in a way that created a coherent fictional world).<br />The last two shots of Life of an American Fireman, which show a fire company rescuing a mother and child from a burning building, are particularly interesting. The rescue is shown first from the inside (shot 8) and then from the outside (shot 9). So the last shot is a replay of the same event from a different perspective, enabling the spectator to see everything that happened. (As in Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, 1902, which has the spaceship landing on the moon twice, from two different perspectives.) Porter thus shows us actions unfolding in two contiguous spaces, but rather than cutting back and forth between them as Griffith did in The Lonely Villa (1909) he keeps the scenes unified in a way now familiar from instant replays of sporting events. Nonetheless, when actions occur off-screen (the journey to the fire) time is condensed. Time is not verisimiliar, but highly malleable.<br />Immediately Life of an American Fireman was completed Edison competitor Sigmund Lubin won a court case that invalidated established ways of copyrighting films. Once again Edison curtailed production for a number of months until this was reversed in the court of appeals. Meanwhile George Fleming left the Edison company. In autumn 1903 Porter began to collaborate on a freelance basis with actor Gilbert M. Anderson (later Broncho Billy Anderson). Their best-known project was The Great Train Robbery (1903). A contribution to the newly popular crime genre that had come out of Britain, The Great Train Robbery depicted the process of robbing a train in exciting detail. Its temporal organisation and the successive depiction of two separate lines of action (the train robbers, the posse) make it exemplary of pre-1908 cinema's method of representation. And it was without doubt the most commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era, perhaps of any film prior to The Birth of a Nation (1915).<br />The Great Train Robbery arrived at an opportune moment. The US film industry was beginning to take off and the number of exhibition outlets was expanding rapidly. At the beginning of 1905 Porter found a new full-time collaborator in Wallace McCutcheon, previously production head at the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. In this period Porter continued to make occasional films in the tradition of The Great Train Robbery, though not as many as is sometimes thought: Capture of Yegg Bank Burglars (1904) and The Train Wreckers (1905) are the two principal examples. In the longer one-reel format he displayed a continuing fiair for comedy (The Terrible Kids, May 1906; Getting Evidence, September 1906) and a new one for family melodramas (Stolen by Gypsies, July 1905). In his search for subject matter he borrowed from a wide range of popular entertainments: postcards (The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, May 1905), songs (Waiting at the Church, May 1906), newspaper cartoons (The Rivals, August 1907) and films by competitors (Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, March 1906, is heavily indebted to Gaston Velle's Rêve à la lune, 1905).<br />An important element of Porter's work in the 1904-08 period was his sustained engagement with the world of theatre. As part of a larger change within film-making, his conception of cinema gradually shifted from having an affinity with the newspaper to one with the stage. In this period he reworked a number of popular plays, beginning with The Ex-Convict (November 1904). Porter took No. 973, a one-act drama highly dependent on dialogue, and transformed it into an eight-scene film with brief intertitles. A moving tearjerker, in which a child the ex-convict saves in an earlier scene in turn saves him after he unsuccessfully tries to rob her father's house to feed his family, it is the oldest film ever to make me cry. Other reworkings of plays included The Miller's Daughter (1905), Kathleen Mavourneen (1906), Daniel Boone; or Pioneer Days in America (1907) and The Devil (September 1908). Life of a Cowboy, which refigured Royale's The Squaw Man (1905) through a series of substitutions and inversions, was according to Porter the first film Western. The hero is the lone cowboy who displays a range of Western skills (lassoing, horse riding, gun fighting) and wins the girl from back east, even as he retains the devotion of the local Indian maiden.<br />The rising popularity of cinema and the demand for more and perhaps better films put increasing pressures on Porter and the Edison company. In May 1907 Porter found a new collaborator in playwright and stage manager James Searle Dawley. The two worked together for the remainder of Porter's Edison career, moving into the company's new, more spacious studio in the Bronx on 11 July 1907. Sets could be larger, and in films such as A Race for Millions (August-September 1907) a car could appear on stage. Edison films were becoming more elaborate (Stage Struck, August 1907), but what company executives really wanted was for Porter to increase his rate of production. This he found difficult to do.<br />In June 1908 new top management at the Edison company started a second production unit. Porter was designated studio head and oversaw both units even as he remained head of one. Meanwhile D. W. Griffith began to work as a director at the rival Biograph organisation, single-handedly outperforming both Edison units in terms of output. This was also the moment when film was becoming a form of mass entertainment with a quite different system of representation - one that served as the foundation for subsequent Hollywood cinema. This involved linear structures that eliminated overlapping actions and narrative repetitions, unfortunately a Porter trademark. Consistent screen direction, never one of Porter's concerns, also became important. And films were expected to display a narrative clarity that was not dependent on an audience's prior knowledge of the plot - again at odds with Porter's reliance on well-known stories. This new way of motion-picture storytelling was embraced by Griffith and resisted by Porter.<br />Porter's films received consistently positive reviews until June 1908, after which they were more and more criticised. The Edison company was losing ground rapidly, turning out more pictures but selling fewer and fewer prints. Edison executives soon concluded that the maker of The Great Train Robbery was washed up and over the hill. In February 1909 they removed him from his responsibility as studio head and in November 1909 he was fired.<br />The first decade of the twentieth century must have ended on as depressing a note for Porter as it began. In the interim, he played a key, at times dominant role in the development of the American film industry. The decade saw a transition from long-standing practices in which exhibitors provided their own form of individualised screen entertainment to cinema as a recognisable form of standardised mass entertainment. Porter's deep commitment to a system of production and representation - as well as his resistance to the large-scale, corporate mentality that followed - make him an exemplary figure of that time.<br />Sight & Soundmarianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-62718860167701723082007-07-04T05:46:00.000-07:002007-07-04T05:50:53.925-07:00MICHAEL CHANAN The changing geography of Third Cinema<span style="font-size:130%;">The changing geography of Third Cinema</span><br />MICHAEL CHANAN<br />Screen. Volume: 38. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 388.<br /><br />In 1968, after two years work, a group of filmmakers in Argentina calling themselves Grupo Cine Liberación, radical in both politics and their approach to cinema, completed a mammoth three-part political film running almost four and a half hours entitled La hora de los hornos/Hour of the Furnaces. 1 Constrained by the conditions which followed the military coup of 1966, but bolstered by the growth of organized resistance, the film was shot semi-clandestinely in conjunction with cadres of the Peronist movement (the negative was smuggled out to Italy where the film was finished). In short, as the North American critic Robert Stam has put it, it was a film made 'in the interstices of the system and against the system . . . independent in production, militant in politics, and experimental in language' 2<br />Setting out with the intention of making a social documentary in the manner established in Argentina ten years earlier by Fernando Birri and the Documentary School of Santa Fe (of which one of the group, Gerardo Vallejo, had been a member), the project underwent an organic transformation as a result of the conditions in which it was made. In particular, its most famous trait — the 'openness' of its text — derived from the experience of the filmmakers in the organization of political debates around the screening of films from Cuba or by filmmakers like Joris Ivens:<br />____________________<br />1 This is a revised version of an article entitled "Le troisième cinéma de Solanas et Getino", CinémAction, no. 60 ( 1991 ).<br />2 Robert Stam, 'The Hour of the Furnaces and the two avant- gardes', in Julianne Burton (ed.), The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990 ), p. 253.<br /><br />We realized that the most important thing was not the film and the information in it so much as the way this information was debated. One of the aims of such films is to provide the occasion for people to find themselves and speak about their own problems. The projection becomes a place where people talk and develop their awareness. We learnt the importance of this space: cinema here becomes humanly useful. 3<br /><br />Accordingly the film was constructed in a highly idiosyncratic manner. Prompted by intertitles posing questions like 'Why did Perón fall without a struggle? Should he have armed the people?', it was designed to be stopped in the projector to allow for iscussion<br />and debate — designed, in other words, to disrupt the normal passive relationship of the spectator to the screen.<br />The end product amounts to a militant poetic epic tapestry, weaving together disparate styles and materials ranging from didacticism to operatic stylization, direct filming to the techniques of advertising, and incorporating photographs, newsreel, testimonial footage and film clips — from avant garde and mainstream, fiction and documentary. But the filmmakers described it as a 'film act', rather than a film in the conventional sense (which indeed it was not): 'an unfinished work, open in order to incorporate dialogue and for the meeting of revolutionary wills'. 4<br />Stam has pointed out the paradox which resulted: where 'openness' in art is usually understood in terms of plurisignification, polysemy, a plurality of equally legitimate readings offered to the contemplation of the receiver, Hour of the Furnaces 'is not open in this sense: its messages are stridently unequivocal'. 5 The openness of the film lies elsewhere: in the political relationship between the film and the viewer — at least, in the clandestine circumstances in which the film was necessarily viewed in Argentina itself in the years before 1973, when the Peronists won a resounding electoral victory, the political conditions of the country were transformed, and a version of the film was put on commercial release. Those clandestine audiences were not insignificant: with some fifty prints in circulation, the film makers estimated 100,000 viewers had seen it over the five years in which the film led its hidden life. 6<br />Following the completion of the film, two members of the group, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, wrote a manifesto based on the experience entitled Hacia un tercer cine/Towards a Third Cinema. 7 Subtitled 'Notes and experiences on the development of a cinema of liberation in the Third World', there is a doubtless deliberate ambiguity in the term 'Third Cinema' which requires explication. The wordplay comes from the analogy with the term 'Third World', meaning the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa<br />____________________<br />3 Table Ronde avec Fernando Solanas et al., "Cinéma d'auteur ou cinéma d'intervention?", CinémAction, no. 1 ( 1978 ), p. 60.<br />4 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Cine, cultura y descolonización (Buenos Aires:<br />Siglo XXI, 1973 ), p. 10, quoted in Ana López, 'Argentina, 1955- 1976: the film industry and its margins', in John King and Nissa Torrents (eds), The Garden of<br />Forking Paths:Argentine Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1987 ). p. 67.<br />5 Stam, The Hour of the Furnaces, pp. 251-66.<br />6 CinémAction, no. 1, p. 61.<br />7 The essay first appeared in the journal Tricontinental, published in Paris in October 1969, and has been republished several times since, in different languages and in different versions, some abbreviated. For the purposes of the present article I have used<br />the version published in Michael Chanan (ed.), Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: British Film Institute/Channel Four, 1983 ).<br /><br />-373-<br />and Latin America. This term had its origins at the Bandung Conference of 1955, the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, when China promulgated the theory of the three worlds. The First World consisted in the advanced capitalist countries of the West, including North America and Australasia; the Second World<br />comprised the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe; the countries of the remaining continents were thus the Third World, to which China declared its allegiance. 8 On the one hand, therefore, the term corresponds to what Solanas and Getino referred to as 'a new historical situation': 'ten years of the Cuban Revolution,<br />the Vietnamese struggle, and the development of a world-wide liberation movement whose moving force is to be found in the third world countries'. 9 On the other hand, Third Cinema is not restricted to the Third World, even in the original conception of the idea, for in order to illustrate what they meant, they immediately cited examples which come from the First World, namely, 'Newsreel, a US New Left film group, the cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the films made by the Etats Généraux du Cinéma Français and those of the British and Japanese student movements'. 10<br />A few paragraphs later, they add the experiments carried out by Chris Marker in France when he provided groups of workers with 8mm cameras and basic instruction in their use.<br />The explanation of this apparent contradiction lies in their argument that the restitution of the real place and meaning of the most diverse phenomena, through experimental films which challenge orthodox representation and establish a new relation with the audience, is eminently subversive both in the neocolonial situation to be found in the countries of the Third World, and in the consumer societies of the First World. They might have added, but did not, in the Second World too. In whichever world, 'every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or penetrates the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the system finds indigestible'. 11 Notice that 'experimental' here means something a little different from its traditional use in the context of, say, underground or avant-garde film. The Argentinians suggest a position in which, to fulfil the criteria of Third Cinema, there can be nothing in political terms which is tentative or hypothetical about the content or signification of the images concerned; whereas the avant-garde or underground notion of experimentalism defends the notion of a space which is untouched by these considerations (without thereby becoming reactionary). The idea of Third Cinema, in which the camera is often equated, albeit somewhat rhetorically, to the gun, restores to the term 'avant-garde' something of its original meaning which, as Baudelaire once remarked, was probably due to the French predilection for military metaphors.<br />Geographical confusions dissolve when the two Argentinians<br />____________________<br />8 For a more detailed account, see Roger Scruton, 'Three World Theory', in A Dictionary of Political Thought (London: Pan Books, 1983 ).<br />9 Solanas and Getino, 'Towards a Third Cinema', in Chanan (ed.), Twenty-Five Years, p. 17.<br />10 Ibid., p. 17. This slightly begs the question of which world Japan belongs to.<br />11 Ibid., pp. 22-3 (translation revised).<br /><br />-374-<br />explain what they mean by First and Second Cinema, which correspond not to the First and Second Worlds but constitute a virtual geography of their own. First Cinema is the model imposed by the US film industry, the Hollywood movie — whose domination is such that even the 'monumental' films, like Bondarchuk's War and Peace (USSR, 1967 ), which had begun to appear in Second World countries, submit to the same propositions. Even when they adopt only the language of the US model, and not its themes, this still corresponds to an ideology which posits a particular relationship between film and spectator, where cinema is conceived as pure spectacle. This kind of film — made for exhibition in large theatres, with a standardized duration (feature-length or blockbuster) and hermetic forms that are born and die on the screen — is not only designed to satisfy the commercial interests of the production companies, it also leads to the absorption of forms which necessarily imply a bourgeois Weltanschauung inherited from the nineteenth century, in which the capacity of the subject to participate in making history is denied to all except the heroic and exceptional individual, and history is present only as an external force and an object of contemplation.<br />Moreover, US cinema not only imposes its models of form and language, but also industrial, commercial and technical structures which include the festivals, magazines and even film schools which perpetuate its values. Here the Argentinians speak from their own perspective as Third-World filmmakers. This institutional structure, they explain, guarantees the hegemony of the films made by the imperialist countries, because the film industries of dependent countries like Argentina are too flimsy and underfinanced to compete effectively, even in their own markets.<br />The first serious alternative to arise in these countries was the kind of film subsequently known as auteur cinema, art cinema or, in a later phase, new-wave cinema. However, although the comparison suggests itself immediately, Solanas and Getino refrain from identifying the model for this Second Cinema as European, which would be inaccurate both historically and conceptually; I shall return to this below. This alternative, they say, represented an evident advance in terms of the freedom of filmmakers in a country like Argentina to express themselves outside the standardized form and language of the regular commercial movie, with the consequence that the directors involved — they mention Del Carril, Torre Nillson, Ayala, Feldman, Murua, Kohon, Khun, Birri — constituted at a certain moment the vanguard of Argentinian cinema. Indeed, given the cultural hunger which these films started to satisfy, this Second Cinema began to produce its own structures, its own patterns of distribution and exhibition, its own ideologies, critics and reviews.<br />But it also generated, they say, a misplaced ambition to develop a parallel film industry to compete with First Cinema, and this could<br />-375-<br />only lead to its own institutionalization, within the system, which was more than ready to use Second Cinema to demonstrate the democratic plurality of its cultural milieu. In the process, however, the vanguard was defused and became a cinema made by and for the limited social groups characteristic of what the Argentinians call the dilettante elite. These groups were politically reformist — for example in opposing censorship — but incapable of achieving any profound change. They were especially impotent in the face of the kind of repression unleashed by the victory of reactionary, proto-fascist forces.<br />A real alternative in this situation was only possible, they said, if one of two requirements were fulfilled: 'either to make films that the system could not assimilate because they are foreign to its needs, or to make films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the system'. 12 The latter — as they specified in 1979 at the Latin American Film-makers Conference at Viña del Mar in Chile, the year before the election of Allende — constituted militant cinema proper, an internal category of Third Cinema. Militant cinema, said Solanas and Getino, or guerrilla film-making, as they called it, was a collective endeavour which opposed itself not only to First Cinema but also to the prevailing Second Cinema notion of the auteur film. In order to accomplish their task, the film crew needed to operate with a radical conception not only of the content of the film but also of the production process, including the team's internal relations, the role of the producer or director, and of individual skills. For example, 'every member of the group should be familiar, at least in a general way, with the equipment used, and must be prepared to replace each other in any phase of production. The myth of the irreplaceable technician must be exploded.' 13<br />Despite the rhetoric about the camera as a gun that can shoot twenty-four frames a second, and the projector as weapon of images, this conception of militant cinema was not entirely voluntaristic. For one thing, explaining why guerrilla filmmaking had not been previously possible, Solanas and Getino mentioned the technical advances in film gear which occurred at the beginning of the 1960s, consisting of the introduction of lightweight hand-held cameras and tape-recorders, fast film stock that could be shot in available light, and associated equipment (the same factors that were responsible for<br />the appearance of the movement known in France as cinéma vérité, and in the USA as 'direct cinema', whose practitioners were also opposed, at least to start with, to established forms). For another thing, as Getino pointed out some years later, the original manifesto was not a formulaic speculation but the product of a concrete experience: 'It is difficult to imagine the subsequent international exposure of these theories had the film [ Hour of the Furnaces] not existed. It was only through the existence of the film that we were able to refute the opposition of critics to our theories.' 14<br />____________________<br />12 Ibid., p. 21 (translation revised).<br />13 Ibid., p. 24 (translation revised).<br />14 Octavio Getino, 'Some notes on the concept of a "Third Cinema"', excerpted from Notas sobre cine argentino y latinoamericano (Mexico: Edimedios, 1984 ), in Tim Barnard (ed.), Argentine Cinema (Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986 ). p. 102.<br /><br />-376-<br />The clarification proposed at Viña del Mar was necessary not only because of certain ambiguities in the original formulation, but also because of the discovery that others were thinking along similar lines. In Cuba, for example, Julio García Espinosa had written his own manifesto, also based on his filmmaking experiences, under the<br />title Por un cine imperfecto/For an Imperfect Cinema. Both the context and the objectives were different — it was intended in the first place as a warning against the technical perfection which, after ten years of practice by the revolutionary film institute ICAIC, now began to lie within the reach of Cuban filmmakers. But certain aspects of Garcfa Espinosa's thesis were directly comparable, including his argument that any attempt to match the 'perfection' of the commercial movie of the metropolis was mistaken, and contradicted the endeavour implicit in a revolutionary cinema, because the beautifully controlled surface of commercial cinema was a way of lulling the audience into passive consumption. (Also, a film industry in a Third-World country could hardly afford such luxurious ambitions.) Clearly there is a similar evaluation here of what Solanas and Getino call First Cinema. Furthermore, there is a certain homology between the two manifestos, not only when the Argentinians write that 'The effectiveness of the best films of militant cinema show that social sectors regarded as backward (by dominant ideology) are perfectly capable of grasping the precise meaning of a visual metaphor, a montage effect, or some linguistic experiment as long as it relates to a determinate idea', but also when they continue that 'revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one which passively illustrates or documents or registers a situation, rather it attempts to make an intervention which impels a response' 15 — in other words, it promotes the active involvement and subsequent political participation of the viewer.<br />In certain respects, however, the Cuban manifesto was less restrictive and more open about the type and range of films which would conform to its criteria, for it clearly includes films which Solanas and Getino place in the Second Cinema category, such as<br />the work of Fernando Birri, or much of Brazilian Cinema Novo. In fact, there was a certain slippage in the Argentinian manifesto between the categories of Second and Third Cinema. As long as Hour of the Furnaces itself was taken as the very model of Third Cinema, rather than an exemplar of one of its options, Second Cinema could be taken to include certain attempts at an alternative type of cinema which from a more comprehensive perspective are more correctly seen as alternate models of Third Cinema. Getino recognized this ten years later when he wrote that 'We didn't fully realize at the time the extent to which the Argentinian reality of the late 60s defined the content and form of our work and its parallel theoretical elaboration'. 16 This is connected with a second problem.<br />At one point the Argentinian manifesto makes the claim that the<br />____________________<br />15 Solanas and Getino, 'Towards a Third Cinema' in Chanan (ed.), Twenty-Five Years, p. 23 (translation revised).<br />16 Barnard (ed.), Argentine Cinema. p. 101.<br /><br />-377<br />clearly differentiated national characteristics typical of early cinema have since disappeared. This is a highly tendentious assertion — especially with regard to Second Cinema — which is subsequently contradicted in the manifesto itself, at any rate by implication, when it says that while guerrilla cinema did not yet have enough experience to lay down general standards, 'what experience there is has shown, above all, the ability to make use of the concrete situation of each country'. For this 'concrete situation' necessarily includes the individual susceptibilities of different national cultures, which in turn implies that even an oppositional cinema is likely to want to cultivate national cultural traditions.Both Solanas and Getino later revised their positions to take account of this. Getino effectively criticized their earlier formulation when he continued, in his later article, by observing that the value of a theory such as theirs is always dependent on the terrain in which the praxis is carried out, and any attempt to offer universal prescriptions 'would be erroneous without consideration of the national context at its root'. 17 Solanas admitted something similar in 1978 when he commented that 'Third Cinema is also aligned with the national culture', adding that 'By national culture we mean that of the ensemble of the popular classes'. 18 At the same time, Solanas modified the original definitions of the three types of cinema in order to correct two misinterpretations of the thesis. If the three types are summarized as<br />i. large-scale production, big budget;<br />ii. independent production and auteur cinema;<br />iii. films made by collectives of militants;<br /><br />then the first misinterpretation consists in taking every big budget movie automatically as First Cinema, every auteur film as Second Cinema, and every collective film as Third Cinema; while the second consists in classifying First Cinema as the big spectacle,<br />Second Cinema as intimate or intellectual, and Third Cinema as political. The real state of affairs was different: a question of political and ideological function, not of purely filmic categories; in other words, it was a matter of the interests to which the films answer. First Cinema responds to the interests of transnational monopoly capital, be it movie as spectacle, auteur cinema, or film as information; and Solanas is undoubtedly correct when he adds that even the scientific documentary is susceptible to the aspirations of big capital. Second Cinema, on the other hand, expresses the aspirations of the middle layers, the petit bourgeoisie. Consequently Second Cinema is often nihilist, pessimist, mystifactory. Here too, all categories of films may be found, including the political, although 'In neocolonial and dependent countries, the middle sectors are generally aligned with the thinking of the metropolis'. Third Cinema, however, 'is the expression of a new culture and of changes in<br />____________________<br />17 Ibid., p. 102.<br />18 CinémAction, no. 1, p. 66.<br /><br />-378-<br />society. In a general way, third cinema renders account of reality and history.'<br />Again, all types of film are possible:<br />What determines Third Cinema is the conception of the world, and not the genre or an explicitly political approach. Any story, any subject can be taken up by Third Cinema. In the dependent countries, Third Cinema is a cinema of decolonization, which expresses the will to national liberation, anti-mythic, anti-racist, anti-bourgeois, and popular. 19<br />Even this later reformulation of the thesis retains some of the more idealist and voluntaristic aspects of the original; but this is to be expected, and not necessarily critical. Meanwhile, as the concept was taken up more widely, connections were made with parallel movements not only elsewhere in' Latin America but other continents too. An anthology which appeared in Mexico in 1972, for example, reprinted the original manifesto alongside writings and interviews covering developments in Mexico itself, in Uruguay (by Mario Handler), Brazil (Glauber Rocha), Colombia (Carlos Alvarez),<br />Bolivia (Jorge Sanjinés) and Chile (Miguel Littín), as well as an interview with the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, a collective statement from Vietnam, and an encounter between Solanas and Godard. 20 Similar stirrings had begun in other parts of<br />the world, especially the Arab world, 'Where the first manifestos appeared in 1967-8 in Cairo and Morocco; and at the end of 1973, a General Assembly of Third-World filmmakers was held in Algeria, to consider the role of film in the struggle against imperialism' and neo- colonialism and the problems of international cooperation. The<br />Committees appointed to report on these questions included representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Republic of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, Senegal, Congo, Mali, Tunisia, Palestine and Mauritania, with observers from Britain, France, Sweden and Italy. The presence of these observers confirms that Solanas and Getino were not mistaken to include certain seciors within the First World in their account of Third Cinema — on condition, of course, that these sectors did not attempt to exercise any kind of political or ideological hegemony.<br />By now, it was becoming clear that another aspect mentioned by Solanas and Getino was at play, the question of the possible 'transnational' function of Third Cinema, so to speak. 'Testimony about a national reality', they had written, can be 'an inestimable means of dialogue and knowledge on a global scale. No internationalist form of struggle can be carried out successfully without a mutual exchange of experiences between peoples, if peoples cannot manage to break out of the Balkanization which<br />____________________<br />19 Ibid.<br />20 See Alberto Hijar (ed.), Hacia un tercer cine, Cuardemos do Cine,<br />no. 20 (Mexico: UNAM, 1972 ).<br /><br />-379-<br />imperialism strives to maintain. . .' 21 Here, however, Solanas and Getino were not being idealist: they were perfectly aware that the reading of a film depended upon the conditions of its reception, and these were vastly different in the First and Third Worlds: 'A cinema which in the consumer society does not attain the level of the reality in which it moves can play a stimulating role in an underdeveloped country, just as a revolutionary cinema in the neo-colonial situation will not necessarily be revolutionary if it is mechanically taken to the metropolitan country'. 22 In 1978 Solanas cited as an example of the former, the reception of Monicelli's Les Camarades (I Compagni/The<br />Organizer [ Italy, 1963 ]) in Argentina. 23 They were also aware that the system was perfectly capable of absorbing the most dangerous impulses, that virulence, nonconformism, plain rebelliousness and discontent can easily be turned into products on the capitalist market, into consumer goods. Nevertheless, they were prepared to put their faith in the sheer power of the medium. A film on the Venezuelan guerrillas, they maintained, would say more to a European public than twenty explanatory pamphlets, especially in a situation where Third-World struggles were increasingly related to those unfolding in the metropolitan countries, as in those years they seemed to be.<br />If this was not idealistic, it was still somewhat optimistic. It was not just a question of the state of ignorance of First-World audiences — even sympathetic ones — about Third-World conditions and struggles, compounded by the neglect and disinformation of the dominant media, then as now. There were also wide differences in aesthetic and cultural susceptibilities which began to emerge as the circulation of Third-World films in Europe and the USA began to improve; principally, just as Solanas and Getino predicted, through the 16mm film circuits. These differences were especially pertinent in the USA, with its large Latino communities and growing numbers of immigrants from other parts of the Third World; and it is no accident that an Ethiopian scholar, Teshome Gabriel, who taught film studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, turned his attention to the study of Third Cinema in the late 1970s, at a time when the Third World began to make its presence felt in the USA from within, and a new Chicano cinema was first appearing.<br />There are two main thrusts in Gabriel's work, one theoretical, one critical. With his concern to interrogate Third-World cinema on its own ground, his theoretical project is the reinterpretation of Third Cinema in terms of the genealogy of Third-World culture proposed by Frantz Fanon in his seminal book The Wretched of the Earth. 24 Fanon identifies three stages in the cultural development of the colonized people, for which Gabriel finds homologies within cinema. Gabriel first draws attention to the comparison in his book, Third Cinema in the Third World, 25 and then develops it in a subsequent<br />____________________<br />21 Solanas and Getino, 'Towards a Third Cinema', in Chanan (ed.), Twenty-Five Years, p. 23<br />(translation revised).<br />22 Ibid., p. 23.<br />23 CinémAction, no. 1.<br />24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1964).<br />25 Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World:the Aesthetics of Liberation, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982 ).<br /><br />-380-<br />essay, 'Towards a critical theory of Third-World films'. 26 My discussion below draws mainly on the latter.<br />While Gabriel downplays the comparison which can be drawn between Fanon's three phases and the concepts of First, Second and Third Cinema proposed by Solanas and Getino, nevertheless the degree to which the one can be related to the other is quite remarkable, and gives a significant reading of the development of film culture in countries in all Third-World continents. There is another very interesting homology to be found in a work by the Peruvian Marxist, José Carlos Mariátegui, his Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana/Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality of 1928, which critiques the orthodox Marxist periodization of art on the basis of the history of class struggle in Europe on the grounds that this is hardly appropriate to a continent like Latin America. For Mariátegui, instead of the feudal, the aristocratic and the bourgeois, a country like Peru experiences the colonial, the cosmopolitan and the national. In the first of these periods, the literature of the country is not that of its own people, but of the conquistador, an already evolved literature transplanted into the colony, where it usually continues to exert an influence beyond the overthrow of the colonial power. During the second period, which is ushered in by the establishment of the independent republic, elements from different foreign literatures are assimilated<br />simultaneously, and the unique cultural hold of the original colonial power is broken. Finally, in the third period, which only properly arrives with economic as well as political independence, a people 'achieves a well-developed expression of its own personality and its own sentiments'. 27 Obviously this is not a scheme which can be<br />directly applied even in general terms to countries as diverse as Argentina, Egypt or India, which each have different histories of colonial domination. But cinema, which belongs to the twentieth century and employs a technology invented in the metropolis, produces a much more similar situation in all continents.<br />The first phase everywhere is that of the uncritical assimilation of the product of the dominant culture, marked by dependency on the Hollywood model, submission to its values, concepts and practices. This does not necessarily mean direct imitation of Hollywood genres, so much as the elaboration of new genres appropriate to the national<br />realities concerned, like the Mexican ranchera or the Indian 'Bollywood' musical. These cinemas are usually only sustainable in the larger countries with sizeable internal markets (although subsequent examples like the Hong Kong film industry depend on the exploitation of a niche within the international market). The second phase is the indigenist, or remembrance phase, marked by nostalgia for a legendary or folkloric past, which thus produces a break with first cinema primarily in terms of themes and subjects. National Third-World cinemas which have entered this phase may<br />____________________<br />26 In Third World Affairs 1985 (London: Third World Foundation, 1985 ).<br />27 José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Casa de las<br />Americas, 1975 ), p. 21.<br /><br />-381<br />thus begin to promote the process of decolonization, but without any real challenge, at least initially, to the orthodox film language of First Cinema in which audiences have grown up. This phase provides a different reading of Second Cinema, especially given that Gabriel cites the example of early films by Rocha (Barravento [Brazil, 1961]) and Sembene (Mandabi [Senegal, 1968]). There are also variants, which pick out themes that are not exactly folkloric but exoticist and exploitative. Babenco's Pixote (Brazil, 1980 ) is a particularly notorious example. The third phase, in which the aims of decolonization, both cultural and politico-economic, become primary, can be called the combative. This is Third Cinema proper. Here, of course, Gabriel includes the example of Solanas and Getino who, after all, adopt Fanon's criterion themselves when they declare that in the service of liberation, aesthetics is dissolved into social life — 'because only in this way, as Fanon would say, can decolonization become possible, and culture, cinema and beauty . . . become our culture, our cinema, our beauty'. 28 However, Solanas and Getino are for Gabriel only one example; in general he tends towards the broader conceptualization of Garcia Espinosa's concept of Imperfect<br />Cinema, and cites other examples of films which the Argentinians would originally have placed in the Second Cinema category, if only because they still testify to the qualities of individual authorship. This, of course, is one of the reasons why the original definition of Third Cinema, with its emphasis on collective authorship, needed<br />revision, or at least clarification. It is necessary to allow for the kind of film — the outstanding example is the work of Sanjinés — which in stylistic terms retains all the marks of individual authorship, but in the process of its creation incorporates the values of the collectivity within which it is made. Indeed it is possible to argue that this is also the condition of much African cinema, and clearly applies to directors like Ousmane Sembene, Souleyman Cissé and many others.<br />This, in turn, exemplifies a tension which reflects back on the whole theoretical endeavour. Unless these categories — whichever set we use — are comprehended dialectically, their application will inevitably be mechanical and sterile. Gabriel is keenly aware that the whole approach tends towards schematicism, and he therefore emphasizes that there are intermediate positions, 'grey areas', between each phase. Not only that, but a film which occupies such a grey area may face in either direction; indeed, it may be contradictory, and face in both directions at once (even deliberately — the Cuban film Lucía by Humberto Solás [1968] is a case in point). Only a dialectical understanding allows for this. At the same time, says Gabriel, it demonstrates precisely the fact that the idea of Third Cinema is not a set of discrete products but a process of becoming.<br />There is no space here to deal with the critical thrust of Gabriel's work. Suffice it to say that he demonstrates considerable critical acumen, and an admirable methodology. In his book on the<br />____________________<br />28 Solanas and Getino, 'Towards a Third Cinema' in Chanan (ed.), Twenty-Five Years, p. 20 (translation revised).<br /><br />-382-<br />aesthetics of liberation, for example, he not only surveys some of the major themes of third cinema, but adopts a comparative method for examining style and ideology, setting against each other First and Third Cinema films on the same subject, or the work of a European director against that of a director from the Third World. In the essay<br />'Towards a critical theory of Third-World films', he advances a set of interlocking components of critical theory which give him real purchase on crucial topics like the radically different representation of space and time in a cinema based not on literary culture, as in the First World, but on the oral cultures of the Third-World populace.<br />Gabriel himself explains the importance of this critical work when he remarks that in the same way there is a history of unequal economic exchange between North and South, there is also unequal symbolic exchange. The difficulty which radical Third-World films present to western interpretation is at least twofold: the result of the film's resistance to the dominant conventions of metropolitan cinema in its own territory, and the loss by First-World viewers of their normal privileged position as the decoder and ultimate arbiter of meaning.<br />Critical work like Gabriel's is essential in the face of the growing confusion of signs that now besets us. Without entering into a debate about postmodernism, and the way that images are now produced, recycled, received and then recycled again, it is enough to point to the advances over the last decade in video technology. These advances have not only served to expand and accelerate the circulation of visual materials; in the same way that Third Cinema (as Solanas and Getino observed) was in many ways a by-product of the development of 16mm film at the beginning of the 1960s, the advances in video in the 1980s have expanded the possibilities for all sorts of 'guerrilla' filmmaking. Back in 1981, I was able to use a modest commission (£5000) from a West German television station to go and shoot a 16mm documentary on the guerrilla forces in El Salvador, but only because collaboration with both the FMLN and a militant film collective back in Britain enabled us to minimize the costs. Five years later, it was possible for us to produce a solidarity video on Chile with even less money, in less time and without even going there, because Chilean filmmakers were able to supply a ready-edited video for incorporation into a project produced in London.<br />Developments in video technology are intimately connected with the expansion of television broadcasting and especially the development of cable and satellite transmission. Between the means of delivery and the means of production the relationship is complex and full of tensions, but even in the USA, the heartland of First<br />Cinema, and what we might call, by extension, 'First Television', this process creates new opportunities for activities we could<br />-383<br />similarly call 'Third Television'. I am referring here to the provision of access channels on the cable networks, which activists have been able to use in order to transmit not only their own independent programmes, but also videos collected from Third-World countries, especially Latin America. Indeed one of these groups, Paper Tiger<br />Television based in New York, was able to organize the distribution of compilation tapes by satellite, for retransmission by access groups across the country. 29<br />During the Gulf War, Paper Tiger produced a compilation video of coverage of anti-war demonstrations by different access television groups across the country, which was shown on Channel Four in Britain. In Britain, where cable and satellite have been much slower to develop, the introduction of Channel Four in the early 1980s, with a remit to produce minority-interest programmes, provided new opportunities not only for the broadcast of films and videos from the Third World, but also for the development of new strands of independent production at home. This included a number of collective workshops which had grown up during the 1970s, which were formally recognized in the Workshop Declaration signed by both Channel Four and the ACTT (Association of Film and Television Technicians, now known, since the merger of several of the entertainments unions, as BECTU). The collective practices of these workshops correspond in great measure to the production strategies proposed by Solanas and Getino for Third Cinema. Importantly, they included Black and Asian film and video<br />collectives, who were thus able to present for the first time on British television programmes authored by British Third-World minorities.<br />The comparison is hardly so simple, of course, for reasons of both theory and praxis. Producing work for a public corporation in a (more or less) liberal democracy with the remit to provide certain spaces for it is not the same as militant filmmaking within a populist or military dictatorship destined to be viewed in marginal spaces; nor, if this comparison seems dated, is it the same as videomaking by the indigenous peoples of Northern Brazil, for distribution in alternative circuits, which is not clandestine but still part of a life- and-death struggle. The new configuration which came about with Channel Four in this country's independent film culture was addressed by a conference at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986 on the theme of Third Cinema. Here it became clear that the situation was replete with deep contradictions. In the 1970s, the Left was still strong, vociferous and demonstrative. New initiatives were launched across the field of cultural politics, drawing on the lessons to be learnt, for example, from Chilean refugees and the revolution in Portugal, both of which provided powerful instruction about the media, and helped to inform the positions which were recognized in the Workshop Declaration. The paradox of Channel Four — doubtless<br />____________________<br />29 See Michael Chanan, "Playing the access card". New Socialist, no.<br />50 ( June 1987 ), p. 45.<br /><br />-384<br />predictable from the perspective of Third Cinema — was that official recognition threatened to institutionalize an oppositional film movement which was one of the strongest in Europe. It forced the new programme makers into corners, raising expectations at the same time as imposing new conditions of competition over funds and air space. Moreover, the initial efforts of the new programme makers often betrayed the difficulties of adapting to what was, even if the ratings were relatively negligible, a mass audience, whose anonymity demanded different strategies from those appropriate to the direct encounter with an audience at a small, politically motivated meeting. And of course, overshadowing all this activity was the electoral defeat of the established Left, and the consequent offensive of the new Tory Government, soon bolstered by the jingoism of the South Atlantic War. The result was fragmentation and demoralization.<br />The Edinburgh Conference brought out all the nerviness of this situation, which quickly polarized the participants, including speakers who came from abroad. David Will, who wrote a lengthy report on the event for the journal Framework, 30 detected a strong opposition between pluralist positions on the one hand, and populist tendencies on the other, which he roundly criticized. He also reported a split between those he called Afro-American populists, and Asian speakers who appealed strongly to western ideas. This account provoked an extremely irate response from a black American participant, Clyde Taylor from New York, who objected to being labelled as a populist simply because he had argued that it was necessary to interrogate the western concept of aesthetics, as Nietzsche and Foucault had, and to recognize the determination of specific historical experiences and cultural differences. 'The suppression of my opposition to Western aesthetics makes me out to be a different kind of barbarian than I am willing to admit', he wrote in reply. 'My quarrel is not with "art" nor with the theoretical assumptions behind it . . . but with the preemptive European metatheorising that has been placed on these activities.' 31<br />Will also identified a third and much more pertinent area of discussion, namely the two sessions directly concerned with 'Third Cinema in the Black British Context'. Here the debate was focused on the question of the 'community' which supposedly made up the audience which these filmmakers addressed, including their response to the exhortations frequently directed at them not to produce negative images of this community. The British Asian filmmaker H. O. Nazareth spoke directly to this question in a paper which considered the objections made by members of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities to films like My Beautiful Launderette, or the television drama series King of the Ghetto. These, in the terms proposed by Solanas and Getino, are successful examples of Second Cinema and its counterpart, Second Television; they use a conventional narrative language to explore themes which, especially<br />____________________<br />30 David Will, "Edinburgh Film Festival, 1986", Framework, nos 32/ 33 (1986).<br />31 Clyde Taylor, "Eurocentrics vs new thought at Edinburgh", Framework, no. 34 (1987).<br />pp. 141-2. I can only declare a certain sympathy with Taylor's arguments, even though he perhaps overstates the case.<br /><br />-385-<br />in the case of the former, are decidedly risque. Nazareth argued that the Afro-Caribbean or Asian filmmaker should not for a moment contemplate compliance with such objections, which were patronizing and protectionist, and could only lead to 'sentimental<br />impoverishment' of the media. 32<br />But does such a notion of 'community' have any real meaning? Taylor criticizes Will's report for Eurocentric anxiety about the question, since 'connectedness to communities struggling against oppression is an essential characteristic of Third Cinema and its symbiosis with the third world'. 33 However, it is exactly the nature and quality of this symbiosis which becomes the problem, especially when trying to achieve Third Cinema from within the First World. There is no question, from the gist of what he says, that he believes this is perfectly possible. The example he mentions is Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers (Italy, 1966 ).<br />However, I suspect that Taylor's bewilderment over the proceedings at Edinburgh, which was shared by other participants from North America, both black and white, reflects a crucial difference between British and North American political cultures. In the USA, the weakness of national leftist traditions corresponds to a much greater sense of community on the local level. Doubtless, given the sheer size of the country, this is not so surprising. In Britain, a much smaller country, national traditions of left political<br />culture are both much stronger and more centralized. Even though they long ago became ideologically compromised and diluted, the result is a certain fear of the divisiveness of appeals to the rights of different communities. For immigrant peoples, the assertion of community becomes a political necessity, and rewards the cultural activist who is able to mobilize it. Unfortunately, this produces anxiety in the white native, who is suffering from problems like the breakup of communities by postwar urban redevelopment and increasing social disintegration. This rebounds on the political sensibilities of the immigrant communities, which reproduce the gamut of positions to be found in the wider body politic.<br />Will reports that two different positions had emerged in the black film community about how to deal with this situation. For the Afro- Caribbean video workshop, Ceddo, the concept posed no problems; their strategy was to address a community which they saw as homogenous. Nazareth and the Black Audio-Film Collective, on the other hand, argued that the black and Asian communities were not homogenous, and the idea of reflecting or addressing them was illusory. The problem is revealed in a film like Passion of Remembrance, a critical study of the subordination of the issues of sexual politics to antiracist struggle, which employed an experimental style that reminded many viewers of Godard. Will's commentary on this film is pointed; it evokes 'one of the distinctive characteristics of Third Cinema as defined by Gabriel: a cinema which cannot be fitted<br />____________________<br />32 Will, "Edinburgh Film Festival, 1986", p. 206.<br />33 Taylor, "Eurocentrics vs new thought", 1987 , p. 144.<br /><br />-386-<br />into traditional categories'; accordingly, it resoundingly justifies the contention that Third Cinema could indeed be made in Britain. 34 Taylor thought Will was rather too ready to make the claim, and he may be right. Passion of Remembrance is one of those films which occupies what Gabriel calls the grey area somewhere between Second and Third Cinema, a film which does not quite connect with a community it cannot quite identify, whose strengths are closer to the avant garde than popular sensibility.<br />The contradictions which surfaced at Edinburgh in 1986 came partly from the way the conference was set up. Will reported the distress expressed by the North American critic Julianne Burton on her discovery that there were no Latin American filmmakers at the conference to speak for themselves. It is symptomatic of this omission that Will was able to begin his report with the claim that the term Third Cinema was coined by Teshome Gabriel; while Homi Bhabha delivered a characteristic piece of metatheorizing, addressing the distinction between cultural diversity and cultural difference from a perspective derived from Derrida, which demonstrated ignorance of the history of Third Cinema in both practice and theory. 35 One is reminded that this very journal managed to ignore the existence of both the theory and the practice of Third Cinema until 1983. 36 Since many of the positions advanced at the conference were informed by the traditions of Screen, the conclusion follows that the conference was indeed in certain measure, as Clyde Taylor maintained, a belated and confused attempt by Eurocentric theorists to come to terms with a cultural force which they had always found somewhat awkward and slippery. 37<br />In light of the development over the last few years of postcolonial theory represented precisely by figures like Bhabha, this judgement might now seem too hasty. The real issue lies elsewhere, in the perennial problem about the relationship, or rather mismatch, between theoretical endeavour and the terrain of praxis. This issue is part of the problem: if the question is the practice of Third Cinema, then this is not conducted according to a theory; it responds directly to everyday exigencies. And this applies to both means and ends, both the political target and the route taken by the process of production.<br />These exigencies, at the end of the 1990s, are those of a new world order which is not really new at all, but more like the old one with a part chopped out. In the West, Communism has fallen (except in Cuba) and the Cold War is over but it still hurts, like a phantom limb. At the same time, globalization, for vast swathes of the world, is not experienced as a new world ethos, but as the intensification of a process which has been going on ever since they first entered into a colonial state. However, the last few decades have seen the<br />____________________<br />34 Will, "Edinburgh Film Festival", p. 203.<br />35 See ibid., p. 198 and Homi K. Bhabha, 'The commitment to theory', in Jim Pines and Paul Willeman (eds), Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989 ), pp. 111-32.<br />36 In 1983, Screen produced a special issue on Third Cinema which included articles by<br />Julianne Burton and Teshome Gabriel : Screen, vol. 24, no. 2 ( 1983 ) "Racism, Colonialism and Cinema". However, two other British film journals of the time, Afterimage and Framework, both published material on the subject in the 1970s.<br />37 Taylor, "Eurocentrics' vs. new thought", passim.<br /><br />-387-<br />technological explosion in communications and the media which now goes by the name of convergence, and in this process, in which dominant information and audiovisual production becomes both more embracing and self-referential, the means of production have become cheaper, more accessible and easier to operate, and have altered the conditions for creation in both the margins and the interstices. The means for producing Third Cinema, Third Video, even Third Television, are much greater now than when the praxis first appeared; while the political context has been transformed.<br />The original Third Cinema was premissed on militant mass political movements of a kind which in many places no longer exist, and upon ideologies which have taken a decisive historical beating. The spirit of Che Guevara's Tricontinental Movement has been fragmented. The survival of Third Cinema depends on its origins within the margins and the interstices. Margins and interstices are different but closely related spaces. They are also global in their interconnections. A successful writer, say, from an African country, who is exiled by the regime and comes to live in London, has been politically marginalized but has entered the interstices of cultural life in the metropolis. A successful Caribbean writer who, having lived in London, chooses to return home is returning from the margins within the metropolis to the margins beyond. On the other hand, in the universe of representational spaces in which their work is received, the point of reception is polyvalent. The global conditions of postmodern culture make it possible for margins and interstices across the globe to become aware of each other. This is even more acute in the case of, let us say, a North African filmmaker exiled in<br />Paris who makes a film about the marginality of his fellow exiles which is then seen, sporadically and intermittently, on screens all around the world; or an Argentinian exile who returns to make a film funded by a European television station about the course of the continent's political aspirations. The results is perhaps the extension of Third Cinema into a new space akin to what Teshome Gabriel has recently called nomadic cinema.<br />This much is theory. Perhaps it is necessary to reiterate the point which Getino made in his Notes on Third Cinema, written ten years after the original manifesto: the value of theory is always dependent on the terrain in which the praxis is carried out. Which suggests that what we need now is a new geography.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-52995653145593983492007-06-29T12:38:00.000-07:002007-06-29T12:42:12.343-07:00THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE: PUTTING ON A SHOWPUTTING ON A SHOW: THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE<br />The great film-makers of European art cinema are now silent. Why should we value what they achieved? Why did their work so easily descend into pastiche and self-parody? And how far was their appeal based on their freedom to explore sexuality in an 'adult' way?<br /><span style="font-size:130%;">by Thomas Elsaesser</span><br />Originally published in Sight and Sound, April 1994<br />"I don't want to make films again...This film [<a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/after_the_rehearsal.htm">After the Rehearsal</a>] was supposed to be small, fun, and unpretentious...Two mountainous shadows rise and loom over me. First: Who the hell is really interested in this kind of introverted mirror aria? Second: Does there exist a truth, in the very belly of this drama, that I can't put my finger on, and so remains inaccessible to my feelings and intuition?...We should have thrown ourselves directly into filming...Instead we rehearsed, discussed, analyzed, penetrated carefully and respectfully, just as we do in the theatre, almost as if the author were one of our dear departed." (Ingmar Bergman, 25-26 March 1983, quoted in Images—My Life in Film.)<br />Ingmar Bergman is hardly a name contemporary cinema makes much use of, except as an adjective, usually applied to Woody Allen films that the reviewers find embarrassing. But it has not always been so: in the early and mid-60s Bergman had enormous prestige, swelling in a rising arc from <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a> (1956) to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a> (1963) and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a> (1966) before subsiding fitfully with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/hour_of_the_wolf.htm">Hour of the Wolf</a> (1967) and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/shame.htm">Shame</a> (1968). It was the time of film clubs and the Academy Cinema, and I distinctly remember a programming meeting of the Sussex University film society which broke up in disarray over the question of whether it was possible to call both <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance great films (we settled for Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and were lynched by our audience). The row led me to start a film magazine, having discovered in Cahiers du cinéma Godard's eulogy 'Bergmanorama' practically next to his piece on Sam Fuller's Forty Guns. For at the height of middle-class Bergmanomania (in the pages of Sight and Sound, for instance) and Movie's 'Nicholas, not Satyajit,' Godard taught us that the cinema (or le cinéma) was one and indivisible. Especially when, like Godard, you were intent on reinventing it.<br />"<a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a> is the most original film by the most original of filmmakers. It's for today's cinema what Birth of a Nation was for the classical cinema, it's And God Created Woman, but fully achieved, without putting a foot wrong, a film of a total lucidity with regards to both its dramatic and moral structure as well as its mise-en-scene." (Godard in Arts, 30 July 1958.) Reading what Bergman has to say about <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a> in Images ("I have never made a less complicated film. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom") and then watching it on video, Godard's enthusiasm is understandable: it is a glorified, glorious home movie, a hymn to a young woman's sensuality, and for the director of A bout de souffle clearly an open invitation to mix Rossellini and Rebel without a Cause.<br />Reviews in Britain were more circumspect. In The Listener (9 July 1959) John Weightman, "after recently assimilating a new batch of four films by Ingmar Bergman, made between 1949 and 1953," reflects on the director's "extraordinary unevenness of quality. How can he be at once so subtle and so unsubtle?" Weightman disliked <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a>, but liked <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a>, along with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> (aka Thirst) and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/lesson_in_love.htm">A Lesson in Love</a>, mainly because of its poetic (i.e. neo-realist) qualities: Bergman "reflects the instability of the couple's relationship in the changing mood of water and sky," the acting is of "uncanny accuracy," and in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Monika</a> "the two young husbands are perfect examples of the decent, naive, Scandinavian male who is driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." The last point is nicely offset by Bergman's description (in The Magic Lantern) of how he fell in love with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/harriet_andersson.htm">Harriet Andersson</a> during the making of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a>, and how pleased they were when it turned out that they had to re-shoot most of the outdoor footage because a faulty machine at the lab tore up several thousand metres of the negative.<br />But Weightman ends his review on a now familiar note: "In putting all these characters and moments of life on to the screen in so many brilliant, if fragmentary episodes, Bergman has done something for Sweden that no-one, to my knowledge, is doing for England. But there may be a parallel in France. Two or three young French directors, like Bergman, have deliberately turned down attractive foreign offers and international stars in order to produce films that have a local, home-made or hand-made character. The camera is again being used as a private eye, as a means of expressing a single yet complex view. This return to the artisan tradition is an interesting development, even though some of the initial products have all the defects of first novels...The cinema is such a rich art form and the poetry of the camera so much more facile than poetry in language, that it is easy for the filmmaker to get drunk on the possibilities of his medium. I think Bergman is slightly drunk in this way."<br />Quick Hollywood, slow Europe<br />Weightman's essay contains such a handy compendium of the terms which made Bergman and others the icons of auteur cinema that it prompts the question of what has happened to those towering representatives of European art cinema? Or more precisely, what can still hold together the idea of the 'auteur' and that of a 'national cinema' (as it also applied to the late Fellini, or to New German Cinema in the 70s, or British cinema in the Thatcher 80s)? Weightman already sees what Bergman has "done for Sweden" in the double perspective we have inherited: the quintessential and clichéd of a nation's character embodied in personal or 'poetic' cinema, and the defensive stance of "hand-made" films against slick entertainment. For behind the question of the fate of art cinema, of course, lurks that other one, debated ad nauseam, aired afresh every year at Cannes or Berlin: the future of European cinema vis à vis Hollywood (whether "attractive foreign offers" or France's GATT reactions about its cinematic patrimony). A few years ago, a Channel 4 programme Pictures of Europe neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who probably has more reason than most to be wary of the idea of national cinema, but who also needs to believe in auteur cinema: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; living in the twentieth century means learning to be American."<br />In academic film studies, the Hollywood versus Europe question seems at times like the founding myth of the discipline, so much so that it is usually discussed under separate headings: the economic case (Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Film Industry, Kristin Thompson's Exporting Entertainment, Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign); the cultural case (a UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conference in London last year was partly devoted to the topic); and the formal case (either early cinema scholars' debate about Europe's deep staging and slow cutting versus Hollywood's shallow staging and fast cutting, or a difference in story-telling). This last distinction is outlined by David Bordwell in Narration and the Fiction Film, where character-centred causality, question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, deadline plot structures and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical of 'classical' cinema, while other narrative conventions are self-conscious and strategic deviations from the classical norm. Film studies, for once, does not seem totally out of touch with the views of the industry. The norm/deviancy argument could be seen as repeating, at the level of film theory, the hegemony of Hollywood at the cultural and economic level, since all other film styles merely reconfirm the power of the dominant by their very strategies of displacing and circumventing it. Similarly the opposition Europe/Hollywood, as worked out around early cinema, has been echoed since the 20s in the Hollywood complaint that European pictures are too slow for American audiences, a point taken up by many European directors and actors who have worked in both industries.<br />In Pictures of Europe, Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud described American speed as a "positive quality," as did Beineix, Zanussi and Luc Besson. Puttnam and Almodóovar were more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde preferred the slower delivery of dialogue and less hectic action of European cinema, along with—not surprisingly—Wim Wenders, Bertrand Tavernier and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a>. Paul Schrader thought that it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas—and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed or investigated." Schrader's distinction helps tease out some of the formal implications: the norm/deviancy model, for instance, could be criticized for assuming the validity of the problem-solving model for both kinds of cinema. And while his theory doesn't work too well for comedies, which never pretend to solve the issues they raise, it might explain why a happy ending in a European art film is felt to be a cop-out, a fundamentally unserious mode of closure. After all, isn't one of the characteristics of 'modern' cinema (until recently synonymous with the art film) its metaphysical doubt about master narratives of progress, preferring to be skeptical of linear time and the efficacy of action? Such is the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of cinema holds a more dynamic view of Godard's distinction between "action" and "reflection," contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinema with the time-image of modern cinema.<br />Transatlantic crossing<br />Of course, the problem-solving model is not intended to characterize a film-maker's personal beliefs; it is merely posited as the norm underlying, if not both kinds of cinema, then both kinds of audience. American, or 'classical,' films are the dominant because they are made ('tailored' was the term already used by King Vidor) for an audience used to Hollywood (and which audience isn't?), while European filmmakers are said to express themselves rather than (ad)dress the audience. But if one assumes that art cinema merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a>), reconstructing the time scheme (as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/cries_and_whispers.htm">Cries and Whispers</a>) or guessing what 'really' happened and what was merely imagined (as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a>), then the difference is one of genre or expectation: the tasks of the art film are intuitively recognized by the spectator and either avoided as a chore or sought as a challenge. And one should remember that among audiences watching art films are also American spectators—in fact, it was the US distribution practice of the art-house circuit which gave the term 'art cinema' its currently accepted meaning.<br />Indeed, this may be the rub, the point where a 'cultural' view differs from the cognitive case. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately audiences who decide how a film is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a film is shown, in which case an art film is simply every film screened at an art-house cinema, including old Hollywood movies, as in Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinema, one and indivisible. It's something of a lame definition, and a 'cultural' argument might avoid the tautology by viewing the Hollywood/Europe opposition merely as a special case of a more general process in which art and other films have assigned and reassigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial characteristics, but which on closer inspection provide an instructive map of movie culture that ignores all kinds of stylistic boundaries but speaks eloquently of the life of films in history. One could even call it a map of misreadings. European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of Hollywood films: what auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors intended, but this did not stop another generation of American viewers from appreciating what the Cahiers critics extracted from them.<br />If this is now a commonplace about Hollywood, it is just as true about European art cinema. The qualities for which film-makers were praised were not necessarily what the audiences liked about their movies, and what made the films famous was not always what made them successful. In the case of Italian neo-realism, for instance, the film-makers' aesthetic-moral agenda included a political engagement, a social conscience, a humanist vision. Subjects such as post-war unemployment or the exploitation of farm labour by the big landowners were part of what made neo-realism a 'realist' cinema, while the fact that it did not use stars but faces from the crowd made it a 'poetic' cinema. Yet a film like Rome, Open City about the Italian resistance braving the German Gestapo with communist partisans and Catholic priests making common cause against the enemy—represented only a particular (and short-lived) political compromise, while with established performers such as Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi it was not exactly a movie that used lay actors. Rome, Open City became a success abroad for many reasons, including its erotic, melodramatic and atmospheric qualities. In one often reproduced shot there is a glimpse of Anna Magnani's exposed thighs as she falls, gunned down by the Germans, while in another scene a glamorous German female agent seduces a young Italian woman into a lesbian affair and supplies her with cocaine. To American audiences, unused to such fare, the labels 'art' and 'European' began to connote a very particular kind of realism, to do with explicit depiction of sex and drugs rather than political or aesthetic commitment.<br />Bergman is crucial here. Respected in the early 60s for his films of existential angst and bleak depictions of religious doubt, he was able to get finance for his films from Svensk Filmindustri in part because in the art houses of America graphic portrayals of sexual jealousy or violence as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/sawdust_and_tinsel.htm">Sawdust and Tinsel</a> or <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/virgin_spring.htm">The Virgin Spring</a>, or of a woman masturbating (in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a>) defined adult cinema for the generation prior to the 'sexual revolution.' When in the mid-60s other film-makers in Europe (Denmark, Germany) began to make films for which the label 'adult' was a well-understood euphemism, and when the Americans themselves relaxed censorship, the art-film export suffered a decline as an economic factor for European national cinemas (in Italy, for instance). But it remained a cultural and artistic force, above all for subsequent generations of more or less mainstream American directors from Arthur Penn to Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola, and also for the academy: without the European art and auteur cinema, film studies might never have found a home in American universities.<br />What can we call this re-assignment of meaning, this fluctuation of critical, cultural and economic currency between one country and another? A misunderstanding of the filmmaker's intention? An acknowledgment that as many Bergmans exist as there are audiences recognizing something of novelty interest or spiritual value in his films? Or just an integral part of what we mean by 'art cinema' (and, finally, by any form of cinema), where the primary economic use-value is either irrelevant (because of government subsidies, as in the case of Bergman), or has already been harvested, leaving a film or a film-maker's work to find its status on another scale of values? It is what forms a 'canon' (see recent Sight and Sound essays by Peter Wollen and Ian Christie), or makes a film a 'classic' (see the slim volumes in the BFI Publishing series).<br />In which case, the old idea of European films as expressive of their national identities would appear far-fetched. It would suggest that 'national cinema' makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinema by its very definition must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity and become that national whore which is the heritage film. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binarism towards something that defines a national cinema 'positively,' such as "the decent, naive, Scandinavian male...driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." Another positive definition is of a national history as a counter-identity. Such might be the case with the films of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, fanning out towards a broader media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas in which (to us) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and protest. For these films, international (i.e. European) festivals are the markets that can assign different kinds of value, from politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status, setting in motion the circulation of new cultural capital beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art-cinema distribution, a television sale).<br />One conceivable conclusion is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument and the post-modern paradigm (it's what audiences make of films that decides their value) hide a more interesting relationship in which national cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and miscognition enjoy equal status. It suggests that Bergman's carefully staged self-doubt, Weightman's prophetic faith in his early poetic cinema and American audiences' frisson at the 'mature' director's candid look at sexual obsessions and violent marital strife may have a common denominator. Retrospectively, negatively, by a kind of paring away, they delineate the slim ground occupied by an auteur who also, like Bergman, has to signify a national cinema: high culture themes, stylistic expressivity, that indeterminacy of reference critics prized as 'realism.' By contrast French cinema is a national cinema with such a diversity of strands that it makes its auteurs (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Rivette) almost marginal figures in the overall constellation.<br />Auteur cinema today may not be dead, but what we mean by an auteur has shifted somewhat: for Europe and America, it is no longer about self-doubt or self-expression, metaphysical themes or a realist aesthetic. The themes that still identify Bergman as an auteur would today be mere affectations, a filmmaker's white carnation in his button-hole. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood as Bergman sported, even when they believe or doubt as passionately as he did. Authority and authenticity lie nowadays in the way film-makers use the cinema's resources, which is to say in their command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral. From David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argento—all are auteurs and all are valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de force, demonstrating qualities not so far removed, finally, from Bergman, "drunk on the possibilities of his medium."<br />Bergman and Corman<br />Reading Bergman's Images—My Life in Film (in fact two years' worth of interviews with Lasse Bergström with the questions cut out and bits from the director's work books and The Magic Lantern pasted in) with this in mind leaves one a little disappointed. One learns about Bergman's dislike of colour (because it takes away mystery), the importance of lighting (and of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/crew/nykvist.htm">Sven Nykvist</a>), and that some of his early films were devised in order to experiment with complicated camera movements. But he says next to nothing about many of the other things that make him a great film director—his use of close-ups, his work on the soundtrack, the composition of incredibly complex yet fluid action spaces within the frame in both indoor and outside scenes. Biographical details, childhood memories, moral introspection, the theatre, actors and actresses, music and music-making make up a loosely woven narrative that discards chronology and groups the films under such oddly coy titles as 'Dreams Dreamers,' 'Jests Jesters,' 'Miscreance Credence,' 'Farces Frolics.' Often Bergman confesses of this or that film that he doesn't have much to say about its making. Contrary to the title, there is little here about images. Instead, what holds the book together is a daunting effort to account for the process of story-conception, of what mood to be in when writing, what memory to follow up on, what dream to cross-fertilize with an incident he has read about, what well of anguish to tap when the plot seems to wander off in the wrong direction.<br />It reminds one of how much legitimation and cultural capital Bergman the film director still derived from writing, from being an author as well as an auteur, and at the same time how removed he was from the routines of Hollywood scriptwriting—from story-boarding or using the script as the production's financial and technical blueprint. In this, he conforms to the cliché of the European director: improvisation on the set or on location, the most intense work taking place with the actors, the film taking shape as the director penetrates the inner truth of the various motifs that the story or situation first suggested to him. Bergman, the Important Artist.<br />The notion that Bergman's films are autobiographical has both given them coherence and authenticated them as important. In a sense, Images supports some of the earnest exegeses of his work: one finds the theme of the artist caught between imagining himself a god and knowing he is a charlatan and conjurer; the motif of the lost companion/partner in an alien city, a war zone, an isolated hospital; the transfer of identity and the destructive energies of the heterosexual couple. But Bergman is also candid about his own compliance with his admirers' interpretative projections. Images opens with the admission that Bergman on Bergman, a book of interviews from 1968, was "hypocritical" because he was too anxious to please. And in a similar vein, he now thinks the notion, endorsed by himself in the preface to Vilgot Sjöman's Diary with Ingmar Bergman, that <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/through_a_glass_darkly.htm">Through a Glass Darkly</a>, <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/winter_light.htm">Winter Light</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a> form a trilogy is a "rationalization after the fact": "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnapps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol." (And yet a look at the filmographies of Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Wenders, Herzog, Kieslowski shows how important a prop the idea of the trilogy is for the self-identity of the European auteur.)<br />Reading Images a little against the grain of its own declaration of authenticity, it seems just conceivable that Bergman's claim to being one of the cinema's great auteurs rests most firmly on his ability to dissimulate: that the big themes, the flaunting of moral doubt and metaphysical pain, represent not a personal plight transfigured into art but the doubly necessary pre-text for a cinematic tour de force. The big themes were doubly necessary, I am suggesting, because they helped to define his cinema as a national cinema and because they allowed him to reinvent himself as a filmmaker: prerequisites for creating an oeuvre that could be recognized as such at a time when Hollywood still had genres and stars rather than directors as stars.<br />As to Bergman the figurehead of a national cinema, Images makes clear how many overt and covert threads connect his films to the key authors and themes of Scandinavian literature. His immense achievement was to have recognized and made his own dramatic situations, themes and characters that echoed those of the great Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen especially, and to have used his lifelong work in the theatre as both a permanent rehearsal of his film ideas in progress, and as the place to forge the stock company of actors and actresses who give his films their unmistakeable look, feel and physical identity: <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/harriet_andersson.htm">Harriet Andersson</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/bjornstrand.htm">Gunnar Björnstrand</a>, <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/thulin.htm">Ingrid Thulin</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/von_sydow.htm">Max von Sydow</a>, <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/josephson.htm">Erland Josephson</a>. Even so private a film as <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a> uses Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger; even so ostensibly an autobiographical work as <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/fanny_and_alexander.htm">Fanny and Alexander</a> borrows, apart from its explicit references to Hamlet, motifs, names and allusions from Ibsen's Wild Duck and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and Dreamplay.<br />Beyond their role of giving him a form (the chamber play) and a set of dramatic conflicts (Ibsen's bourgeois family falling apart through the "life-lie"; Strindberg's couple tearing each other to pieces in sexual anguish and hatred), the dramatists Bergman is attached to remind one of the importance of the texture of speech and voice for our idea of a national cinema, and indeed for the European art cinema as a whole. This suggests that one function of auteur cinema as a national cinema, before the advent of television, was to transcribe features of a nation's cultural tradition as figured in other art forms (the novel, theatre, opera) and to represent them in the cinema. One can follow this process in Bergman's career, where the films from the late 50s onwards tend to be more or less self-consciously crafted images, first of the Nordic middle-ages and then of a middle-class Sweden. From <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a> to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/virgin_spring.htm">The Virgin Spring</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/magician.htm">The Magician</a>, from <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/hour_of_the_wolf.htm">Hour of the Wolf</a>, from <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/cries_and_whispers.htm">Cries and Whispers</a> to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/fanny_and_alexander.htm">Fanny and Alexander</a>, there is an uneasy acknowledgment of the identity others have thrust upon him as a national icon. One response is parody or pastiche: is it merely hindsight that discovers in Bergman's big themes a wonderful excuse for putting on a show? Re-seeing <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a> I was amazed and amused by its Grand-Guignolesque elements, not just Death and the strolling players but even the young girl's death at the stake. Its deftly staged spectacle, atmospheric touches, wonderful sleights of hand and sarcastic humour prompted the perhaps blasphemous thought that <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/von_sydow.htm">Max von Sydow</a>'s Knight back from the Crusades was closer in spirit to Vincent Price in a Roger Corman film than to Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc.<br />Hence, perhaps, a trauma that seems to have haunted Bergman briefly, even more urgently than his arrest by bungling Swedish bureaucrats for tax fraud: the fear of an arrest of his creativity. The tax business resulted in a six-year-long self-exile to Germany, and seems to have wounded him to the quick. But so did the pun in a French review of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/autumn_sonata.htm">Autumn Sonata</a> (with Ingrid Bergman) which suggested that "Bergman was not only directing Bergman, but doing Bergman." Images is in a sense the record of having laid that ghost to rest, for it gives rise to the theme of an artist becoming a pastiche of himself, a fear Bergman sees confirmed in the later work of Tarkovsky, Fellini and especially of Buñuel, whom he accuses of a lifetime of self-parody. Tying in with the "Schnapps-Idee" of the auteur trilogy, self-parody is perhaps the fate Bergman believes lies in store for all European auteurs who outlive both the economic and cultural moment of the national cinema with which they are identified. From more recent times, the cases of Herzog and Wenders come to mind (though the counter-examples are as interesting: Rossellini, when he began to make his great historical films for television, or Godard, when he took on video as if as a way of taking back his own earlier films, commenting on them by spraying them with ever more metaphysical 'graffiti'). In Bergman's case, the farewell to the cinema was not only the signal to carry on with the theatre, but it also led him to reinvent himself as an autobiographer, novelist, scenarist, and the self-reflexive, slyly exhibitionist essayist he shows himself in Images, treating his big themes with an irony not always present when he was turning them into films.<br />Ghosts and dreams<br />So how does one go about writing Bergman back into the contemporary cinema, into a film history other than that of the European auteur/national cinema? I would probably start not with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> (usually considered his stylistic breakthrough to a 'modern' cinema), but with a film from eight years earlier which strikes me, for much of its 83 minutes, as being as timelessly 'modern' as all great films are: <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> (1949), which though cast in the form of a journey, rather like <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a>, has a searing visual intelligence, a pulse, a body, a shape, a fury, as if made by someone "drunk on the possibilities of his medium." Bearing in mind the febrile energy and extraordinary urgency with which <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> moves between its characters' past and present predicaments and the various people to whom the central couple were or are tied, that old art-cinema staple of the reality/illusion divide, which is one of Bergman's big themes in so many of his films, takes on a new meaning, becoming part of the heroic effort to wrest from cinema, that medium of time and space, a logic neither enslaved to chronological time nor to physical space, but instead creating another reality altogether.<br />In his best moments Bergman manages to render palpable a sense of indeterminacy such as has rarely existed in the cinema since the great silent European films of the 20s (Murnau, Lang, Dreyer): not psychological or psychoanalytical, but 'phenomenal.' In this sense, Bergman inscribes himself in an art-cinema, non-classical tradition, as one of those directors whose craft goes into making possible those imperceptible transitions between past and present, inner and outer space, memory, dream and anticipation which also give contemporary post-classical cinema its intellectual energy and emotional urgency. Bergman, in order to achieve this kind of energy, experimented in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> with an extraordinary fluid camera and complex camera set-ups. Realizing how much more difficult it was to achieve spatial dislocation in the sound film, he nevertheless did so brilliantly in some of his subsequent films—through the soundtrack in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a> and the lighting in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a>, as well as through the floating time of presence and memory, anticipation and traumatic recollection of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/cries_and_whispers.htm">Cries and Whispers</a>.<br />In this respect, Bergman's film-making is as modern as Godard thought it was. <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> to this day gives one the feeling that this is the kind of cinema that every generation has to reinvent for itself, that the cinema always starts again with this kind of vulnerability and radicalness. If it means being branded as art cinema, so be it, at least until it becomes the prisoner of the body it seems fated to create for itself, that of an auteur's cinema pastiching its own cultural self-importance.<br />Liv Ullmann and Bob Hope<br />One of the most poignant passages in Images occurs when Bergman discusses <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a>'s primal scream at the climax of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/face_to_face.htm">Face to Face</a>: "Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Now when I see <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/face_to_face.htm">Face to Face</a> I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It's called Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says: 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/face_to_face.htm">Face to Face</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a>'s incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help but think of Road to Morocco."<br /><br />© Sight and SoundPUTTING ON A SHOW: THE EUROPEAN ART MOVIE<br />The great film-makers of European art cinema are now silent. Why should we value what they achieved? Why did their work so easily descend into pastiche and self-parody? And how far was their appeal based on their freedom to explore sexuality in an 'adult' way?<br />by Thomas Elsaesser<br />Originally published in Sight and Sound, April 1994<br />Poner en la sombra: el cine arte europeo<br />Los grandes realizadores del cine arte europeo ahora están en silencio. Cómo debemos valorar sus logros? ¿Porqué sus trabajos han descendido fácilmente al pastiche y la autoparodia? Y cuan lejos está su atracción basado en su libertad para explotar la sexualidad de una manera “adulta”?<br />"I don't want to make films again...This film [<a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/after_the_rehearsal.htm">After the Rehearsal</a>] was supposed to be small, fun, and unpretentious...Two mountainous shadows rise and loom over me. First: Who the hell is really interested in this kind of introverted mirror aria? Second: Does there exist a truth, in the very belly of this drama, that I can't put my finger on, and so remains inaccessible to my feelings and intuition?...We should have thrown ourselves directly into filming...Instead we rehearsed, discussed, analyzed, penetrated carefully and respectfully, just as we do in the theatre, almost as if the author were one of our dear departed." (Ingmar Bergman, 25-26 March 1983, quoted in Images—My Life in Film.)<br />No quiero volver a hacer filmes otra vez… Esta película [Después de ensayo] se suponía pequeña, divertida, sin pretensiones… Dos enormes sombras se levantaron y aparecieron sobre mí. Primero: ¿Quién diablos está realmente interesado en esta clase de aria introvertida menor? Segundo: ¿Existe alguna verdad en las entrañas de este drama<br />Ingmar Bergman is hardly a name contemporary cinema makes much use of, except as an adjective, usually applied to Woody Allen films that the reviewers find embarrassing. But it has not always been so: in the early and mid-60s Bergman had enormous prestige, swelling in a rising arc from <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a> (1956) to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a> (1963) and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a> (1966) before subsiding fitfully with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/hour_of_the_wolf.htm">Hour of the Wolf</a> (1967) and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/shame.htm">Shame</a> (1968). It was the time of film clubs and the Academy Cinema, and I distinctly remember a programming meeting of the Sussex University film society which broke up in disarray over the question of whether it was possible to call both <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance great films (we settled for Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and were lynched by our audience). The row led me to start a film magazine, having discovered in Cahiers du cinéma Godard's eulogy 'Bergmanorama' practically next to his piece on Sam Fuller's Forty Guns. For at the height of middle-class Bergmanomania (in the pages of Sight and Sound, for instance) and Movie's 'Nicholas, not Satyajit,' Godard taught us that the cinema (or le cinéma) was one and indivisible. Especially when, like Godard, you were intent on reinventing it.<br />"<a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a> is the most original film by the most original of filmmakers. It's for today's cinema what Birth of a Nation was for the classical cinema, it's And God Created Woman, but fully achieved, without putting a foot wrong, a film of a total lucidity with regards to both its dramatic and moral structure as well as its mise-en-scene." (Godard in Arts, 30 July 1958.) Reading what Bergman has to say about <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a> in Images ("I have never made a less complicated film. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom") and then watching it on video, Godard's enthusiasm is understandable: it is a glorified, glorious home movie, a hymn to a young woman's sensuality, and for the director of A bout de souffle clearly an open invitation to mix Rossellini and Rebel without a Cause.<br />Reviews in Britain were more circumspect. In The Listener (9 July 1959) John Weightman, "after recently assimilating a new batch of four films by Ingmar Bergman, made between 1949 and 1953," reflects on the director's "extraordinary unevenness of quality. How can he be at once so subtle and so unsubtle?" Weightman disliked <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a>, but liked <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a>, along with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> (aka Thirst) and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/lesson_in_love.htm">A Lesson in Love</a>, mainly because of its poetic (i.e. neo-realist) qualities: Bergman "reflects the instability of the couple's relationship in the changing mood of water and sky," the acting is of "uncanny accuracy," and in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Monika</a> "the two young husbands are perfect examples of the decent, naive, Scandinavian male who is driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." The last point is nicely offset by Bergman's description (in The Magic Lantern) of how he fell in love with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/harriet_andersson.htm">Harriet Andersson</a> during the making of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/summer_with_monika.htm">Summer with Monika</a>, and how pleased they were when it turned out that they had to re-shoot most of the outdoor footage because a faulty machine at the lab tore up several thousand metres of the negative.<br />But Weightman ends his review on a now familiar note: "In putting all these characters and moments of life on to the screen in so many brilliant, if fragmentary episodes, Bergman has done something for Sweden that no-one, to my knowledge, is doing for England. But there may be a parallel in France. Two or three young French directors, like Bergman, have deliberately turned down attractive foreign offers and international stars in order to produce films that have a local, home-made or hand-made character. The camera is again being used as a private eye, as a means of expressing a single yet complex view. This return to the artisan tradition is an interesting development, even though some of the initial products have all the defects of first novels...The cinema is such a rich art form and the poetry of the camera so much more facile than poetry in language, that it is easy for the filmmaker to get drunk on the possibilities of his medium. I think Bergman is slightly drunk in this way."<br />Quick Hollywood, slow Europe<br />Weightman's essay contains such a handy compendium of the terms which made Bergman and others the icons of auteur cinema that it prompts the question of what has happened to those towering representatives of European art cinema? Or more precisely, what can still hold together the idea of the 'auteur' and that of a 'national cinema' (as it also applied to the late Fellini, or to New German Cinema in the 70s, or British cinema in the Thatcher 80s)? Weightman already sees what Bergman has "done for Sweden" in the double perspective we have inherited: the quintessential and clichéd of a nation's character embodied in personal or 'poetic' cinema, and the defensive stance of "hand-made" films against slick entertainment. For behind the question of the fate of art cinema, of course, lurks that other one, debated ad nauseam, aired afresh every year at Cannes or Berlin: the future of European cinema vis à vis Hollywood (whether "attractive foreign offers" or France's GATT reactions about its cinematic patrimony). A few years ago, a Channel 4 programme Pictures of Europe neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who probably has more reason than most to be wary of the idea of national cinema, but who also needs to believe in auteur cinema: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; living in the twentieth century means learning to be American."<br />In academic film studies, the Hollywood versus Europe question seems at times like the founding myth of the discipline, so much so that it is usually discussed under separate headings: the economic case (Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Film Industry, Kristin Thompson's Exporting Entertainment, Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign); the cultural case (a UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conference in London last year was partly devoted to the topic); and the formal case (either early cinema scholars' debate about Europe's deep staging and slow cutting versus Hollywood's shallow staging and fast cutting, or a difference in story-telling). This last distinction is outlined by David Bordwell in Narration and the Fiction Film, where character-centred causality, question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, deadline plot structures and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical of 'classical' cinema, while other narrative conventions are self-conscious and strategic deviations from the classical norm. Film studies, for once, does not seem totally out of touch with the views of the industry. The norm/deviancy argument could be seen as repeating, at the level of film theory, the hegemony of Hollywood at the cultural and economic level, since all other film styles merely reconfirm the power of the dominant by their very strategies of displacing and circumventing it. Similarly the opposition Europe/Hollywood, as worked out around early cinema, has been echoed since the 20s in the Hollywood complaint that European pictures are too slow for American audiences, a point taken up by many European directors and actors who have worked in both industries.<br />In Pictures of Europe, Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud described American speed as a "positive quality," as did Beineix, Zanussi and Luc Besson. Puttnam and Almodóovar were more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde preferred the slower delivery of dialogue and less hectic action of European cinema, along with—not surprisingly—Wim Wenders, Bertrand Tavernier and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a>. Paul Schrader thought that it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas—and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed or investigated." Schrader's distinction helps tease out some of the formal implications: the norm/deviancy model, for instance, could be criticized for assuming the validity of the problem-solving model for both kinds of cinema. And while his theory doesn't work too well for comedies, which never pretend to solve the issues they raise, it might explain why a happy ending in a European art film is felt to be a cop-out, a fundamentally unserious mode of closure. After all, isn't one of the characteristics of 'modern' cinema (until recently synonymous with the art film) its metaphysical doubt about master narratives of progress, preferring to be skeptical of linear time and the efficacy of action? Such is the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of cinema holds a more dynamic view of Godard's distinction between "action" and "reflection," contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinema with the time-image of modern cinema.<br />Transatlantic crossing<br />Of course, the problem-solving model is not intended to characterize a film-maker's personal beliefs; it is merely posited as the norm underlying, if not both kinds of cinema, then both kinds of audience. American, or 'classical,' films are the dominant because they are made ('tailored' was the term already used by King Vidor) for an audience used to Hollywood (and which audience isn't?), while European filmmakers are said to express themselves rather than (ad)dress the audience. But if one assumes that art cinema merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a>), reconstructing the time scheme (as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/cries_and_whispers.htm">Cries and Whispers</a>) or guessing what 'really' happened and what was merely imagined (as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a>), then the difference is one of genre or expectation: the tasks of the art film are intuitively recognized by the spectator and either avoided as a chore or sought as a challenge. And one should remember that among audiences watching art films are also American spectators—in fact, it was the US distribution practice of the art-house circuit which gave the term 'art cinema' its currently accepted meaning.<br />Indeed, this may be the rub, the point where a 'cultural' view differs from the cognitive case. By the logic of reception studies, it is ultimately audiences who decide how a film is to be understood, and they often take their cue not only from title, poster, actors or national origin, but from the place where a film is shown, in which case an art film is simply every film screened at an art-house cinema, including old Hollywood movies, as in Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller retrospectives: the cinema, one and indivisible. It's something of a lame definition, and a 'cultural' argument might avoid the tautology by viewing the Hollywood/Europe opposition merely as a special case of a more general process in which art and other films have assigned and reassigned to them identities and meanings according to often apparently superficial characteristics, but which on closer inspection provide an instructive map of movie culture that ignores all kinds of stylistic boundaries but speaks eloquently of the life of films in history. One could even call it a map of misreadings. European films intended for one kind of (national) audience or made within a particular kind of aesthetic framework or ideology, for instance, undergo a sea change as they cross the Atlantic and on coming back find themselves bearing the stamp of yet another cultural currency. The same is true of Hollywood films: what auteur theory saw in them was not what the studios or even the directors intended, but this did not stop another generation of American viewers from appreciating what the Cahiers critics extracted from them.<br />If this is now a commonplace about Hollywood, it is just as true about European art cinema. The qualities for which film-makers were praised were not necessarily what the audiences liked about their movies, and what made the films famous was not always what made them successful. In the case of Italian neo-realism, for instance, the film-makers' aesthetic-moral agenda included a political engagement, a social conscience, a humanist vision. Subjects such as post-war unemployment or the exploitation of farm labour by the big landowners were part of what made neo-realism a 'realist' cinema, while the fact that it did not use stars but faces from the crowd made it a 'poetic' cinema. Yet a film like Rome, Open City about the Italian resistance braving the German Gestapo with communist partisans and Catholic priests making common cause against the enemy—represented only a particular (and short-lived) political compromise, while with established performers such as Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi it was not exactly a movie that used lay actors. Rome, Open City became a success abroad for many reasons, including its erotic, melodramatic and atmospheric qualities. In one often reproduced shot there is a glimpse of Anna Magnani's exposed thighs as she falls, gunned down by the Germans, while in another scene a glamorous German female agent seduces a young Italian woman into a lesbian affair and supplies her with cocaine. To American audiences, unused to such fare, the labels 'art' and 'European' began to connote a very particular kind of realism, to do with explicit depiction of sex and drugs rather than political or aesthetic commitment.<br />Bergman is crucial here. Respected in the early 60s for his films of existential angst and bleak depictions of religious doubt, he was able to get finance for his films from Svensk Filmindustri in part because in the art houses of America graphic portrayals of sexual jealousy or violence as in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/sawdust_and_tinsel.htm">Sawdust and Tinsel</a> or <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/virgin_spring.htm">The Virgin Spring</a>, or of a woman masturbating (in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a>) defined adult cinema for the generation prior to the 'sexual revolution.' When in the mid-60s other film-makers in Europe (Denmark, Germany) began to make films for which the label 'adult' was a well-understood euphemism, and when the Americans themselves relaxed censorship, the art-film export suffered a decline as an economic factor for European national cinemas (in Italy, for instance). But it remained a cultural and artistic force, above all for subsequent generations of more or less mainstream American directors from Arthur Penn to Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola, and also for the academy: without the European art and auteur cinema, film studies might never have found a home in American universities.<br />What can we call this re-assignment of meaning, this fluctuation of critical, cultural and economic currency between one country and another? A misunderstanding of the filmmaker's intention? An acknowledgment that as many Bergmans exist as there are audiences recognizing something of novelty interest or spiritual value in his films? Or just an integral part of what we mean by 'art cinema' (and, finally, by any form of cinema), where the primary economic use-value is either irrelevant (because of government subsidies, as in the case of Bergman), or has already been harvested, leaving a film or a film-maker's work to find its status on another scale of values? It is what forms a 'canon' (see recent Sight and Sound essays by Peter Wollen and Ian Christie), or makes a film a 'classic' (see the slim volumes in the BFI Publishing series).<br />In which case, the old idea of European films as expressive of their national identities would appear far-fetched. It would suggest that 'national cinema' makes sense only as a relation, not as an essence, being dependent on other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term. Yet a national cinema by its very definition must not know that it is a relative or negative term, for then it would lose its virginity and become that national whore which is the heritage film. Instead, the temptation persists to look beyond the binarism towards something that defines a national cinema 'positively,' such as "the decent, naive, Scandinavian male...driven nearly frantic by the vagaries of the female." Another positive definition is of a national history as a counter-identity. Such might be the case with the films of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, fanning out towards a broader media interest in Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas in which (to us) complicated national and post-colonial histories set up tantalizing fields of differentiation, self-differentiation and protest. For these films, international (i.e. European) festivals are the markets that can assign different kinds of value, from politico-voyeuristic curiosity to auteur status, setting in motion the circulation of new cultural capital beyond the prospect of economic circulation (art-cinema distribution, a television sale).<br />One conceivable conclusion is that both the old Hollywood hegemony argument and the post-modern paradigm (it's what audiences make of films that decides their value) hide a more interesting relationship in which national cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and miscognition enjoy equal status. It suggests that Bergman's carefully staged self-doubt, Weightman's prophetic faith in his early poetic cinema and American audiences' frisson at the 'mature' director's candid look at sexual obsessions and violent marital strife may have a common denominator. Retrospectively, negatively, by a kind of paring away, they delineate the slim ground occupied by an auteur who also, like Bergman, has to signify a national cinema: high culture themes, stylistic expressivity, that indeterminacy of reference critics prized as 'realism.' By contrast French cinema is a national cinema with such a diversity of strands that it makes its auteurs (Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Rivette) almost marginal figures in the overall constellation.<br />Auteur cinema today may not be dead, but what we mean by an auteur has shifted somewhat: for Europe and America, it is no longer about self-doubt or self-expression, metaphysical themes or a realist aesthetic. The themes that still identify Bergman as an auteur would today be mere affectations, a filmmaker's white carnation in his button-hole. Instead, auteurs now dissimulate such signatures of selfhood as Bergman sported, even when they believe or doubt as passionately as he did. Authority and authenticity lie nowadays in the way film-makers use the cinema's resources, which is to say in their command of the generic, the expressive, the excessive, the visual and the visceral. From David Lynch to Jane Campion, from Jonathan Demme to Stephen Frears, from Luc Besson to Dario Argento—all are auteurs and all are valued for their capacity to concentrate on a tour de force, demonstrating qualities not so far removed, finally, from Bergman, "drunk on the possibilities of his medium."<br />Bergman and Corman<br />Reading Bergman's Images—My Life in Film (in fact two years' worth of interviews with Lasse Bergström with the questions cut out and bits from the director's work books and The Magic Lantern pasted in) with this in mind leaves one a little disappointed. One learns about Bergman's dislike of colour (because it takes away mystery), the importance of lighting (and of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/crew/nykvist.htm">Sven Nykvist</a>), and that some of his early films were devised in order to experiment with complicated camera movements. But he says next to nothing about many of the other things that make him a great film director—his use of close-ups, his work on the soundtrack, the composition of incredibly complex yet fluid action spaces within the frame in both indoor and outside scenes. Biographical details, childhood memories, moral introspection, the theatre, actors and actresses, music and music-making make up a loosely woven narrative that discards chronology and groups the films under such oddly coy titles as 'Dreams Dreamers,' 'Jests Jesters,' 'Miscreance Credence,' 'Farces Frolics.' Often Bergman confesses of this or that film that he doesn't have much to say about its making. Contrary to the title, there is little here about images. Instead, what holds the book together is a daunting effort to account for the process of story-conception, of what mood to be in when writing, what memory to follow up on, what dream to cross-fertilize with an incident he has read about, what well of anguish to tap when the plot seems to wander off in the wrong direction.<br />It reminds one of how much legitimation and cultural capital Bergman the film director still derived from writing, from being an author as well as an auteur, and at the same time how removed he was from the routines of Hollywood scriptwriting—from story-boarding or using the script as the production's financial and technical blueprint. In this, he conforms to the cliché of the European director: improvisation on the set or on location, the most intense work taking place with the actors, the film taking shape as the director penetrates the inner truth of the various motifs that the story or situation first suggested to him. Bergman, the Important Artist.<br />The notion that Bergman's films are autobiographical has both given them coherence and authenticated them as important. In a sense, Images supports some of the earnest exegeses of his work: one finds the theme of the artist caught between imagining himself a god and knowing he is a charlatan and conjurer; the motif of the lost companion/partner in an alien city, a war zone, an isolated hospital; the transfer of identity and the destructive energies of the heterosexual couple. But Bergman is also candid about his own compliance with his admirers' interpretative projections. Images opens with the admission that Bergman on Bergman, a book of interviews from 1968, was "hypocritical" because he was too anxious to please. And in a similar vein, he now thinks the notion, endorsed by himself in the preface to Vilgot Sjöman's Diary with Ingmar Bergman, that <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/through_a_glass_darkly.htm">Through a Glass Darkly</a>, <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/winter_light.htm">Winter Light</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a> form a trilogy is a "rationalization after the fact": "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnapps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol." (And yet a look at the filmographies of Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Wenders, Herzog, Kieslowski shows how important a prop the idea of the trilogy is for the self-identity of the European auteur.)<br />Reading Images a little against the grain of its own declaration of authenticity, it seems just conceivable that Bergman's claim to being one of the cinema's great auteurs rests most firmly on his ability to dissimulate: that the big themes, the flaunting of moral doubt and metaphysical pain, represent not a personal plight transfigured into art but the doubly necessary pre-text for a cinematic tour de force. The big themes were doubly necessary, I am suggesting, because they helped to define his cinema as a national cinema and because they allowed him to reinvent himself as a filmmaker: prerequisites for creating an oeuvre that could be recognized as such at a time when Hollywood still had genres and stars rather than directors as stars.<br />As to Bergman the figurehead of a national cinema, Images makes clear how many overt and covert threads connect his films to the key authors and themes of Scandinavian literature. His immense achievement was to have recognized and made his own dramatic situations, themes and characters that echoed those of the great Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen especially, and to have used his lifelong work in the theatre as both a permanent rehearsal of his film ideas in progress, and as the place to forge the stock company of actors and actresses who give his films their unmistakeable look, feel and physical identity: <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/harriet_andersson.htm">Harriet Andersson</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/bjornstrand.htm">Gunnar Björnstrand</a>, <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/thulin.htm">Ingrid Thulin</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/von_sydow.htm">Max von Sydow</a>, <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/josephson.htm">Erland Josephson</a>. Even so private a film as <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a> uses Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger; even so ostensibly an autobiographical work as <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/fanny_and_alexander.htm">Fanny and Alexander</a> borrows, apart from its explicit references to Hamlet, motifs, names and allusions from Ibsen's Wild Duck and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and Dreamplay.<br />Beyond their role of giving him a form (the chamber play) and a set of dramatic conflicts (Ibsen's bourgeois family falling apart through the "life-lie"; Strindberg's couple tearing each other to pieces in sexual anguish and hatred), the dramatists Bergman is attached to remind one of the importance of the texture of speech and voice for our idea of a national cinema, and indeed for the European art cinema as a whole. This suggests that one function of auteur cinema as a national cinema, before the advent of television, was to transcribe features of a nation's cultural tradition as figured in other art forms (the novel, theatre, opera) and to represent them in the cinema. One can follow this process in Bergman's career, where the films from the late 50s onwards tend to be more or less self-consciously crafted images, first of the Nordic middle-ages and then of a middle-class Sweden. From <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a> to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/virgin_spring.htm">The Virgin Spring</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/magician.htm">The Magician</a>, from <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/hour_of_the_wolf.htm">Hour of the Wolf</a>, from <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/cries_and_whispers.htm">Cries and Whispers</a> to <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/fanny_and_alexander.htm">Fanny and Alexander</a>, there is an uneasy acknowledgment of the identity others have thrust upon him as a national icon. One response is parody or pastiche: is it merely hindsight that discovers in Bergman's big themes a wonderful excuse for putting on a show? Re-seeing <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/seventh_seal.htm">The Seventh Seal</a> I was amazed and amused by its Grand-Guignolesque elements, not just Death and the strolling players but even the young girl's death at the stake. Its deftly staged spectacle, atmospheric touches, wonderful sleights of hand and sarcastic humour prompted the perhaps blasphemous thought that <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/von_sydow.htm">Max von Sydow</a>'s Knight back from the Crusades was closer in spirit to Vincent Price in a Roger Corman film than to Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc.<br />Hence, perhaps, a trauma that seems to have haunted Bergman briefly, even more urgently than his arrest by bungling Swedish bureaucrats for tax fraud: the fear of an arrest of his creativity. The tax business resulted in a six-year-long self-exile to Germany, and seems to have wounded him to the quick. But so did the pun in a French review of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/autumn_sonata.htm">Autumn Sonata</a> (with Ingrid Bergman) which suggested that "Bergman was not only directing Bergman, but doing Bergman." Images is in a sense the record of having laid that ghost to rest, for it gives rise to the theme of an artist becoming a pastiche of himself, a fear Bergman sees confirmed in the later work of Tarkovsky, Fellini and especially of Buñuel, whom he accuses of a lifetime of self-parody. Tying in with the "Schnapps-Idee" of the auteur trilogy, self-parody is perhaps the fate Bergman believes lies in store for all European auteurs who outlive both the economic and cultural moment of the national cinema with which they are identified. From more recent times, the cases of Herzog and Wenders come to mind (though the counter-examples are as interesting: Rossellini, when he began to make his great historical films for television, or Godard, when he took on video as if as a way of taking back his own earlier films, commenting on them by spraying them with ever more metaphysical 'graffiti'). In Bergman's case, the farewell to the cinema was not only the signal to carry on with the theatre, but it also led him to reinvent himself as an autobiographer, novelist, scenarist, and the self-reflexive, slyly exhibitionist essayist he shows himself in Images, treating his big themes with an irony not always present when he was turning them into films.<br />Ghosts and dreams<br />So how does one go about writing Bergman back into the contemporary cinema, into a film history other than that of the European auteur/national cinema? I would probably start not with <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a> (usually considered his stylistic breakthrough to a 'modern' cinema), but with a film from eight years earlier which strikes me, for much of its 83 minutes, as being as timelessly 'modern' as all great films are: <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> (1949), which though cast in the form of a journey, rather like <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/wild_strawberries.htm">Wild Strawberries</a>, has a searing visual intelligence, a pulse, a body, a shape, a fury, as if made by someone "drunk on the possibilities of his medium." Bearing in mind the febrile energy and extraordinary urgency with which <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> moves between its characters' past and present predicaments and the various people to whom the central couple were or are tied, that old art-cinema staple of the reality/illusion divide, which is one of Bergman's big themes in so many of his films, takes on a new meaning, becoming part of the heroic effort to wrest from cinema, that medium of time and space, a logic neither enslaved to chronological time nor to physical space, but instead creating another reality altogether.<br />In his best moments Bergman manages to render palpable a sense of indeterminacy such as has rarely existed in the cinema since the great silent European films of the 20s (Murnau, Lang, Dreyer): not psychological or psychoanalytical, but 'phenomenal.' In this sense, Bergman inscribes himself in an art-cinema, non-classical tradition, as one of those directors whose craft goes into making possible those imperceptible transitions between past and present, inner and outer space, memory, dream and anticipation which also give contemporary post-classical cinema its intellectual energy and emotional urgency. Bergman, in order to achieve this kind of energy, experimented in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> with an extraordinary fluid camera and complex camera set-ups. Realizing how much more difficult it was to achieve spatial dislocation in the sound film, he nevertheless did so brilliantly in some of his subsequent films—through the soundtrack in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/silence.htm">The Silence</a> and the lighting in <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/persona.htm">Persona</a>, as well as through the floating time of presence and memory, anticipation and traumatic recollection of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/cries_and_whispers.htm">Cries and Whispers</a>.<br />In this respect, Bergman's film-making is as modern as Godard thought it was. <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/three_strange_loves.htm">Three Strange Loves</a> to this day gives one the feeling that this is the kind of cinema that every generation has to reinvent for itself, that the cinema always starts again with this kind of vulnerability and radicalness. If it means being branded as art cinema, so be it, at least until it becomes the prisoner of the body it seems fated to create for itself, that of an auteur's cinema pastiching its own cultural self-importance.<br />Liv Ullmann and Bob Hope<br />One of the most poignant passages in Images occurs when Bergman discusses <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a>'s primal scream at the climax of <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/face_to_face.htm">Face to Face</a>: "Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Now when I see <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/face_to_face.htm">Face to Face</a> I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It's called Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says: 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/face_to_face.htm">Face to Face</a> and <a href="http://www.bergmanorama.com/repertory/ullmann.htm">Liv Ullmann</a>'s incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help but think of Road to Morocco."<br /><br />© Sight and Soundmarianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-38127797419874635592007-06-29T12:36:00.000-07:002007-06-29T12:38:26.096-07:00Noel Burch's To the Distant ObserverNotes for<br />Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer<br />In this book about Japanese cinema, Burch intends to couch the discussion of the history of film styles not in terms of universal values but in norms and deviations in practices within a specific social context. More specifically, he identifies essential differences between Japanese and Western modes of representation through a Marxist approach. He argues that since the Japanese seem to have a disdain for film theory (an erroneous assumption), one must look at the art itself, identifying a few "masters" who 1) de-construct Western modes of filmmaking and, 2) refine and systemetize specifically Japanese traits. Burch argues to shift the "Golden Age" of Japanese cinema from the 50's to the 30's. At the same time, his sights are set on a bigger picture; he intends to look at the national context of Japanese cinema to change the way we think about film history as a whole.<br /><br />1. A System of Contradictions<br />Burch contends that the pertinent traits of Japanese aesthetics were defined almost entirely between the ninth and twelfth centuries (in the Heian period). He asks why other countries (like China, India, and Egypt) adopted Western modes of representation wholesale, along with all the limitations and ideological baggage that come with it. He partly attributes this difference of filmic and traditional modes to the historical circumstances of colonization. Japan had to luck to avoid being colonized, and even created an infrastructure for the film industry independent of outside forces.<br />In this chapter, Burch points out a pair of contradictory traits that often come up in discussions about Japan, that is the Japanese "faculty for assimilation" or "lack of originality" (depending on the writer's inclinations). Burch rightly calls them stereotypes that mystify the culture, and he intends to reveal the underlying ideological assumptions behind such claims. Whether Japanese are adept at assimilation and transformation ("making things uniquely Japanese" as it is often put) or are mired in stagnant conservatism (miming China before and the United States in the postwar period), each notion invokes the value of originality. However, Burch argues that in Japan originality has never been a virtue. Before the Meiji Restoration and the entrance of capitalism, artists were not the sole creator and proprietor of their work. There was no concept of plagiarism. Tied to this are the terms superposition and supersession. In the West, one period replaces another. In Japan, Burch identifies a fixative effect in which different types of art did not supplant each other, but co-existed to the present day (superposition). These factors are crucial for understanding the development of cinema in Japan.<br /><br />2. A System of Signs<br />Because of superposition and the lack of a concept of plagiarism, artists may relate their art to other everything that came before it. Burch turns to the writing system and Heian poetry as examples. He describes the adoption of Chinese characters and their adaptation to Japanese language. Most important is the development of the two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana. In order to construct a sentence, one must combine at least hiragana with Chinese characters (katakana is reserved for foreign loan words). You can think of the difference between the kana and characters (kanji ) as analogue vs. digital. What Burch finds significant is that both co-exist simultaneously. Neither the phonetic or non-phonetic components are privileged. The language may thereby afford access to both a linear mode of linguistic representation, such as that in the West, and to an "Oriental mode" which it is an implicit critique of linearity. The inspiration for this argument ultimately comes from French philosophy and literary criticism, especially Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics and Barthes' fanciful essays on Japan. Combining these ideas with his own understanding of the development of cinematic narrative, Burch writes: "The linearization of writing and the linear conception of speech are rooted in the Western sense of time based on movement in space." (p. 40) Arguing that the "digital" linguistic mode of Chinese characters provides the foundation for a very different basis for narrative, Burch draws a connection (an analogy? metaphor?) between non-linear language and the indifference to linear causality he finds in the modes of filmic representation in the silent period. In the next chapter he shows how this works in poetry.<br /><br />3. A Boundless Text<br />Burch quotes a Heian poem at length, laying out the concepts of polysemy and intertextuality. These two processes engage the reader in an act of creation in which "the profound equivalence of reading and writing speaks directly to modern artistic practice and theory. (he quotes Eisenstein)<br />The "boundless text" he offers contains, explicitly or implicitly, all the basic theoretical challenges that Japan offers Western thought and practice:<br />· An inclination to read a given text in relation to a body of texts.<br />· No value placed on originality and no taboos on "borrowing," both of which are based on Western individualism.<br />· No privileging of a linear approach to representation.<br />· No precedence of content over form as in the West.<br /><br />Part 2 A Frozen Stream?<br />4. A Machine Appears<br />Burch lays out a very brief summary of the early Japanese cinema based on Anderson and Richie's book, placing it in the context of a fascination for things Western after the Meiji restoration, and one facet of the Pure Cinema Movement. He mentions, in passing, the influence various arts felt from the West and describes the shinpa movement in theater. This is a theater based and what the Japanese thought Western theater was like, which produces oddities such as Hamlet on a bicycle. It is this transformation of the art by way of Japanese ideology that Burch leaves dangling before us; he'll assert the differences between Western and Japanese modes of representation in silent film are based on this ideological difference.<br /><br />5. A Parenthesis on Film History<br />But first, he's going to examine the process by which 19th century ideologies of representation came to determine the representational modes of Western film. This is probably the most important chapter of the book, as it constitutes a radical repositioning of the major figures at the dawn of cinema by looking at them from the ground of Japanese cinema. Nearly all narratives of the invention of cinema identify Lumiere with non-fiction and Melies with fiction. Burch intends to switch the historical division in film to Lumiere & Melies vs. Americans Dickson & Raff & Gammon et al.<br />"I regard the work of Melies and Lumiere, however, as two aspects of the same phenomenon. Conversely, the contradiction between the films shot by the Lumieres and their cameramen, and some of those produced for the Edison company during the first few years by Dickson and Raff and Gammon is I believe absolutely fundamental" (p. 61).<br />The people working for Edison were interested in the "total reproduction of life," an "essential aspiration of the bourgeoisie with regard to representation." (p. 61). The Lumieres were still the direct heirs of Muybridge and Co., as they were interested in the silent reproduction of perceptual movement. Burch describes the Lumiere's work as non-centered spacially (not guiding the gaze of the spectator) and temporally (often having no beginning or end). The films were also non-linear viewing experiences, since the clips were often showed more than once. Burch compares these early films to recent modernist films.<br />Burch also points out differences in their methods (Edison and Dickson put the camera in their Black Maria, prefiguring the sound stages of the 30's) while Lumieres set it up outside, recording things with an almost scientific impulse. Melies worked in a studio, but to "construct a world as radically and avowedly artificial as possible." (p. 62) Even the language they used reveals the difference: "The neologisms coined by Edison (Vitascope) and the Lumiere brothers (Cinématographe) are also emblematic of their antithetical positions: a 'vision of life' as opposed to 'an inscription of movement'."(p. 62) Burch places Porter in a middle ground between the "Lumiere/Edison contradiction", citing the medium close-up of The Great Train Robbery (1903) (which could be tacked on either the beginning or end) and the bedroom rescue in The Life of an American Fireman (1902) (shown two times from inside and outside) as impulses toward the Lumiere mode of representation. At the same time, Porter's work in the development of reverse field, cross-cutting and ellipsis places also puts him on the Edison side as they were to constitute the future Hollywood style. By WWI, the adoption of reverse field editing and the eyeline match were the last steps in breaking down the barrier of 'alienation' which informed the relationship between the early film and its essentially working-class audience. With the search for a better audience (which brought middle-class norms into the mode of representation) and the coming of sound, the project initiated by Smith, Porter, Griffith and Co. was completed.<br />Burch takes on previous film historians, who describe Japanese cinema as constantly catching up to the rest of the world until its "golden age" in the 1950s. He asserts that the creative lag most experts see in the silent Japanese film is based on an ideological assumption, a "fundamental incompatibility between the West's developing 'codes of illusionism' and Japanese indifference to 'illusionism' in the Western sense." (p. 66) At the end of the chapter, he once again draws a line between the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Shimizu, and Naruse and the most radical films of the 60's and 70's (including Godard and Warhol). Before tracing the development of Japanese separation from Western codes, however, he wants to look for its origin.<br /><br />6. A Rule and its Ubiquity<br />This chapter introduces presentational vs. representation styles in a discussion of kabuki. Some characteristics:<br />· Audience shouts comments during the performance<br />· Use of oyama, female impersonators<br />· Use of visible stage hands dressed in black outfits<br />· Free contraction and dilation of narrative time<br />· Polysemy and intertextuality of the 'libretto<br />· Rejection of illusionist depth in set design and blocking<br />Burch then quotes Barthes on bunraku puppet theater and asserts this presentational style in traditional arts directly influenced silent, and even sound, film.<br /><br />7. Bulwarks of Tradition<br />Now Burch begins discussing presentational style in Japanese cinema. He talks about the benshi , the narrator who "translates" the film at one side of the screen. In the West, the benshi had always been credited with holding Japanese film back from what it could have been. Burch wishes to recoup their position, claiming they played an historically positive role in the resistance to Hollywood codes. He sees Japanese film of the 20's and 30's as a "store house" of the Primitive modes of representation. The benshi's political maneuvering preserved this style and their act of reading the film relieved the film itself of the burden of narrative. In the dominant cinema of the West, the titles suspended representation momentarily; in Japanese cinema, the benshi often made up lines and changed the meaning of the story. Every film, foreign or Japanese, lost the possibility of transparency because the benshi was simultaneously reading the film for them. In addition, some seats in Japanese theaters were turned toward the projector, allowing the spectator to view both the "effective and effected gestures" (using the language Barthes described bunraku with, implying a connection between the two).<br />Many scholars have accused early Japanese film of remaining primitive, simplistic, rough. Burch once again wants to expose the ideological assumptions underlying such assertions. He gives examples of Japanese silents which reveal a mastery of Western style, then says, "the Western codes had impinged upon Japanese perception, but Japan was on the whole not interested in them as a system; they were merely used on occasion to produce special dramatic effects." He gives three Japanese attitudes toward Western mode of decoupage : utter unconcern, occasional use of specific techniques in their Western signifying context (swish pans, dissolves), and mastery (by directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi).<br />Burch then brings kabuki back into the discussion, identifying several conventions that appear in early film (sets, symbolic actions, oyama, tableaux (a kabuki version of what you see in American silents like A Corner in Wheat ), etc. These codes, which had become naturalized in the cinema, began to be systematically excluded in the teens and twenties. Burch speculates a conflict between them and emerging Western codes and tastes whose outcome would determine the entire course of Japanese cinema.<br /><br />Part 3 Cross-Currents<br />8. Transformational Modules<br />Burch asks, what do we make of Japanese use of a Western machine in a medium largely influenced by capitalism in in light of their faculty for assimilation and transforming elements borrowed from foreign culture? He calls this a process of radicalization (first of Chinese culture, then Western) and he will inventory "transformational modules" which "bear directly upon the ways in which the codes developing in the cinema of the West between 1900 and 1920 were transformed, displaced, and truncated in Japan during the 1920's and 1930's." (p. 90) Japanese react to foreign ideas, artifacts and techniques by wholesale acceptance, global rejection, or transformation/adaptation. Burch says acceptance or rejection depends upon a given element's usefulness to the ruling class. The catagory of adaptation and transformation concerns him most and he cites three examples: the ritualization of Indo-Chinese Buddhist logic, introduction of linear perspective, and adaptations of Western clothing during the Meiji era. These three attitudes --- acceptance/rejection/adaptation --- co-exist and comprise the underlying forces in the development of Japanese modes of cinematic representation in the 20's and 30s.<br /><br />9. Lines and Spaces<br />Burch describes the Pure Cinema Movement, a movement in the 1920's to emulate Hollywood cinema. Shochiku Co. turns from live performance (kabuki and shinpa) to cinema, importing technicians from Sessue Hayakawa's Hollywood entourage. They begin to replace oyama with real women, use real locations and hope to control, if not eliminate, the benshi. This movement is an instance of wholesale adoption. They also adopted Western codes of editing as they perceived them. This was all consistent with the spirit of the Meiji Restoration, although Burch attributes it to a political climate affected by a fast-rising proletariat and a new liberal middle-class who united to oppose the post-feudal oligarchy. The movement was shortlived because of political pressure from benshi and oyama groups, the 1923 earthquakes affect on the film industry, and --- most important for Burch --- Japanese ultimate rejection of Western modes of representation.<br /><br />10. The Fate of Alien Modes<br />The films in the pseudo-American style emphasized visual aspects of Japanese society that appeared Western: clothes, make-up, gesticulations, sets, etc. But Burch is more interested in the transformation of modes of representation, which he analyses along three axes: surface/depth, centering/decentering; continuity/discontinuity. He has already discussed how the West resolved these issues in chapter 5, now he'll look at Japan.<br />He describes in detail Souls on the Road (1921), which was influenced by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and which he feels is far more complex. It's a film designed to imitate Western codes and, at the same time, be so complex and use so many titles that it would make benshi obsolete. For Burch, it actually ended up radicalizing the Western modes.<br /><br />11. Displacements and Condensations<br />This chapter covers the early development of chambera or swordplay films, particularly those of Ito and specifically in the adoption and radicalization of editing codes.<br /><br />12. Surface and Depth<br />Burch attributes the frontality of Japanese images to the force of modes of representation in traditional art, as well as the mixture of primitive Western editing and the architecture in Japanese homes (which naturally take 90 degree angles on rectangular surfaces and contain little or no furniture). Depth producing oblique angles in cutaways and close-ups would destroy a perceived unity. Aspects of the pro-filmic space which lend themselves to a Western approach (the hallways with their sliding doors) seem to have been ignored.<br /><br />Part 5 A Chain is Broken<br />23. Film and Democracy<br />In 1852, Perry opens Japan "in the name of Western mercantile imperialism." In 1962, samurai kill a Brit and an English ship razes part of Kagoshima in retaliation. The Japanese are impressed and respond by establishing deep economic ties. After the war, the Americans have a similar experience as they are welcomed with a obsequiousness no one had expected. Burch quotes a journalist for a range of explanations, one of which he singles out as a dominant factor in post WWII cinema: "The Occupation program sought to restore and extend the trends which had existed in the 20's. The ruling class was now able to exploit the workers unimpeded by feudalistic mores and structures. The workers, in turn, enjoyed unions, parliamentary democracy, social security, etc. The peasants were given ownership of land. Out of this class struggle, mutations arise in the cinema. As was seen before in the 20's, when the contradictions of capitalism developed, so did a need for "Western-style" films. A similar process occurs following the war. Masters of Burch's Golden Age (Naruse, Mizoguchi et al) "cleave closely to the Western mode of representation." Only Ozu remains true to the 20s, yet becomes "fossilized".<br />Burch offers a sketchy history of the post-war period against which he'll place Kurosawa. He divides films here between those which serve and contested bourgeois interests. On the right, he identifies "pure vehicles for dominant ideology": Western-style dramas and Western aesthetizations of traditional material (Rashomon, Gate of Hell ). On the left, he sees films dealing with problems censored in the past. The best known ones are Shindo's Children of the Atom Bomb (1953) and The Human Condition (1959-61) by Kobayashi.<br />A third catagory develops out of these basic two near the end of the occupation. He describes it as a sociological film of various shades, not committed to any particular class position, and represented best by the films of Kinoshita. Related to this catagory is the 'human drama' set in the lower classes (often called rumpen mono, literally "lumpen thing"). It is here that Kurosawa began working.<br />Burch sees little work of any worth in any of the directors of this period, outside of Kurosawa and Ichikawa, "a director who never developed a systemics comparable to those encountered in the major films of Kurosawa but who must nevertheless less be counted as the first stylist of the period." This period in the 50s is generally considered the golden age by most critics. Burch calls it a "dark period" marked by only one lasting body of work, the mature films of Kurosawa.<br /><br />24. Kurosawa Akira<br />Burch puts him in the company of Lange, Eisenstein, Sternberg, and Dreyer. He subscribes to the widely held notion that Kurosawa mastered the Western mode of representation before building on it and surpassing it.<br />He picks out a scene from The Most Beautiful (1944) (of a woman at a microscope) which he compares to Potemkin and Ozu's so-called pillow shots. Burch identifies a second period in Kurosawa's career from 1946-50, a new manner of social thought and representation based on neo-realism with a heavy dose of pathos. He gives examples and lists features common to Kurosawa's mature work: disjunctiveness, pathos, excess, and stubbornness of this characters.<br />Rashomon : The first film to reach a Western audience is also the first to bridge the gap between the 50s and the 20s and 30s genre of chambera sword films. He also says it's the first film to display the director's "rough hewn geometry". Before this, the films had an organic linearity and invisible continuity. Rashomon, on the other hand, is remarkably free from those rules.<br />At this point (pp. 298-299) Burch draws a rather surprising parallel between Kurosawa and Ozu. Kurosawa's consistent employment of 180 degree jump cuts, with its accompanying abrupt change in eyeline and screen direction, harks back to Ozu and Naruse. Further, Kurosawa uses other editing techniques that foreground the articulations smoothed over in Hollywood style editing: frequent and sharply contrasting juxtapositions of CU and LS, of moving and fixed shots, or shots with contrary movement, as well as the hard edged wipe (this last point is mentioned quite often by other critics, though rarely contextualized). Ozu uses techniques like jump cuts freely without the slightest attempt to match anything (in the Western sense). Kurosawa, on the other hand, always resolves the disruptions his editing creates. "Ambiguity in Kurosawa --- as in Eisenstein and nearly all the classical Western masters --- is an element of tension to be answered by one of resolution; never is it a categorical indifference to univalence or linearity as it is in Ozu and more generally in the classical cinema of Japan." (p. 299)<br />Eisenstein is another interesting connection Burch makes. He compares the reversals of position, eyeline and screen direction to Eisenstein's dialectics of montage units, and compares the forest sequence in Throne of Blood to the baby carriage on the Odessa steps.<br />Burch then discusses Ikiru, particularly in relation to its structure and that 'rough-hewn geometry'. Not surprisingly, the content doesn't excite him, being "marred by its complicity with the reformist ideology dominant in that period" and the "typically petty bourgeois doctrine of the heroic individual as agent of social change." (p. 306) Next he attempts to recoup Record of a Living Being, claiming it was attacked and/or ignored on ideological grounds by the bourgeois press.<br />"Cobweb Castle (Throne of Blood) ...is indisputably Kurosawa's finest achievement, largely because it carries furthest the rationalization process of his geometry." (310) It is designed upon principle of juxtaposing moments of extreme violence with those of static, restrained tension (a characteristic of Kurosawa he discusses earlier). This occurs from scene to scene and even shot to shot (in the sequence where Washizu see Miki's ghost). The resolution of this dichotomy between tension and relaxation is resolved in the last scene. "This bravura passage is usually recognized by Western critics as such, but nothing more; it is seen as grotesque and gratuitous or brilliant but gratuitous. On the contrary, it is the very keystone of the film's formal structure. Here at last that tense, horizontal alternation between scenes of decentered frenzy and dramatic but static scenes is resolved into a vertical orgasm of on-screen violence." (p. 317)<br />Burch mentions Hidden Fortress, observing that long after Hollywood shied away from wide-screen, Hong Kong and Japan continued using it. The Hong Kong approach to wide-screen is similar to Hollywood with respect for centering, for diagonal rather than symmetrical balance, and for the clarity of depth and the like. Japanese composition, on the other hand, is de-centered, centripetal, using geometrical foreground elements and frontal angles....all characteristic of the Golden Age of the 30s. He goes further to compare this composition to ukiyo-e wood block prints and screens as far back as the Muromachi period (14th to 16th century).<br />Burch then quickly passes over the films in Kurosawa's "fourth manner", which he says come nowhere near the masterpieces of the 50's. He treats Yojimbo (1961) in the same manner: "it is truly nothing more than a fusion of the latter-day chambera tradition with the Hollywood Western, which gave birth to that Cinecitta hybrid, the spaghetti Western." His denigration of Yojimbo is telling. For a writer interested in the juncture of East and West (more like the lack of it), one would think he would pounce on a film that stands between the Hollywood western, the samurai film, and the spaghetti western. Furthermore, despite his populist leanings, he ignores what was one of the biggest hits in Japanese cinema. However, there is the danger of finding a Kurosawa tainted by Hollywood codes.<br />He spends a couple paragraphs talking about High and Low (1963), a modern-day detective story. He admires the film's structure and dislikes its humanistic themes. He dismisses Red Beard (1965) and praises Dodeskaden (1972) as an attempt by an old master to keep up with the times.<br /><br />Part 6 Post-Scriptum<br />25. Oshima Nagisa<br />Burch compares Oshima to Godard, like everyone else, but asserts that characterization is not completely accurate. He perceives a contradiction between class struggle as the motor of history vs. ideology of the self-fulfilling individual; he also feels Oshima has been torn by the desire to reach a wide audience and the need to experiment. Oshima seems "to function within several separate ideological frameworks: that of traditional Japan, which obviously both fascinates and repels him; that of a Western (cosmopolitan) bourgeoisie, still problematic for the Japanese Left... And somewhere, in all of that, is Marxism."<br /><br />26. Independence: Its Rewards and Penalties<br />In this last chapter, Burch identifies and discusses film which support his final thesis: "that an authentically modern, revolutionary cinema in Japan must involve a conjunction of traditional artistic practice with elements of a materialist theory of art, dialectical and historical in nature, as it is developing in the West." (pp. 359-360).<br /><br />Some thoughts.......<br />These reading notes are intended more to help read through Burch's dense text than summarize the barrage of criticism that the book inspired. A few things, at least, are worth noting:<br />Burch sets up a questionable polemic between Japan and the West, ignoring all sorts of Western influences that go back as far as the 16th century. He seems outraged that Japanese would allow themselves to be soiled by the West and in doing so, picks and chooses what he sees in traditional arts (his approach unwittingly ends up compatible with neo-nationalist idealizations of Japanese culture). For example, during the Meiji period, kabuki was undergoing changes in acting style, theater design, length of performances, management styles etc. all under the massive changes happening with the influx of ideas from the West; you'd never know it reading Burch. The same thing was happening in painting, literature, scultpture, and other traditional arts. However, Burch wants to avoid this Western convergence, using the ideas of superposition and intertextuality to portrays Japanese art as a "frozen stream": either the art is fossilized, or it succumbs to Western bourgeois ideology (sells out). He idealizes an imagined Japan, just as Barthes did before him, and creates an veritable virginal land on the other side of the Pacific. Not surprisingly, his critics used Edward Said's Orientalism to ground their attack.<br />What is most important about this book is not the practical criticism about Japanese film, but the attempt (in its theoretical criticism) to shift the big division in film history from the Melies/Lumiere split or Bazin's Realist/Formalist split, to Melies & Lumiere/Porter & Griffith & Dickson etc....between representational and presentational modes. In that sense, his project is pretty impressive. His efforts also directed us to a body of prewar cinema that had been taken for granted up to that point, leading to a complete reevaluation of the films and the role of the benshi.<br />Those interested in the critiques should look to the following articles for starters: Whitaker, Sheila. review of TTDO, Framework 11 (Autumn 1969): 47-48; Bordwell, David. review of TTDO, Wide Angle 3.4 (1980): 70-73; Polan, Dana B. "Formalism and its Discontents, " Jump Cut 26 (1981): 63-66; Cohen, Robert. "Toward a Theory of Japanese Narrative, " Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6.2 (Spring 1981): 181-200; de Bary, Brett. review of TTDO, Journal of Japanese Studies 8.2 (Summer 82): 405-410; Malcomson, Scott L. "The Pure Land Beyond the Sea: Barthes, Burch and the Uses of Japan," Screen 26.3/4 (May/Aug. 1985): 23-33.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-81866570418296015952007-06-29T12:26:00.000-07:002007-06-29T12:36:45.102-07:00Textos sobre "nuevo cine alemán" y nueva olaLos remito a la página del Insituto Goethe de Buenos Aires donde se encuentran colgadas las clases de Ricardo Parodi sobre la relación entre la Nouvelle Vague y el nuevo cine alemán<br /><br />Introducción con información sobre el neorrealismo y el cine alemán de la década del 50<br /><a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase1.htm">http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase1.htm</a><br /><br />Sobre Godard y Kluge<br /><a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase2.htm">http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase2.htm</a><br /><br />Sobre Estuache y Wenders<br /><a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase3.htm">http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase3.htm</a><br /><br />Sobre Resnais y Herzog<br /><a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase4.htm">http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase4.htm</a><br /><br />Sobre Truffaut y Fassbinder<br /><a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase5.htm">http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase5.htm</a><br /><br /><br />Sobre A. Varda y otros<br /><a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase6.htm#_ednref8#_ednref8">http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin6/clase6.htm#_ednref8#_ednref8</a>marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-20003904564522603732007-06-29T12:24:00.000-07:002007-06-29T12:26:15.827-07:00películas para trabajo de historia del cine de 2º añodirector<br />película<br />año<br />Lloyd Bacon<br />La calle 42<br />1933<br />Tod Browning<br />Drácula<br />1931<br />Tod Browning<br />Freaks<br />1932<br />Frank Capra<br />Lo que sucedió aquella noche<br />1934<br />Frank Capra<br />Vive como quieras<br />1938<br />Frank Capra<br />El secreto de vivir<br />1936<br />Frank Capra<br />Caballero sin espada<br />1939<br />George Cukor<br />Mujercitas<br />1933<br />George Cukor<br />David Copperfield<br />1935<br />George Cukor<br />Hollidays<br />1938<br />George Cukor<br />Mujeres<br />1939<br />Michael Curtiz<br />Honor y gloria<br />1934<br />Michael Curtiz<br />Ángeles con caras sucias<br />1938<br />Roy del Ruth<br />La melodía de Broadway 1936<br />1936<br />Cecil B. De Mille<br />Cleopatra<br />1934<br />Victor Fleming<br />Lo que el viento se llevó<br />1939<br />Victor Fleming<br />El mago de Oz<br />1939<br />John Ford<br />La patrulla perdida<br />1934<br />John Ford<br />El delator<br />1935<br />John Ford<br />Enemigo público nº 1<br />1935<br />John Ford<br />La diligencia<br />1939<br />John Ford<br />El joven Lincoln<br />1939<br />Howard Hawks<br />Scarface<br />1932<br />Howard Hawks<br />Adorable revoltosa<br />1938<br />Howard Hawks<br />Sólo los ángeles tienen alas<br />1939<br />Fritz Lang<br />Furia<br />1936<br />Stan Laurel y Oliver Hardy<br />Hijos del desierto<br />1933<br />Stan Laurel y Oliver Hardy<br />Tontos de altura<br />1939<br />Ernst Lubitsch<br />La viudad alegre<br />1934<br />Ernst Lubitsch<br />Ninotchka<br />1939<br />Leo Mc Carey<br />Sopa de ganso<br />1933<br />Leo Mc Carey<br />La pícara puritana<br />1937<br />Leo Mc Carey<br />Cita de amor<br />1939<br />Rouben Mamolian<br />Reina Cristina<br />1933<br />Lewis Milestone<br />Sin novedades en el frente<br />1930<br />Mark Sandrich<br />Sombrero de copa<br />1935<br />King Vidor<br />La calle<br />1931<br />King Vidor<br />Ganarás el pan<br />1934<br />Josef Von Sternberg<br />La venus rubia<br />1932<br />Josef Von Sternberg<br />Tu nombre es tentación<br />1935<br />Raoul Walsh<br />Héroes olvidados<br />1939<br />James Whale<br />El hombre invisible<br />1933<br />James Whale<br />La novia de Frankenstein<br />1935<br />William Wyler<br />Callejón sin salida<br />1937<br />William Wyler<br />Cumbres borrascosas<br />1939marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-38846620356652437232007-05-31T08:09:00.000-07:002007-05-31T08:27:29.178-07:00Cine alemán en los años '20<div><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">La Seducción del abismo: Romanticismo, naturalismo, organicidad y cristalinización</span></strong> </div><div> </div><div>Por Ricardo Parodi</div><div><br /><strong>Apuntes para una teoría del montaje en el cine mudo alemán III</strong><br />En nuestro intento de conceptualizar las particularidades formales de la escuela alemana de montaje, hemos seguido a Vicente Sánches Biosca y Gilles Deleuze, para señalar que el montaje alemán de la década del veinte, ya fuera dentro del mal llamado "expresionismo" como dentro de su supuestos movimientos rivales, como el "Kammerspielfilm", se caracterizaba por lo que Eisenstein denominaba "montaje en cuadro" y por la representación del movimiento en términos de intensidad lumínica.<br />Si con la escuela americana el movimiento se representa como continuidad, como la prolongación de cuadro en cuadro de un mismo movimiento, como ocurre, por ejemplo, con la filmación de una persecución, con la escuela alemana aparece el armado o montaje de un cuadro (falsamente considerado "estático"). Para Vicente Sánchez - Biosca, "uno de los modelos de representación presente (o latente) en el cine de Weimar - el equívocamente denominado "expresionista" - tendía a una fuerte resistencia del encuadre, es decir, a una negativa a formalizar un espacio de referencia que se articulara sobre la diversidad de planos (variación de puntos de vista, ángulos, escala, etc.). Tildar, sin embargo, a dicho modelo de "primitivo" no puede resultar más inexacto. Porque estos planos poseen una minuciosa segmentación de espacio en su interior".<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a3#a3">(3)</a><br />Pero es dentro del cuadro, donde aparece una particular forma de representación del movimiento. La luz es movimiento; es su representación. Es la luz la que difumina los costados del cuadro mismo, la que tiende a borrar los contornos de las figuras,<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a4#a4">(4)</a> abstractizando la representación toda.<br />El cuadro mismo, al perder sus contornos, se abisma hacia lo inorgánico. Es lo que veíamos en "Fausto", de <a href="http://www.academiadelapipa.org.ar/murnau_exiliado.htm" target="_blank">Murnau</a>, uno de los ejemplos que más podemos citar ya que, a nuestro entender, es el paradigma del cine "expresionista", donde la operatoria de la luz percibe o circunscribe un otro espacio, superpuesto al escenográfico, que no encuentra límite en el marco o borde del cuadro. Cuando, en una escena de la película, Fausto es llamado a salvar a una madre yacente y afectada por la peste, surge de las sombras, se acerca al cuerpo de la pobre mujer, que ocupa todo el margen inferior del cuadro, intenta salvarla, fracasa, y se retira nuevamente hacia la oscuridad. Allí, en esa escena, directamente no hay escenografía.<br />Todo el probable espacio escenográfico, toda la puesta en escena, los decorados, la habitación misma donde se juega la escena, parece subsumida por la luz, por la falta de luz, por su carencia. Por una ausencia torna presente la oscuridad. La ausencia de luz decíamos, es ausencia de la Gracia, la gran caída de un espíritu que sólo puede esperar y creer en su destino trágico.<br /><strong>La Ruina Romántica</strong><br />Un espíritu que, si descubre a la naturaleza, es para presentir en ella toda la fuerza de lo inconmensurable, lo inasible, incluso de lo ominoso latente en ella, como ocurre en frente a las ruinas del castillo de "<a href="http://193.96.193.67/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=957" target="_blank">Nosferatu</a>"(Idem, 1922),también de Murnau. Estas fuerza naturales siniestras serán nuevamente evocadas por <a href="http://membres.lycos.fr/gimena/dracfilm/nosfe2.htm" target="_blank">Herzog en su remake</a> de la película. Herzog conserva el espíritu romántico del filme de Murnau, pero profundiza, por la línea del desborde barroco, la sensación de caída y tragicidad de los escenarios naturales. Pero la ruina, no es un símbolo del "expresionismo" pictórico o literario. Por el contrario, es un símbolo y cumple una función precisa dentro del romanticismo.<br />"Lo peculiar y fecundo de la ruina romántica es que de ella emana este doble sentimiento: por un lado una fascinación nostálgica por las construcciones debidas al genio de los hombres; por otro lado, la lúcida certeza, acompañada de una no menor fascinación, ante la potencialidad destructora de la Naturaleza y del Tiempo".<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a5#a5">(5)</a><br />Es esta dimensión infranqueable de la finitud temporal humana reaparecerá en la obra de Herzog, en "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=1113" target="_blank">Fata Morgana</a>" (Idem, 1970), por ejemplo. Las ruinas neo- góticas, típicas del romanticismo alemán, son reemplazadas allí por los desechos industriales abandonados en el desierto del Sahara. La naturaleza, para Herzog, un romántico desesperanzado y profundamente escéptico, no es simplemente "natural". Por el contrario, es símbolo, es expresión del espíritu y de la lucha del hombre con lo inconmensurable y lo sublime. Herzog, como el último gran heredero del "romanticismo - expresionismo" alemán.<br />En Peter Schamoni, otro de los nombres fundamentales del Nuevo Cine Alemán, podemos encontrar preocupaciones similares. La influencia del romanticismo en su obra se hace evidente en su largometraje "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=1496" target="_blank">Caspar David Friedrich</a>" (Idem, 1986), donde la figura del pintor no posee actualización precisa. Es siempre una sombra, un fantasma en fuga.<br /><strong>Friedrich, Murnau, Lang y algunos otros</strong><br />Como ya saben, estas reflexiones teóricas en torno al cine alemán de la década del veinte no pretenden ser un "panorama" ni una indagación histórica pormenorizada de las distintas líneas estéticas que siguió la producción cinematográfica de la época sino que, más bien, sólo intentan trazar una suerte de mapa o diagrama de las distintas relaciones de pensamiento puestas en juego por el "cine de Weimar".<br />Se trata de confeccionar un posible (uno entre tantos) diagrama del cerebro - cine de Weimar. Dentro de dicho cerebro caben regímenes representacionales tan contrapuestos como el cine "abstracto" o el cine social más realista. Pero, hemos llegado al punto de sostener la imposibilidad de seguir denominando "expresionismo" a la corriente más conocida de la época.<br />Por el contrario, los títulos que habitualmente se asocian con dicho movimiento presentan una notablemente heterogénea gama de influencias donde si bien el Romanticismo, su ideario, su orientación estética y espiritual, es preponderante, también están presentes el Barroco e incluso, sobre todo en lo referente al espacio escenográfico, el expresionismo mismo.<br />En todo caso, se trataría de un Neo - expresionismo con características formales propias e intransferibles.<br />Este Neo - expresionismo supo apelar, como una de las claves de su éxito, a toda una serie de recursos que no dejan de ser fascinantes, casi hipnóticos, ya que apelan a ese costado oculto, irracional, que subyace debajo del pensamiento racionalista.<br />Pero, insisto, ambas tendencias, ambas caras del cristal de Weimar, estan claramente actualizadas en el cine mudo. Del costado más despojadamente orgánico - racional de la producción ( "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=1066" target="_blank">Madre Krause</a>", "La Tragedia de una Prostituta", etc.), nos hemos de ocupar la próxima clase. Por ahora, permítanme ahondar un poco más en las influencias románticas del Neo-expresionismo. <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a6#a6">(6)</a><br />Tengo ante mí una reproducción de un cuadro de Friedrich: "Dos hombres contemplando la luna" de 1819. Como es habitual en las obras del más importante pintor alemán del romanticismo, los personajes, vestidos con capas y el típico gorro burgués, el uno, el más joven, apoyando el brazo en el hombro del otro, comtemplan la luna que se cuela detrás de un viejo árbol dando la espalda a los posibles espectadores. La mirada de los hombres se dirige hacia la oscura luz de la luna, esa luz mortesina que es símbolo de la Sehnsucht romántico, una tensión, una caída metafísica hacia el infinito que envuelva al paisaje todo cargándolo de presagios. Pero el árbol, ese árbol semicaído y con sus ramas desnudas e implorantes, que se extienden ocremente hacia el cielo, no deja de recordarme, de remitirme, a una escena muy similar, jugada en un cementerio, otro de los temas preferidos de Friedrich, correspondiente a "Las <a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=952" target="_blank">Tres Luces o La Muerte Cansada</a>" (Der Müde Tod, 1921), tal vez la película mas "expresionista" de Fritz Lang.<br />Sobre la obra de Lang por ahora lo que importa es destacar la clara, nítida influencia de los motivos y formas compositivas de Friedrich y de todo el romanticismo (formas ojivales incluídas) en la fotografía de Erich Nitzschmann y Hermann Saalfrank, responsable de los episodios alemanes de la película.<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a7#a7">(7)</a> Ese árbol, y la naturaleza entera, incluída la Muerte como una potencia de ella, como una prolongación de su intensidad, están lejos de ser indiferentes u "objetivamente" registrables. Jensen, en su notable obra dedicada a Caspar David acota cosas como las siguientes: "A Friedrich le resultaba imposible contemplar la naturaleza con ojos del científico, pese a la minuciosidad con que la contempló. Temía una especie de corrupción científica del arte que así perdería su elemental fuerza profética para el espíritu".<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a8#a8">(8)</a><a name="8"></a> Son las fuerzas oscuras de la naturaleza, en las hierbas arrancadas durante la noche, a la luz de la luna, las que el boticario - brujo, del filme de Lang sabe evocar.<br />Friedrich también esta presente en el cruce de caminos donde Fausto invoca al diablo, o en el cementerio al borde del acantilado donde Lucy espera el retorno de su amado frente al mar en "Nosferatu".<br />Para una evocación del Neo - expresionismo.<br />Intentemos, ahora si, un breve cuadro - resumen de lo expuesto hasta ahora.<br /><strong>Montaje</strong><br />En el llamado "expresionismo" cinematográfico encontramos una clara tendencia hacia el trabajo del montaje dentro del cuadro mismo. Todos los objetos, los elementos, los personajes, etc., están intensivamente trabajados en cuanto a su posición relativa, cual tablero de ajedrez, participando en la constitución de un sentido global que, sin embargo, nunca llega a ser totalmente sintético u orgánico ya que el trabajo del claroscuro, que se extiende sobre la superficie del cuadro, difumina y borra los límites de las figuras e incluso del cuadro mismo.<br />Es este trabajo de la Luz lo que nos da la pauta de que, el "neo - expresionismo", entiende al movimiento en términos de intensidades lumínicas. Más Luz = Más Movimiento, decíamos la clase pasada.<br /><strong>Concepción de la Luz</strong></div><br /><div>La luz nunca es una en el "expresionismo"; por el contrario, siempre presenta una partición, una bipolaridad que supone, a la oscuridad, a la sombra, como un otro costado ominoso siempre presente. En realidad, ya sea que nos refiramos al manejo de la luz en filmes típicamente pensados como expresionistas, "Fausto", "Las Tres Luces", "Sombras", etc., o películas de "Kammerspielfilm", como "Añicos", "San Silvestre" (Sylvester, 1923), ambas de Lupu Pick, o "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=970" target="_blank">El Último Hombre</a>", también de Murnau, e incluso a "Varieté" (idem, 1925) de Dupont, en todos los casos debemos hablar del "claroscuro" como el factor lumínico predominante.<br />El claroscuro es el gris, es el punto medio entre la luz y la oscuridad total. El gris como lo blanco que se confunde con lo negro, que conforman una nueva vida oscilante, ambigua indiscernible, inseparable.<br />En algunos casos (J. Tourneur, O. Welles, etc.), cuando el cine negro americano intenta una aproximación al expresionismo, lo hace por la vía del contraste lumínico, donde el blanco y el negro son dos entidades, dos masas, separadas. Es que el empirismo anglosajón trabaja sobre la base de un fuerte esquema de pensamiento dualista (de allí la importancia del montaje paralelo en la escuela orgánico - activa del cine norteamericano), mientras que la Luz, y por lo tanto el montaje, neo - expresionista alemán, evoca la necesidad de un pensamiento idealista fuertemente monista.<br /><strong>El combate entre la Luz y la Oscuridad</strong> </div><br /><div>El combate entre la luz y la oscuridad es permanente, inagotable en el "expresionismo". Sin posibilidades de obtener un éxito absoluto ya que la luz y la oscuridad, el bien y el mal, envuelve el uno al otro, lo contiene y revitaliza, se potencian continuamente.<br />La palabra mágica, la que da vida a las cosas inanimadas, es arrancada a un Astaroth que surge de las más infinitas sombras para sumergirse nuevamente en ellas una vez pronunciada la expresión. Por un momento, por un instante, estuvo en la luz, pero pronto volvió a su lugar carente de Luz. Describimos una escena de "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=1039" target="_blank">El Golem</a>" (Der Golem, 1920), de Wegener en su segunda versión. Una vez que el muñeco de arcilla,<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a9#a9">(9)</a><a name="9"></a> pura oscuridad, presencia ominosa de los espíritus oscuros, se pone en movimiento nada podrá detenerlo, salvo la extrema pureza, la absoluta blancura, la Luz como totalidad, como 1, de unos niños que, jugando ingenuamente, le quitan el papel donde se halla escrita la maldita palabra.<br />Margarita, condenada a la hoguera por dejar morir a su hijo en una cuna de nieve, de intensa blancura, grita pidiendo ayuda a Fausto. A miles de kilómetros de distancia su voz llega a los oídos de su amado que, presuroso, parte a su rescate. Sin embargo llega tarde. Sólo atinará a morir junto a ella en el fuego que le devuelve la juventud perdida antes de morir.<br />El fuego como luz, como blancura que, sin embargo, ha de consumirse en lo más oscuro, en lo más negro, como resto, como residuo, del carbón. Luz y oscuridad, blanco y negro. Los otros dos colores fundamentales, el azul y el amarillo, según Goethe, solo son distintos grados de intensidad de la polaridad blanco (luz) - negro (ausencia de luz). Todos los colores, incluso el gris, son puntos formales del movimiento de intensidades de la Luz.<br />Justamente lo mismo ocurre en "Las Tres Luces", donde una enamorada tendrá tres oportunidades para recuperar a su novio arrebatado por una muerte cansada de ganar siempre. Cada una de las oportunidades es la historia de una luz, de una vida, que la muchacha deberá conseguir a cambio de la del joven. No lo conseguirá hasta que ofrezca su propia vida. Entonces la muerte se los ha de llevar a los dos. Por fin han de estar juntos, ¿pero, a qué precio?. Son los típicos finales ambiguos del romanticismo expresionista, donde toda superación espiritual, todo sacrificio, supone un encuentro con lo infinito, con lo inevocable: con lo sublime.<br /><strong>Lo Sublime</strong> </div><br /><div>"Lo sublime debe ser siempre grande; lo bello, pequeño. Lo sublime debe ser simple, lo bello puede estar adornado puede estar decorado y adornado...La soledad profunda es sublime...Una gran altura es sublime, tanto como una gran profundidad..." escribe Kant en su "Crítica del Juicio". Para él, lo Sublime es aquello que supera las condiciones de nuestra imaginación. Más que a una sensación o sentimiento, lo Sublime remite a una condición, a una afección: a una afectación del espíritu.<br />En realidad Kant plantea dos dimensiones de lo Sublime: lo matemático y lo dinámico.<br />En lo sublime matemático, la progresión numérica parece extenderse infinitamente, hasta el punto en que nuestra imaginación ya no puede abarcarla, comprenderla. Se trata de un choque, de un encuentro con el propio límite del pensamiento que, al mismo tiempo, impulsa a pensar en lo cuantitativamente desmesurado, en el exceso.<br />Por otra parte, lo sublime dinámico, implica esa intensidad, esa afección que nos sobrecoge cuando apreciamos las fuerzas de la naturaleza, su inconcebible y radicalmente ajena belleza. Es aquello que presentifica nuestra pequeñez, nuestra insuficiencia, nuestra transitoriedad orgánica. Pero lo que nos aniquila, lo que nos ciega con su intensidad, puede también engendrar una nueva fuerza espiritual y ética que se sobreponga a la inorganicidad. Lo sublime se actualiza en el blanco puro, en la llama que consume toda oscuridad, en la polaridad extrema que el neo - expresionismo no cesa de invocar.<br />Superando el claroscuro, extremando su vía, las figuras y las líneas del expresionismo remiten ahora a un inorgánico, a una falta de jerarquía y ordenamiento, que es anterior, previo, a toda vida.<br />O en todo caso es una " vida no orgánica de las cosas, una vida terrible que ignora la sabiduría y los límites del organismo, tal es el primer principio del expresionismo, válido para la naturaleza entera, es decir, para el espíritu inconsciente perdido en las tinieblas, la luz opaca, lumen opacatum"<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a10#a10">(10)</a><a name="10"></a>. Incluso en su primer filme norteamericano, "<a href="http://www.centenarioluiscernuda.org/otras/amanecer.htm" target="_blank">Amanecer</a>" (Sunrise, 1927), esta concepción de una vida pre - orgánica esta presente en Murnau. Allí se trata del pantano, magma indiferenciado de materia todavía no totalmente organizada, de vida con contornos difusos, donde la bruma y la oscuridad impiden distinguir las formas. Se trata de una vida anterior a las formas mismas, las formas reconocibles de lo humano. Es lo Sublime lo que nos enfrenta, una y otra vez, con nuestros propios límites, con nuestra propia finitud. Lo Sublime es también una línea quebrada, no partida, una línea de inflexión de la cual pueden renacer, luego, todas las formas.<br />Líneas Otra característica del "neo - expresionismo" es la operancia, la operatoria, de la línea quebrada. No se trata de la línea que da contorno y definición a las formas, como ocurre en la pintura expresionista, sino la línea que prefigura un espacio escenográfico inorgánico sobre el cual luego se ha de asentar, como una sombra, el espacio lumínico.<br />La línea quebrada, que aparece en films tan diversos como "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=949" target="_blank">El Gabinete del Dr. Caligari</a>" , "Las Manos de Orlac", de Robert Wiene, o en "El Golem", de Paul Wegener, "El Gabinete de las Figuras de Cera" , de Paul Leni, "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=1012" target="_blank">El Castillo Vogeloed</a>", "Fantasmas" , "Nosferatu" de Murnau, "Las Tres Luces", "<a href="http://www3.inter-nationes.de/in/?MIval=fzfass_s.html&in_nr=961" target="_blank">El Anillo de los Nibelungos</a>" de Lang entre tantas otras películas que podríamos citar adquiere la forma precisa de ojiva gótica o neogótica y donde, por lo tanto, alcanza su máxima expresión y referencia al romanticismo.<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a11#a11">(11)</a><a name="11"></a><br />Esta forma neogótica ya no describe un espacio preexistente, anterior a la representación. Por el contrario, crea, genera un espacio geométrico inédito. Pero no se trata de una geometría euclidiana, del círculo o métrico - cartesiana. Es una geometría de la violencia pulsional, del arrebato y la intensidad. Es una geometría de las pulsiones parciales donde podemos vislumbrar el punto de encuentro entre la línea escenográfica y el espacio lumínico: la línea quebrada se prolonga hasta encontrarse con la sombra. La sombra, el claroscuro, se transforma en su prolongación infinita, sublime. Así, la ojiva, en su punto de quiebre, no cesa de remitir al cometido, a la funcionalidad del punto de inflexión del pliegue barroco.<br /><strong>Del Barroco</strong> </div><br /><div>No es casualidad que Lotte Eisner encuentre, como uno de los aspectos sobresalientes del expresionismo, el regusto por la ornamentación sobrecargada. Pero ese es uno de los aspectos más evidentes del barroco. En ese sentido, el cine "expresionista" en su referencia al romanticismo, en su uso sobrecargado del símbolo, en su gusto por el trabajo con el exceso y el límite, en su preocupación por la pura forma y la prolongación infinita de la línea quebrada, no cesa de plegarse una y otra vez sobre si mismo y sobre otras representaciones se constituye en un arte barroco.<br />Para Deleuze, "El barroco no remite a una esencia, sino más bien a una función operatoria, a un rasgo. No cesa de hacer pliegues. No inventa la cosa: ya había todos lo pliegues procedentes de Oriente, los pliegues griegos, romanos, románticos, góticos, clásicos... Pero él curva y recurva los pliegues, los lleva hasta el infinito, pliegue sobre pliegue, pliegue según pliegue. El rasgo del barroco es el pliegue que va hasta el infinito". <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a12#a12">(12)</a><a name="12"></a><br />El rasgo que el "Neo- expresionismo" cinematográfico, en su condición de extensión hacia lo sublime, engendra en la prolongación de la línea (antes bien habría que decir del punto) en la Luz es la condición de posibilidad del plegado infinito. Todo se pliega en el "expresionismo, desde la línea que no cesa de quebrase y hacer ojiva, esto es, insisto, plantear un punto de inflexión, hasta la Luz, que hace de la actualización del movimiento una cuestión de intensidades, y que expresa, en lo alto, a nivel del alma o la metáfora idealista, los pliegues que la materia y los cuerpos expresan en lo bajo.<br />Es Wölffin quien introduce, en la historia del arte, el término "barroco". En su obra "Renacimiento y barroco" establece una tensión entre una tendencia hacia el trabajo con las formas puras, simples del Renacimiento y las rebuscadas y complejas formulaciones del "barroco" (término de origen portugués).<br />El barroco en si mismo no posee definición, se lo reconoce por oposición al formalismo clásico. En ese sentido Deleuze puede afirmar que "el barroco es el arte informal por excelencia", siempre y cuando se entienda que "lo informal no es negación de la forma: platea la forma como plegada, y existiendo únicamente como "paisaje de lo mental", en el alma o en la cabeza, en la altura..." <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase5.htm#a13#a13">(13)</a><a name="13"></a><br />Es así como el "expresionismo" cinematográfico, que entre sus supuestos postulados había rechazado todo psicologismo, alcanza el nivel de lo mental: como extensión de los pliegues de la materia, como prolongación de las formas que expresan un devenir de lo mental que abole el "adentro" y el "afuera" para entronizar un objetivismo puro que, sin embargo, no excluye, sino al contrario lo incluye, a lo siniestro y lo inorgánico. "Fantasmas" (Phantom, 1922) de Murnau, donde un joven, obsesionado con una joven con la que se cruza accidentalmente ve como los edificios de una calle entera se inclinan sobre él, o en "La Calle" (Die Strasse, 1923) de Karl Grune, donde un anuncio de una óptica repentinamente mira al personaje, son ejemplos, entre tantos otros, de esta aspiración de ir de lo material, de la forma de la materia, plegado tras plegado, hacia los pliegues de la mente o del alma.<br />Por otro lado, el prólogo de "Fausto", o el final de "Las Tres Luces" , ¿no expresan acaso también esta condición infinita del pliegue extendiéndolo hacia un espacio virtual, simbólico o metafórico?.<br /></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>Aquello era otra cosa: los filmes realistas del período.</strong><br /></span><strong>Introducción</strong><br />Weimar llega a su fin. Un proyecto de República, de nación, surgido de las cenizas de un país derrotado, de la urgencia del momento y de las presiones exteriores, concluye sus días "democráticamente". Pero Weimar presenta también un tejido social rasgado, lleno de huecos o iancias imposibles de llenar, desde las que sólo puede surgir la angustia como respuesta inundante, anonadante. Weimar implica la ruptura de toda la serie de conexionados o relaciones que constituían un proceso mental predeterminado, lleno de tópicos cristalizados, de rituales y ceremonias que presentan ahora evidentes disrupciones, fracturas. Ahora bien, en términos muy generales, que no pretenden constituir ningún modelo de argumentación sociológica ni nada por el estilo, nos permitimos acotar que la angustia promueve habitualmente dos tipos de reacciones muy distintas: una "hacia adelante" y otra "hacia atrás".Hacia adelante, implica un salto innovador hacia el caos para extraer de él nuevas regularidades, nuevas formas. Esa fue toda la experiencia creadora de Los Años Luz. Efectivamente, ante la falta de certezas, ante la desaparición de los marcos de referencia, los grandes artistas y realizadores reaccionaron con una creatividad antes pocas veces vista, hicieron del hueco y la fragmentación un motor generador de ideas; trataron de volcar en la representación y en el símbolo las pulsiones de vida que una época nueva reclamaba en términos de Imágenes nuevas. Se apuntó a la creación de un universo nuevo de vanguardia, de experimentación. Y esto afectó todos los órdenes de la vida, primordialmente el político (si es que hay algo en la vida que, de antemano, no forme parte de un orden político), aunque en el plano del discurso los tartamudeos no fueran infrecuentes.Pero sabemos, la Historia nos lo cuenta, que el cristal de Weimar, la bipolaridad que representaban sus fuerzas en conflicto, terminó inclinando la balanza hacia "atrás". Es hacia atrás, hacia la angustia transformada en miedo, donde ganaron las historias orgánicas, las grandes sagas históricas. La tensión fue resuelta hacia el lado de la tranquilizante evocación de un pasado tan mítico como irreal.Es que la angustia, la falta de "objeto" genera paranoia. Y la paranoia es el nombre del juego de la política.Si el racismo fue el eje del discurso político nazi, lo fue por ser el hecho tremendamente efectivo de ofrecer, ahora si, un objeto hacia el cual podía dirigirse la angustia paranoica. El judío fue la máquina hitleriana de transformación de la angustia en miedo. El judío, su representación, su imagen, fue lo que permitió obturar el hueco, componer la iancia, reparar el tejido dañado. "Que hubiera sido de nosotros sin el judío", se preguntaba Goebbels, para agregar rápidamente: "hubiéramos tenido que inventarlo".Es cierto que siglos de nacionalismo y racismo latente allanaron el camino. Es cierto que los efectos de Versalles y la inflación galopante hacían sentir sus efectos. Pero ellos, los nazis, supieron como sacar provecho de la angustia paranoide de la masa, por ellos mismos constituida, al entregarles el chivo expiatorio perfecto, el que restituía organicidad narrativa a una linealidad histórica quebrada en Weimar.Es que Weimar remitía a una idea de Pueblo fragmentado (noción que no es necesariamente mala), ellos, los nazis, generaron una película, generaron una representación orgánica del Pueblo.Tal como plantea Syberberg, Hitler fue el filme de Alemania, el filme donde un pueblo que en lo real se hallaba partido, fragmentado, encontró una falsa autorepresentación de "Pueblo" como Uno. Hitler les dio a todos los que estaban ansiosos por calmar el hueco y la angustia, la posibilidad de contar su historia en términos de narración lineal, pletórica de enlaces lógico - causales. El producto final de la máquina propagandística nazi fue la creación de una magnífica superproducción de Imagen - acción, con millones y millones de extras y decorados. Suntuosos, románticos y en ocasiones dantescos decorados naturales y artificiales donde se ofrece una Situación Determinada y se indican las Acciones Determinadas ("solución final" incluida) tendientes a resolverla. El cine y su potencia de ensoñación no fueron inocentes, no fue ajeno Auschwitz, no fue ajeno a la pulsión de muerte. Obviamente, para certificar la eficacia de la maquina - cine, del autómata hitleriano, no hace falta esperar de todos, de la masa, el convencimiento absoluto. A la propaganda no le interesa convencer profundamente, ganarse el convencimiento mental consciente. Le basta con que se haga, que se actúe, lo que ella marca, señala. Es la eficacia de los medios, el cine incluido, lo que vino a presentificarse en el despliegue ideológico nazi. La eficacia de los medios para producir marcas en lo real. Marcas orientativas, enlaces lógico - causales naturalizados que esconden siniestramente su marca de origen, su producción ideológica tendenciosamente orientada.</div><br /><div><br /><strong>Weimar también tuvo su Pueblo</strong></div><br /><div>En este sucinto mapa que hemos intentado trazar, el cine de la República de Weimar, donde se ha ido desde lo más cristalino de la representación, el cine "abstracto" y experimental de Ruttmann, Fischinger y Richter, hasta las formas más "realistas", en los casos de Jutzi, Rahn y May, e incluso Pabst.No se trata de realizadores que permanecen encasillados en un solo modo de producción. Por el contrario, la obra cinematográfica de la época demuestra la absoluta fluidez con que los autores se manejaban en un registro u otro.Pero, si nos permitimos jugar con todo esto por un momento y tomamos al cine abstracto como aquella organización representacional que más tiende a trabajar con la Imagen en si misma, con la Imagen (producto mental esencialmente) en tanto costado virtual, imaginario, no actual, de una Representación que es, por definición, mucho más orgánica, "real" y actual, podemos obtener un pequeño diagrama como el siguiente donde ubicar los estilos o movimientos que hemos analizado:</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzp7Yr4Rxbu-FdNbh81wjKke7cSKuelg0DsVM46vd3osGRgckssvaCSbC-Xch1gXQw-XmaIjbbN9fnmFOYR5NRgUZCwjJbFlX_67JM1BvwhLnO-AFy7DqMzNiJCr71mBLWBpwybbS9bLE/s1600-h/Sin+título3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070744867078132466" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 81px" height="97" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzp7Yr4Rxbu-FdNbh81wjKke7cSKuelg0DsVM46vd3osGRgckssvaCSbC-Xch1gXQw-XmaIjbbN9fnmFOYR5NRgUZCwjJbFlX_67JM1BvwhLnO-AFy7DqMzNiJCr71mBLWBpwybbS9bLE/s320/Sin+t%C3%ADtulo3.jpg" width="320" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>Siempre se trata de tendencias o fluctuaciones, no de posiciones férreas y estancamiento ya que siempre, todos los estilos o formas de organización de la Imagen, están profundamente conectados entre sí, forman parte del mismo cristal.De éste diagrama sólo nos falta analizar lo que, muy genéricamente, hemos consignado como cine social.<br />Primero están los filmes que fueron considerados "tragedias de la calle" donde el peso de los símbolos aún se hace sentir en toda su intensidad. Mucho menos sobrecargados pero aún conservando en parte el valor metafórico que la luz y la oscuridad representaban para el filme "expresionista", películas como "La escalera de Servicio" (Hintertreppe, 1921) de Paul Leni y Leopold Jessner, presentaban ya un desplazamiento del juego lumínico hacia otros tópicos.Efectivamente, si el en "expresionismo", el juego entre la luz y la oscuridad representaba las infinitas posibilidades del alma para ascender hacia lo sublime o de degradarse en la más absoluta falta de luz espiritual, la oscuridad como Cero Absoluto, aquí, la luz se traslada, tímidamente, hacia el juego entre "los de arriba y los de abajo", a una lucha, que no es de clases, entre los pobres y los ricos.Cargada aún de una fatalismo metafísico, la luz de los filmes "de la calle", muestran ahora el conflicto lumínico haciéndolo corresponder con la lucha entre la burguesía y el proletariado desclasado; la calle en si misma es, dentro del cine de Weimar, una frontera imprecisa, un límite lábil donde se confunden lo público y lo privado, lo objetivo con lo subjetivo. La calle de los años Luz, pierde sus bordes y límites y es más una sensación espiritual que una realidad tangible y concreta."La Calle" (Die Straße, 1923) de Karl Grune es claro ejemplo de ello pero también, de otro elemento adicional que se esconde en la calle: la pulsión, el deseo sexual.Efectivamente, la película de Grune muestra como un burgués, que al principio de la película se halla cómodamente sentado en el sillón de su sala, plenamente iluminada, se verá rápidamente atraído por el "abismo", por la oscuridad de una prostituta, de una "callejera". Lógicamente, al final de la película, el orden burgués será restaurado y el personaje habrá comprendido los riesgos, incluida la locura, de entregarse a su propio deseo.Más interesante aún es "La Tragedia de una Prostituta" (Dirnentragodie, 1927) de Bruno Rahn. Allí, salvo en los momentos en que el melodrama cobra cuerpo, sobre todo en la figura de Asta Nielsen, la calle es el lugar del fragmento, de la inorganicidad: "Hace tiempo que esta calle ha devorado las almas; por lo tanto es imposible evocarla por medio de las caras y los cuerpos, por ello es por lo que, a lo largo de metros y metros de película, Rahn hará captar sobre las aceras y los peldaños sucios de una escalera esos movimientos de piernas y pies, cuyo anonimato cobra una elocuencia contundente"<a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a1">(1)</a><a name="1"></a> . En otros términos, en estos filmes, la calle remite siempre, o casi siempre, a pulsiones parciales, aquellas que presentifican la latencia siniestra de la Pulsión de Muerte.Es en filmes como "Madre Krause" (Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück, 1927) de Phil Jutzi, donde la política y lo social intentan escaparse de lo pulsional - individual. En el filme de Jutzi, la marcada influencia de Pudovkin y el cine realista soviético no es obstáculo para el despliegue de la tragedia y el melodrama típicamente alemán. Obviamente, la dimensión metafórica o simbólica queda aquí relegada a un segundo plano para dar lugar al proceso de toma de conciencia de Max un joven trabajador del asfalto, de la calle aun pantano, que se enamora de Erna, la joven hija de Madre Krause.Aquí si, dentro de las formulaciones internas de la estética de los filmes sociales y de la calle, podemos encontrar, si se quiere, un retomar de la impronta del montaje como continuidad, como construcción de una totalidad a partir de elementos discretos. Se trata de la idea de montaje como la pared que se construye "ladrillo tras ladrillo", como diría Eisenstein. Sin embargo, incluso en este caso, en el caso de la influencia de Pudovkin primero y de Vertov después, la idea de montaje en cuadro nunca llega a ser totalmente abandonada. Tengan en cuenta que, en películas como "Así es la Vida" (So ist das Leben, 1929) de Karl Junghans, llegaron a importarse actrices soviéticas, como Vera Baranovskaia, la extraordinaria intérprete de "La Madre" (Mat, 1926) <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a2">(2)</a><a name="2"></a>.Pudovkin, Eisenstein y Dovjenko eran los nombres más conocidos de un cine soviético que llegó a estar prontamente de moda en la Alemania de aquellos años. Muchos fueron los que se precipitaron al intento de imitación puntual del estilo soviético pero, como incluso llegó a reconocerlo Walter Ruttmann, su influencia general fue más que notoria entre los artistas vanguardistas. Después de "El Acorazado Potemkin", (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925), decía Ruttmann, el cine de vanguardia alemán cambia, se modifica para otorgar al montaje un lugar preponderante en la expresión del movimiento. Películas como "Berlín, Sinfonía de una gran ciudad" (ya comentada en la clase 3) y "Gente en Domingo" (Menschen am Sonntag, 1929) de Robert Siodmak y Edgar G. Ulmer, se concentran en obtener una conciencia gaseosa de la gente, y por consecuencia del Pueblo, en un estado ya de atomización, de volatilización molar. No se trata del cuerpo orgánico del Pueblo, del gran héroe que metafóricamente absorbe sobre sí toda la carga de la germanidad. No es el soldado que encuentra "dulce morir por la Patria" del nazismo y otros movimientos de derecha. Es la gente anónima, con un rostro que se confunde con la multitud, que se hace masa, el que se virtualiza en ambas películas (influenciadas, sobre todo la segunda, por Dziga Vertov). De hecho, los títulos iniciales de "Gente en Domingo", un documental que "sólo" se concentra en registra el descanso dominical de la gente de Berlín, son significativos a ese respecto: "Cinco personas juegan en este filme el mismo papel que tienen en la vida: el conductor de taxi, la vendedora de zapatos, la vendedora de discos gramofónicos, el representante de vinos y la maniquí. Después del rodaje retornaron nuevamente a la masa anónima de la que salieron. Partículas minúsculas de una gran ciudad separadas del grandioso decorado urbano. Uds. las reconocerán: son personas sencillas". <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a3">(3)</a><a name="3"></a><br /><strong>El Símbolo se vuelve Pulsión</strong><br />El psicoanálisis también, no podía ser de otro modo, dejó su marca en el cine de Weimar. La disciplina creada por Sigmund Freud ponía de relieve toda una serie de temáticas y cuestiones que no podían menos que llamar la atención a esos indagadores de lo siniestro que eran los realizadores del neo - expresionismo y el "Kammerspielfilm". De hecho en "Añicos" de Lupu Pick se puede señalar la importancia de lo pasional en el desarrollo del melodrama del guardabarreras. Pero también el énfasis en resaltar como la presencia del Símbolo, de los diversos símbolos que aparecían en la película, el espantapájaros, las botas, etc., de alguna manera equiparaba la atmósfera realista del filme de Pick con las grandes ensoñaciones metafóricas del "expresionismo". Aún faltaba una forma de representación que, sin desprenderse totalmente del peso e importancia del símbolo, característicos del cine alemán de la época, propugnara una representación más directa y acabada de lo pulsional en el cine.De representar la pulsión se trata en el cine de Pabst. Veamos cómo:Con el cine de Georg Wilhelm Pabst la Imagen- pulsión adquiere una nueva categoría. No se trata simplemente de un cine "psicologista", como a veces se piensa equivocadamente. La influencia del psicoanálisis en la obra de Pabst orienta la cosa en otra dirección. El centro de la pregunta psicoanalítica es el Deseo y la Pulsión y su articulación significante en términos de las formaciones del inconsciente: síntoma, sueño, lapsus y el chiste. Sobre todas estas cuestiones trataba ya "Misterios de un Alma" (Geheimnisse einer Seele, 1926) película sobre la que ya hemos hablado en el seminario anterior <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a4">(4)</a> <a name="4"></a>. Como muchos seguramente recordarán, se trata del primer intento por llevar al cine las teorías psicoanalíticas de Sigmund Freud. Si bien la trama narrativa aparenta ser simple y lineal, no consideramos que la película de Pabst haga un "empleo superficial del psicoanálisis (...) aun a despecho de sus grandes dotes visuales" tal como sostiene Lotte Eisner <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a5">(5)</a><a name="5"></a> . "Misterios..." esconde más de lo que dice. En efecto si bien la compulsión (hacia el asesinato de su mujer) que sufre su atribulado protagonista parece curada, casi milagrosamente, al final de la película gracias a la oportuna intervención de un analista, el cierre no es totalmente orgánico. Quedan muchos "restos diurnos" sin aclarar, muchos síntomas latentes que pueden reaparecer en cualquier momento. Esto es notable en la última escena del filme donde la aparente calma de un lago, una casa de campo, una bella mujer y un hijo esperando, no nos tranquilizan demasiado.Pero el filme donde más se ha de acercar Pabst a la Imagen- pulsión directa es, sin lugar a dudas, "Lulú o la Caja de Pandora" (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1928).Junto con "Tres Páginas de un Diario" (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929), "Lulú..." , representa la madurez absoluta del filme dramático mudo alemán.Lulú, su rostro, el rostro aniñado y sensual de Louise Brooks, no remite aquí tanto a lo afectivo como al montante de deseo que sólo un fetiche puede absorber sobre si. Lulú como fetiche. Como el fetiche que circula entre un circunspecto juez, su hijo, una amante lesbiana que apenas puede contenerse, un padre de mirada incestuosa. Todos entrarán en un gran declive. Las pulsiones parciales que cada uno de ellos dirigen hacia la Lulú - fetiche sólo pueden conjugarse en pulsión de muerte.Es que, a la Imagen- pulsión, le corresponden dos signos profundamente ligados entre si: el síntoma y el fetiche.El síntoma (recordemos, una de las formas en que el deseo inconsciente se actualiza indirectamente), denota la presencia, marca la existencia de un Mundo Originario distinto, separado, del Medio Derivado, medio de la cultura, de la legalidad social, etc.Los mundo originarios, en el cine Clásico, remiten a geografías específicas, claramente delimitas: el desierto, la selva, el pantano, etc., aunque el Mundo originario también puede actualizarse dentro de cualquier Medio Derivado que pueda ahora contener a las pulsiones parciales desencadenadas por personajes sujetos de su propio deseo. En el caso de "Lulú..." se trata de un barco enclavado en medio de la neblina. Un barco donde el vicio, el juego y la prostitución, circulan libremente. A ese lugar llega el fetiche- Lulú. En "La Calle sin Alegría" ( Die freudlose Gasse, 1925), el Mundo Originario es una carnicería, un burdel en "Tres Páginas...", etc.El fetiche es, por lo general, un objeto (parcial) circulante en el Medio Derivado que ha sido arrancado de él para ser convertido, ser utilizado, para pasar a poseer otro valor, en el Mundo Originario. En realidad es Eric von Stroheim el gran autor de la Imagen- pulsión dentro del cine mudo. Sus fetiches son absolutamente, radicalmente, paradigmáticos: el dinero en "Codicia" ( Greed, 1925), un zapato en "La Viuda Alegre" (The Merry Widow, 1927) o la comida en "La Reina Kelly" (Queen Kelly, 1933).Pero sabemos, y esto no es un dato menor, que la posibilidad y la desgracia de la obra de Stroheim estuvieron dadas por los Estados Unidos.Austriaco de nacimiento, si bien cultivó la imagen clásica de director alemán "maldito", con cabeza rapada y monóculo incluido, Stroheim nunca permaneció demasiado ligado al universo cultural alemán y toda su simbología e idealismo. Esto le permitió desarrollar una obra singular, donde la pulsión aparece representada libremente, sin las ataduras que representarían su anexión al símbolo y la admonición moral. Sin embargo, también sabemos de la forma en que sus películas fueron cercenadas, destrozadas por una censura tan intolerante como idiota. Sabemos de la miopía de los productores, que impidió el desarrollo de una de las obras más interesantes de la historia del cine.Después de Stroheim, a caballo entre el cine Clásico y el Cine Moderno, esta el más grande director de Imagen- pulsión de todos: Luis Buñuel. En él, el refinamiento representacional de las fuerzas pulsionales alcanza su máximo despliegue hasta cubrir, sobre todo en sus últimas películas, el universo entero. "Ese Oscuro Objeto de Deseo" (Cet obscur objet du désir, 1977) muestra a un Fernando Rey totalmente obsesionado por una mujer que es dos. Dulce y cándida por un lado, sensual, calculadora e indiferente por el otro, esta doble mujer (en el filme el personaje femenino es interpretado por dos actrices que se alternan en la actuación: Angela Molina y Carole Bouquet) se constituye en el verdadero objeto fetiche de Rey. Es esta una de las facultades de la histeria: la capacidad de convertirse ella misma, su cuerpo, su mirada, su pose, en fetiche para la mirada deseante del otro. Esto es lo que hace Lulú a lo largo de toda la película de Pabst (y él era muy consciente de la dimensión psicoanalítica que comportaba tal composición del personaje), conducirse como el fetiche de la mira de un juez, de su hijo, de una amante lesbiana, incluso de su propio padre. A todos arrastrará a la ruina, al gran declive, a la pulsión de muerte.El refinamiento de la puesta en escena, la marcación actoral ajustada, que ya evita la sobreactuación típica del modelo teatral transportado al cine, no es obstáculo para que el orden de lo siniestro reaparezca en "Lulú..." como ese universo pulsional latente, nunca totalmente explicitado que, cuando emerge, conduce a la muerte. Al final de la película cuando, con los personajes centrales ya en Londres, aparece repentinamente la figura de Jack el Destripador (personaje que ya había sido representado en "El Gabinete de las Figuras de Cera" de Paul Leni) la pulsión de muerte alcanza su máxima expresión. Sujeto de su propio deseo, sin embargo Jack intenta redimirse, capturado por la figura de Lulú, por su mirada. Pero su compulsión por matar es más fuerte que él. Ve el brillo del filo de un cuchillo que, en su movimiento, actualiza el crescendo de la tensión, de su tensión, pulsional. La pulsión, en este caso, tiene que ver con eso, con cortar, con arrancar, con desarticular. Con lo animal, concebido como lo "sin restricciones" al orden del deseo, con la rapiña, con esa compulsión hacia la muerte que el personaje de Peter Lore en "M" no cesará de recordar (nos).Pero Pabst no es Buñuel. Todavía esta demasiado cargado de la retórica "expresionista" como para concebir una representación verdaderamente directa de la pulsión en el cine sin matizarla, sin hacerla mediar por luces y sombras. Así, "Lulú..." y "Tres Páginas...", películas habitualmente consideradas como dos de las representantes más importantes del filme psicológico alemán de la época, también operan sobre la sublimación de lo pulsional hacia el combate entre la luz y la oscuridad. Obviamente de un modo mucho más "realista" que en "Fausto", por ejemplo, la lucha contra la pulsión, devenida Mal, contra el deseo oscuro, se transforma en lucha por la virtud recobrada, por la Luz que espera al hijo del juez cuando, al final de la película, se va detrás de una comitiva del Ejército de Salvación.<br /><strong>Fritz Lang y el final de Los Años Luz</strong><br />Es con Fritz Lang donde el claroscuro alcanza su grado máximo de refinamiento y sutileza. Son las pequeñas oscilaciones de un gris "racional" las que ahora reemplazan el combate perpetuo de la Luz con la Oscuridad.Ya no hay en él esa aspiración metafísica idealista que inspiraba a Murnau, a Wegener, a Robinson y otros. Si bien este proceso de racionalización de las representaciones es progresivo y gradual, sólo en "La Muerte Cansada" ( y en el episodio alemán) y en "El Anillo de los Nibelungos" parece Lang manejar parámetros estéticos similares a los de otros realizadores "expresionistas". Mucho más jugada hacia la Imagen- acción, ya sea en su "gran forma" como en la "pequeña forma", el centro aparente, actual, de la obra de Lang parece ser la acción efectivamente realizada sobre un medio geográfico determinado y no las metáforas simbólico - románticas. Efectivamente, ya el serial "Die Spinnen" (Der goldene See, 1919, y Das Brillantenschiff, 1920) muestra un amplio sucederse de lugares, situaciones, tesoros escondidos y duelos que habrán de encontrar su punto de perfeccionamiento en "Dr. Mabuse" (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, parte 1: "Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler - ein Bild der Zeit". Parte 2: "Inferno - Menschen der Zeit") en términos del aseguramiento del desarrollo narrativo en función del despliegue de una lógica causal que maneja ya perfectamente la mirada del espectador (el Saber, el Ver y el Creer que éste maneja).Sin embargo, cuando hablamos de Imagen- acción en el caso langniano, y de casi todo el cine alemán de la época, hay que tener siempre presente que dicho régimen de la Imagen nunca obtuvo el mismo nivel de cierre y clausura que obtendría dentro del Montaje orgánico - Activo de la escuela americana.A pesar de la linealidad narrativa que toda la serie Mabuse, e incluso del grado de perfeccionamiento al que dicha linealidad va a llegar en el período sonoro, en el Lang "alemán" la proliferación de elementos, signos y símbolos, es tan grande que conspira grandemente contra la organicidad total del filme.En efecto, si la acción y la aventura son el centro actual de la obra de Lang, el automatismo mental, sus complejas y nunca del todo actualizadas relaciones, se constituyen en su otro centro. Un centro virtual, nunca del todo aclarado. La imagen- acción, de este modo, se trasforma casi en la excusa para la acumulación de nuevos procesos, de nuevos conexionados de relaciones mentales entre indicios nunca del todo ciertos.No es casualidad, entonces, que la representación del autómata haya sido también para él un motivo de preocupación. Mabuse hipnotiza a sus víctimas; con sus profundos e inescrutables ojos, las convierte en autómatas que ahora sólo podrán responder a su deseo. El deseo del amo.Es ese mismo deseo, aquí devenido en deseo de una máquina, el que vuelve mucho más erótico al duplicado que al original en "Metrópolis" (Ídem, 1926), tal vez la mayor producción de la U.F.A. en esos años.Efectivamente, sabemos que en esa película aparece la primera representación de un robot en la historia del cine. Un robot que ha sido confeccionado para plagiar a la joven "revolucionaria" que quiere mostrar, cristianamente, a los chicos "de abajo" como son los jardines de los "de arriba". Lo interesante es que los movimientos de la máquina son mucho más sensuales y eróticos que los del original de carne y hueso. Es como sí, desplazado el centro de la Mirada, la máquina pudiera permitirse aquello que la mujer, en tanto objeto de deseo no debe permitirse. Como no se lo permite "La Mujer en la Luna" (Frau im Mond, 1929), intento altamente racionalista por mostrar las teorías de Werner von Braun, el padre de la cohetería alemana, quién diseñaría las bombas V1 y V2. Allí, en la luna racionalista, abandonadas las pesadas ataduras románticas del claroscuro, todo es Luz. Es la confianza ciega en la luz que la ciencia y la tecnología arrojarán, en un siempre esperado mañana, sobre las oscuridades del alma y la sinrazón. La historia demostraría lo contrario.Pero, volvamos a "Metrópolis": la masa anónima de trabajadores, con su gris indiferencia uniformada, camina automáticamente, carentes de lama y conciencia, a ejercer sus maquinales trabajos hasta que la catástrofe los saque de su letargo.En Lang, la masa ya no remite a la unidad de representación consciente del Pueblo. Por el contrario, y tal vez por vez primera, la masa es un inconsciente colectivo, pulsional y violento. La cámara cinematográfica ocupa así, ahora más que nunca, el lugar de una conciencia, la cámara es generadora de conciencia cinematográfica. Si Lang no cesa de evocar figuras de autómatas, que van desde el robot individual hasta la masa devenida autómata social, lo hace con la condición de poder restituir en algún lugar, en algún punto, "en lo alto", una conciencia y certeza de verdad.Esto se ve también perfectamente en "Furia" (Fury, 1937), primer filme norteamericano de Lang <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a6">(6)</a><a name="6"></a>. En la escena en que la masa enardecida se dirige a linchar a un inocente (Spencer Tracy) la cámara ocupa un lugar ligeramente elevado en relación al conjunto. Es una mirada subjetiva no de un personaje destacado sino de la masa como todo, como organicidad autómata, como un sin-conciencia colectivo. Pero después, en el justo momento en que los principales instigadores del linchamiento son llevados a juicio, es una cámara, el registro objetivo que unos periodistas gráficos obtuvieron del momento de los incidentes, la que aporta la certeza, la Verdad incontestable. Cámara - Conciencia - Representación - Verdad forman así una misma línea, poseen un mismo valor de trascendencia posible.Sin embargo, en Lang, el autómata también adquiere otras características. El autómata - compulsivo de "M" (Ídem, 1931) muestra la máxima expresión intensiva en términos pulsionales. Se trata de un asesino en serie, que mata por no poder contener una extraña pulsión que no puede dominar sino que, por el contrario, lo domina a él transformándolo en autómata de sus propios impulsos. El espacio de "M", y en casi todo Lang, no cesa de plegarse sobre si mismo (característica barroca, tal como vimos en la clase pasada). Es un espacio laberíntico <a href="http://www.goethe.de/ins/ar/pro/filmseminar/htm/semin2/clase6.htm#a7">(7)</a><a name="7"></a> que expresa, más que una realidad física concreta, los complejos andariveles por los que se deslizan los procesos mentales del asesino serial. Y después de "M" viene "El Testamento del Dr. Mabuse" (Das Testament des Doktor Mabuse, 1932/33), el último gran filme de Los Años Luz.No nos olvidamos, por supuesto, de las grandes obras maestras que marcaron el ingreso de la cinematografía alemana al período sonoro ( como "El Ángel Azul", de Joseph von Stemberg, "Kuhle Wampe" de Slatan Dudow y Bertolt Brecht, que sería uno de los últimos exponentes del cine propagandístico comunista antes de la imposición de la férrea censura nazi, "Carbón" (Kameradschaft) de Pabst, y tantas otras). Pero hemos elegido a "El Testamento..." como cierre de este seminario por dos razones: la primera, de tipo meramente histórico, debido a que fue el filme prohibido de Lang en Alemania, por considerar los nazis ya en el poder que los métodos que aplicaba la banda de ladrones y falsificadores que presenta la película, para sembrar el terror y el caos en el país, eran muy similares a los empleados por sus propias escuadras. Después de esa película a Lang se le ofrece, sin lugar a dudas debido al lugar que ocupaba dentro del partido su esposa, Thea von Harbou, la presidencia de la UFA. Cargo del que desiste por motivos hoy puestos en duda, decidido a emigrar.Por otro lado, "El Testamento..." muestra, tal vez como ningún otro filme del período, la ambivalencia, la dialéctica hegeliana del amo y del esclavo, la dialéctica existente entre el autómata y el automatizador. En efecto, "El Testamento...", su final, nos deja con la duda de saber si el director del manicomio ha caído bajo el influjo hipnótico de un Mabuse ya muerto o si, por el contrario, ha sido su propio deseo el que ha engendrado el delirio que dio vida a los procesos mentales de Mabuse. O el deseo de un Otro por dominar y controlar produce un autómata o el deseo por "dejarse ir", por sucumbir ante el sutil encanto de ya no poseer conciencia, interrogación propia, por el contrario ha promovido el nuevo estatuto del autómata. Ambas cuestiones están siempre en juego, en circunstancias y momentos históricos determinados. En cualquier caso lo que queda claro, lo que el cine pone en claro, es que todo cristal posee al menos dos caras y que la una no agota la otra. Lo actual encubre a lo virtual, la vigilia prolonga el sueño, lo real sólo es la parte organizada de lo imaginario, los Años Luz suelen precipitar en los Años Oscuros. </div><div> </div><div>Texto extraido del Seminario sobre Cine Alemán organizado por el Instituto Goethe de Buenos Aires dictado por Ricardo Parodi</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div>marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-73173349833502316442007-05-08T06:43:00.000-07:002007-05-08T06:45:42.283-07:00Bibliografía - Documental - 2007Bibliografía<br />- Barnouw, Eric, El documental, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1996. (En la biblioteca de coordinación)<br />- Bazin, André, ¿Qué es el cine?, Madrid, Rialp, 1999. (En la biblioteca de coordinación)<br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/stella-bruzzi-new-documentary.html">- Bruzzi, Stella, New Documentary: a critical introduction, Londres, Routledge, 2000.</a><br /><a name="TOPE"></a><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/el-coeficiente-zapruder.html">- Chanan, Michael, “El Coeficiente Zapruder”, en FILMWAVES nº4 (Traducción de G. De Carli)</a><br />- Ferro, Marc, Historia contemporánea y cine, Barcelona, Ariel, 1995.<br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/cun-real-es-la-realidad-en-los-filmes.html">- Godmilow, Jill and Shapiro, Ann-Louise "How Real is the Reality in Documentary </a><br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/cun-real-es-la-realidad-en-los-filmes.html">Film?, en, History and Theory v36, n4 (Dec, 1997) (Trad. M. Amieva)</a><br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/postulados-del-documental.html">- Grierson, John, Postulados Del Documental, (selección de texto realizada por el Taller de Expresión 2, de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA) </a><br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/el-guion-en-el-cine-documental.html">- Guzmán, Patricio, El guión en el cine documental,</a> <a href="http://catedras.fsoc.uba.ar/decarli/textos/Ferro.htm" target="_parent"></a> <br />- Farocki, Harun, Crítica de la Mirada, Buenos Aires, Altamira, 2003.<br /><a href="http://www.cinesinorillas.com.ar/elextranjero/kaes.htm">- Kaes, Antón, From Hitler to Heimat. The return of History as Film, Harvard University Press, 1992. (Epílogo, trad. de M. Amieva)</a><br />- la Ferla, Jorge, (comp.) De la Pantalla al Arte Transgénico, Buenos Aires, Libros de Rojas, 2000.<br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/la-representacin-de-la-realidad-c2-p1.html">- Nichols, Bill, La representación de la Realidad, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1997.</a><br />- Renov, Michael. (Ed), Theorizing Documentary. New York, Routledge, 1993.<br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/imgenes-marcadas-fuego-representacin-y.html">- Sánchez Biosca, Vicente, “Imágenes marcadas a fuego. Representación y memoria de la Shoah”, en Revista Brasileira de Historia, Sao Paulo, v. 21 n° 42, 2001.</a><br />- Torreiro, Casimito, y Josetxo Cerdán, Documental y vanguardia, Madrid, Cátedra, 2005. (En la biblioteca de coordinación)<br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/qu-queremos-decir-con-que.html">- Vaughan, Dai, “¿Qué Queremos Decir Con “Que”?” en: For Documentary: 12 essays, Londres 1999. (Traducción G.De Carli) </a><br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/la-importancia-del-cine-no-actuado.html">- Vertov, Dziga Escritos y Diarios de Trabajo, Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 1977.</a><br /><a href="http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2007/05/las-reglas-del-juego-documental.html">- Wolf, Sergio, “Las reglas del juego (documental)”, en El Amante el 11/08/2002.</a><br />- Yoel, Gerardo (comp.), Pensar el cine. Imagen, ética y filosofía, Buenos Aires, Manantial, 2004.<br /><br /> Los vínculos remiten a la página en la que se encuentra el artículo citado. Consultar por el resto de la bibliografía.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-1528142897732508132007-05-08T06:35:00.000-07:002007-05-08T06:37:18.802-07:00Imágenes marcadas a fuego. Representación y memoria de la Shoah<a name="titulo"></a>Imágenes marcadas a fuego. Representación y memoria de la Shoah<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nota">*</a><br /><br />Vicente Sánchez Biosca Universidade de Valência<br /><br /><br />RESUMO Tomando como objeto de análise o documentário Shoah, este artigo estabelece relações entre imagem, representações, história e memória. Palavras-chave: Shoah; cinema; memória.<br /><br />ABSTRACT This article analyses the documentary Shoah, dealing with the relations between images/representation and history/memory. Keywords: Shoah; cinema; memory.<br /><br /><br />El primer encuentro con el inventario fotográfico del horror extremo es una suerte de revelación, la revelación prototípicamente moderna: una epifania negativa. Para mí, fueron las fotografias de Bergen-Belsen y Dachau que encontré por casualidad en una librería de Santa Mónica en julio de 1945. Nada de lo que he visto – en fotografias o en la vida real – me afectó jamás de un modo tan agudo, profundo, instantáneo. En verdad, creo posible dividir mi vida en dos partes, antes de ver esas fotografias (yo tenía doce años) y después, aunque transcurrió mucho tiempo antes que comprendiera cabalmente de qué se trataba. ¿Qué se ganaba con verlas? Eran meras fotografias, y de un acontecimiento del que yo apenas tenía noticias y de ninguna manera podia remediar. Cuando miré esas fotografias, algo cedió. Se había alcanzado algún límite, y no solo el del horror: me senti irrevocablemente afligida, herida, pero parte de mis sentimientos empezaron a atiesarse; algo murió; <a name="tx01"></a>algo llora todavia.<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt01">1</a><br />Con su habitual fuerza y agudeza, Susan Sontag apuntaba con estas palabras, y en el corazón de su propia experiencia, los avatares, los límites, los riesgos y el porvenir de lo que se dio en llamar una 'pedagogia del horror'. Nuestros espíritus y nuestros ojos están, en plena era televisiva, demasiado acostumbrados a un consumo diario del horror. Quizá por ello nos resulte trabajoso operar un salto atrás en la conciencia y situarnos en el contexto de lo visible cincuenta anõs atrás, tal vez más trabajoso incluso que hacerlo a períodos más alejados en el tiempo, como por ejemplo a mediados del siglo XIX. Recordemos, pues, algunos hechos<br />El 12 de abril de 1945, todavia la rendición de Alemania no se habia producido. Sin embargo, tres notables artífices del Ejército norteamericano – George Patton, Omar Bradley y Dwight Eisenhower – visitan el campo de Ohrdruf, dependiente de Buchenwald. Sus ojos se estrellan contra un espectáculo que rebasa a todas luces una perspectiva militar y se resiste a entrar en los parámetros de lo hasta entonces concebido como un comportamiento de guerra. Este hecho y la decisión inmediata que toman dichos jerarcas de la Armada norteamericana constituyen un hito en la historia del encuentro entre los medios de comunicación y las Fuerzas Armadas. Y lo es porque la voluntad explícita de los gobiernos y, en particular, de las autoridades militares fue incidir en la vida civil, en la reeducación de los culpables y los cómplices, en el conocimiento de los testigos y de los que decián no saber. En efecto, los Aliados, especialmente los norteamericanos, atribuyeron dos funciones a la imagen indigesta de cuanto se veía en los campos: la muestra de los horrores como instrumento pedagógico y como forma de acusación. Testimonio y educación: pieza de convicción para un processo jurídico, mas igualmente confianza en que el sufrimiento de ojo ante lo inhumano debía ser garantía para evitar toda repetición. Si la pregunta que se hacían los soldados norteamericanos era "Why We Fight?," la respuesta – Eisenhower dixit – estaba en estas imágenes y la brindaban los reporteros y documentalistas. Ante lo increible, lo innombrable, lo inefable, el ejército imponía un imperativo ético: ver a manos llenas.<br />Ahora bien, la pedagogia del horror implicaba también una educación de los culpables. ¿Como era posible que los alemanes no supieran? Los SS, mas también los apacibles ciudadanos de las problaciones cercanas (Weimar, por ejemplo, se hallaba junto a Buchenwald) fueron conducidos en una suerte de procesión punitiva o siniestro circuito turísitico a los lugares en que se exhibía un ceremonial del horror: cabezas reducidas, pieles humanas utilizadas como impíos objetos de decoración, órganos humanso conservados en formol. Una inmediata sintonia se produjo entre estas tentativas y la voluntad de muchos fotógrafos o cineastas independientes, como George Rodgers, Sydney Berstein o Lee Miller, pues éstos se esforzaron en planificar sus encuadres en profundidad de campo, procurando en todo caso mostrar sin corte alguno los visitantes y los cadáveres amontonados, con el fin de que sirviera de testimonio inequivoco. Ciertamenente, todo parecia increíble. Precisamente por ello era necesario levantar acta de su existencia para que nadie pudiera jamás negar su realidad. Levantar acta de de lo inverosímil exigía, lo sabían, una puesta en escena de la desnudez y una orientación hacia el trauma visual.<br />A pesar de todo, las imágenes captadas, en cámara fotográfica o cinematográfica, no eran transparentes, no daban cuenta de los mismos hechos que los supervivientes calificaban de inefables. Por muy presto a dispararse que estuviera el objetivo, no había simultaneidad alguna entre los hechos vividos y los captados. Así, un primer rasgo discursivo se desprendía de la huida de lo real respecto a la mirada: su carácter metonímico. Los acontecimientos terribles eran revelados por imágenes no menos hirientes, pero éstas sólo mostraban sus resultados, no su processo. A ello se añade que los fotógrafos rara vez iban en la vanguardia del ejército, con lo que un retraso de cuatro o cinco días (es lo que le sucede por ejemplo a Rodgers al llegar a Bergen-Belsen) contribuía a deformar todavía más lo que el ojo del primer soldado contempló. Un extraño mito se forjaba en estos días al cual sólo la televisión del directo daría una también sorprendente respuesta: recuperar la mirada pura, el virginal encuentro con las cosas como si éste encerrara una verdad inextricable pero necesaria.<br />Quizá el mejor ejemplo contrario y también la prueba inequívoca de que toda estética de la reconstrucción espectacular o narrativa de los acontecimientos era imposible fue realizada por los cineastas soviéticos a la liberación de Auchwitz. Semanas después de este día, los mejores operadores ruedan una simulación de la liberación ante las alambradas a rebosar de prisioneros famélicos, pero con vendajes incomprensiblemente blancos. Várias cámaras recrean con cierto nervio la llegada de la vanguardia soviética, mientras la banda sonora reproduce vítores de júbilo de los recién liberados. A pesar de los cuerpos delgados de los deportados, unas vendas inverosimilmente blancas y pulcras desvelaban la farsa hasta tal punto que los soviéticos decidieron retirar la película de circulación. Los testimonios orales o escritos que evocan la llegada a Auschwitz del Ejercito Rojo después de las marchas de la muerte que evacuaron el campo no dejan duda alguna respecto a la desolación que reinaba en el campo, el temor de los prisioneros a un regreso de los alemanes y cierta indiferencia de los militares hacia las victimas.<br />En cualquier caso, retornando a las imágenes norteamericanas y británicas, el imperativo ético (e incluso político e jurídico) que se exigia a los planos rodados había de determinar un tratamiento estético, imponer unos límites al ejercicio del montaje, mas también un modelo de filmación suficientemente probatorio. Así, el empleo de la profundidad de campo, apoyando el contraste entre personajes en primer plano y fondos de cadáveres, el recurso a la enunciación con sonido directo del día, la hora y la personalidad de los soldados ante cámara se concebian como índices ineludibles de realidad, pruebas irrefutables de la veracidad de aquello que se resistía a ser creído. Nada debía deteriorar el realismo hiriente de lo filmado: ver con dolor era sinónimo de aprender.<br />No en vano muchas de estas películas vinieron precedidas de declaraciones juradas de los responsables de efectos especiales fotográficos, testimoniando que ninguna operación de trucaje había sido emprendida y que, por demás, la copia presentada respondía integralmente al negativo original. Valga como ejemplo los dos textos que encabezan la película norteamericana producida por el United States Counsel of the Prosecution of Axis Criminality titulada Nazi Concentration Camps. El primero de ellos está firmado por Robert H. Jackson y reza así:<br />This is an official documentary report compiled from films made by military Photographers serving with the allied armies as they advanced into Germany. The films were made pursuant to an order issued by general Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander allied expeditionary forces.<br />Robert H. Jackson United States Chief of Counsel<br />El segundo, firmado por George C. Stevens, en octubre de 1945, expresa que se trata de un documento oficial rodado por los fotógrafos que aconpañaban a las fuerzas armadas y que es fiel reflejo de la realidad y añade que el trabajo que se presenta fue encargado para 20th Century-Fox, donde se ocupaba de los efectos especiales (fecha 25.08.1945). Certifica asimismo que este filme de 2.000 metros no ha sido modificado y representa el negativo original seleccionado entre los 25.000 metros de película similar en características que habían sido rodados. Este último documento aparece también al final del filme, demostrando una obsesión de autentificación, testificando de nuevo la veracidad de los hechos.<br />Mas no se trataba tan sólo de mostrar horrorizando, sino de denunciar y bien sabemos que la perspectiva común de las fuerzas aliadas fue distinguiéndose entre sí a partir de los años inmediatamente posteriores a la capitulación de Alemania, debido a los imperativos de la guerra fría y los cambios de estrategia que ésta implicaba. En consecuencia, las censuras, los aligeramientos de imágenes, fueron frecuentes y el reciclaje de material fue sufriendo diversos montajes siempre al servicio de los diversos y cambiantes contenidos políticos que se pretendía transmitir. Para ello se pusieron en funcionamiento voces en off de cuño propagandístico que incidian en tal o cual aspecto de lo concentracionario. Quizálo más llamativo de todo ello, por su recurrencia, fue el oscurecimiento del exterminio judio en beneficio de una crítica a la deshumanización y criminalidad política de los nazis. Con este precario equilibrio circularon por los noticiarios de toda Europa y América durante los meses siguientes imágenes muy variadas, donde el remontaje era frecuente, aun cuando el requisito de verdad fue constante y consistía en no cortar ni montar en demasia. Algún día habria de realizarse un estudio pormenorizado de las fuentes, reescrituras, remontajes y aligeramientos que en los distintos países tuvieran estas imágenes. Pero no es éste mi cometido hoy.<br />Sin embargo, algo se olvida en toda esta estética; algo cuya dependencia de la ética y de la propaganda (y reténgase que se trata de dos cuestiones distintas y a menudo en contradicción) provoca una tensión fundamental en cuanto al efecto que reclama del espectador. Y esto es precisamente lo que Susan Sontag había detectado desde sus ojos de niña. Lo diremos en palabras de una superviviente: toute la pédagogie de lãhorreur en <a name="tx02"></a>reproduit la jouissance<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt02">2</a>. Edificante o no, la imagen del horror es por definición una imagen del sinsentido y los cuerpos extremos, los cadáveres, los amasijos de huesos, las miradas ausentes de los musulmanes, no dejan, a pesar de la mejor voluntad, de desencadenar una extraña fascinación, un goce muy especial. Ya las vanguardias habían indagado en la idea de un ojo devorador y perverso, sediento de goce escópico, cuya mejor expresión eran los cuerpos despedazados y Georges Bataille levantó buen testimonio de ello en su <a name="tx03"></a>Histoire de lãoeil<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt03">3</a>. A la pregunta que los sociólogos se hacen (¿hay acomodación al horror?; ¿se estimula con su reiterada representación una necesidad de incrementar sus dosis?), cabría añadir otra más interesante y de implicaciones más inciertas: ¿es compatible el goce del ojo con los principios éticos que se pretende transmitir?<br />Un punto de precario equilibrio, crucial para la historia de las representaciones cinematográficas de la violencia y la fascinación <a name="tx04"></a>por los cuerpos despedazados<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt04">4</a>, puede encontrarse en una enigmática película firmada por Sydney Berstein cuyo título es Memory of Camps. A Painful Reminder, que contó con la intervención de Alfred Hitchcock en calidad de asesor de montaje. Su material de base no es otro que las filmaciones hechas por las fuerzas británicas al liberar Bergen-Belsen, acompañadas y aderezadas por otro metraje cedido por los americanos y fragmentos de Triumph des Willnes, de Leni Riefenstahl, entre otros. En ella se advierte un primer embrague de la fuerza escópica señalada y la voluntad ética y acusatoria en el seno de una endeble estructura narrativa que se pretendía remontarse al nazismo y a la guerra. Mas la precariedad estaba (y de paso el gran interés de su resultado) en la incapacidad que la película muestra para dulcificar el impacto de las imágenes de violencia y, además, en el anuncio de una relación traumática que toda discursivización ha de producir en las imágenes que le sirven <a name="tx05"></a>de punto de partida<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt05">5</a>.<br /><br />EL FILME DE MONTAJE: ANTE LA MEMORIA PERDIDA<br />Una segunda estrategia documental se plantea una década más tarde. Se trata igualmente de una película, un mediometraje, cuyo impacto en la opinión pública, en la formación pedagógica y en la memoria colectiva, especialmente en Francia, iba a durar largo tiempo. A saber, Nuit et brouillard, realizada por alain Resnais en 1955. La inmediatez delas imágenes y de su función interpretativa ya ha pasado, la reconstrucción de la mirada virginal del primer soldado que se dio de bruces ante el cuerpo objetualizado del superviviente no puede ya ser objetivo de la representación. Tampoco puede extrañar que tras una década numerosos instrumentos de discursivización (memorias, biografías, testimonios, escritura de la historia) se hayan hecho cargo de los acontecimientos reales. En pocas palabras, la historia amortaja los hechos y la actualidad que exige la mirada en riguroso presente da paso a una reflexión sobre el pasado que se articula necesariamente con el presente. Estamos, pues, ante un intento de inscribir una dialéctica comprometida: la historia y la memoria. Es así como Resnais, consiguiendo la colaboración del escritor Jean Cayrol, testigo directo de la experiencia concentracionaria por su estancia en Mauthausen, emprendió la realización de esta película.<br />En 1953-1954, había visto la luz un libro de gran relevancia para la memoria de la deportación. Se trata de Tragédie de la déportation 1940-1945. Témoignages des survivants des camps de concentration allemands, coordinado por Olga Wormser y Henri Michel, autores que se encontraban a la cabeza del comité d'Histoire de la DeuxiÌme Guerre Mondiale, concretamente en un departamento llamado Commission d'Histoire de la Déportation. Ambos oficiaron de asesores históricos para el filme, por lo que Nuit et bruoillard ilustra un estado de la memoria y una propuesta de tratamiento del material documental de acuerdo con el estado de la reflexión histórica.<br />En su sentido estricto, la de Resnais es una película de montaje y asimismo un esfuerzo titánico por inscribir las huellas del pasado en el presente. En lugar de enterrar el pasado en el arropado territorio discursivo de la historia, Resnais vertebra su película sobre un marcado contraste entre lo que quedó de los campos (imágenes del presente que son filmadas en color) y la emergencia del pasado reproducido a través de fotografías en blanco y negro procedentes de <a name="tx06"></a>múltiples archivos gráficos<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt06">6</a>.<br />Se desprende de ello la consciencia de dos exigencias: el testimonio es vital, la experiencia directa es la única legitimación para hablar de los hechos que amenazan la humanidad, mas el contacto directo no basta. La reflexión, el discurso se impone. El goce del ojo ya no puede éticamente dejarse correr, en un momento en que múltiples imágenes y relatos han sido construidos de modo obsceno sobre los detalles de lo vivido. Por su parte, el montaje no es sinónimo de falsificación, pues nadie duda de los hechos en sí, mas la huella precisa también ser resguardada y las fotos contienen ese presente inminente, aunque haga referencia a un pasado.<br />En efecto, el congelado que es norma de la fotografia es garante de un tiempo pasado pero real, captado para siempre e inmovilizado. Algo no puede ser transformado, algo resiste a la interpretación (las fotos, su fechación); algo, en cambio, debe ser recordado desde el presente y el montaje y la articulación del presente (verbal mediante el texto de Cayrol, visual mediante el uso del color) son los instrumentos de la misma. Una pregnancia ontológica del hecho, irrefutable, testigo (la fotografia) unida a un artilugio autorial, marcado, conductor de un discurso, como es por excelencia el montaje. <a name="tx07"></a>Dos herramientas en contradictión<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt07">7</a>.<br />Ahora bien, esta libertad mayor que se permite el realizador fruto de su exigencia ética hacia el presente y su rigor para con el ejercicio de la memoria entraña también un mayor margen de interpretación. Y el texto de vocación poética de Cayrol conforma la idea de un magno e igualitario universo concentracionario, uniforme, sin diferencias. David Rousset, en un célebre libro, bautizó así a este conjunto de circuitos de campos y en cierto modo <a name="tx08"></a>Resnais lo certifica<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt08">8</a>. Hay modelos diferentes de campos en cuanto a su arquitectura y localización, pero la identidad de las víctimas, las condiciones de los campos son intercambiables y en este contexto el exterminio judio ocupa un lugar secundario y de complemento, es decir, subsumido a fin de cuentas en la inhumanidad del régimen nazi para con sus enemigos, políticos civiles o militares. Annette Wieviorka es terminante y de hecho no yerra al señalar a este respecto que el objeto de la película no es en ningún <a name="tx09"></a>caso el exterminio judio<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt09">9</a>.<br />Las imágenes tienen algo de ejemplaridad: son una ilustración. Y tal vez sea bien explícito en este sentido el título de la película, tomado del famoso decreto nazi Nacht und Nebel, en realidad consistente en tres textos diversos, el primero de los cuales data de 7 de diciembre de 1941, redactado por el mariscal de campo Keitel, pero explícitamente concebido por el mismo Hitler. Se trataba de establecer las lineas de comportamiento, en realidad sin precedentes, para con los enemigos del Reich y consistentes en que desaparecieran sin dejar rastro de la faz de la tierra, apoyándose en una frase de Alberich, personaje legendario de Das Rheingold, de Wagner, tan del gusto del Führer. Esta opción del título es, a fin de cuentas, reveladora de la primacía que se concebe a los prisioneros políticos en detrimento, en particular, del sórdido e irracional exterminio de los judíos. En este sentido, Nuit et brouillard responde a un tiempo y a unas creencias bien fechadas en la historia de la representación mental e historica de la Shoah y su concepción de la relación entre ética y estética es bien distinta de aquélla que advertíamos en Memory of Camps.<br /><br />LUGARES MUDOS, TESTIGOS QUE HABLAN: SHOAH<br />Shoah (Claude Lanzamann, 1985) es mucho más que una película, aun cuando sorprende hasta qué punto su estudio ha pasado por alto a los historiadores. Objeto de análisis para psicoanalistas, teóricos del cine, filósofos o pensadores en general, no ha despertado la necesidad de una investigación por parte de la disciplina histórica, a pesar de su enorme influencia en toda la comunidad judía internacional. Quizá no sea errado pensar que esta inmensa obra de nueve horas de duración ofrece una respuesta a la cuestión lacerante de Theodor Adorno sobre la legitimidad de crear una obra de arte después de Auschwitz, pues a fin de cuentas Shoah es también y sobre todo una obra de arte. Mas vayamos a lo que ahora nos interesa. Iniciada em 1974 y merecedora de once trabajosos años de sufrimientos, investigación, entrevistas y montaje, Shoah arranca de la constatación inevitable de que la memoria se ha convertido en tarea ardua y tal vez abocada al declive en los tiempos que corren, tanto debido a la avanzada edad de los supervivientes como a las esclerotización de una retórica que habla de manera cada vez más estandarizada del exterminio judío.<br />La película extrae toda su fuerza de una opción formal y ética insólita que la coloca en las antípodas de la elección del filme de montaje por Resnais, a saber: el rechazo de principio a toda imagen (fotografia, filmación) que recree un pasado perteneciente a los campos de la muerte, a saber, una imagen de archivo. Por el contrario, Lanzmann va en busca de los emplazamientos actuales en los que, contra toda verosimilitud, se perpetró la masacre del puebo judío. Visita los lugares en compañia de los protagonistas con el fin de provocar en ellos el surgimiento de la memoria. Ahora bien, no se trata de una memoria universal, pues no hay discurso colectivo capaz de hacerse cargo de lo vivido. Es el discurso de los sujetos lo que determina los acontecimientos y su recreación. Lanzmann, pues, se apresta a hacer nacer en ellos como si de un fantasma se tratara la imagen viva del pasado, mas dicha imagen jamás será exportable a los demás y, por consiguiente, nunca podrá materializarse más que como pesadilla transmitida por medio de la palabra.<br />Se trata aquí de una abolición de la distancia que separa del pasado, con lo que se propone alcanzar un atemporalidad que corresponde más al trauma y el inconsciente mismo que a un universo discursivizado, relatado, historiable. Si existen imágenes documentales en el filme de Lanzmann, éstas nacen del encuentro entre los lugares del pasado tal y como han permanecido y la palabra de los supervivientes. Había que rendirse a una evidencia: aquello que los soldados británicos y norteamericanos habían observado con sus ojos aterrorizados ya no existe. Por ello, lo que hay al comienzo del film – dice Lanzmann – es, por una parte, la desaparición de las heullas; no hay ya nada, sino la nada y a partir de ella había que hacer un filme. Por otra parte, existía la imposibilidad de contar por parte de los supervivientes, de parir la cosa, <a name="tx10"></a>lo innombrable<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt10">10</a>. En consecuencia, el silencio es la primera diana a la que apunta el realizador, el silencio no del pasado, sino del presente. Las arrugas en los rostros, el malestar de las personas entrevistadas, la desfiguración del marco espacial de estos "no-lugares de la memoria", como dice Lanzmann invirtiendo la conocida expresión de Pierre Nora: la entrada a Auschwitz, el río Ner en los alrededores de Chelmno, la vía del ferrocarril que conduce de Malkinia a Treblinka, los crematorios... todo permanece mudo y desierto.<br />En suma, es la belleza sosa de los paisajes y la indiferencia de un tiempo privado de nexos con el pasado, lo que deve ser interrogado: "Yo era consciente del cambio y al mismo tiempo me era necesario pensar que el tiempo <a name="tx11"></a>no había hecho su trabajo"<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt11">11</a>. Lo anodino es, pues, la condición de los lugares ante los cuales Lanzmann pone en marcha una batería implacable destinada a asediar a los supervivientes, verdugos y testigos, hasta hacer aparecer ante ellos los fantasmas del pasado. Función reveladora de la palabra, nada en realidad es posible sin ella ni puede darse por existente. Y así, la palabra, la oralidad, adquieren la misión más relevante en Shoah, pues a través de ellas se atraviesa el tiempo, se inscribe lo vivido para desaparecer definitivamente.<br />Lanzmann confesó que las primeras entrevistas con los supervivientes y testigos eran de una total confusión, por lo que se vio obligado a transformar a los personajes en actores de su próprio drama para obtener los primeros resultados. Mas los transformaba precisamente en los actores de unos papeles que éstos habían efectivamente desempeñado en el pasado. Ésta es exactamente la paradojica dramaturgia de Lanzmann. Así, la fuerza dramática contenida en estas entrevistas contrasta con el ideal de neutralidad que advertimos en otro tipo de testimonios grabados en vídeo que se han puesto en marcha en las últimas décadas, como el proyecto emprendido por Spielberg o por la Universidad de Yale, a los que aludiremos más adelante. Además, Shoah se encuentra dotada de una estructura matemáticamente calculada y el montaje, pese a respetar la oralidad del testimonio, es de una precisión infernal.<br />Consideremos a modo de ejemplo el relato por uno de los personajes que mayor presencia adquieren en Shoah, a saber, Filip Mñller, tal y como aparece en sus memorias tituladas Sonderbehandlung (Tratamiento <a name="tx12"></a>especial)<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt12">12</a>: la riqueza inagotable de la experiencia contrasta con una falta de potencia de palabra que, en cambio, rebosa en la película de Lanzmann. Su voz de narrador, su mirada alucinada, sus ojos perdidos a medida que se hunde en el pasado, sus largos silencios y su dicción pausada recuerdan esa figura del narrador oral típico de antaño de cuya ausencia y pérdida tanto lamentó Walter Benjamin en un texto que trata de la pérdida del valor de la experiencia y su transmisión por vía narrativa. Sólo con una excepción: el relato de Müller no versa sobre un tiempo vivido, como el relato del marinero y del campesino evocados por Benjamin, sino que su tema es el más sórdido de los imaginables, pues trata del contacto diario, monótono e inacabable con cadáveres.<br />Y, con todo, Müller construye un tableau vivant más que un relato alterando sus tiempos verbales al presente repentinamente, su hermosa voz que marca la cadencia de una visión. Además, su narración no avanza linealmente como las leyendas, sino que la palabra busca un sostén en el espacio, se torna flotante, apuntando al acontecimiento originario. Lanzmann traza con pudor un recorrido con su cámara por los espacios descritos, como si un ojo penetrara lentamente por el espacio desierto, sin más huella aquella que las palabras inscriben en la ausencia.<br />A continuación, me centraré en tres fragmentos cuyo tema es el campo de Treblinka. En el escenario en que antaño estuvo este campo reina ahora una desolación todavía mayor que en Auschwitz-Birkenau, convertido en monumento a la memoria. Dicho de otra manera, Treblinka no posee la riqueza metafórica que bien se puede atribuir a Auchwitz: monumentalidad, hipérbole de la masacre mecanizada, conglomerado de las funciones de campo de trabajo, instalación de las industrias alemanas, campo de concentración y de exterminio, todo al mismo tiempo. Las dimensiones más modestas de Treblinka, espacial y cuantitativamente, riman bien con la monotonia de su objetivo: la muerte.<br />Recurriré a los ejemplos de tres personajes cuyas funciones coinciden con los tres registros de la experiencia de la Shoah que fueron descritos por el historiador Raul Hilberg, a saber: <a name="tx13"></a>ejecutores, víctimas y testigos<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt13">13</a>. Sólo el representante de la tercera categoría será transportado por Lanzmann a los lugares de la tragedia. Pese a todo, la cámara realizará también en el resto de los casos el siniestro trayecto compasada por la palabra. El lugar en que se efectúa la entrevista con el ejecutor Suchomel es familiar, una habitación de su domicilio en la que el anciano y enfermo Unterscharführer se conplace en ofrecer la 'voz de la Historia' a su interlocutor, pese a su modesta renuncia a firmar su testimonio y la condición impuesta a su interlocutor de preservar su anonimato. En segundo lugar, la víctima Abraham Bomba toma la palabra en una peluquería de Holon (Israel), espacio dotado de siniestras semejanzas con aquél de Treblinka en el que antaño ejerció su trabajo. Por último, Henrik Gawtawski, empleado polaco de ferrocarriles, es el testigo mudo por excelencia que emplea largo tiempo antes de poder despegar los labios y articular las primeras palabras.<br /><br />EL GOCE DEL EJECUTOR<br />Franz Suchomel, Unterscharführer SS destinado en Treblinka entre septiembre de 1942 y noviembre de 1943, había comparecido como acusado ante la corte de Düsseldorf en 1963, por la que fue condenado a seis años de trabajos forzados por su participación en el asesinato de 300.000 detenidos. En el filme de Lanzmann, el entrevistador le tiende una celada en la que cae: lo lleva a revivir el pasado a través de una serie de preguntas técnicas que rehuyen cualquier valoración moral. El lenguaje administrativo, cuantitativo, estadístico y descriptivo en el que Suchomel enuncia su discurso no es otro (y Lanzmann bien lo sabe) que el deshumanizado y cosificado discurso del III Reich. De ahí que su frialdad burocrática concierte plenamente con el desempeño de sus funciones de antaño y, al propio tiempo, reproduzca de manera sintomática el lenguaje administrativo del régimen al que obedecía. Por supuesto, esta actitud por parte del entrevistador implica una momentánea suspensión del juicio, pero hace infinitamente más impresionante la emergencia de un lenguaje venido del pasado inscrito a fuego en cada palabra fría, neutra, del entrevistado en contradicción con el tema dramático del que éste trata, el asesinato en masa. He aquí el objetivo de Lanzmann: despertar en el anciano de hoy su lenguaje de antaño, hacerle representar por medio de las palabras algo de su personalidad del pasado, mas como si se tratara del mesmísimo presente.<br />Es aquí donde Suchomel cede al orgullo de su condición de 'historiador' de una historia vivida, testigo ejemplar y acaso único de ciertos hechos que ningún otro, cree él, podría referir con tanta autenticidad y legitimidad. Su discurso no lo carga el odio a los judíos, más bien diríamos que es la indiferencia la que habla por su boca y ésta es en realidad tanto más insoportable a nuestros oídos. Así pues, decidido a dar a su entrevistador esa pieza única de convicción que es, en su propios términos, 'Historia en estado puro', entona un canto que hace irrumpir el pasado en el interior de esta modesta estancia:<br />Mirada al mundo de frente siempre bravos y alegres, marchan los comandos marchan al trabajo. Para nosotros hoy nada hay más que Treblinka, que es nuestro destino. Hemos asimilado Treblinka en un abrir y cerrar de ojos. Sólo conocemos la palabra del comandante y sólo la obediencia y el deber. Deseamos servir, y servir todavía más hasta que la pequeña felicidad un dia nos llame.¡ Hurra!<br />En efecto, si no la Historia en estado puro, sí hay algo aquí que se presenta sin contaminaciones, ni distancias. Todo aparece inscrito en la imagen pobre de un cuerpo que quiere proteger su anonimato, borrándose modestamente como sujeto. El terror nace de esa voz desgastada con la que pronuncia un inmenso himno a la muerte. Tras esta anatomía en decadencia, advinamos el cuerpo robusto del joven Suchomel, repleto de proyectos para su futuro militar como SS. Basta leer la canción literalmente para convencerse. Nadie dejaría de ver surgir por un instante los cuerpos de los deportados que caminaban también derechos a la muerte para convertirse en materia prima. Es a esos cuerpos desaparecidos a los que Suchomel presta su voz, ya que era esta letanía la que debían aprender los comandos especiales a su llegada a Treblinka e interpretar con convicción al cabo del mismo día ante la orgullosa mirada de sus verdugos y los de su pueblo.<br />El acto narcisista de Schomel produce un efecto, pues, insospechado: en lugar de borrar su presencia como sujeto que rehusa la publicidad, un relámpago mágico lo transporta al pasado ante nuestros ojos y lo muestra en su esplendor, en su más pleno narcisismo destructor. Sus dificultades articulatorias, su condición de anciano enfermo, son paradójicamente la más rotunda prueba de su poderío de antaño y de la pervivencia de aquellos deseos, sea o no consciente su artífice. Suchomel ignora que en esa imagen, captada de forma clandestina por la cámara, en medio de ese decorado miserable ambientado por un croquis del campo de Treblinka, ofrece su goce para nuestro horror. Es esto lo que resulta obsceno, insoportable. Suchomel, a fin de cuentas, ha regresado al lugar del crimen para recuperar su juventud a través de esta canción siniestra. De este modo, perpetra una vez más el asesinato, lo autentifica, con una fuerza sin límites hasta reventar la pantalla.<br />Todo queda maravillosamente expresado en un breve intercambio de palabras que sigue la explosión del goce, cuando el cuerpo del verdugo se relaja y recupera la sórdida realidad que lo envuelve en la actualidad. Lanzmann aprovecha sutilmente la ocasión para intervenir con emponzoñada suavidad e incrustar de paso su actitud ética hacia el ejecutor:<br />Suchomel: Sí. Ahora reímos y, sin embrago, jes tan triste! Lanzmann Nadie ríe.<br />La entrevista prosigue con un método que es enunciado por Raul Hilberg en un fragmento de la película y que fue el mismo procedimiento de indagación que utilizó el historiador en su larga investigación sobre la Shoah: "Nunca comencé por las grandes cuestiones, pues temía débiles respuestas. Escogi, por el contario, dedicarme a las precisiones y los detalles con el fin de organizarlos en una Gestalt"<br />El hecho merece ser subrayado: Lanzmann se encuentra frente a un burócrata del III Reich, no frente a un criminal convencional, ni siquiera frente a un criminal a secas. Dicho estatuto incierto había sido el arguemnto de su defensa ante el tribunal que lo juzgó y, por tanto, se hacía necesario interrogarlo en su propio lenguaje o, más exactamente en el lenguaje que, interiorizado como estaba, Suchomel compartía con el régimen al que servía. Las preguntas son claras y precisas: "Llega un convoy. Me gustaría que describiese exactamente todo el proceso durante el período de máximo rendimiento del campo". El entrevistador no muestra ningún reparo a recurrir a los mismos eufemismos que definieron el lenguaje de los SS: número de personas 'tratadas', color de los uniformes; en suma, un cúmulo de detalles técnicos de apariencia insignificante. Situar el momento preciso y su proceso en cadena: llegada, selección, espera, rapado, duchas, tratamiento, limpieza, comienzo de una nueva operación. Lo que se impone a la mirada y al espíritu del espectador es el abismo insondable entre la minuciosidad de los datos técnicos y la dimensión metafísica del crimen al que se alude. La imagen escueta de la habitación se opone al croquis que en la pared del fondo representa el campo de Treblinka. La estación, la rampa, la cámara de gas, el crematorio. La cámara de Lanzmann se desprende de este lugar para recorrer los verdaderos lugares de Treblinka tal y como subsisten en el presente. Entretanto, Suchomel se vacía en pormenores. La belleza de una puesta de sol nos alivia momentáneamente de la angustia del Mal absoluto.<br /><br />UN DOLOR QUE NO EDIFICA<br />Abraham Bomba es un superviviente de Treblinka que fue deportado desde la ciudad de Czestochowa. Su oficio de barbero le salvó la vida al llegar al campo ya que fue empleado por las SS para cortar el cabello de las mujeres justo antes de su gaseamiento. Bomba es entrevistado por Lanzmann en Israel mientras corta los cabellos de un cliente en una barbería (en realidad, bomba ya no ejercía este oficio desde hacía tiempo y se trata de una escenificación que contribuye a insertalo en su papel del pasado). Lejos del lugar de la tragedia, sin anclajes materiales, Lanzmann se ve forzado a trabajar con la similitud de las situaciones con el fin de arrancar la palabra. A pesar de todo, el entrevistado mantiene un discurso distante respecto a su objeto, haciendo gala de una frialdad descriptiva sorprendente. Cierto que los hechos que narra no carecen de dramatismo, mas la pasión y los afectos del sujeto se mantienen controlados, sin duda por el paso del tiempo. El dolor parece así ajeno a la palabra y ésta discurre con fluidez, sin llegar – claro está – a la ligereza.<br />En Treblinka – relata Bomba – él y sus compañeros, los barberos del comando especial, esperaban a las mujeres en el interior de las cámaras de gas con el fin de ahorrar tiempo a la operación de preparación y gaseamiento. De idéntico modo a como había procedido con Suchomel, Lanzmann dirige sus preguntas hacia los detalles minúsculos, casi ridículos en comparación con la dimensión de los hechos: con qué instrumentos cortaban los cabellos de las víctimas, cuál era la velocidad de sus movimientos, cuánto tiempo se prolongaba cada operación, cuál la longitud de los cabellos, en qué consistía el decorado (espejos, sillas, etc). Reconstruir las coordenadas espaciotemporales parece, de este modo, fundamental para componer una Gestalt o imagen de conjunto. En ningún momento está en juego la apelación directa, la pregunta por los sentimientos e el juicio moral del testigo. Lo singular se impone entonces desde el único punto de vista que interesa: el hombre en ese entorno, en ese lugar, en ese tiempo. Y es aquí donde empieza a abrirse paso la dimensión no domesticada de la experiencia y, con ella, inevitablemente surgirán los afectos.<br />El interrogante clave es por fin enunciado: ¿qué sintió usted la primera vez? Esta apunta a lo originario, pues Lanzmann está firmemente convencido de que todo lo que sigue la primera vez es mecánico, serial, impensado e incluso insentido. La primera vez es lo impensable, el momento, mítico, en que la maquinaria se pone en marcha. El entrevistador revela aquí sus ideas previas, sus fantasmas personales y no lo esconde en lo más mínimo. Es más, con el fin de sumergir al personaje en su papel del pasado, le ruega que imite los movimientos de antaño con sus tijeras. El rostro, como el discurso de Bomba, permanece pese a todo inalterable, como sí el acontecimiento hubiera sido preservado por una distancia infranqueable que lo protegiese de toda emergencia del afecto. La cámara explora su gesto y, al cabo de cierto tiempo, el peso del silencio resquebraja los asideros del presente y la certeza del discurso se perfora. Los ojos de Bomba se impregnan de lágrimas, su voz se rompe y el anciano suplica a su entrevistador y en cierto modo torturador, le ahorre este inútil sufrimiento. Lanzmann se muestra cruel y dulce a un mismo tiempo, implacable en suma: "Sabe que es necesario. Sé que es duro. Perdóneme". Es entonces cuando Abraham expulsa los hechos que había intentado extirpar de su vida y de su recuerdo.<br />Un día, uno de sus camaradas vio entrar en la cámara de gaz a su esposa y su hermana para cortarse los cabellos antes de desaparecer para siempre en cenizas. Momento de una extrema intensidad en el que el esposo y hermano, sin poder despegar los labios ni advertir a sus seres amados de la muerte inminente que les esperaba, prolongó algunos segundos, un minuto quizá este breve, último y mudo encuentro, retardando la operación, desgarrado de dolor. Relatando un hecho que pertenece a la historia personal de otro y del que Bomba fue testigo, un foso se abre en su discurso para engullirlo, soltando las amarras temporales para transportarlo a ese lugar imposible en el que "las cosas se dan a la vista en una suerte de alucinante intemporalidad o, <a name="tx14"></a>mejor, atemporalidad"<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt14">14</a>. Esta realidad que surge como una alucinación parece muy cerca de aquella concepción que Jacques Lacan formuló, a saber: lo real concebido como lo imposible.<br /><br />EL SILENCIO DEL TESTIGO<br />Un último testigo, una nueva estrategia de discurso, un mismo lugar. Otra vez Treblinka. El personaje es el polaco Henrik Gawtawski, cuyo oficio consistió en conducir los trenes con transportes especiales entre la estación de Malkinia, en el nudo ferrorviario polaco, y Treblinka, campo de la muerte. El sujeto había ralizado mecánicamente su trabajo en multitud de ocasiones durante el periodo álgido de funcionamiento del campo. Ahora lo vemos a bordo de una locomotora, envejecido, asomado a la ventana. Escruta el paisaje con un gesto pensativo, casí idiotizado, en total silencio, sólo roto por el ruido de la máquina. Diríase que no reconoce nada del paisaje. De repente, el ferrocarril se detiene sin que pueda saberse la razón. Cuando el cuerpo del maquinista se yergue, un panel sobresale del bello paisaje de la verdura, como un bajorrelieve. Su mero nombre nos hace estremecernos: TREBLINKA. Ni una sola palabra. Aquí Shoah parece situarse en las antípodas de la oralidad. El viejo maquinista gira la cabeza hacia toda una serie de vagones inexistentes, ya que el ferrocarril está en realidad compuesto tan sólo por la locomotora. En un estado cercano al éxtasis, lleva mecánicamente su mano a la garganta y hace un gesto terrorífico de degollamiento, que repite por dos veces.<br />Irrupción repentina del pasado que ha sido lograda merced a la intervención de un reconocimiento del escenario que hace al personaje franquear el umbral del pasado y saltar por encima de las constricciones del tiempo: la atemporalidad surge entonces como el tiempo del trauma, es decir, como una falta absoluta de tiempo. Es como si el destino de las víctimas hubiera surgido ante sus ojos. Lanzmann confiesa haberse quedado helado por este gesto inesperado, pese a haber alquilado él mismo la locomotora y haber invitado al maquinista a efectuar por última vez ese trayecto: "Llegamos a la estación y se le ve ahí, asomado y, por sí mismo, hace ese gesto increíble en su garganta mientras mira los vagones imaginarios (...). Comparadas con esta imagen, las fotos de archivo se hacen insoportables. <a name="tx15"></a>Esta imagen es la verdad misma"<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt15">15</a>.<br /><br />MISTERIOS DE LA PUESTA EN ESCENA<br />El proyecto de grabación de testimonios de supervivientes de la Shoah emprendido en las últimas décadas por varias instituciones, entre las que destaca por su magnitud y la multiplicidad de centros delegados el denominado Survivors of the Shoah. Visual History Foundation, auspiciado y puesto en marcha por Steven Spielberg de resultas de los contactos por él efectuados durante el rodaje en Cracovia de su film de ficción Schindlerãs List, en 1992, nos ofrece un modelo postrero de tratamiento del testimonio. Asimismo, nos permitirá una comparación con el tratamiento escénico, artístico y memorístico que acabamos de analizar, in extenso, de Claude Lanzmann. En el proyecto de Spielberg, los rasgos de la puesta en escena apuntan idealmente a un grado cero de escritura que borraría por completo, o tanto como ello fuera posible, la intervención del entrevistador, la presencia misma de la cámara, la variación entre duración de planos o tomas. Después de enunciar el lugar, la fecha, la lengua en que se efectúa la entrevista y la identidad del entrevistador, así como del superviviente, el tratamiento en continuidad de cada cinta de video, tan sólo matizado en ocasiones por un ligero zoom o reencuadre, sin vocación enfática, la ausencia de mirada a cámara y la exclusión del entrevistador del campo visual, expresan la voluntad de huir de cualquier dramatización del relato por procedimientos otros que la voz del testigo y los elementos visuales pragmáticos que le van unidos (sus silencios, sus gestos, sus explosiones de emoción, caso de que éstas se produzcan). En ningún caso le es lícito al entrevistador romper el silencio, colmar las lagunas o preguntar más de lo estrictamente necesario.<br />La duración usual de las <a name="tx16"></a>entrevistas Survivors of the Shoah<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt16">16</a> oscila entre cuatro y ocho cintas de video de 30' de duración cada una de ellas (así pues, entre 2 y 4 horas), siempre dependiendo de la voluntad o predisposición al relato de cada superviviente. Al término de los relatos, el entrevistado suele presentar algún miembro se su familia si lo considera oportuno y comentar fotos de familia, pertenecientes a sus antepasados, muchos de elllos fallecidos o asesinados en los campos de concentración. El objetivo consiste en la reconstrucción de la familia, dado que ésta ha sido destruida en gran proporción. En suma, se trata de un ejercicio de enraizamiento en la tradición familiar, quebrada por la barbarie.<br />Ahora bien, las marcas de enunciación no pueden extirparse por completo en la organización de las entrevistas. Así, aunque de gran flexibilidade, éstas siguen un orden cronológico: arrancan evocando los orígenes familiares, la infancia, haciendo hincapié en la percepción de elementos antisemitas en el periodo anterior a las leyes antijudías, su relación con los no judíos; a continuación, la detención, el reagrupamiento en campos franceses y, por fin, <a name="tx17"></a>la deportación al Este<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt17">17</a>; para concluir, el retorno y la reintegración en la vida social, civil, familiar tras la guerra. En la actualidad, me encuentro empeñado en realizar un estudio algo más sistemático de algunos rasgos retóricos, narrativos y compositivos de estas entrevistas, mas su desarollo en este texto desbordaría con mucho los objetivos que hoy me guian.<br />Este tipo de proyectos que se han generalizado en los últimos veinte años responde, por una parte, a una reacción frente al crecimiento del negacionismo; pero también nacen al calor del auge de la memoria y la moda incluso de la historia oral de la parte de los modernos historiadores, que obedece a una revisión de la relación entre lo público y lo privado, lo singular y lo colectivo en la historia. En efecto, dar nombre a todos los supervivientes, como a los muertos, es un magno y loable esfuerzo humanitario por invertir el asesinato en masa emprendido por los nazis: gentes sin nombre y con sólo número, gaseados masivamente retoman su identidad humana, aunque sea tras la muerte.<br />Ahora bien, también la singularidad, el relato individual, tiene sus riesgos: en primer lugar, reduce la información, la experiencia a la de las víctimas, dejando de lado aquellas dos figuras tan ricas para la documentación sobre la Shoah que Hilbert y Lanzmann habían incluido en sus investigaciones, a saber: los testigos y los ejecutores. Esto obliga a definir la noción de superviviente o a presuponerla. Además, supone integrar la preeminencia de lo individual en el registro de lo informático, de la estadística, pues para el estudio se aplica una serie de criterios generalizables cuya vertebración con lo singular debe ser adecuadamente pensada.<br />Por último, parece especialmente relevante señalar el reto que esta magnífica y desbordante información, repleta necesariamente de errores, faltas de perspectiva e impostaciones procedentes de la tradición concentracionaria, plantea a los historiadores. Éstos en efecto deben estudiarla, pero también filtrarla y contrastarla. Todo exceso de fiabilidad, toda sacralización de la memoria en detrimento de la historia llevaría a fabricar, como dijo Annette Wieviorka en una ocasión una documentación repleta de errores que, mal juzgados, podría llegar a ser <a name="tx18"></a>de oro para los negacionistas<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt18">18</a>.<br /><br />EL PORQUÉ, EL MITO, EL CONTRAMITO, LA ESCATOLOGIA<br />Mas regresemos por última vez a Shoah, objeto privilegiado de estas páginas por su desmesura. A la película de Lanzmann se le ha reprochado en alguna ocasión haber hecho revivir el horror mas que ayudar a comprenderlo. Es ésta la opinión de Tzvetan <a name="tx19"></a>Todorov en su espléndida obra Face à l' extrême<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt19">19</a>. Lanzmann, sin embargo, es pese a todo firme en su planteamiento: "Dirigir sobre el horror una mirada frontal exige que renunciemos a las distraciones y escapatorias, la primera de la cuales y la más <a name="tx20"></a>falsamente central, es la cuestion del porqué" <a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt20">20</a>. Y añade: "Un filme dedicado al Holocausto no puede ser más que un contramito, es decir, una investigación sobre el presente del holocausto o, cuanto menos, sobre un pasado en el que las cicatrizes están tan frescas y vivamente inscritas en los lugares y las conciencias que se dan a <a name="tx21"></a>ver en una alucinante intemporalidad"<a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#nt21">21</a>.<br />Las ideas que expresan las citas anteriores pueden ponerse en relación entre sí: faltando el porqué, la causa, sólo el mito (¿el contramito?) estaría en condiciones de servirnos en la empresa. Avancemos por este delicado derrotero, pues es la transmisión misma lo que hace surgir el acontecimiento originario, en la medida en que abole toda distancia entre el pasado y el presente. En consecuencia, el pasado aparecería como un acontecimiento originario. Desde este punto de vista, Shoah tiene algo de mítico, ya que los humanos no disponemos de otro instrumento para remontarnos a los orígenes primeros. Así, el esfuerzo por arrancar los hechos de la experiencia llamándola 'la verdadã, como hace Lanzmann, en su sentido metafísico, no puede ser la obra ni el trabajo del historiador. Sólo los orígenes y el porvenir escapan al ejercicio de la historia: unos cayendo bajo el reinado del mito; el otro, de la futurologia o la escatologia. La radicalidad de Shoah consiste en desvelar el lado escatológico de la Shoah al tiempo que funda un mito. Que el mito sea real, en su sentido más fuerte, es decir, como imposible, no reduce en absoluto el valor de la investigación; antes bien, lo acrecienta.<br /><br />EL PRIMER JUDIO Y EL ÚLTIMO<br />Para conservar en la memoria, desearía evocar las palabras con las que arranca Shoah:<br />Una casita blanca Permanece en mi memoria. Con esta casita blanca Sueño cada noche.<br />En el lugar en el que se escucha esta cancionilla tuvo lugar el acontecimiento originario, lo imposible, objeto único de Shoah, a saber: la Endl¸sung o solución final: el gaseamiento en camiones de los primeros judíos junto con prisioneros de guerra soviéticos en diciembre de 1941.<br />Otras palabras se deján oír alrededor de nueve horas más tarde, justo antes de la irrupción de un sórdido rumor de ferrocarril, fin de un film sin esperanza:<br />Y recuerdo un momento En que sentí una especie de alivio, De serenidad, Y me dije: soy el último judío, voy a esperar la mañana, voy a esperar a los alemanes.<br />La mañana siguiente al apocalipsis, ésas son las palabras de uno de los supervivientes de la insurrección del gueto de Varsovia, justo cuando esperaba no serlo. Con ellas se cierra el filme. Este es el testigo para el porvenir. Dos lugares derruidos, dos personajes que nos hablan de él: Simon Srebnik nos ofrece el contracanto de Franz Suchomel, la más radical inversión de un estallido de goce. Ninguna abolición del tiempo percibo aquí, diga lo que diga Lanzmann. El último nos habla desde el día siguiente a la tragedia, desde este amanecer de duelo y plomo que resulta todavía más inextricable que la masacre misma.<br /><br />NOTAS<br /><a name="nota"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#titulo">*</a> Este artigo foi publicado no livro Segle XX: racionalitat, cultura i barbàrie, Gerona, Universidade de Gerona, 2000.<br /><a name="nt01"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx01">1</a> SONTAG, Susan. Sobre la fotografia. Barcelona: Edhasa, 1981, pp. 29-30.<br /><a name="nt02"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx02">2</a> STERN, Anne-Lise, cit. Por Liliane Kandel ("La lettre volée de Danile J. Goldhagern ou Un 'réviosionnisme radicalã". Les Temps Modernes, nº 592, febrero-marzo, 1997, p. 49.<br /><a name="nt03"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx03">3</a> BATAILLE, Georges. Histoire de lãoeil. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967.<br /><a name="nt04"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx04">4</a> La expresión remite, claro está, a Jacques Lacan en cuanto este autor señala un cuerpo unificado en el espejo a través de la identificación imaginaria. Frente a ella, el cuerpo que percibe, en lo real, sería este cuerpo despedazado, informe.<br /><a name="nt05"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx05">5</a> Véase nuestro estudio "Hier ist kein Warum. A propos de la mémorie et de l'image des camps de la mort", Protée, 25-1 (1997), pp. 53-65.<br /><a name="nt06"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx06">6</a> Un estudio minucioso de esta película señalando la procedencia de cada uno de los planos puede encontrarse en Richard Ruskin: Nuit et bruoillard by Alain Resnais. On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film, Aarhus University Press, 1987. Un estudio textual que contextualiza los usos discursivos de la película en el conocimiento histórico y estático de los testimonios de la deportación puede encontrarse en la tesis de licenciatura inédita de Arturo Lozano Aguilar, Nuit et bruoillard: entre la historia y la memoria, Universidad de Valencia, Dpto. Teoría de los Lenguajes, bajo la dirección de Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, curso académico 1997-1998.<br /><a name="nt07"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx07">7</a> Vienen a nuestra memoria las palabras de Roland Barthes: "Lo que la Fotografia reproduce al infinito únicamente há tenido lugar una sola vez: la Fotografia repite mecánicamente lo que nunca más podrá repetirse existencialmente" (La cámara lúcida. Nota sobre la Fotografia, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1982, p. 31.).<br /><a name="nt08"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx08">8</a> ROUSSET, David. Lãunivers concentrationnaire. Paris: Minuit, 1965 (texto de 1945).<br /><a name="nt09"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx09">9</a> WIEVIORKA, Annette. Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l'oubli. Paris: Plon, 1992.<br /><a name="nt10"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx10">10</a> "Le lieu et la parole", entrevista com Claude Lanzmann en Au sujet de Shoah. Paris, Berlín, 1990, p. 295.<br /><a name="nt11"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx11">11</a> "Les non-lieux dela mémoireã, en Au sujet de Shoah, ya cit., p. 290.<br /><a name="nt12"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx12">12</a> Trois ans dans une chambre Ë gaz. Paris, Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, 1980 (original alemán de 1979).<br /><a name="nt13"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx13">13</a> HILBERG, Raul. Victims, Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945. Nueva York, HarperCollins, 1992.<br /><a name="nt14"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx14">14</a> "Les non-lieus de la mémoire", Au sujet de Shoah, ya citado, p. 285.<br /><a name="nt15"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx15">15</a> "De l'Holocauste à Holocauste ou comment sãen débarrasser". Au sujet de Shoah, ya citado, p. 300.<br /><a name="nt16"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx16">16</a> Agradecemos la gran amabilidad con que fuimos acogidos en París por el Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC), en cuyos archivos pudimos consultar numerosos testimonios videográficos pertenecientes a la sección francesa de dicho proyecto de investigación.<br /><a name="nt17"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx17">17</a> Las consultas que he realizado en el CDJC conciernen tan sólo a los deportados al Este, pero existen en los archivos otros casos distintos.<br /><a name="nt18"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx18">18</a> Annete Wieviorka en el "Colloque de Cerisy", Cinéma/Telévision et Histoire, julio de 1997.<br /><a name="nt19"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx19">19</a> TODOROV, Tzevevan. Face à l'extréme. Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 292.<br /><a name="nt20"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx20">20</a> "Hier ist kein Warum", ya citado, p. 279.<br /><a name="nt21"></a><a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-01882002000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso#tx21">21</a> LANZMANN, Claude. "De l'Holocauste à Holocauste ou comment sãen débarrasser", en Au sujet de Shoah, ya citado, p. 316.<br /><br />Artigo recebido em 05/2001. Aprovado em 10/2001.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-30526993013634889482007-05-04T08:12:00.001-07:002007-05-04T08:12:55.521-07:00"Vertigo" Travelling: mirada y delirioTravelling: mirada y delirio («Vertigo», 1958, Alfred Hitchcock)<br />José Luis Castro de Paz<a name="0"></a><br />Referirse hoy a Vertigo, uno de los films que más literatura crítica y analítica ha generado desde su realización en 1958 -a lo que hay que añadir la revitalización que supuso su reestreno en 1984 tras veinte años fuera de distribución- parece casi un tópico, o una osadía. Proliferan sin embargo, en todo el mundo y especialmente en el ámbito anglosajón, estudios que buscan el principio de su fascinación en posibles conexiones literarias o en leyendas míticas, siguiendo el camino que abriera en su día Guillermo Cabrera Infante<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_1_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">1</a>. Por otro lado, el análisis de los complejos mecanismos narrativos y de puesta en escena de uno de los más rigurosos ejercicios de escritura fílmica del final del clasicismo es objeto también de atención reiterada, contando en España con aportaciones notables<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_2_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">2</a>. <a name="1"></a><br />Como ha señalado González Requena, uno de los rasgos más característicamente manierista de la escritura hitchcockiana es la tematización de la mirada, que en el cine clásico operaba oculta entre los aconteceres del relato. En Vertigo, tal reflexión sobre la mirada es llevada al máximo en una de sus vías, «la que se ocupa de la lógica delirante de sus pasiones»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_3_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">3</a>. Se tratará, aquí, de la plasmación fílmica de la mirada delirante, cuya fuerza dependerá sobremanera -de ello nos ocuparemos más adelante- de la formulación plástica que se nos ofrezca de esa mujer irreal, de ese Objeto de Deseo, de esa Imago Fascinante -ese brillo capaz de concentrar en él toda la luz, de suprimir en su favor todas las otras imágenes visibles<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_4_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">4</a>- sobre el que la enunciación movilizará uno de los más rigurosos entramados de planos subjetivos -de punto de vista de Scottie, el protagonista masculino- que el cine ha conocido. <a name="2"></a><br />Si esto es así, lógico será suponer que la enunciación volcará toda su sabiduría significante -y esta no es precisamente poca- a la hora de confrontar, por vez primera, esa mirada masculina con el que será, desde ese instante, el objeto único de su pulsión escópica. Se trata de un breve fragmento (1 minuto 35 segundos, a casi 13 minutos del inicio del film) del que, sin embargo, habrá de depender buena parte del desarrollo posterior del texto: la aparición de Madeleine Elster en el restaurante Ernie's, donde cena con su marido, y al que Scottie acude con el fin de conocerla y poder iniciar su investigación. No nos detendremos en el análisis pormenorizado de los 15 planos que componen el fragmento -que ya en otro lugar hemos intentado<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_5_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">5</a>-. Diremos, no obstante, que si bien la organización visual del film desde el punto de vista de Scottie se plantea ya desde la secuencia inaugural en los tejados, es a partir de este pasaje desde el cual el proceso de identificación de dicha mirada con el espectador que el film construye -y que alcanzará su clímax en la larga persecución que viene a continuación- queda indefectiblemente anudado. <a name="3"></a><br />Tras un plano exterior del restaurante -que permite relacionar su arquitectura con el «viejo y alegre» San Francisco del que Elster le había hablado en su despacho-, el plano 2 nos introduce en el interior de Ernie's. Sentado en la barra, la mirada de Scottie busca ansiosamente. Una panorámica hacia la izquierda y un travelling oblicuo de retroceso hacen que la cámara abandone a Scottie y encuadre, en plano de conjunto, el lujoso comedor -paredes tapizadas en rojo fuego, doradas lámparas de araña, figurantes vestidos de gala-; por un momento, un cuadro rodeado de flores se sitúa en el centro de la pantalla y parece un posible foco de atención -otro cuadro y otras flores serán destacados elementos simbólicos a lo largo del film- pero, de inmediato, la figura de espaldas de Madeleine aparece al fondo, por la izquierda del encuadre. Súbitamente disminuye el sonido diegético y comienza, acompañado del inicio del tema musical de Madeleine, un lento, ritualizado y sinuoso travelling -la primera aparición de la curva en el film- entre las mesas hasta que se observa con claridad la pose de la mujer: inmóvil, el hombro izquierdo ligeramente adelantado, su cabello rubio formando un elegante moño en espiral. La melodía de Herrmann, al coincidir su inicio exactamente con el del travelling, quedará así unida -y lo estará durante todo el film- a la propia visión de Scottie. <a name="4"></a><br />Señalemos de entrada que dicho travelling -y los diferentes encuadres resultantes del movimiento de la cámara- no se corresponden de forma ortodoxa con el campo de visión de Scottie y, en rigor, no forman parten de la tipología de planos subjetivos; no obstante, su función es esencialmente idéntica ya que «de hecho, posiciones de cámara no identificables directamente con la visión de tal o cual personaje, pueden jugar similar papel, con tal de que se inscriban en un contexto de legibilidad que permita la imputación de ese plano como designación de un sujeto que de una forma u otra, lo sustenta»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_6_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">6</a>. Un complejo movimiento de cámara calificado, en sí mismo, como «uno de los más delirantes (...) de todo el cine de Hitchcock»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_7_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">7</a> y que encierra, veremos, una asombrosa productividad significante. Pero ¿por qué delirante? ¿Qué hace particularmente atractiva, extraña, fascinante, esa aproximación de la cámara? <a name="5"></a><br />Barthelemy Amengual, en un interesante y ya clásico artículo que relacionaba Vertigo con la leyenda medieval de Tristán e Iseo, había ya reparado en la originalidad de la resolución fílmica adoptada por Hitchcock para presentar a Madeleine y expresar, al mismo tiempo, el surgimiento de la pasión. Ese lento trayecto que la mirada de Scottie se impone -señalaba el autor francés- muestra el mágico momento en el que el deseo de llegar al fin lucha con el temor de ir demasiado rápido, con la angustia de perderse: es «la retracción deslumbrada marcada por el héroe delante de la fuerza de esa atracción, a la cual él cede ya»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_8_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">8</a>. Dialéctica de lo cercano y lo lejano: la forma misma de la pasión. <a name="6"></a><br />Sorprende sobremanera, con todo, la solución de montaje adoptada a la hora de dar forma a esa mirada delirante. No es aquí el lugar de penetrar en un sistema de montaje tan rico e históricamente complejo como el que -valga la extrema simplificación- desarrolló el modelo clásico de Hollywood y que tan notablemente, desde posiciones teóricas diversas, analizaron David Bordwell o Vicente Sánchez Biosca<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_9_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">9</a>. Parece claro, sin embargo, que existen unas fórmulas más o menos codificadas a la hora de representar lo que mira un personaje inmóvil, que únicamente girase sus ojos o su cabeza. Aquí, la mirada de Scottie -sentado en la barra del bar- no se traduce, en el siguiente plano de la ecuación de dos de que se compone el esquema básico de la cámara subjetiva, en una lógica panorámica que nos permita compartirla -o en cualquier otra fórmula posible por medio de raccord-, sino en un travelling que, dejando los ojos atrás, se aproxima así, mentalmente, hacia esa pieza única, inalcanzable, objeto de las pasiones más enfermizas. <a name="7"></a><br />Vertigo<a name="8"></a><br />Francesco Casetti no deja de observar algo similar cuando analiza el papel que la secuencia inaugural de Él (1952, Luis Buñuel) -film con el que Vertigo tiene más de un punto de contacto, no sólo, aunque sobre todo, por tratarse de dos textos que analizan una mirada masculina fascinada ante su objeto de deseo, sino también en el sentido de subvertir desde dentro los mecanismos narrativos y de puesta en escena del modelo institucional en el que ambos está inmersos, y tratándose además de géneros tan sólidamente codificados- asignaba a su espectador ideal. En plena celebración del lavatorio de pies, durante los oficios católicos de Semana Santa, el plano 18 nos muestra al protagonista, Francisco, mirando, seguido del primer plano (subjetivo) del sacerdote besando los pies de uno de los niños -esquema básico ABAB-. De nuevo primer plano de Francisco (plano 20) que, girando la cabeza, se apresta a una nueva observación: un travelling (plano 21) a ras de suelo va mostrando los pies calzados de los fieles sentados en el primer banco del templo. Cuando ve unos elegantes zapatos femeninos de tacón, la cámara -la mirada- parece hacer caso omiso pero, de inmediato, retrocede sobre sus pasos -cambiando la dirección del aparato, ahora de derecha a izquierda- y, elevándose, termina por encuadrar el rostro de Gloria, la portadora de aquellos zapatos y aquellas piernas. La mirada del personaje ha sido atrapada y todo lo que ha de ocurrir con posterioridad hallará en ella su justificación primera. Casetti señala lo extraño del uso del travelling y la grúa en vez de la lógica panorámica, «casi aclarando -añade- que se trata de materializar un recorrido mental antes que una trayectoria completa». El movimiento de la cámara, también aquí vacilante y obstinado al tiempo, manifiesta, como en el film hitchcockiano, «la fatiga de una búsqueda y la voluntad de una posesión»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_10_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">10</a>. <a name="9"></a><br />Hitchcock recurrirá a este perverso uso del travelling en varias ocasiones a lo largo del film -en el museo, relacionando a la mujer del cuadro con la que lo mira; en el hotel, tras la primera cena de Scottie con Judy Barton -cuando ve en ella el material idóneo para re-construir a Madeleine- y sólo después de la descomposición del fantasma que él mismo ha creado -con el descubrimiento del engaño- los ojos volverán a su lugar (travelling hacia atrás en el flash-back del museo, cuando observa el collar), superando el delirio, pero matando al tiempo el deseo. Se trata, en fin -y el travelling que nos ocupa es una de las más bellas soluciones que la escritura hitchcockiana haya dado a este problema-, de hacer partícipe al espectador de sensaciones que únicamente la interiorización de lo que el personaje ve podría justificar. No es simplemente la representación de una mirada y su objeto, sino el resultado de un trabajo significante empeñado en transmitir la relación mental que un sujeto establece entre su mirada y lo que ve (el Deseo, en definitiva). <a name="10"></a><br />Centrémonos ahora, finalmente, en esa Imago Fascinante, hacia la cual se encaminaban, delirantes, los ojos del protagonista-enunciatario -y, por tanto, los del espectador-. Como señaló tan inteligentemente Eugenio Trías, la imagen de Madeleine constituirá el rostro del abismo al que se aferrará, obsesivamente, la visión de Scottie, «perdida para las 'ilusiones del día'»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_11_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">11</a>. Ya los créditos, diseñados por Saul Bass, permiten establecer determinadas conexiones poéticas y metafóricas: es el rostro de la mujer -como apunta Martín Arias<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_12_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">12</a>- lo que, «transitoriamente tapa y oculta el fondo negro abismal». «La belleza es aquello que protege del abismo y que, paradójicamente, conduce a él, la pasión como aquello que apunta hacia la locura y la muerte, el amor como engaño y representación». Para ello, la escritura hitchcockiana recurrirá a una composición pictorizada de la imagen femenina que -además de sugerir premonitoriamente, sin duda, su carácter fraudulento- puede ponerse en relación con formulaciones estéticas del movimiento romántico. La misma música de Bernard Herrmann -de innegables raíces en el Tristán e Isolda wagneriano- basa su estructura obsesiva y anhelante en cualificadas segregaciones armónicas del romanticismo, tal como apuntó, en un magnífico estudio<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_13_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">13</a>, José Luis Téllez. Pero también pueden establecerse relaciones -y Juan Miguel Company y Sánchez Biosca así lo hicieron- entre el tipo de inscripción de Scottie ante el abismo pictórico que se muestra ante él y esa suerte de inclusión / exclusión del sujeto-espectador en la representación pictórica del romanticismo, «por medio de una lectura fantómica de los cuadros paisaje»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_14_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">14</a> modificando la posición que la escena clásica le asignaba. Si Vertigo tiene como tema mayor lo siniestro -o el abismo negro y aterrador que hay detrás de esa belleza fraudulenta-, camina hacia esa categoría estética partiendo de unas referencias pictóricas que no olvidan, en su formulación, la poética inglesa de lo sublime, tal como la definió Giulio Carlo Argan<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_15_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">15</a>. <a name="11"></a><br />Hitchcock consuma y lleva al límite, como señala Gilles Deleuze, la imagen-movimiento, porque su cine, aún ligado a la acción, se sitúa a las puertas de esa situación óptica y sonora pura que permitiría captar «algo intolerable, insoportable. No un hecho brutal en tanto que agresión nerviosa... (sino) algo excesivamente poderoso, o excesivamente injusto, pero a veces también excesivamente bello y que entonces desborda nuestra capacidad sensoriomotriz». Y no deja el autor de observar, al mismo tiempo, como ya el romanticismo inglés se proponía esa finalidad de captar lo insoportable, lo intolerable, «el imperio de la miseria, y con ello hacerse visionario, hacer de la visión pura un medio de conocimiento y acción»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_16_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">16</a>. Cuando ese tipo de situaciones ópticas y sonoras puras no se prolonguen ni sean inducidas por una acción -con la irrupción, en fin, de las escrituras modernas- se cumplirá, recurriendo otra vez a las palabras de Deleuze, «el presentimiento de Hitchcock: una conciencia cámara que ya no se definiría por los movimientos que es capaz de seguir o de cumplir, sino por las relaciones mentales en las que es capaz de entrar»<a style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-STYLE: normal" onclick="javascript:window.open('not0001.htm#N_17_','notas','WIDTH=700,HEIGHT=200,left=200,top=100,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes').focus()" href="javascript:void(null);">17</a>. <a name="12"></a><br />Vertigo está ya más cerca, por todo ello, del vanguardismo moderno que del modelo clásico, al que, con todo, lo une todavía -y no es poco- el poder fascinante de una narración regida por la calculada enunciación hitchcockiana.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-38255795830377794242007-05-04T08:10:00.001-07:002007-05-04T08:10:49.121-07:00Fantasías urbanas en el cine de los años veinteFantasías urbanas en el cine de los años veinte<br />por Vicente Sánchez-Biosca<br />Lars, cultura y ciudad nº 7, Enero 2007<br /><br />Manhatta , el mítico film realizado en 1920 por el pintor y fotógrafo Charles Sheeler y el fotógrafo Paul Strand, se cierra con un bello atardecer cayendo como un manto sobre la bahía del Hudson. Las nubes cubren el astro en su decadencia mientras nosotros, espectadores, sentimos el privilegio otorgado por esa visión elevada del imponente panorama natural; una perspectiva que sobrepasa las limitaciones físicas del hombre, como si la cámara hubiese querido regalarnos con un don divino. La retirada de los últimos barcos vespertinos compone un hermoso cuadro que evoca la contemplación jubilosa de la naturaleza en su pureza todavía incontaminada.<br />En realidad, Manhatta pasa por ser la primera de las sinfonías urbanas que el cine prodigó durante los años veinte y principios de los treinta; sinfonías en las que la metrópoli imponía su ritmo, su fascinante trazado y daba cobijo a la muchedumbre hormigueante, la masa, una de las acuciantes preocupaciones de los filósofos de la época. En ellas, en esas sinfonías de despliegue técnico sin igual, el cine acudía a la cita engalanado con el privilegio de haber sido el arte técnico por excelencia, la forma de expresión surgida genuinamente de la era moderna del maquinismo. Por eso hizo del montaje una metáfora imponente: la ciudad se convertía en una auténtica cadena de montaje, de velocidad, y la música sinfónica garantizaba un estilo de orquestación que afinara los distintos instrumentos en su diapasón. El mito de la gran ciudad adquiría así una forma perenne en la que música, urbanismo y montaje se daban cordialmente la mano. De este origen pueden derivarse películas que, de una manera o de otra, figuran en el arsenal de la vanguardia cinematográfica e, incluso, de su posterior deriva realista : Rien que les heures (A. Cavalcanti, 1925), Twenty-Four Dollar Island (R. Flaherty, 1925-1927), Autumn Fire y A City Symphony (Herman Weinberg, 1929 y 1930, respectivamente), El hombre con la cámara (Dziga Vertov, 1929), À propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930), A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931) o City of contrasts (Irving Browning, 1931), por sólo citar unas cuantas.<br />Sea como fuere, la premonitoria Manhatta todavía se hallaba lejos de ese éxtasis urbano ; antes bien, estaba inundada del espíritu whitmaniano tan genuinamente americano que aspiró a la fusión entre naturaleza y urbe, hombre y masa, anhelando una síntesis que algo tiene de mítica. Es ese espíritu que inspiró, como en una olla hirviendo, el lustro mágico de la literatura y el pensamiento norteamericanos, entre 1850 y 1855, y del que deslumbran por su irrepetibilidad obras como La letra escarlata (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850), Moby Dick (Herman Melville, 1851), Walden (Henry David Thoreau, 1954) y la primera edición de Hojas de hierba (Walt Whitman, 1855). Y es que el cuadro que describió Whitman y que apunta en Manhatta tiene algo de místico. Evocaba el poeta:<br />Pero ¿qué puede parecer más majestuoso y admirable que Mannhattan cuajada de mástiles?<br />¿El río, la puesta de sol y las olas de bordes recortados de la marea?<br />¿Las gaviotas agitando sus cuerpos, el barco de grano en la penumbra y la lenta gabarra?<br />¿Qué dioses pueden superar a estos que me llevan de la mano y que otras voces que quiero me llaman presto y en alto por mi nombre más íntimo cuando me acerco?<br />Extrañamente, nada en esta cita, cuyo hálito invade Manhatta , recuerda la ciudad moderna que preside el film: los ferrocarriles, la zona financiera de Wall Street, las masas a bordo del ferry, la técnica industrial de las construcciones, los rascacielos... Y es que la imaginería urbana que palpita en Manhatta es una mezcla que aspira a la síntesis o que pugna, en todo caso, en una feroz dialéctica, lejos, muy lejos de las fantasías rotundamente modernas en las que la técnica de expresión abrazaría la misma mecánica que el tema. En este sentido, la celebérrima novela que John Dos Passos dio a luz en 1925, Manhattan Transfer , encarnaría un modelo bien distinto y lo haría sobre la misma ciudad -Nueva York- y los mismos motivos que Manhatta , contradictoriamente moderna, recorría bajo el halo protector de Whitman.<br />En cambio, lo que determinó la modernidad en las películas que siguieron la estela de Manhatta y que, sin ánimo de exhaustividad, hemos citado más arriba fue su entrega al éxtasis de la técnica. Ninguna de ellas encarnó tanto ese abandono febril como Berlín, sinfonía de una gran ciudad , que el artista plástico Walter Ruttmann dirigió en 1927 siguiendo una idea del guionista austríaco Carl Mayer. En este caso, no se trataba de ese epítome de la modernidad que fue Nueva York, sino del Berlín convertido en crisol de la capital europea. Todo en esta cinta es un canto, una prosopopeya, a la ciudad viva. Su motivo es una jornada completa de su existencia, desde el despertar en el que un tren a gran velocidad parte de los extrarradios para precipitarse sobre la urbe todavía desperezándose hasta los fuegos artificiales que coronan la noche con un cielo estrellado y apoteósico. Desde la quietud matutina, los movimientos (un papel, una hoja, agitados por el viento, las cortinas de los negocios abriéndose, los primeros obreros que acuden al trabajo, los primeros medios de transporte...) van encadenándose, acelerándose, multiplicándose, hasta alcanzar un verdadero éxtasis que, periódicamente, se suspenderá (la hora del almuerzo, la de la comida) para retomar su impulso poco después y alcanzar una todavía más impactante celeridad de torbellino.<br />Y es que el ritmo deviene en una auténtica trituradora desde la que se observa todo: lo humano y lo mecánico se funden supeditándose a una unidad superior, en cuyo seno los trenes y las fábricas, los andamios y el tráfico, los viandantes y las manifestaciones obreras acabarán por perder su identidad. Se diría que Ruttmann ha tomado la decisión de borrar el contenido (político, social, incluso iconográfico) de cada elemento figurado para doblegarlo a un criterio más pertinente (un gesto en movimiento, un esquema compositivo) para, a renglón seguido, someterlo a un orden rítmico y extático que lo engulle todo. Su herramienta será el montaje. Y es que las máquinas que pueblan esta ciudad moderna no huelen a proletario ni a revolución, a protesta ni a clase social, como lo hicieron las soviéticas de esos mismos años, o como sucederá con Berlin Alexanderplatz poco más tarde (tanto en la novela de Alfred Döblin -1929- como en su adaptación a la pantalla por parte de Piel Jutzi -1931-), sino a diseño; eran, si se nos apura, la primera íntegra apuesta cinematográfica por el diseño en los tiempos en los que la Bauhaus se hallaba empeñada en la tarea de fusión del arte y la industria y la Nueva Objetividad se imponía como forma artística en el panorama weimariano. Berlín, sinfonía de uan gran ciudad añadía a esta síntesis la superficie pulida e inmaculada de un ritmo creciente, de una orquestación de los objetos y los hombres que no en vano recibió el nombre de sinfonía.<br />Sin embargo, la ciudad tentacular, fascinante y dinámica que preconizaron como objeto de arte los pintores de principios de siglo (futuristas y expresionistas, en particular) no desembarcó de manera natural en el cinematógrafo. Por paradójico que pueda parecer, ya que el cine era hijo de la técnica por derecho propio, la pintura se había comportado de modo más radicalmente moderno que la máquina de filmar y ello a pesar de que su materia expresiva era a todas luces más tradicional y clásica. Acaso un ejemplo lo pruebe de manera sintomática.<br />En 1914, Ludwig Meidner proclamaba a los cuatro vientos sus entusiastas «Instrucciones para pintar la gran ciudad» en estos términos: «¡Pintemos -animaba a sus correligionarios- lo que está cerca de nosotros, nuestro mundo urbano, las calles tumultuosas, la elegancia de los puentes colgantes de hierro, los gasómetros que cuelgan entre blancas montañas de nubes, los colores hirientes de los autobuses y las locomotoras de los trenes rápidos, los hilos ondeantes del teléfono, lo arlequinado de las vallas publicitarias...!». A nadie se le escaparán los ecos futuristas que tales instrucciones entrañan y que bien podrán hallarse sin modificaciones importantes en los manifiestos de Marinetti y sus compañeros de escuela, como tampoco los cuadros de Umberto Boccioni. Es un gesto radical de transformar en objeto de contemplación estética el éxtasis del presente técnico y cotidiano, en detrimento de los géneros y motivos de la tradición artística.<br />Pues bien, ese mismo artista plástico -Meidner- fue el encargado de componer los decorados de una película de 1923 - Die Strasse , La calle -, dirigida por Karl Grüne. Pese al entusiasmo que estallaba en el anterior manifiesto, e incluso a pesar de que el cine era a todas luces un medio más idóneo para la representación de lo moderno; y, lo que es más, a despecho del tiempo transcurrido entre estos dos momentos, casi una década, Meidner será presa en sus diseños para la pantalla de una imaginería mucho más arcaizante de lo que hacían presagiar sus anteriores declaraciones.<br />En efecto, La calle contiene explosiones fascinantes de agitación festiva, automóviles y barahúnda, expresadas por medio de collages , pero está ideada por una mente más anacrónica. En el interior de un hogar apacible, hasta la asfixia, un hombre reposa sobre el sofá mientras su esposa se emplea en tareas domésticas. Es de noche, pero sobre el techo de la habitación, iluminado, se proyectan sombras, destellos de una incesante agitación exterior. Es el hombre en su vida anodina quien se siente requerido por esa prometedora atracción de un abismo de luz; una luz que, pronto lo descubriremos, entraña corrupción, perdición y crimen. Así irrumpe la calle, la ciudad, como algo fascinante y peligroso, algo que abre los ojos hasta enceguecer, pero también algo abisal. La ciudad no es una realidad; es un fantasma que, sazonado en la mente del protagonista, despierta infinitos e inconfesables deseos que lo precipitarán en la ruina y la desdicha.<br />Una imagen condensa esta visión inquietante de la ciudad. El protagonista inicia, en plena noche, la persecución de una atractiva prostituta. El oscuro callejón se asemeja a un túnel por el que el errante se encamina a una perdición fascinante cuando el signo de una tenue luz se ilumina súbitamente: son dos lentes que anuncian una clínica oftalmológica o sencillamente una óptica. Sin embargo, la banalidad del referente en nada empobrece la estremecedora sensación que se apodera de nosotros al sentir esos dos ojos hiperbólicos arrancados del cuerpo y mirando la escena como una premonición siniestra de lo que no tardará en advenir. Y, al propio tiempo, representa la amenaza de saberse observado. Sacudido por su repentina presencia, el hombre queda paralizado por la visión. A partir de este instante, penetraremos de su mano en la faz inquietante, telúrica y críptica, de la noche urbana, de sus poderes de atracción y sus efectos devastadores. Una imaginería sale al paso; una imaginería que en nada recuerda la modernidad, la técnica, el tráfico y la masa. La conocíamos desde los cuentos infernales de E.T.A. Hoffmann, desde los relatos fantásticos del romanticismo alemán, desde los abismos insondables a los que nos asomó la pintura de Caspar David Friedrich y, con más razón todavía, desde esa renovación del género fantástico que tuvo lugar a principios del siglo XX (a la cabeza del cual encontramos a Gustav Meyrinck, Alfred Kubin o, incluso, el tortuoso universo de Hanns Heinz Ewers). De todo este asfixiante arsenal bebió El gabinete del Dr. Caligari , la película fundacional del expresionismo cinematográfico que dirigió Robert Wiene en 1920, hasta convertirlo en su manifiesto y su programa.<br />El hecho es que esta visión se halla más cerca de las inquietudes del espíritu que de la faz moderna de sus decorados y ambientes. Los alemanes denominaron este efecto la Stimmung , atmósfera, entendiendo por tal una irrespirable y envolvente aura que rodeaba a las personas y a los objetos, abstrayéndolos de cualquier materialidad y haciendo recaer sobre ellos un peso cósmico. No era un caso aislado. Numerosas ciudades que tomaron cuerpo en el cine producido en el primer lustro de la República de Weimar se comportaron con una aversión muy sospechosa hacia el presente: eran figuraciones góticas o neogóticas encerradas en un pasado remoto que desataba, por añadidura, poderes ocultos y jamás presentidos procedentes de tiempos y estadios antropológicos arcaicos ( Nosferatu , de Murnau, 1922), telas pintadas, como las famosas de El gabinete del Dr. Caligari , que proyectaron los terrores primigenios y la locura misma sobre el decorado exterior, pero también de sus secuelas, en las que la ciudad aparecía amenazada por fantasmas del inconsciente de clara inspiración romántica, reconstrucciones medievales cercanas a la imaginería judía de la Cábala ( El Golem , de Paul Wegener, 1921) o parajes románticos en los que la naturaleza animada excluía toda presencia urbana ( Las tres luces , Fritz Lang, 1921).<br />Hubo, pues, que desprender a las calles y a las ciudades de esas atmósferas anímicas asfixiantes para abrirlas a los mundos reales o simplemente a lo que una observación estética medianamente atenta podía encontrar sin demasiados esfuerzos en la pintura, la fotografía o la arquitectura del Berlín o el París contemporáneos. Y esta reclamación de derechos por parte de la realidad llevó al cine, especialmente al alemán que había sido el más hermético e inquietante, en la dirección de un realismo cada vez más radical e indómito, dando cuerpo a los actores sociales, pero también a los objetos, a los decorados de calles y fiestas, etc. En ocasiones, esta progresiva presencia escoró hacia el melodrama, en otras apuntó en la dirección de la denuncia obrera y la militancia de izquierdas, sin excluir, claro está, el vanguardismo formal. En todos estos casos, muy diversos entre sí, asistimos a una corporeización de lo abstracto, a la deslumbrante emergencia del mundo contemporáneo que nace de entre las brumas de la inmaterialidad telúrica anterior y acabará imponiéndose de manera rabiosa e hiriente.<br />El panorama es harto complejo, y no menos confuso. Diseño, maquinismo, abstracción urbanística, ritmo frenético, se codean con el sueño americano de fusión entre naturaleza y urbe, la permeación de la superficie moderna al animismo y los poderes de la mente... Decididamente, las contradicciones enmarañan la visión de la ciudad moderna en el cine hasta tornarla opaca y viscosa. Si una película es capaz de resumir esta amalgama y ofrecerla con una dosis a un tiempo de grandiosidad y de cursilería es, a no dudarlo, Metrópolis . Esta superproducción en la que la mayor empresa cinematográfica alemana y europea, la Ufa, quemó sus naves, en la que los más modernos y espectaculares estudios berlineses de Neubabelsberg desplegaron su enormidad, este film que, según reza la tradición, tanto gustó a Hitler y a Goebbels, se quiso monumental y sobrehumano: en él los hombres sucumbían al peso aniquilador de los edificios modernos e inhumanos, todos ellos tallados a escala gigantesca, en sus puertas y ventanas. Incluso la masa humana se fundía en cuerpos orgánicos y colectivos, como los de los obreros alienados descendiendo a su ciudad de las profundidades, en cuidadosa inmersión en el submundo de la lujosa metrópolis de los amos. Y allí esos cuerpos se convertían a su vez en arquitectura deshumanizada. Mas si ésta era la apariencia de las maquetas, del futurismo de inspiración y fantasía neoyorkinas, Metrópolis coqueteaba, caprichoso o irresponsable, con otras fuentes arquitectónicas, con otros modelos históricos que chocaban con el colosalismo moderno e, incluso, lo desmentían.<br />Estilos arcaicos que tan adheridos habían estado al cine alemán anterior reaparecían conquistando un terreno que parecía olvidado. La catedral gótica ubicada extrañamente en el corazón de la metrópolis es el núcleo donde se corporeizan los pecados capitales y donde se resuelve la alegoría social de la película que preconiza la superación de la lucha de clases en aras de una hermandad cristiana; allí mismo tiene lugar la batalla final en la que el siniestro inventor acaba sus días a manos de Freder, el redentor. Las catacumbas del arte paleocristiano describen, por su parte, un trazado subterráneo, resto del pasado de la antigua ciudad, y sobre el que se construyó la nueva megalópolis; en ella enuncia la beatífica María su promesa de redención cristiano-social, la llegada del Mesías que, en inverosímil alianza, se convertirá en su amado. Más extraña todavía es la arquitectura imaginaria que convoca la casita del inventor, casita de golem , apuntaba certeramente el guión original de Thea von Harbou, en la que se perpetra una fechoría que está a caballo entre la sofisticación técnica futurista y el misterismo alquímico de tiempos remotos: la creación del doble de María para soliviantar a los obreros en un gesto de sadismo incomprensible y derrotarlos definitivamente.<br />Y es que Metrópolis se comporta como un verdadero pastiche de figuras y alusiones arquitectónicas en el que parecen conjugarse o, si se prefiere, mal trabarse, como en un collage , las fantasías más diversas de la ciudad vista por el cine a mediados de la década de los veinte, de sus ansias modernistas y de sus fallas arcaizantes, de sus fantasías románticas y de su espíritu kitsch . En su incompletitud, en su incoherencia extrema (que no es otra que la de la película misma y la de sus componentes formales), Metrópolis exhibe menos la realidad arquitectónica de los años veinte que lo que muchos hombres soñaron por aquellas calendas. De ahí su valor de documento.<br />A fin de cuentas, el cine de estos años no fue reflejo de las urbes que se edificaban y se planeaban en la realidad. Ni siquiera lo fue probablemente de los proyectos abortados. Estuvieran o no estas realidades en su norte, el cine tuvo un poder del cual la arquitectura carecía, un poder derivado de su impotencia factual, de su inconsistencia material, si se nos permite la expresión. Fue por ello expresión de anhelos, sueños y fantasías de ciudades que no habían existido nunca o que habían desaparecido para siempre, pero que una vaga nostalgia recordaba y anhelaba. Ésta es su prerrogativa: gracias a esta inconsistencia, el cine aportó tanto a la topografía imaginaria de las ciudades. La paradoja tomaría la forma de un capricho: cuanto menos documenta el cine respecto a los hechos, es decir, cuanto más impotente se revela para materializar aquello que idea, más aporta sobre los sueños que no fueron, más libre se siente, en suma, para soñar e inventar. Pues los sueños más profundos -eso nadie lo ignora- son aquéllos que jamás se hicieron realidad.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-74449480850161199732007-05-04T08:07:00.000-07:002007-05-04T08:09:53.023-07:00Rediscovering EisensteinPublication Information: Book Title: Eisenstein Rediscovered. Contributors: Ian Christie - editor, Richard Taylor - editor. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1993.<br /><br />Introduction: Rediscovering Eisenstein<br /><br />Ian Christie<br /><br />Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. William Blake <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">1 </a><br />How does Eisenstein's reputation stand today? Ostensibly it is secure. He ranks among the acknowledged founding fathers of cinema, with at least one title in most lists 'the greatest films ever made', while the Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin must be almost as widely quoted and parodied as the 'Mona Lisa'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">2 </a>Whenever film teaching and theory are discussed, his name is invariably invoked-even if only to warn against the dangers of both enterprises. But behind, or perhaps because of, these tokens there is also an undeniable ambivalence. This was well expressed by Richard Roud's editorial note in his Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, where every line of praise sounds qualified:<br />That Eisenstein is one of the most important figures of world cinema can hardly be questioned; but except for Strike and some of those 'rushes' from Que Viva Mexico!, his lack of humanity becomes more disturbing with every passing year. A man of science? Yes. A great theorist of film practice? Of course. The first great teacher? Well, given his lack of followers, one has doubts. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">3 </a><br />Roud and many others, it seems, would like to question the whole edifice of Eisenstein's reputation, to argue that-despite undeniable local successes-it was all built upon a series of massive mistakes: Soviet Communism, the doctrine of montage, the notion that science or theory have any place in art. It is as if they have only been prevented from toppling Eisenstein from his pedestal, like the tsar's statue in October, by the power of the myth or, to borrow Benjamin's term, 'aura' that surrounds him. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">4 </a><br />Will that 'aura' survive the collapse of the Soviet state which created and sustained it? Quite apart from Western empiricist mistrust of Eisenstein's intellectualism and systemic aspiration-the director Lindsay Anderson diagnosed him as 'compulsively an intellectual'!-there is a different<br />-1-<br />current of hostility within the Russian dissident tradition. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">5 </a>For Solzhenitsyn's Convict X 123, Ivan the Terrible amounted to a 'justification of political tyranny. …A mockery of the memory of three generations of Russian intelligentsia', while Eisenstein was 'an arse-licker, obeying a vile dog's order'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">6 </a>Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled her husband's distaste for 'the specious glitter of the then fashionable Eisenstein with his mechanical splendours' in her memoir of the inter-war period. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">7 </a>And more recently, hostile references to Eisenstein pepper the writings of Andrey Tarkovsky. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">8 </a>None of this is surprising. In a culture dedicated to inner resistance, neither Eisenstein's many public humiliations nor his acts of personal bravery were likely to be credited against the canonic status of his films.<br />Indeed the period of glasnost saw a rising tide of impatience and recrimination. Few of the classic Soviet film-makers escaped condemnation at some point as 'Stalinist', and in Naum Kleiman's contribution to this book there is an echo of the defence that he and other scholars had to make against such irresponsible allegations. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">9 </a>Despite Eisenstein's steadfast refusal of triumphalism-and it should be recalled that both Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible would have been profoundly elegiac had they not suffered censorship-there remains a vague implication of complicity between tyrant and victim. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">10 </a><br />Even before the terms of a post-Soviet Russian culture have emerged with any clarity, it has long been obvious that Eisenstein's achievement demanded to be seen in a new, more sophisticated totality than his 'Soviet' persona allowed. There is even perhaps a useful reinterpretation to be made here of the identification with Leonardo which Eisenstein himself professed. Just as we have to disentangle the historical Renaissance Leonardo from the 'genius' and technological visionary promoted by Italian Fascism, so the 'little boy from Riga' who grew up in Russia's Silver Age needs to be distinguished from the 'Master of Soviet cinema' who became a vital ambassador for, as well as prisoner of, Stalin's regime. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">11 </a>Both artists emerged from highly traditional cultures to face the challenge of new scientific values. Both eagerly embraced the new paradigms, while also retaining much of their heritage: hence no doubt the lack of any simple relationship between the theory that both so passionately professed and their brilliant, fragmentary and essentially intuitive pictorial practice. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">12 </a><br />Certainly we must now question the familiar verdict attributed to Shklovsky that 'the books Eisenstein wrote were the films he did not make'. Even if planning major studies like Direction and Method helped ease his desperation after the loss of, first, Que Viva Mexico! and then Bezhin Meadow, it is clear that Eisenstein had already defined his goal and distinctive method. While still in Mexico, he wrote in a letter to Maxim Strauch:<br />-2-<br />Although I have deftly adjusted to 'armchair' work in a Pushkin-like kibitka-my own kind of thinking gyroscope!-I still feel a terrible need to settle down and finally consolidate the theoretical organism. Yes, and what's more, I'm doing a great deal of drawing!<br />Actually, the filming, theory and drawing are done in 'relays' so as to keep going at all costs. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">13 </a><br />Despite the traumas of the following eighteen years, he succeeded as few others of his generation did in 'keeping going'. Teaching, writing and drawing were undoubtedly easier to practise when film production became a high-risk affair of state, but they never simply 'replaced' film-making, as is clear from the stream of concrete film projects which he continued to formulate. The fact remains that Eisenstein's unique enterprise was as difficult to accept for his Soviet contemporaries of 1935 and the late 1940s as it is for many today. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396779">14 </a><br />The exhibition Eisenstein: His Life and Art was organised as a deliberate challenge to the images of Eisenstein that make him seem remote, dogmatic, naive; a victim of the same familiarity that has bred snobbish contempt for those two great near-contemporaries he was proud to call friends, Chaplin and Disney. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">15 </a>Alongside the celebrated films, it laid equal stress on what has previously seemed marginal to his main achievement-private drawing, theatre work, friendships, collecting, travels-and revealed how much, even now, remains unexplored in the legacy of this most famous of film-makers and compulsive autobiographer. For Eisenstein became the first and most persuasive expert on 'Eisenstein'. There is scarcely any aspect of his career and life on which he did not first comment, often with a wit and apparent candour that has inhibited dissent. But to make progress in a world which certainly does not regard Eisensteinian precepts as axiomatic, scholars have to look beyond or behind the erudite self-analysis of 'one's own scholarly self to gain other vantage points. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">16 </a>Hence the origin of this book in a conference commemorating Eisenstein's '90th birthday', with participants from a dozen countries and, thanks to glasnost, younger Soviet scholars gaining their first international platform. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">17 </a>In addition to the scholars present, Tatyana Gomolitskaya, daughter of Sergei Tretyakov, was a welcome guest who brought vivid first-hand memories of Eisenstein as enfant terrible of the early Soviet theatre and avid collector of both detective stories and risqué jokes. The conductor Alan Fearon talked about how his experience of restoring the original music for Potemkin and October had given him a new respect for this almost forgotten collaborator of Eisenstein's. And finally, the playwright Richard Crane and director Faynia Williams read from their kaleidoscopic play based on Eisenstein's life and work, Red Magic, later performed at the Edinburgh Festival and in London.<br />It was an occasion to assert simultaneously the 'wholeness' of Eisenstein<br />-3-<br />and the striking diversity of approaches, lessons and influences that his legacy embraces, with a particular emphasis on neglected contexts and the importance of texts only now being published. Consideration of what he planned but did not achieve, as a number of contributors stress, can be just as revealing as the apparently 'finished' works. In light of this continuing process of rediscovery, what follows here by way of introduction is a condensed stocktaking of work in progress and work still remaining to be done which will eventually re-establish the 'mythic' Eisenstein of the Comintern and Cold War years on firmer historical and analytic ground.<br /><br />HOW LONG (AND FAST) IS A PIECE OF FILM?<br />Eisenstein's completed films at least may seem to pose no problem of accessibility. In Britain and the United States, as in most developed countries, all seven features, as well as Time in the Sun and the Bezhin Meadow reconstruction, are currently in commercial distribution. After early censorship skirmishes, they have remained more or less continuously available since their first appearance, and all are now also on home video. But how complete and authentic are the available versions?<br />From empirical research such as Kristin Thompson's, reported here, much more is now known about the vanguard role played by Eisenstein's films in creating a world-wide market for the early Soviet cinema. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">18 </a>This success also contained the seeds of future problems, since the foreign returns to the Soviet state-in a rare conjunction of the economic with the political-were so great that pragmatic expediency soon governed their international distribution. Before this, Eisenstein's first feature, The Strike, had won early recognition at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, but was little seen at home and not actually distributed abroad until after Eisenstein's death, by which time preservation material had been secured by the Soviet archive, Gosfilmofond. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">19 </a>Although the original titling seems to be lost, the fact that it was never submitted for prewar foreign censors' approval seems to have preserved an essentially complete and common version. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">20 </a><br />With the subsequent silent films, on which Eisenstein's fame mainly rests, matters are more complex. As Thompson confirms, Germany was by far the most important market for Potemkin and, with hard currency and film stock both in acutely short supply, it must have seemed expedient to sell the negative directly to the German distributor, Prometheus. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">21 </a>There it was edited to meet the censor's demands, so that the material which was eventually regained from Germany to become Gosfilmofond's main source reflected these changes and the 1925 Soviet 'original' was effectively lost. When Kleiman came to restore the film in the 1960s, using as additional sources an early copy which had survived at the Institute of<br />-4<br />Cinematography, VGIK, and one sent by Eisenstein with Leyda as a gift to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he discovered that Eisenstein had almost certainly used his Berlin trip of 1926 to re-edit the film while complying with the censor's requirements. So, while the MoMA-based restoration remains the most complete, there are still important textual cruxes to be explored (including those which Kleiman could then not broach for political reasons, such as a Trotsky quotation). <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">22 </a>Also missing from all release versions to this day is the original red stencil tinting of the ship's flag, which Eisenstein considered vital to the film's impact on audiences. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">23 </a><br />October was to follow a similar pattern, after being caught in the crossfire of Trotsky's final challenge to Stalin. Montagu, who probably knew Eisenstein better than any foreigner but was constrained by pro-Soviet loyalties, wrote laconically of October being 'slashed to ribbons in response to political changes'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">24 </a>The film's co-director Grigori Alexandrov, meanwhile, was quoted in 1963 describing a visit by Stalin to the cutting room 'just before the film's première on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1927', at which he allegedly 'asked for cuts of several important scenes totalling…approximately 3000 feet'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">25 </a>Apart from the date given for Stalin's intervention, this is roughly compatible with Eisenstein's published claim in late December 1927 to be working on 'two films: Before October and October. 13,000 feet in all'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">26 </a>The longest version known today is approximately 9200 feet.<br />As with Potemkin, the original negative appears to have been sold to Germany to earn much-needed hard currency for new production, but does not appear to have returned. In addition to four differing positives held by the Soviet archive, a few cut sequences survived until the 1960s, when Kleiman considered inserting these into a 'research version' for limited circulation. This modest ambition was overtaken by Alexandrov's proposal for a new sound version to mark the 'Jubilee' of the Revolution in 1967. Once again, more complete material was found abroad, this time a 16mm print in Britain. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">27 </a>Alexandrov was able to add sequences of the Mensheviks and of Lenin and the Central Committee. But his version, originally furnished with a voice-over commentary as well as extensive sound effects and music, proved little short of disastrous and was modified. Close examination of what was finally released-which became the new international release version-shows that Alexandrov made numerous minor cuts in a vain effort to make the film more like a conventional narrative.<br />But October resists such 'normalisation'. Quite apart from the political reasons for its lacunae, Eisenstein effectively discovered the potential of metaphoric or 'intellectual' montage while working at intense pressure on its editing. He was inspired to contemplate a filmic analogue of Marx's Capital, and many sequences such as the 'gods' and Kerensky's entry into<br />-5-<br />the Imperial apartment bear witness to this new formal interest, doubtless at the expense of narrative material already filmed. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396780">28 </a>More than almost any other major film, October is essentially uncompleted, as was noted by contemporary Soviet reviewers; and even after the political forces which shaped and constrained it can be openly explored, it remains highly enigmatic. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">29 </a>As Tsivian's important study here of a variant script shows, it also permits more readings than Soviet-authorised orthodoxy has so far allowed, including the marked influence of Russian Symbolism as mediated through Blok and Bely and evidence of the erotic complexity of Eisenstein's genius. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">30 </a><br />The General Line poses an immediate issue of identity with its alternative title, The Old and the New, adopted for the film's delayed release in late 1929. Were there in fact two fundamentally different films? And which of these survives today? Again, the evidence so far available is scant and opinions differ. Seton states bluntly that changing agricultural policies required a fresh start and a new scenario, <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">31 </a>while Barna quotes Eisenstein on the film's 'shattered vertebrae and broken spine', adding without any further source that 'of the original conception there remained only the first three reels, and the agitation scene in the second part'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">32 </a>Leyda, however, casts doubt on whether the film was radically changed when production resumed after October. 'Putting together the available evidence, I should say that when the crew returned to The General Line in Spring 1928, there was no more than further shooting on the long-before determined story.' <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">33 </a>But he goes on to indicate the more probable reason for the film as it stood in early 1929 excluding much that had been shot in both periods of filming. Perhaps because of the exceptional demands of October, Eisenstein had developed an unusually free approach to 'composition' by editing:<br />in the cutting-room, there was, of course, the always painful whittling process that reduced twice too much material to a normal running length of film. Here, as in both Potemkin and October, Eisenstein had to throw away almost as many ideas as the best ones that the finished films retained. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">34 </a><br />One instance of what was discarded from the earlier period of shooting is an episode that featured the Constructivist artists Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova as 'foreigners', apparently visiting the Soviet countryside by aeroplane. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">35 </a>A rather different element also now missing is the image of Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa' which Seton claims was juxtaposed with a sleeping peasant woman in the evocation of the 'old' village-surely a case of post-October intellectual montage? <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">36 </a>At least one copy had hand-coloured fireworks accompanying the bull's 'wedding', in succession to the red flags of the 'Potemkin'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">37 </a>In fact the completion of The General Line coincided with an explosion of teaching, theory and polemic on Eisenstein's part, much of which seems to have left some trace on the film. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">38 </a><br />-6<br />Thus it may be necessary to reinterpret Shklovsky's account of Eisenstein hastily assembling a 'carnivalesque film on abundance' to divert the bankers who came to see why the production was so far behind schedule. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">39 </a>Was this perhaps more than a temporary expedient, marking the point at which an intended simple, didactic film became the riot of fertility symbolism and Utopian magic that Stalin saw in February 1929 and that largely survives today? For, although most changes to the film have conventionally been attributed to Stalin's intervention in February 1929, it is not clear that this resulted in more than an elaborate search for 'the correct end'-which eventually replaced the Chaplinesque original and introduced Andrei Burov's Constructivist 'vision' of the new collective farm. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">40 </a>Even the emblematic change of title seems to have been a cautious move by the producers Sovkino rather than an order from Stalin and the film was in any case withdrawn from distribution in 1931 (as were many other Soviet films of the previous decade) before being pillaged for a 1932 documentary. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">41 </a><br />What this account suggests is that probably neither a 1926 Urtext nor the actual late 1929 Soviet release version still exist, because the former was never completed and the latter partially dismembered. On balance, it would seem that we have only The General Line as it was finalised in the first six months of 1929. But there remain important differences between the versions of this currently available, noted here by Myriam Tsikounas, which must stem from the prints originally sent abroad in 1929 or, more recently, from the partial reconstruction undertaken by Kleiman using a Belgian print. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">42 </a><br />The 'new' history of early cinema points to a radically different understanding of textual stability throughout the silent period. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">43 </a>Because individual copies of films could be and were easily altered for many different reasons in the course of their circulation, it makes little sense to search for a unique original or authentic version of each production. Films routinely existed in multiple versions, with opportunities for modification occurring at all stages from the producing studio to the point of exhibition. Synchronised sound drastically reduced, without wholly eliminating, the scope for such changes. Today, it is certainly possible to seek the longest or the earliest version of a silent film, but this may not represent the final wishes of the maker(s) or indeed what any actual audiences saw. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">44 </a>To trace the reasons for variation, on the rare occasions when this is possible, is to come closer to understanding the complex workings of a system that was in some ways less akin to mass production than is now widely supposed.<br />Soviet silent cinema belonged to this general international regime, but has also been subject to some highly specific circulation factors. For Eisenstein's silent films, four distinct processes of textual variation can be identified:<br />-8<br />1 politically motivated alterations before and after domestic release;<br /><br />2 foreign distributors' changes, as demanded by local censorship, but also arising from translation, projection practice and commercial judgement;<br /><br />3 Eisenstein's own revisions when the opportunity or need presented itself;<br /><br />4 deliberate 'modernisation', especially when synchronised sound was added (including 'step-printing'). <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">45 </a><br />It is the last of these, together with many generations of 'duping' from positive material, that has rendered most of the widely available prints (and consequently the videos made from them) of Eisenstein's silent films so inadequate. Equally damaging is the widespread use of inappropriate projection speeds. While no 'correct' speed can be claimed with confidence-since this was a matter of widespread variation and controversy in the silent period-the 16 or 18 frames per second often regarded as 'silent speed' today is undoubtedly too slow for many of the montage rhythms and tropes to cohere. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396781">46 </a>Eisenstein discovered how damaging this could be when he witnessed Potemkin shown more slowly than he at least was used to at its London première in 1929, allegedly in order to synchronise with Meisel's music, and the audience laughed at the rearing stone lions. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">47 </a>Recent experience has shown that the impact of restored versions, shown at an appropriate speed under proper cinema conditions, is nothing short of revelatory. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">48 </a><br />An important step towards realising this goal has been the revival of interest in Edmund Meisel's original music for Potemkin and October. Whereas Prokofiev's contribution to Nevsky and Ivan has long been acknowledged, Meisel has remained no more than an obscure footnote to Eisenstein's early career, with only seriously deficient scores surviving. The restoration and performance of his two major scores by Alan Fearon has made a strong case for reassessing the original success of Potemkin as a more equal partnership between film and music than might have seemed possible-and for wondering if October would have fared better had Meisel's score been properly synchronised and more widely performed. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">49 </a><br />Meisel, it transpires, broke decisively with the 'pot-pourri' tradition of film music and launched boldly into a musical architecture that responded to the challenge of Eisenstein's non-narrative montage construction. His Gerauschmusik, or 'noise music', deploys often ironic leitmotivs and quotations against a background of rhythmic ostinati (supported by a large percussion section) and massive dynamic contrasts, all couched in the Modernist idiom of the 1920s. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">50 </a>Only the young Shostakovich's 1929 score for New Babylon rises as completely to the challenge of the late Soviet montage idiom, with its sardonic play on 'Belle époque' operetta to underline the tragedy of the Paris Commune. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">51 </a>With authentic performances, it is now possible to appreciate how much the response to Meisel's<br />-9-<br />music must have shaped Eisenstein's idea of sound-image counterpoint. For in performance with the film, if not so obviously on the page, it interacts with Eisenstein's images to make plausible the otherwise Utopian concept of a 'single denominator' which would combine the visual and the auditory. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">52 </a><br />It was inevitably with Meisel that Eisenstein planned to demonstrate how synchronised sound-on-film could be used non-naturalistically. Unfortunately the detailed plans he had prepared to post-synchronise The Old and the New in London came to nothing, and indeed probably could not have been realised with the limited sound technology of the period. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">53 </a>But Eisenstein's faith in the potential of natural sound and music to become as malleable and meaningful as film images clearly stemmed from what he had already learned through Meisel. And we may wonder if The Old and the New can be considered in any way complete without its intended soundtrack that would have combined natural sound, musique concrete and musical 'typage'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">54 </a><br />The saga of Que Viva Mexico! has been extensively researched, but mainly in terms of the politics and personalities involved. Although Eisenstein was never able to edit his cherished Mexican footage, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what can be discerned from the mass of surviving film material. While controversy has continued over Seton's intervention to make Time in the Sun-claiming to follow Eisenstein's own editing plan-Leyda patiently assembled all the remaining material into a 'study version' of the Mexican project, based on the assumption that Eisenstein would in fact have created the film in the course of editing it, as he had always done previously. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">55 </a>This unique opportunity to examine the raw material for an Eisenstein film seems so far to have prompted no further study of his compositional practice beyond the suggestions offered in Leyda's commentary titles.<br />After the loss of the Mexican footage and other frustrated projects of the early 1930s, Bezhin Meadow was completed in rough-cut by the end of 1936, before being finally banned in March 1937. Its material is believed to have been destroyed during the battle for Moscow in 1941, but the hope of discovering a hidden print still haunts Eisenstein scholars. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">56 </a>Meanwhile, the reconstruction that was made from surviving single frames in 1967 by Kleiman and Yutkevich gives at least a partial impression of this most elaborate production. But the intense, hieratic impression conveyed by these frozen images and the music subsequently added needs to be supplemented by other information about the production, most of which we owe to Jay Leyda, as David Stirk and Elena Pinto Simon explain in their contribution here. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">57 </a><br />The uncertainties about the films of Eisenstein's last decade stem largely from that period's climate of terror and secrecy. In the case of Alexander Nevsky, we know from Eisenstein himself that the original scenario<br />-11-<br />continued after Nevsky's defeat of the Germans at Lake Peipus to show him first paying tribute to the Khan in order to buy time for military preparations, then dying before reaching his home. But Eisenstein was told that the scenario should end with the triumph of Lake Peipus and, in a phrase often attributed to Stalin, that 'such a fine prince could not die'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">58 </a>We owe to Shklovsky the further anecdote of the 'missing reel' from Alexander Nevsky. The story is that, when a hasty Kremlin preview of the film was arranged while Eisenstein slept at the cutting room, one sequence was accidentally omitted and could not later be inserted for fear of upsetting Stalin. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">59 </a>This is supposed to have included a fight on the bridge at Novgorod which resulted from the ordinary people challenging the merchants' decision not to resist the Teutonic invasion-a sequence that would surely have met with Stalin's approval? Shklovsky's anecdote carries 'poetic' conviction, but is not entirely convincing in technical detail, although Leyda and Voynow reproduce stills from such an episode which is not in any known version of the film. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">60 </a><br />A much larger issue is the web of supposition still surrounding Ivan the Terrible and its legendary third part. We know that Eisenstein enlarged his original plan for a two-part film early in the production process, and that a full 'literary script' for three parts was published in advance, as had been the Soviet custom. According to Seton, only Parts I and II were actually shot; but Leyda and Voynow claim, more plausibly, that material for all three parts was shot simultaneously, not least because many of the same sets and props were needed. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">61 </a><br />Part I appeared in 1945, already differing somewhat from the published scenario, with the childhood prologue detached. When Part II was eventually released in 1957, the prologue had become a subjective flashback, and it was apparent that the film covered considerably less ground than indicated in the Part II scenario. Was this in fact Eisenstein's own conception of Part II? And, if so, was it the first version which he had completed in 1946 before his heart attack? Or was it, as Leyda and Voynow assert, 'a roughly corrected cutting of Part II' also made in 1946, for which Eisenstein 'lacked the strength to make the new sequences that were needed'? <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">62 </a>They go on to state categorically that by mid-1946, 'there was no talk of or plan for Part III: all materials for it, including four edited reels, had, by then, been destroyed'.<br />Two further Ivan fragments have since come to light: the Knight Staden's interrogation (a fully dubbed and edited sequence) and several shots of Mikhail Romm's screen test to play Queen Elizabeth I in a Windsor Castle scene. Both belong to the original scheme for Part II, which leaves open the possibility that other sequences from this larger conception known to have been filmed-including the great Last Judgement confrontation between Ivan and the 'Tsar of Heaven', familiar from stills-could yet be unearthed. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">63 </a>Other recent discoveries in the<br />-12-<br />ex-Soviet archives encourage such hopes, but it must also be admitted that disappointingly little scholarly attention has so far been paid to earlier expansions of the Eisenstein canon, such as the discovery of his filmed insert, Glumov's Diary, for the 1923 theatre production Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">64 </a>Nor indeed has the rich legacy of well-developed projects been extensively explored; and Håkan Lövgren's valuable study of the Pushkin project here indicates how revealing these can be in the case of a film-maker who managed to realise publicly so few of his ambitions. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">65 </a><br />Much remains to be done, even with that most familiar part of the Eisenstein legacy. A useful first step would be to identify the published Eisenstein 'scripts' as merely transcriptions from whatever material has been to hand, rather than allowing them the dubious status they still enjoy as works of reference. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">66 </a>More valuable would be an international census and 'genealogy' of versions of the films in circulation, which would enable scholars to identify which copies they are using and compare these with others. And with the Russian archives now more able, in theory at least, to co-operate with other archives on restoration, may we not hope to see eventually an Eisenstein film-text 'variorum' collection? The principles that should guide such work were proposed as long ago as 1972 by Ivor Montagu, in an exemplary report he prepared on Potemkin copies held by the National Film Archive in Britain: 'as in Shakespearean scholarship, the wisest recension would be to synthesize everything probable from all copies, giving due weight to intuition and poetic fitness.' <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">67 </a><br /><br />'THIS MAY ALL BE PRINTED SOME DAY'<br />Eisenstein knew that his reputation as a writer would be almost entirely posthumous. Although he published numerous articles throughout his career, only two books actually appeared during his lifetime. The first of these was Leyda's collection of his essays in English translation, The Film Sense in 1942; the second was the literary scenario of Ivan the Terrible in 1944. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396782">68 </a>As Kleiman has reminded us, the official Soviet verdict on Eisenstein remained strongly negative for nearly a decade after his death. None of his films after Potemkin could safely be mentioned while Stalin lived, and his theoretical work was dismissed as the meanderings of a 'muddler '. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">69 </a><br />The first Soviet collection of his essays appeared in 1956, an early harbinger of Khrushchev's 'Thaw'. When the second part of Ivan was released in 1957, the way was now clear for a more substantial monument to his extraordinary gifts as an art historian, philosopher, teacher and polemicist. Hence his widow Pera Attasheva's project for a Selected Works and, given the unpredictability of official policy, the need to realise this speedily. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">70 </a><br />Since neither of the major book-length projects, Direction and Method,<br />-14<br />was in readily publishable form when Eisenstein died, the strategy of the Selected Works was to 'sample' these as an interim measure. And since there was no existing biography, or the scope to write one at that juncture, the remarkably frank memoirs which Eisenstein had started while convalescing in 1946-7 were pressed into service as an impromptu autobiography, to become Volume 1. Therein lay the root of a future problem. For to assemble the free-association pattern of Eisenstein's 'immoral memoirs' into a more or less chronological sequence involved (literally) cutting up the original typescript and discarding material that would not fit this format. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">71 </a><br />It was only when the Eisenstein Archive materials were taken into the Central State Archive for Literature and the Arts (TsGALI) after Attasheva's death in 1965 that Naum Kleiman began a new collation. Gathering all the material not used in the published version, he discovered that Eisenstein had often indicated where an already published article should be dropped into the expanding structure of the memoirs, sometimes in a revised form. Meanwhile the covers of notebooks had been found, papers and inks compared, and the order of composition could now be used to deduce how Eisenstein planned his 'Portrait of the Author as a Very Old Man', which turned out to be also the portrait of an epoch and its generation. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">72 </a><br />Unfortunately, just at the point when Kleiman had arrived at a new, expanded structure for the memoirs and succeeded in getting this published under Eisenstein's chosen polyglot title YO! Ich selbst in an East German/Austrian edition in 1984, Marshall's English translation of the now-superseded 1964 text appeared. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">73 </a>That this should have made no reference to the scholarship of the intervening twenty years was all the more deplorable since a 1978-80 French edition had already made considerable use of the revised ordering and contents. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">74 </a>Only now, in 1993, is an English translation of YO! imminent, nearly thirty years after the first Russian edition. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">75 </a><br />Similar delays and omissions have dogged the publication of the writings as a whole. According to Kleiman's estimate, the Russian Selected Works contains no more than about a quarter of Eisenstein's known writing. A further twelve volumes have long been contemplated to replace the published six and even these would still not include the VGIK lectures and director's working notes. Nor would they deal with the extensive diaries or Eisenstein's letters, selections from which could greatly expand the current range of Eisenstein studies and confirm much that has remained speculative and rumoured, judging from the wit and candour of what little is so far available. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">76 </a>Ultimately, Kleiman estimates, twenty volumes would be needed, but the likelihood of this being achieved in the foreseeable future after the collapse of the Soviet system must be low.<br />Meanwhile, a steady stream of articles, notes and correspondence has appeared in Soviet journals since the early 1950s and many scholars have<br />-15<br />benefited from access to hitherto unpublished manuscripts under the guidance of Kleiman ('Imitation as Mastery' and 'A Few Personal Reflections on Taboo', making their first appearances in English here, are good examples of this process at work). <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">77 </a>Publication of this material abroad in translation has not kept pace and the overall picture is complicated by significant national differences of approach. Two major 'selected works' series, in France and West Germany, set new standards of selection and annotation and included previously unavailable material before both came to a premature end. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">78 </a>Now the Italian and British series, still in progress, have built on this example and are actively helping to redraw the map of Eisenstein's writings, while each following different organisational principles. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">79 </a>Alongside these, the lively variety of Leyda's Calcutta series and Albera's two volumes in French have filled important gaps in our knowledge of, especially, Eisenstein's later views on visual art, cinema and psychology. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">80 </a><br />These developments make a reassessment of Eisenstein's intellectual and critical work pressing and, with some difficulty, possible. From the response to the first volume of the new British edition, it seems clear that many non-specialists still have real difficulty distinguishing stages and contexts in his writing and recognising how its chronology vitally governs what could be said as well as the external prompting and inner development of his thinking. Thus it is still not uncommon to find polemical statements of the late 1920s and obligatory ones of the 1930s, quoted as triumphant proof that ultimately he 'was wrong about everything'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">81 </a>Leyda, who did so much to create the first Western image of Eisenstein as a theorist, remarked ruefully, but perhaps also rather naïvely, on how<br />his vision of film as a synthesis of all the arts and sciences, instead of convincing his colleagues of his determination and devotion to his art, had the effect of dividing them from him; and it is from the other side of this barrier that the Eisenstein portrait formed and hardened. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">82 </a><br />How, it may be wondered, could Eisenstein's colleagues and later filmmakers not be daunted by such a prospectus? And for as long as his theoretical work was disguised or justified as practical 'teaching', how could it fail to be misconstrued? <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">83 </a><br />With all the political inhibitions that Leyda faced in editing the first and most influential of his essay collections, The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949), it is scarcely surprising that he stressed the more conservative aspects of Eisenstein's immense range. In 1964, when he compiled Film Essays and there was reason to believe the major works would soon appear in translation, Leyda's concern was still with filling gaps in the biography of Eisenstein the director-teacher. Thus we have Eisenstein as the admirer of Griffith, Chaplin and Ford (although few would realise the peril even these innocuous enthusiasms caused when they were expressed). But consider<br />-16-<br />another essay, written between 1946-8, in which he mentions inter alia Welles's Citizen Kane, Wilder's The Lost Weekend, Leisen's Lady in the Dark, Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, Hitchcock's Spellbound and Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, in addition to Surrealism and Sartre. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">84 </a>Such a range of references was no doubt made possible by the wartime Allied presence in Moscow which brought films, magazines and conversation from abroad, but it also confirms that Eisenstein's isolation from cinema beyond the USSR was far from voluntary. As Albera observes, this essay also develops some ideas similar to those which appeared contemporaneously in France when the backlog of American wartime films began to arrive. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">85 </a><br />If the constraints on Eisenstein the film-maker and viewer are still underestimated, there is even greater unwillingness to recognise that from a very early stage his intellectual and speculative interests had a momentum of their own, increasingly independent of his film projects. The fact that his studies undoubtedly provided some consolation amid the aborted projects and productions of the 1930s did not necessarily mean they embodied the same ideas or impulses. Instead it is necessary to trace how the 'theoretical organism' born of Eisenstein's kaleidoscopic interests and influences of the late 1920s progressed to become the 'building to be built' of his last decade-a unique work of research, synthesis and introspection on the fundamental sources of human expression.<br />As Grossi shows here, the direction of this study was not unprecedented: in many ways it followed directly from the Russian literary-scientific tradition which was to have a belated yet profound effect on social sciences and cultural studies in the West. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">86 </a>Eisenstein was a near contemporary of Shklovsky, Vygotsky, Tynyanov and Bakhtin; he had close intellectual relations with the first three of these, and twice he planned lecture courses on the psychology of art at the request of the neuro-psychologist Luria. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396783">87 </a>As other contributors to this book make clear, Eisenstein's actual achievements in cultural semiotics and the theory of art demand to be taken seriously. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">88 </a><br />His studies, however, were never merely academic and, as I have suggested elsewhere, there is a demonstrable convergence between Eisenstein's scientific work and his personal quest. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">89 </a>Two linked themes which recur frequently in his writings over twenty years are the semantic potential of 'montage' and the non-narrative or 'musical' import of film. These are most obviously brought together in the concept of counterpoint which serves as a bridge between silent and synchronised-sound cinema. Indeed Eisensteinian montage, when it is not caricatured as a kind of conjuring trick, is often understood as an elaborate counterpoint of signification. Music, meanwhile, comes to stand for what lies beyond verbal signification, for what is perceptible, though ineffable. In Non-Indifferent Nature, he writes of 'the musical line of landscape begun by Potemkin'; and<br />-17-<br />he analyses the 'Odessa mist' sequence in that film in terms of 'a type of “postpainting” passing into a distinctive type of “premusic (proto-music)”'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">90 </a>As Eisenstein pursues these themes in his later writings, where they stand for the 'specificity' of film, it seems that he may in fact be seeking to locate the place of the film-maker in the machinery of cinema, to identify the scene of creation, and thus confirm his own identity as an artist on the cusp of the era of Constructivism-engineer or magus? <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">91 </a>In effect, he shared Leonardo's belief that science was necessary, but by no means sufficient 'to transform the mind of the painter into the likeness of the divine mind'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">92 </a><br /><br />'I NEVER LEARNED TO DRAW' <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">93 </a><br />Eisenstein's drawings have long been prized by initiates, but the rarity of exhibitions and lack of any representative anthology of reproductions have held back recognition of their crucial importance. There has also been the same unwillingness, as with the writings, to grant them due autonomy. On the evidence of the 1988 exhibition, graphic expression provided the most intimate and uncensored record of Eisenstein's emotional life-it is tempting to say on both a conscious and an unconscious level. And in the later writings, it is the motif of drawing that gives greatest insight into his complex processes of self-analysis. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">94 </a><br />Eisenstein drew constantly for all but about six years of his life. The directors Josef von Sternberg and Grigori Roshal were among many later witnesses of this compulsive, almost automatic, activity. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">95 </a>Sternberg recalled how Eisenstein 'always had paper and pencil in front of him', while Roshal described how work colleagues gathered up the drawings so prodigally abandoned. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">96 </a>As a child, Eisenstein filled notebooks with ambitious caricatures, strip cartoons and fantastic compositions. The earliest of these preserved (by his mother) date from 1913 when he was 15 and already publishing his drawings in the school magazine, which he also edited. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">97 </a>They contain a fascinating array of imagery, based variously on the animal stories of childhood, topical events and the 'pure pleasure' of metamorphosis and incongruity. There are meticulously drawn animals paying court to the Tsar of the Universe, a chicken wooing a pig in party dress, animals queuing for admission to the circus and performing an opera. Political sophistication appears early. Germany and Britain fence with each other across the Channel in a Punch-style cartoon, while a sinister figure surrounded by policemen is captioned 'Not an important criminal, but a British Minister!' And narrative makes its appearance with strip cartoons of a bear's adventures and of traditional summer holidays at Trouville.<br />By 1917 he was selling his sophisticated political cartoons, now signed with the punning pseudonym 'Sir Gay', to leading Petrograd newspapers. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">98 </a><br />-18-<br />According to Seton, this was also when he became interested in Leonardo, no doubt encouraged by his own developing graphic skills, which led him to Freud's study and an 'explosive' identification with Leonardo's famous 'childhood memory' of being struck in the mouth by a bird's tail, or at least Freud's controversial diagnosis of this as a sign of the artist's repressed homosexuality.99 Then the final throes of the war and the revolutions of 1917 rescued him from civil engineering studies (also from the possibility of pursuing his discovery of Freud as far as Vienna), and offered a welcome escape into the theatre. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">100 </a>Between 1918 and 1921, it was primarily his design ability that took him from the amateur fringe to the heart of a theatre undergoing its own revolutionary upheaval amid the chaos of the Civil War. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">101 </a><br />The drawing which had begun as an only child's precocious response to the books and journals around him, and increasingly compensated for the loss of family life after his parents separated (allowing him to fantasise a 'normal' family and attack the father he blamed for the divorce) would not resume until 1930. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">102 </a>However the adolescent drawings that have been preserved provide us with important evidence of what would later distinguish Eisenstein as a film-maker, when another unexpected juncture launched him on that career.<br />In the memoirs he makes a telling connection between childhood delight in the vitality of line drawing, the linear contour as 'the trace of movement', and mise-en-scène considered as the 'lines of an actor's movement in time', which points to an essential continuity between childhood caricature and the markedly graphic dynamism of the silent films. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">103 </a>There is also ample evidence of an apprenticeship in observation, condensation and 'pars pro toto' caricature which would become the basis of his later 'typage'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">104 </a>Although this drew on theories of expression which had wide currency in the Russia of Eisenstein's youth, and would later acquire an ideological dimension-opposing the fiction of the actor's disguise with the physiological reality of the 'ordinary person'-its successful use depended upon the cultivated ability to recognise and isolate 'social and personal biography condensed into physical form'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396784">105 </a>We see this on a truly social scale in the great panoramic drawing of 150 Petersburg 'types', but also in more personal terms in the drawing of an inordinately fat man with a ludicrously thin servant. These are proto-typage figures, as well as cruel caricatures of his hated father and a family servant.<br />The adolescent drawings amount to a laboratory in which Eisenstein first perfected his skill with visual metaphor. His exuberant animal drawings initiated a lifelong 'zoomorphism', which delighted in animal-human comparisons and would yield many of the most striking images of his films, from the agents provocateurs of The Strike to the tsar-eagle metaphor of Ivan. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">106 </a>Nor was this a facility merely for isolated comparisons. A parody of conventional encyclopedia illustrations showing man's evolutionary<br />-19<br />descent, done in reverse and titled 'People of the 21st Century', looks forward to the structure of the agents provocateurs sequence and perhaps even to more abstract conceptions like the 'gods' sequence in October. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">107 </a>And was the adolescent drawing of a transparent house a distant source of his later Hollywood project The Glass House? <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">108 </a><br />The fact that there are almost no drawings from the period 1924-30 suggests that for Eisenstein film-making and drawing fulfilled what was essentially the same desire in different ways, so that one could not easily substitute for the other. True, there were many preparatory drawings for Alexander Nevsky-he was fascinated by the image of the Teutonic knights in their sinister heraldic helmets-but only for Ivan the Terrible among all his completed films was there any quantity of actual design and mise-en-scène sketches (which may be explained by the fact that he acted as his own designer on this production). From his equally intensive involvement in theatre as a designer and director between 1917 and 1923, there are literally hundreds of drawings in as many styles as the kaleidoscopic Soviet theatre of that period embraced-by turns Cubist, Cubo-Futurist, Constructivist, commedia dell'arte, pantomime, American 'dime novel' style and Gogolian grotesque. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">109 </a>But although these gave full rein to his love of allusion and caricature, they constituted graphic design, with the distractions of colour, texture and implied volume, rather than the 'pure' line drawing, or 'ascetic search for form', that continued to fascinate him.<br />It was during his fourteen months in Mexico, recalled in the memoirs as 'paradise regained', that Eisenstein experienced some kind of epiphany which started him drawing again with an intensity which would continue for the rest of his life. Mexico's montage of the primitive, the sensual and the religious seems to have reconnected him with whatever was lost during the emotional traumas of his childhood, or repressed during adolescence and youth.<br />He responded to the Mexican primitivism that Diego Rivera had synthesised 'from the bas-reliefs of Chichen-Itzá, through primitive toys and decorated utensils, to José Guadalupe Posada's inimitable illustrations for street songs'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">110 </a>Direct contact with this raw material and with 'the astonishingly pure linear structure of the Mexican landscape itself prompted a return to 'the correct linear fashion' of the unbroken, usually closed, line tracing an abstracted calligraphic image. In fact there is a 1931 portrait by Gabriel Ledesma which shows Eisenstein's features and form as a plan of the hacienda of Tetlapayac where, according to Seton, he found 'the place I had been looking for all my life'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">111 </a>Here indeed is a 'map of the heart', a record of his identification of self with place.<br />Mexico licensed him to revel in religious iconography and ritual kitsch, sometimes exaggerating its intrinsic latent sensuality, as in the 'Jesus Polychrome' and 'Gilded Madonna', elsewhere mingling it with the equally erotic imagery of the bullfight to produce such emblematic montage compositions as an 'Adoration of the Matador', 'Crucified Bull' and the<br />-20-<br />Figure 5 'Paradise regained': Eisenstein posing with Lina Boytler at the Tetlapayac hacienda.<br />specifically titled 'Synthesis: Eve, Europe, Jesus, Torero'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">112 </a>The suite of variations on a theme became established as Eisenstein's basic drawing strategy in Mexico, and among those preserved are a Judas and Gethsemane group, a Samson and Delilah, and two scandalously, though hilariously, blasphemous series: one offering suggestions for commercialising the Christian sacraments, the other starring Veronica as the patron saint of photographers and printers. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">113 </a><br />Central to this period were the many drawings based on the motif of Duncan's murder, which is portrayed as a joint undertaking by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as if following Leskov's 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' rather than Shakespeare. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">114 </a>Eisenstein had actually designed a 'Cubo-<br />-21-<br />Figure 6 Castration, represented as decapitation, recurs in many of Eisenstein's variations on The Death of King Duncan', May-June 1931.<br />Futurist' Macbeth for the Moscow Proletkult Theatre in 1921-2, but his prodigious variations on the murder theme in (mainly) 1931 represent at once the most 'purified' and the most disturbing of all his closed-line drawings. The dramatic kernel of the Macbeth/Duncan series is the Macbeths' simultaneous guilt and exultation at the murder and their lust for power. Some sequences emphasise the savagery of the killing, its gruesome absurdity and Lady Macbeth's active participation, even Duncan's acquiescence, in it. Others concentrate on the erotic satisfaction of the Macbeths; and yet other grotesque and ironic suites explore anachronistic (a post-coital cigarette!) and stylistically allusive variations. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">115 </a><br />These remarkable drawings shed considerable light on the peculiar relationship between the analytic and the affective in Eisenstein's sensibility. They reveal a passionate intellect restlessly, obsessively trying to solve the equations of sexual difference. The king/father is shown as passive or complicit in his assassination; while the ensuing accession to power is<br />-22-<br />portrayed in frankly erotic (albeit ironic) terms. Here Eisenstein's well-attested interest in the Christian mystics' pursuit of religious ecstasy takes profane form as he seeks the link between pathos and ecstasy. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">116 </a><br />Did Mexico also make possible Eisenstein's fullest exploration of his hitherto repressed sexuality? This would not be surprising, if only because Tetlapayac provided more personal and social freedom than he enjoyed at any other time in his life (bearing in mind that he lived mostly with his mother and old nanny in Moscow). Apart from the story Seton recounts about his deliberate attempt to embarrass Upton Sinclair by sending a trunk packed with scandalous drawings to be found by United States customs, it is from this period that most of the known erotic drawings date. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">117 </a>One at least of these creates an extensive tableau of male coupling around a central figure identifiable as a self-portrait. It is pornographically explicit, yet also playful and clearly referential in a variety of ways-the vulture biting a penis could be a mocking allusion to Freud's notorious analysis of Leonardo's dream. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">118 </a><br />Yet the catalogue-like 'showing of acts' cannot simply be treated as evidence of Eisenstein's sexual activity in Mexico or anywhere else. The dominant motif of the drawing in question is castration, which links it directly with the recurrence of decapitation in such contemporaneous suites as 'Salome' and 'Ten Aspects of the Death of Werther', not to mention 'Samson and Delilah'. Whether or not Eisenstein went beyond graphic fantasy and play-acting in Mexico to explore the 'unacted desires' of the homosexuality he had previously mistrusted ('a retrogression…a dead-end', according to Seton's report) cannot yet be established with any certainty. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">119 </a>If he did, it is unlikely that any evidence would have been revealed by Russian scholars, however liberal, in view of the Russian homophobic tradition which the Soviet era crudely reinforced and criminalised. While evidence is appearing of early liaisons with women, there is now a growing consensus among gay commentators that Eisenstein was indeed homosexual and may even have become the victim of blackmail after Mexico. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396785">120 </a>We may never know how his experiences there affected what was certainly an ambiguous sexuality, but the 'unresolved' Oedipal conflict running through most of his subsequent projects is apparent: most obviously in Bezhin Meadow and Ivan the Terrible, but also the Pushkin project (discussed here by Lövgren) and, in different ways, both Alexander Nevsky and the Tamerlane episode of Ferghana Canal. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">121 </a><br />The artist Jean Chariot, who watched him drawing in Mexico 'very quickly so as not to disturb the subconscious elements', recalled that he planned to analyse the drawings to discover 'what had happened in this release of “stream of consciousness”'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">122 </a>His discussion of drawing in the memoirs comes in a chapter titled ironically 'How I Learned to Draw-A Chapter about Dancing Lessons', in which he recalls failing as dismally to learn formal dancing as he did academic still-life drawing. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">123 </a>But he later<br />-23-<br />discovered that he could embroider the foxtrot as fluently as his improvised line danced on paper. Instinctively rejecting what could be taught, his method in all creative work was to let loose a 'capricious flood' of images, words or drawing, then seek ways of shaping or analysing the torrent. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">124 </a><br />The analysis of his own drawings took several forms. One strand has only come to light recently, with the publication of 'A Few Personal Reflections on Taboo', in which Eisenstein starts by noting the injunction against creating images shared by many religions. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">125 </a>From the presumed identity of naming and being, he passes to the idea of depiction as a magical act: the ability to 'capture' a likeness depends upon the subject's consent-and there are coded references here which imply specific (sexual?) relationships: 'I remember that it was the same on at least three other occasions (L., V. and E.). The moment the image was captured on paper, the subject submitted psychologically.' <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">126 </a>He then sketches a distinction between women's 'objectivisation' of their (male) loved ones' thoughts and words, compared with men's 'externalisation' or projection on to, for instance, the heroine of a novel or film-or into a drawing. This leads to a complex reflection on the psychic transaction involved in drawing:<br />We do however remember what it means to 'know' one's wife in the biblical sense. It does not just mean to fuse with her. But, from the position of an admirer-to possess her.<br />You can only imagine another person at the second stage. After the first stage in which you mimic the model. You reproduce her subjectively in yourself in order to return her once again to objectivity, as an image on paper.<br />It is only when this process of mutual penetration-getting inside the model and accepting her within you-is achieved that the image will come on paper. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">127 </a><br />If this text clarifies the 'talismanic' aspect of Eisenstein's drawing, we find the theme of 'mutually penetrating objects in painting and drawing' as early as 1932 in a notebook entry which also introduces the metaphoric concept of 'protoplasm' in relation to both his own and Disney's drawing. Just as protoplasm is the basis of all biological life, so 'non-anatomical' drawing offers the 'truly appealing theme [of] the coming into being of the human form from plasma'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">128 </a>The 1941 drafts for an unfinished essay on Disney continue this exploration of the appeal of the 'plasmatic' in Disney's early animation: the infinite flexibility of figures, their interchangeability with natural objects, and ability to collapse and reanimate at will. 'The very idea…of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism. …And thus, what Disney does is connected with one of the deepest traits of man's early psyche.' <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">129 </a>For<br />-24-<br />Eisenstein, Disney's mastery and depth of appeal are little short of overwhelming:<br />I'm sometimes frightened when I watch his films. Frightened by the absolute perfection in what he does. This man seems to know not only the magic of all technical means, but also the most secret strands of human thought, images, feelings, ideas. Such was probably the effect of Saint Francis of Assisi's sermons. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">130 </a><br />Disney, he concluded, represents 'a complete return to a world of complete freedom…freed from the necessity of another primal extinction'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">131 </a><br />From which it is a short step to Eisenstein's preoccupation with the 'return to the womb', which Lövgren sees as the cornerstone of his psychology of art. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">132 </a>It may be significant that Hanns Sachs was among the Freudians particularly interested in the Mutterleibsversenkung or 'womb complex', and it was he who first wrote about Eisenstein and met him in Berlin in 1929. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">133 </a>In a striking note from 1932, Eisenstein brought together the motifs of ecstasy, drawing as 'creation' and imagined pre-natal experience:<br />This is the graphic equivalent to the sensation of 'flight' among ecstatics: an identical uterine sensation of gyroscopicness and the identical phylogenetic pre-stage-the floating of the amoebic-protoplasmic state in a liquid environment. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">134 </a><br />'How I Learned to Draw', nearly fifteen years later, ends with an evocation of 'paradise…the happiest period of our life, that blessed age when… we dream in the warm wombs of our mothers'. By then he had added to the technique of graphic that of autobiographical free-association as a means of reproducing that primal pleasure. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">135 </a><br /><br />THE BUILDING TO BE BUILT<br />Drawing preserved a link with childhood, with the paradise from which his parents' divorce expelled the young Eisenstein. It absolved him from the responsibility of language, obedience to the word of the father-was this why he fought so hard against the union of image and speech in sound film; why his books remained unfinished?-and it offered direct access to the pleasure of creation. It could be confessional, therapeutic, experimental and speculative, none of which the public nature of cinema, especially in its increasingly censored, ceremonial Soviet form, could ever permit.<br />Amid the bitter personal disappointments and political horrors of the late 1930s, he redefined the 'theoretical organism' first mentioned in Mexico in the form of an allegorical drawing, 'The Building to be Built', which was intended to 'picture my whole future opus'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">136 </a>The image is of a classical temple, in which 'the expressiveness of man' rests upon a<br />-25<br />foundation of 'dialectic method' and supports a pediment of 'the philosophy of art', crowned by the pennant of 'film method'. Thus theory and practice are linked as expressions of the same human drive, with film achieving the new synthesis of the arts, as Eisenstein declared in his essay on the production of Die Walküre in the same year: 'Men, music, light, landscape, colour and motion brought into one integral whole by the single piercing emotion, by a single theme and idea-this is the aim of modern cinematography.' <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">137 </a>Despite its Marxist structure, this temple also evokes the architectural symbolism of Freemasonry and the spiritual evolutionary doctrine of Theosophy, recalling the influence of these movements on Russian Symbolism, which was indeed the culture in which Eisenstein grew up, however hard he, like many others, later tried to cast its ideals in 'materialist' terms. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">138 </a>Thus, for instance, we find the mystical theme of the search for collective immortality which runs through much Symbolist philosophy expressed by Eisenstein:<br />Of all the living beings on earth we are alone privileged to experience and relive, one after the other, the moments of the substantiation of the most important achievements in social development. More. We have the privilege of participating collectively in making a new human history. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">139 </a><br />In the centre of the temple, 'Montage appears as a door to the understanding of the image'. There is the implication of a secret, or mystery, beyond the door, only to be revealed by an initiation into 'montage'; that linking of the primitive with the transcendental, which Yampolsky explores here in his essay on mimesis, and which Eisenstein traced back to the origins of human society in Non-Indifferent Nature. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">140 </a>Nor is this the only drawing in which a whole philosophy is compressed: there is 'EX-TASIS' from Mexico; and the very last cycle, 'Les Dons', a haiku-like series about the ephemerality of nature and its 'gifts'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">141 </a>The importance of these and other graphic works to any understanding of Eisenstein's distinctive synthesis of traditions and philosophies makes serious study of the drawings a high priority.<br /><br />NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE<br />Already in 1988, when the symposium which led to this book took place, the Soviet system that Eisenstein knew had changed beyond recognition. From the perspective of 1993, it has all but disappeared and there is a corresponding danger that the 'official' culture of the Soviet era will now be repudiated en bloc amid the massive waves of disillusion sweeping the former Soviet empire. Eisenstein will no doubt incur fresh charges of 'collaboration' with the tyranny which oppressed him and yet made possible his art; and yet it also seems likely that the impetus for a truly<br />-27<br />Figure 8'LesDons', 19 December 1947: 'GraBhalm' (sic., 'Grass blade') and Butterfly'.<br />international study of his legacy, established during the transitional years of glasnost, will continue. The 1990 Venice Biennale conference expanded the range of approaches begun at Oxford and there are encouraging signs that scholarly relationships which cut across boundaries of continent, tradition and language will take Eisenstein studies into a new era of improved access to materials and franker debate about its many themes that have a resonance for both the present and the future. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">142 </a><br />For the study of Eisenstein's work in all its interrelated forms cannot-should not-be a passive affair conducted exclusively within the academy. It offers a continuing challenge to received ideas in history, philosophy, politics and sexuality; and in an era suspicious of two-way traffic across the bridge between 'theory' and practice, it offers important models and insights. Not the least important aspect of the 1988 exhibition and conference in Britain was a parallel series of workshops for young people held in Oxford, which took Eisenstein's call to 'have the vision' as their motto. These and educational events held around the exhibition in London and Manchester confirmed Eisenstein's lasting importance as a pedagogic stimulus. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">143 </a><br />He may also offer a new 'window on Russia', at a time when its cultural<br />-28-<br />history stands in urgent need of reinterpretation. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">144 </a>The television images of Soviet statues toppling in August 1991 will have recalled for many most immediately the demolition of the tsar's statue in October, which inaugurates that film's elaborate deconstruction of the symbolism of power. Eisenstein was no simple apologist for Lenin or Stalin. Indeed the many accusations of heresy directed against him-first by his colleagues in the LEF group, later by Stalin's apparatchiks and posthumously by Western Marxists-are perhaps the surest proof of his essential originality and independence.<br />It was the Revolution that first freed him from the conformism of bourgeois culture, set to follow in his father's footsteps as an 'obedient little boy from Riga'. Then the liberated theatre of Proletkult and Meyerhold drew him to the Revolution, until film beckoned as a more efficient medium of propaganda. But although he initially identified cinema with the challenge of building communism-Dreiser found him in 1928 'more communistically convinced' than any other artist he met in the Soviet Union-it was in fact cinema that led him to the philosophy and history of art. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">145 </a>For in cinema he found-combined-a stage, a canvas and a laboratory beyond any artist's dreams. Henceforth, for him at least, theory and practice would be indissoluble, while the furtherance of the materialist dialectic would join with his personal vocation in a 'joyful science' suffused with the ecstasy of discovery and creation. Aumont has rightly termed this synthesis a 'theoretical tour de force', which also conscripted the Stalinist theme of 'unity' for Eisenstein's quite un-Stalinist purposes. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">146 </a>Like Galileo, he found an accommodation with absolutism uniquely appropriate to these times.<br />Certainly it goes against the grain of most contemporary readings of the Russian Revolution, which routinely trace a uniformly falling graph. As we survey its brightest talents exported, silenced, murdered or reduced to 'internal exile', the continuing commitment of a battered survivor is hard to credit. After the extirpation of the LEF-Constructivist movement which had most closely shared his hopes and values (even while criticising his experimental exuberance and refusal of purism), Eisenstein found himself increasingly isolated. One by one, he lost his mentors, colleagues and friends (they were often all three)-Bely, Mayakovsky, Vygotsky, Tretyakov, Babel, Malevich, Meyerhold. Yet he could write in 1940:<br />The future does not need to be predicted.<br />It's right here with us. Coming into being. Being born. Being made. It's presently a matter for our hands. But already it's starting to work in reverse. It's breaking into the sphere of relations. Problems of consciousness. Morals. Ethics. Activity. The superstructures are cracking. The new. The unprecedented. Classlessness is entering into them! <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">147 </a><br />This could almost be by the 'futurian' poet Khlebnikov. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396786">148 </a>It echoes that<br />-29-<br />moment when modernist revolt combined with revolutionary millenarianism to produce the clarion call of the early Soviet era. In doing so it recalls the earlier materialist utopianism of the 'god-builders' who, before Lenin's denunciation, had included Lunacharsky, Eisenstein's protector during the 1920s. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396787">149 </a>Nor is this incompatible with claiming Eisenstein as an heir to the Russian Symbolists who ushered in that uniquely mystical and moral Modernism that we still too often consider distinctively 'Soviet'. For above all Eisenstein's visionary zeal pays tribute to the essential syncretism of Russian culture, orientated towards the common good and the future.<br />It was this impulse, essentially humane and Utopian, that led him along similar paths to those of Bakhtin and Tynyanov. This generation of communist scholars, pace Solzhenitsyn's scholar-convicts, did not disgrace the Russian intelligentsia. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396787">150 </a>Rather they kept its ideals alive in dark times, adding fresh insights to its already powerful analysis of the Western cultural tradition and, in the case of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, creating an expression of the age as complex and resonant in its own terms as Pushkin's Boris Godunov. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396787">151 </a><br />There can be little doubt that his work, grasped in its totality, will long outlive the collapse of the system that made it possible. Indeed, the continuing study of Eisenstein as an international and inter-disciplinary enterprise, together with his profound influence on succeeding generations of truly experimental film-makers, should serve as a beacon for the future that he could not predict but tirelessly worked to create out of his profound understanding of the past. As Samuel Palmer wrote of Blake, 'the Interpreter': <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396787">152 </a><br />In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age…<br />-30-marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-53505750396505462852007-05-04T08:04:00.000-07:002007-05-04T08:07:14.077-07:00The frame and montage in Eisenstein's 'later' aestheticsBook Title: Eisenstein Rediscovered. Contributors: Ian Christie - editor, Richard Taylor - editor. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1993.<br /><br />Chapter 14: The frame and montage in Eisenstein's 'later' aesthetics<br /><br />Michael O'Pray<br /><br />The name of Eisenstein is synonymous with the montage film method. Unfortunately this seems to act as a barrier to understanding the full richness and complexity of his writings and films. There is, in truth, much to call the conventional view of montage into question and encourage us to return more open-mindedly to Eisenstein's work. However, part of the problem is the neglect of his later writings, due, it seems, to the lack of support they give to the view of their author as political revolutionary filmmaker par excellence. In fact, his later work, produced in the shadow of Stalinism, is treated with some suspicion, embodying as it does ideas and forms which do not rest easily beside the reasonably well-defined 'revolutionary' montage-based works, The upshot is that Eisenstein seems to divide too neatly into early and late, or montage and post-montage, or revolutionary and post-revolutionary. The lines of demarcation are many but inevitably cut across each other.<br />Eisenstein's work becomes more of a piece than is generally thought if we take seriously his own understanding of montage as a film construction necessarily involving a quite particular use of the film frame and its composition. This view undermines the idea of Eisenstein's later aesthetics being politically or aesthetically 'compromised' and, if true, the relationship proposed between shot and montage would apply to all montage film.<br />Eisenstein's later films, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, embraced historical and narrative tendencies, rejecting the montage method of The Strike, Potemkin, October and The General Line. The usual explanations for this transformation range from the effects of Stalinism and the broad tendency of Socialist Realism to Eisenstein's personal retreat from revolutionary to regressive artist. The identification of the historical subject-matter of the later films with ideological aspects of Soviet socialism at the time has of course been remarked upon, but the actual shift itself from the early montage-dominated theory to 'synthesisation' is very rarely discussed, let alone explained in any persuasive way.<br />Peter Wollen has suggested that Eisenstein's later writings were 'an attempt to shore up, scientifically and intellectually, an art increasingly<br />-211-<br />preoccupied with emotional saturation, ecstasy, the synchronisation of the senses, myth and primitive thought'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">1 </a>Noël Burch, on the other hand, sees the work of the 1930s and 1940s as a result of the conflict between Eisenstein's own aesthetic and the historical-political demands of the Stalin period. For Burch, the consequence is an 'entirely imaginary cinema… ensconced a thousand leagues from the dialectical and materialist cinema he had experimented with and theorised about from 1924 to 1929'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">2 </a>In a more theoretical vein, David Bordwell traces the difference in terms of an Althusserian epistemological shift marking the different ontological and epistemological tendencies in Soviet philosophy, namely between the behaviourist Pavlovism of the early Constructivist and Formalist period and what may be termed the Hegelian idealism and syntheticism of the 1930s and 1940s. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">3 </a>In all three interpretations, the conclusion is the same: Eisenstein is judged to have moved away from a progressive or revolutionary theory and practice towards one which was less so, or, at worst, regressive and reactionary. What I want to propose here is a link, albeit in very general terms, between the early and later writings and films. A symptom of the problem is the fact that it is the very concept for which Eisenstein is famous-montage-which he continually reworks throughout his life.<br />To a large extent, the above criticisms rest upon a certain idea of the Russian revolution and its aftermath, namely the assumption that the revolution was lost under Stalin. Two fairly obvious points need to be made here. First, a revolutionary art can be judged so according to either its context (a relativist view) or its intrinsic form (an essentialist view). <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">4 </a>Second, revolutions make sense only as events within what is otherwise 'stable'. That is to say, most revolutions are followed, politically at least, by periods of attempted consolidation and stabilisation. Revolution for its own sake and as a permanent state is an extreme position and rarely if ever achieved in practice. The criticisms in question also imply that there was a revolutionary art in the 1920s (probably true prima facie) and that such art remains essentially revolutionary even when the political context in which it exists has ceased to be.<br />Eisenstein lived through the revolution and its cultural impact in the 1920s to witness the attempts of the 1930s and 1940s to transform the economy, come to terms with the Russian past and defeat the threat of Western European fascism. In the same period, ideas of revolution were replaced in the Soviet Union by a nationalist ideology promoted by Stalin. Inevitably, opposition to Stalinism has been conflated with the negation of socialism itself. But criticism of Eisenstein for producing work under Stalin, and with the latter's support, seems narrowly idealistic, implying that Soviet communism is to be equated with any other form of dictatorship and that its art is inferior to both 'revolutionary' art and 'progressive' art produced in bourgeois society. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">5 </a>The issues here are prickly, to say the<br />-212<br />least, and judgements relating to the Stalin era are rarely detached and rational. Unavoidably, the morality of certain forms of social and political change besets most forms of analysis.<br />Eisenstein's later films did take on the character described above by Wollen. The two parts of Ivan the Terrible amount to a classic instance of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or 'total work of art', with an emphasis on the concepts of synchronisation of the senses, unity, excess and ecstasy. Their expressionist mise-en-scène, historical narrative as plot, compositional formalism, exaggerated acting style and what Eisenstein called 'vertical montage' are all features that demarcate these from the earlier films. Montage as the explosive perpetrator of meanings and as the means of constructing a cinematic language gives way to a different, seemingly more conservative, if not wholly conventional, form of editing. It is slower-paced, allowing development of action within the shot; and it rarely juxtaposes radically different images in metaphorical association. Such editing may, however, suggest a more complex notion of montage itself.<br />We must turn now to the shot considered in terms of its framing. There is a sense in which montage was originally called forth by a particular kind of framing, so meticulously composed that each shot could exist independently of any other. In these, the camera tends to be static and the image comprises a strong aesthetic structure which tolerates barely any unneccessary detail. The compositional precision and autonomy of individual shots lends them a photographic beauty quite distinct from the functionalism of, for example, Vertov's films.<br />Stanley Cavell takes Eisenstein's compositional formalism and 'saturation' of the frame as the determining factor for Eisensteinian montage. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">6 </a>The mode of shot framing and composition, Cavell argues, could not but result in the montage method, for there is no other means of merging or joining shots when the composition is so highly constructed and so aesthetically saturated. Cavell proposes that 'montage is necessary to film narrative only on the assumption that a certain species of frame is necessary'. Contrasting Dreyer's 'power with cinematic stillness, with the stasis of the frame' with Eisensteinian montage, Cavell is led into a fascinating discussion about how the frame, the shot's length and the discontinuity of shots might be determined by the mode of framing in much the same way that the size of the canvas is never arbitrary for a good painter, but is determined (and perhaps the determination works in both directions) by the compositional qualities of what the frame, so to speak, contains.<br />This view has at least the merit of breaking away from a purely intellectualist notion of montage. In other words, it sets out formal constraints and perhaps ultimately psychological ones, that are as determining of montage as are ideas about creating new meanings. Such an approach also suggests that Eisenstein's films are far from simply instantiations of a theory. It also seems to support the view that, whilst Eisenstein did radically qualify the<br />-213-<br />'explosion' view of montage in his later work, he seems never to have relinquished his commitment to the saturation of the frame. Cavell should be quoted more fully at this point, for his brief remarks on composition and montage include views which we will find echoed by Roland Barthes:<br />one significance of Eisensteinian montage may lie fundamentally not in the juxtaposition and counterpoint of images but in the fact which precedes that juxtaposition or counterpoint, viz. that it demands, and is demanded by, individual images which are themselves static or which contain and may compound movements that are simple or simply cumulative.… If, say, the design of light and shadow made by certain frames of the Odessa steps is less significant than the fact that this design fills and simplifies the entire frame, then the sense conveyed may be that any pose of nature or society is arbitrary and subject to human change, that no event is humanly ungraspable, and that none can determine the meaning that human beings who can grasp it are free to place upon it. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">7 </a><br />There are two points here. The first is a philosophical one about the conceptual relationship between montage and shot composition, when Cavell claims that primacy lies with the shot and not with montage. In other words, Eisenstein's fundamental commitment is to a type of shot and not to a means of concatenation of shots. Moreover, these two aspects are conceptually of a piece: the choice of one leads or is determined (and the choice of verb here is extremely important) by the other. Eisenstein understood this in some sense when he refused to allow the shot to be simply an element in montage, but spoke instead of it being a montage 'cell'. The biological vocabulary suggests that the connection he wanted was one of natural necessity, as in scientific law-likeness. At other times he spoke of the shot as the 'molecule' of montage. His desire to connect inseparably the shot and montage, refusing to allow them to be called elements, was an attempt to render them conceptual or theoretical terms. This reflects Eisenstein's embrace of dialectical materialism, characteristically using a physical science model as explanation in film theory. However, on Cavell's account, the link is a purely conceptual one and thus does not depend on the veracity of dialectical materialism; rather, it relies upon the idea of the static non-directional narrative quality of the Eisensteinian shot.<br />A second point arises from Cavell's observation that the overallness of the frame composition in the aesthetically saturated shot is crucial in how it imparts meaning. The shot's construction has an arbitrariness and thus an openness to interpretation of the real. It is on these grounds that Eisenstein's anti-realism is founded. And, paradoxically, the idea that reality is a social construction and as such indeterminable as meaning, rests on the highly determined construction of the shot and most importantly on the spectator's seeing it as construction. This amounts to an assertion of the<br />-214-<br />historical nature of society. Interestingly, Eisenstein assessed montage in similar terms as late as 1948 when, in Notes of a Film Director, he defined it as the<br />destruction of the indefinite and neutral, existing 'in itself, no matter whether it be an event or a phenomenon, and its reassembly in accordance with the idea dictated by attitude to this event or phenomenon, an attitude which, in turn, is determined by my ideology, my outlook, that is to say, our ideology, our outlook.… It is at that moment that a living dynamic image takes the place of passive reproduction. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">8 </a><br />This too is Cavell's point.<br />In his important 1944 essay 'Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today', Eisenstein touched on the same issue when discussing Dovzhenko's film The Earth. He remarks that the failure of the sequence with the naked woman owes something to<br />the oven, pots, towels, benches, tablecloths-all those details of everyday life, from which the woman's body could easily have been freed by the framing of the shot-so that representational naturalism would not interfere with the embodiment of the conveyed metaphorical task. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">9 </a><br />Eisenstein returns time and time again to this idea of the frame. For him, as he reveals in these remarks on The Earth, the notion of framing is a necessary aspect of the notion of montage. It is intrinsic to Eisenstein's concept, in order for it to function as montage in the strict sense, that framing is subservient to a metaphoricism. And this is perhaps the essential difference between expressive editing and Eisensteinian montage.<br />In his essay 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein', Barthes invokes the notion of the tableau. Diderot's aesthetic, he argues, rests upon the notion of the perfect theatrical play as being a 'succession of tableaux' each of which is a<br />pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">10 </a><br />Moreover, for Barthes, Eisenstein's films are 'a contiguity of episodes, each one absolutely meaningful, aesthetically perfect'. These perfect frames become 'pregnant moments', according to Barthes, related to Brecht's 'social gesture'. Barthes asserts that 'the pregnant moment is just this presence of all the absences (memories, lessons, promises) to whose rhythm History becomes both intelligible and desirable'. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">11 </a><br />The points made by Barthes are somewhat different from Cavell's, but they share the same source-reflection on the nature of the shot and what<br />-215-<br />that implies. For Barthes, as for Cavell, there seems little doubt that montage flows from the demands of the shot, which in turn is related to the social and artistic construction of a representation, and the revelation in such a method that it is a construction.<br />On such a view, Eisenstein's later aesthetic becomes less problematic, largely because it does not depend on the rather superficial view of montage implied by some of Eisenstein's critics. So we find, in Ivan the Terrible for instance, the aesthetic excess of the frame and the highly composed, almost 'decadent', sensibility reinforce the notion of the 'pregnant moment' or tableau. Often in Ivan the montage is not at the level of the editing, or sequence of actual cuts between shots in the film, but in the shifting composition that occurs within the same static frame, where each shift is held as an aesthetic moment. The result is an attempt to shift and transform the representations more subtly perhaps than in the earlier, more violent, montage method. Equally important, the frame saturation found in the earlier films is not to be found in the same form in Ivan and Nevsky, at least not in the 'overall' form suggested by Cavell. The framing, composition and shot duration of Ivan preclude the explosive montage method being used; nevertheless, according to Eisenstein, the method is still montage, albeit 'vertical montage'.<br />Finally, in the section entitled 'The Music of Landscape' in Non-Indifferent Nature, Eisenstein makes a series of remarks which would seem to support the view being put forward here. He begins by speaking of sound:<br />The sphere of sound, of course, took upon itself the rhythmicisation of the screen event more easily and naturally, for under these conditions it was possible to achieve this even when the visual depiction itself was invariable and static!<br />But this changing situation, as we said above, could not help but influence fundamentally the very principles by which 'linear' montage is constructed-that is, the combination of visual depictions of passages within the actual visual components of the audiovisual construction.<br />The new position was expressed in the fact that under the new conditions the very centre of support of visual montage had to be moved to a new area and to new elements.<br />This support, as we have shown before, was, although often excessively 'aestheticised', the juncture between pieces, that is, the element lying outside of the depiction.<br />With the transition to audiovisual montage, the basic support of the montage of its visual components moves into the passage, into the elements within the visual depiction itself.<br />And the basic centre of support is no longer the element between the shots, the juncture, but the element within the shot, the accent within the<br />-217-<br />piece, that is, the constructive support of the actual structure of visual depiction. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">12 </a><br />Eisenstein is here referring to the shot and its internal construction: the 'visual depiction', as he calls it, 'the accent within the piece'. He cites the montage moment at the juncture, if we can call it that, between image and sound, so that the raw material of this dialectic is the shot as construction, plus the sound track. Attention is being drawn to montage understood in the vertical sense, where meaning is articulated in the interweaving of the shot's internal elements.<br />My intention has been to assert, in summary terms, the primacy of the shot in Eisenstein's theory. Whatever the changes in his conception of montage, there is a continued commitment in his writings to this notion of the shot and in many ways it provides the link between the early and the later aesthetics. There is nothing here that cannot be found in Eisenstein; all I have tried to do is to change the emphasis in our reading of his theory, against what is its more orthodox reading today.<br />The argument so far-or at least the attempt to set out the context or the elements for a future, more rigorous, argument-questions the view that there was a substantial break or difference between early and later Eisenstein (either in theory or in practice). This is not to say that there were no differences at all. Of course there were, but it now appears that these were shifts of emphasis rather than essence. Indeed in the final essays, particularly those on the synthesisation of the senses and pathos, Eisenstein seems to be moving towards the true centre of his aesthetic in a way that his early writings on montage did not. For it was always synchronisation-and here the difference with Brecht is crucial-that was at stake. His early montage theory was an attempt to establish a link between the cut-outs, the tableaux, the perfect aesthetic shots, and conjoin them within some overall idea or view. In synchronisation, that desire to provide each shot with the image that saturates each moment of the film, that gives the film its governing shape and idea is, in its embrace of aesthetic excess, a key not only to the later films but to the earlier ones as well. <a href="http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108396813">13 </a><br />-218<br />Notes<br />In these endnotes Eisenstein is usually referred to as E, while works cited frequently or by several authors are abbreviated in accordance with the list below. References to archival sources held in the Central State Archive of Literature and the Arts, Moscow (TsGALI) are given in the following standard form of three numbers: fond, followed by opis' and then edinitsa khraneniya.<br /><br />Barna / Y. Barna, Eisenstein (London and Bloomington, Ind.: 1973).<br /><br />Christie and Elliott / I. Christie and D. Elliott (eds), Eisenstein at 90 (Oxford: 1988).<br /><br />EAW / J.Leyda and Z. Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: 1983).<br /><br />ESW 1 / S.M. Eisenstein, Selected Works (ed. and trans. R. Taylor) Vol. 1: Writings 1922-34 (London and Bloomington, Ind.: 1988).<br /><br />ESW 2 / S.M. Eisenstein, Selected Works (ed. M. Glenny and R. Taylor, trans. M. Glenny) Vol. 2: Towards A Theory of Montage (London and Bloomington, Ind.: 1991).<br /><br />FF / R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: 1988).<br /><br />Film Form / S.M. Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (ed. and trans. J. Leyda) (New York: 1949).<br /><br />IFF / R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London and New York: 1991).<br /><br />IP / S.M. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniya v shesti tomakh (Selected Works in Six Volumes) (Moscow: 1964-71). The numeral indicates the volume number: e.g. IP 1.<br /><br />Leyda / J. Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: 1960).<br /><br />Memories / Immoral Memories: An Autobiography by S.M. Eisenstein (trans. H. Marshall) (Boston, Massachusetts: 1983 and London: 1985).<br /><br />NIN / S.M. Eisenstein, Non-Indifferent Nature (trans. H. Marshall) (New York: 1987).<br /><br />Nizhny / V. Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein (ed. and trans. I. Montagu and J. Leyda) (London: 1962).<br /><br />Seton / M. Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography (New York: 1960).<br /><br /><br />-219-marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-31312564065939245992007-05-04T08:02:00.000-07:002007-05-04T08:04:34.461-07:00Orson Welles and the Modern Sound FilmBook Title: A History of Narrative Film. Contributors: David A. Cook - author. Publisher: W. W. Norton. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1996.<br /><br />Cap.10 Orson Welles and the Modern Sound Film<br /><br />At the very moment that France was being occupied by the Nazis and the rest of Europe was engulfed in war, a young American director made a film which was to substantially transform the cinema. In 1939 Orson Welles (1915-85) was brought to Hollywood by the financially troubled RKO Pictures under an unprecedented six-film contract which gave him complete control over every aspect of production. * At twenty-four, Welles' experience in radio and theater was vast. From 1933 to 1937 he directed and acted in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway plays, including a production of Macbeth with a voodoo setting and an antiFascist Julius Caesar set in contemporary Italy; in 1937, with John Houseman (1902-88), he founded the famous Mercury Theatre company; and between 1938 and 1940 he wrote, directed, and starred in the weekly radio series Mercury Theatre on the Air, whose pseudodocumentary broadcast based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds caused a nation- wide panic on Halloween night in 1938.<br />Welles had made several short films in connection with his theatrical productions (such as Too Much Johnson, 1938), but he had never been on a soundstage in his life. His first feature film was to have been an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, filmed with a subjective camera from the point of view of the narrator (who is also a participant in the action), but this project was abandoned indefinitely due to technical problems, cost overruns, and other difficulties, including the outbreak of war in Europe and the internment of its female lead, the German actress Dita Parlo. † Next, Welles undertook to film a script written by himself and Herman J. Mankiewicz (1898-1953) about the life<br />____________________<br />* According to Frank Brady in Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (New York: Scribner's, 1989), the original RKO contract, signed on July 22, 1939, was actually a two‐film deal which gave Welles a remarkable degree of control over production on the set but also gave the studio the right of preproduction story refusal and postproduction "consultation" on the release print (pp. 199-200). The exaggeration of the contract's terms was probably the work of RKO's publicity department.<br />† Dita Parlo (1906-71) was working in the French film industry when the war began (she had played featured roles in Vigo's L'Atalante [1934] and Renoir's La Grande illusion [1937], among other films); military officials had her arrested as an alien and, ultimately, deported to Germany. For a full account of the Heart of Darkness project and its termina- tion, see Robert L. Carringer's The Making of Citizen Kane (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1985), Ch. 1.<br />-392- <br />and personality of a great American entrepreneur. Originally entitled simply American, the Welles-Mankiewicz scenario ultimately became the shooting script for Citizen Kane (1941), the now-legendary cryptobioraphy of America's most powerful press lord, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951).<br /><br />CITIZEN KANE<br /><br />Production<br />Welles claimed that his only preparation for directing Citizen Kane was to watch John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) forty times. Ford's influence on the film is pronounced, but it is equally clear that Welles was steeped in the major European traditions, especially those of German Expressionism and the Kammerspielfilm * and French poetic realism. If Kane's narrative economy owes much to the example of Ford, its visual texture is heavily indebted to the chiaroscuro lighting of Lang, the fluid camera of Murnau, the baroque mise-en-scène of von Sternberg, and the deep-focus realism of Renoir. Credit is also due Welles' remarkably talented collaborators—Mankiewicz; the Mercury Theatre players; the composer Bernard Herrmann; the editor Robert Wise; and the unit art director, Perry Ferguson. †<br />But Welles' greatest single technical asset in the filming of Kane was his brilliant director of photography, Gregg Toland (1904-48). Toland had earned a distinguished reputation as a cinematographer in Holly-<br />wood in the thirties and had experimented with deep-focus photography and ceilinged sets in his three most recent films, Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939), for which he had won an Academy Award, The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), and The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940). Welles (or Mankiewicz) had conceived Kane as a film which occurs largely in flashback as characters recall their acquaintance with the great man (played by Welles himself) after his death, and he wanted the narrative to flow poetically from image to image in a manner analogous to the process of human memory. Thus, Welles used straight cuts largely for shock effect and made the most of his narrative transitions through lingering, in-camera lap dissolves. More important, Welles planned to construct the film as a series of long takes, or sequence shots, scrupulously composed in-depth to eliminate the necessity for narrative cutting within major dramatic scenes.<br />____________________<br />* As John Russell Taylor has observed, "Citizen Kane may be the best American film ever made; but it just might be also the best German film ever made." (Quoted in German Film Directors in Hollywood: Catalogue of an Exhibit of the Goethe Institutes of North America [San Francisco: Goethe Institute, 19781, p. 5. ) To make the question of influence even richer, Howard Hawks claimed in a 1976 interview that Welles modeled Kane on his own His Girl Friday (1940) and had told him so in 1941 (Bruce F. Kawin, "Introduction: No Man Alone," in To Have and Have Not, ed. Bruce F. Kawin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 41.<br />† As administrative head of the RKO art department, Van Nest Polglase received official screen credit for this function, with Ferguson listed as "Associate," but the latter was art director in fact. This practice reflected the bureaucratic hierarchy of the studio system, whereby department heads were contractually entitled to screen credits (and, therefore, to awards) for work performed by their subordinates.<br />-393-<br />To accomplish this, Toland perfected for Welles a method of deep‐ focus photography capable of achieving an unprecedented depth of field.<br />As explained in Chapter 9, the "soft" style of photography favored by the studios during the thirties was characterized by diffused lighting and relatively shallow focus—a product of the wider lens apertures required for filming in incandescent light. By the end of the decade, technical improvements in film stocks and lighting permitted greater depth of field, but most studio cinematographers were conservative and continued to practice the "soft" style. Toland, however, was a bold experimenter whose work in-depth—especially in The Long Voyage Home—had earned him a reputation for the kind of flamboyant originality prized by Welles in his Mercury Theatre productions. Toland's self-styled "pan focus" photography for Kane was a synthesis of many techniques he had used before. It employed the newly available Eastman Super XX film stock (an ultrafast film with a very high sensitivity to light—four times faster, in fact, than its standard Super X, without a notable increase in grain) in combination with a 24mm wide-angle lens whose aperture was stopped down to f-8 or less—a radical reduction in its size (see note, p. 385). The scenes were lit by the high-intensity arc lamps recently introduced for Technicolor production, and the lenses were coated with a clear plastic substance (magnesium fluoride) to reduce glare. Finally, Toland used the Mitchell Camera Corporation's self-blimped BNC, a relatively small and portable camera first used professionally in Wuthering Heights, which greatly increased the operator's freedom and range of movement. * With these tools, Toland was able to achieve something very close to "universal" focus within the frames of Citizen Kane, and Welles was able to distribute dramatic action across a depth perspective unlike anything ever used in a sound film. Since the early sixties, improvements in lenses, lighting, and film emulsions have greatly simplified deep-focus<br />____________________<br />* Additionally, a new fine-grain stock for producing release prints had been introduced in 1939. It virtually eliminated graininess in print generation and preserved image depth in films like The Long Voyage Home and Kane. photography, but the technical principles remain much the same. Welles' use of the deep-focus sequence shot in Kane demonstrated an absolute mastery of composition in depth. Like Renoir, he used the deep-focus format functionally, to develop scenes without resorting to montage, but he also used it expressively—as Eisenstein had used montage—to create metaphors for things that the cinema cannot represent directly on the screen.<br />At the height of his arrogance and power, for example, Kane often looms like a giant in the foreground of the frame, dwarfing other characters in the middleground and background, and towering over the audience, often from a low camera angle. Later, Kane's self-absorbed alienation from the world and everyone in it is conveyed by the growing distance which separates him from all other characters within the frame.<br />In these instances, Welles' use of depth perspective involves an expressive distortion of space which creates a metaphor for something in Kane's psychology. At other times, Welles uses deep focus both to achieve narrative economy and to echelon characters dramatically within the frame. Early in the film, a brilliant deep-focus sequence shot encapsulates the story of Kane's lost childhood. We see the front room of a boardinghouse in which Charlie Kane's mother signs the agreement that will permit her son to be taken to the East and later inherit a fortune. In exchanging her son's childhood for an adult life of fantastic wealth, she is selling him, and she knows it. Welles set the shot up like this: In the foreground of the frame, Mrs. Kane and Mr. Thatcher, whose bank is the executor of the estate, sign the agreement. The middleground is occupied by Charlie's weak-willed father, whose vacillation about the agreement is rendered visible as he paces back and forth between foreground and background.<br />In the back of the room is a window through which, in the extreme background of the frame, we see Charlie playing unsuspectingly in the snow with his sled and shouting, "The Union forever!" while in the fore- ground of the same shot, he is being indentured to his own future. Thus,<br />-395-<br />in a single shot, Welles is able to communicate a large amount of narrative and thematic information which would require many shots in a conventionally edited scene.<br />Kane is a film of much fluid intraframe movement. The sequence just described, for instance, actually begins with a medium long shot of Charlie at play in the snow through the open window of the boardinghouse; then the camera pulls back rapidly to reveal the other characters and elements in the composition. But there are three virtuoso moving camera shots in the film, each of which is a tour de force of fluidity and continuity. In the first, from a shot of a poster announcing the appearance of Kane's second wife, Susan, at the El Rancho nightclub, the camera cranes up vertically to the club's flashing neon sign, then tracks horizontally through it and down onto the rain-spattered glass of a skylight. The movement continues after a quick dissolve (made invisible by flashing lightning and distracting thunder), as the camera descends to a medium shot of Susan Alexander Kane and a newsman talking together at a table in the club's interior. In another shot, midway through the film, the camera cranes up vertically from a long shot of Susan singing on the stage of the Chicago Municipal Opera House to a catwalk some four stories<br />above it, where a stagehand makes a vulgar but richly deserved gesture of contempt for her performance. Finally, there is the long swooping crane shot which concludes the film, as the camera tracks slowly across the vast collection of artifacts that Kane has amassed in a lifetime of collecting, coming to rest on the object of the search for "Rosebud" that gives the film its narrative impulse or motive.<br />Other remarkable aspects of this wholly remarkable film are its expressive chiaroscuro lighting * and frequent use of extreme low-angle photography in connection with the figure of Kane. The latter necessitated many muslin ceilinged sets, which had been used in Hollywood before, especially in the work of Toland, but never so consistently and effectively to suggest a sense of claustration and enclosure. (Filmmakers have conventionally left their interior sets roofless, first to admit the sunlight and later to facilitate artificial lighting and the free movement of the boom crane and microphone. ) Finally, and most significantly, attention must be called to Kane's innovative use of sound.<br />Welles' experience in radio served him well in recording the sound- track for Kane. He invented for his few montage sequences a technique he called the "lightning mix," in which shots were rapidly linked together not by the narrative logic of their images but by the continuity of the soundtrack. Kane's growth from child to adult is conveyed in a matter of seconds: a shot of his guardian giving him a sled and wishing him "a Merry Christmas" is cut together with a shot of the same man some fifteen years later, as he completes the sentence—"and a Happy New Year"—again addressing Kane, but in a different dramatic context. Another lightning mix conveys the entire progress of Kane's campaign for governor of New York State in four brief shots. First we see Kane listening to Susan Alexander sing (wretchedly) at the piano in the parlor of her boardinghouse. This dissolves into another shot of the two in the<br />____________________<br />* There are two major lighting styles in Kane—the sharp, high-contrast "daylight" style associated with Kane's youth and rise to power, and the dark, expressionistic "low-light" style which characterizes his corruption and decline.<br />-396-<br />same relative positions in a much more elegantly appointed parlor, that of an apartment in which Kane has obviously set her up. At the end of Susan's performance, Kane claps, and the shot is dovetailed with another of a friend addressing a small street rally in Kane's behalf. The applause, which has been continuous on the soundtrack since the parlor shot, grows louder and multiplies in response to the speaker's words: "I am speaking for Charles Foster Kane, the fighting liberal ... who entered upon this campaign with one purpose only—." Welles cut finally to a long shot of Kane himself addressing a huge political rally at Madison Square Garden and completing the sentence as the camera begins to track toward the speaker's platform: "—to point out and make public the dishonesty, the downright villainy of Boss Jim Gettys' political machine." The address continues, and the narrative resumes a more conventional form.<br />Another device introduced by Welles in Kane was the overlapping sound montage in which—as in reality—people speak not one after another (as they do on the stage) but virtually all at once, so that part of what is said is lost. Overlapping dialogue between major players in a film had been used as early as 1931 by Lewis Milestone in The Front Page, but it had not been used to produce a sense of realistic collective conversation as it was in Kane. A good example in the film (and there is an example in almost every major sequence) occurs in the screening room after the projection of the "News on the March" newsreel. So many persons are speaking on the track simultaneously that one has the distinct sense of having accidentally stumbled into the aftermath of a board meeting. Welles continued to use this technique in his later films, and it has influenced many other filmmakers—both his contemporaries, like Carol Reed, and more recent directors, like Robert Altman, who has been so firmly committed to overlapping sound montage that unknowledgeable critics once complained about the "poor quality" of his soundtracks.<br />A final example of Welles' subtle refinement of sound occurs in one of his best deep-focus set-ups. Kane, in a newsroom, is seated at a typewriter in the extreme foreground of the frame finishing a bad review of Susan Alexander Kane's Chicago opera debut which his ex-friend Jed Leland has written. Correspondingly, we hear the tapping of the typewriter keys on the "foreground" of the soundtrack. From a door in the background of the frame, Leland emerges—barely recognizable, so great is the distance—and begins to walk slowly toward Kane. As he moves from the background to the foreground of the frame, Leland's footsteps move from the "background" to the "foreground" of the soundtrack— from being initially inaudible to having nearly an equal volume with the keys. Similarly, in the Chicago Opera House shot, as the camera dollies up from the stage to the catwalk, Susan's voice grows ever more distant on the track, creating once more a precise correspondence of visual and aural "space."<br /><br />Structure<br />The formal organization of Citizen Kane is extraordinary. Like a Jorge Luis Borges story, it begins with the death of its subject. Through an elaborate series of lap-dissolved stills, we are led from a "No Tres- passing" sign on a chain link fence farther and farther into the forbidding<br />-397<br />Kane estate of Xanadu, as if by the tracking movement of a camera, until at last we approach a lighted window high in a Gothic tower. The light is suddenly extinguished, and Welles dissolves to the interior of the room, where Charles Foster Kane dies in state, clutching a small glass globe which contains a swirling snow scene and whispering "Rosebud"—the word that motivates the film and echoes through it until the final frames. Kane drops the globe in dying; it rolls down the steps and breaks in close‐ up. Through the distorting lens of the convex broken glass (actually, a wide-angle lens focused through a diminishing glass), we watch a nurse enter the room from a door in the background in long shot; she walks to the foreground in close shot, folds Kane's arms, and pulls the covers up to his chest. After a fade to a medium shot of Kane's body silhouetted against the window, we suddenly cut to a logo projected obliquely on a screen, and the soundtrack booms the title "News on the March!"— introducing a sophisticated parody of a March of Time newsreel * on Kane's life and death. Welles is thus able to give a brief and coherent, if unsequential, overview of the major events in Kane's life before they become jumbled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in the succeeding narratives.<br />____________________<br />* The March of Time was a popular series of skillfully (some would say slickly) produced film news journals released monthly in the the United States between 1935 and 1951. Each issue was twenty minutes long, and, generally, focused on a single subject. These films were usually shown as preludes to features, so that Citizen Kane's original audiences might well have watched an authentic March of Time newsreel just before seeing the parodic "News on the March" in Kane. The March of Time series was politically conservative, reflecting the editorial policies of its financial backer, Time-Life, Inc., and of Time-Life's director, Henry R. Luce (1898-1967). Time-Life succeeded the Hearst empire, which was badly crippled by the Depression, to become a major shaper of public opinion during the thirties, forties, and fifties. The identification in Citizen Kane of Rawlston's news organization with the Luce press is entirely deliberate, since it extends the Kane / Hearst analogy.<br />-398-<br />In a sense, the newsreel is Citizen Kane itself in miniature. Like the larger film, it begins with Kane's death (or his funeral), covers the same events in a similar overlapping, chronological manner, and ends with the mystery of Kane's character unresolved. We learn from the newsreel that Kane was an enormously controversial figure, hated and loved by millions of Americans, whose vast wealth was inherited by fluke: a supposedly worthless deed left to his mother in payment for a boardinghouse room gave him sole ownership of the priceless Colorado Lode. We learn that in an earlier period of American history, near the turn of the century, Kane's wealth and the influence of his newspapers were incalculable. We learn that he was married twice—first to a president's niece, then to Susan Alexander, "singer," for whom he built the Chicago Municipal Opera House and Xanadu. We learn that Kane's promising and apparently nonstop political career was destroyed during a campaign for the governorship of the State of New York by a "love-nest" scandal involving Susan Alexander. We learn finally that Kane's newspaper empire was crippled by the Depression and that he subsequently exiled himself to the solitude of Xanadu, where, after many years of seclusion, he died in 1941. The newsreel ends, and the camera discovers a dimly and expressionistically lit projection room, where the contemporary media journalists (successors of the Kane/Hearst empire and identified with the Luce press) who produced the film discuss it. Rawlston, the executive in charge, thinks it needs an "angle" that will somehow explain the paradoxical figure of Kane. Someone seizes upon the man's dying words, the film's release is postponed, and a journalist named Thompson (played by William Alland) is sent out to interview all of Kane's intimate acquaintances to discover the meaning of "Rosebud" and, it is hoped, of Kane himself.<br />The rest of the film is contained in a series of five narratives—told in flashback by each of the people Thompson talks to—and a balancing epilogue of sorts. The narratives overlap with each other and with the "News on the March" newsreel at certain points, so that some of the events in Kane's life are presented from several different points of view within the total film. From the screening room, a shock cut takes us to a poster on a brick wall, suddenly illuminated by lightning, which announces the El Rancho nightclub appearance of the second Mrs. Kane. Through the elaborate craning movement previously described, we are brought into the interior of the club, where a drunk and hostile Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore) refuses to talk to Thompson. He can get no information from the headwaiter either, and the screen then fades out and into a daytime sequence at the Walter P. Thatcher Memorial Library. (Thatcher, we come to understand later in the sequence, was Kane's guardian and executor of the Colorado Lode estate. ) Here, Thompson is grudgingly given access to Thatcher's memoirs, and, as he reads the words "I first encountered Mr. Kane in 1871... ," the screen dissolves from a close-up of Thatcher's longhand to a lyrical shot of a boy playing with a sled in front of Mrs. Kane's boardinghouse, somewhere in Colorado, during a snowstorm. In the long deep-focus shot described above, Mrs. Kane (Agnes Moore- head) signs the papers that make Thatcher's bank the boy's guardian and certify his inheritance. Outside, young Kane is told of his imminent departure for the East; he pushes Thatcher (George Coulouris) into the snow with his sled. We dissolve to a medium shot of the sled, some time later, covered with drifing snow, and then into the "Merry Christmas— Happy New Year" lightning mix, which places us in New York City many years later on the occasion of Kane's twenty-first birthday. * We learn that of all the holdings in "the world's sixth largest private for-tune," which Kane is about to inherit, only the financially failing daily newspaper, the New York Inquirer, interests him, because he thinks "it would be fun to run a newspaper." Next, in a brief but potent montage sequence, we see Thatcher increasingly outraged by the Inquirer's populist, muckraking (and anti-Republican) headlines, until he finally confronts Kane in the Inquirer office. Their apparent antipathy for one another—both ideological and personal—is apparent, and Thatcher warns Kane of financial disaster. As if to confirm this prophecy, the following sequence, composed in depth, shows Kane, much older, signing his now vast but bankrupt newspaper chain over to Thatcher in the midst of the Depression, and here Thatcher's narrative ends.<br />Thompson next visits Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), once Kane's general manager and right-hand man, now the aging chairman of the board of the Kane Corporation. Bernstein's narrative begins by recalling in flashback the first day at the Inquirer office, when he, Kane, and Kane's old college buddy Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) arrived to claim the paper, in what was clearly to be a lark for all three young men. But the playfulness is mitigated a few scenes later when, in the presence of Bernstein and Leland, Kane composes a "Declaration of Principles" for his first front page. † Leland asks to keep the manuscript, comparing it facetiously to the Declaration of Independence. In this sequence, the twenty‐one-year-old Kane is revealed to be the romantic idealist of the crusading populist headlines so repugnant to Thatcher, and Leland's admiration for him is unqualified. In the next sequence, Kane, Leland, and Bernstein are seen reflected in the window of the New York Chronicle Building,<br />____________________<br />* An apparent inconsistency in the continuity script, since seconds earlier in Colorado we have heard Thatcher tell Mrs. Kane that the fortune is "to be administered by the bank in trust for your son ... until he reaches his twenty-fifth birthday."<br />† Both an allusion to a 1935 incident in which Hearst, threatened with a boycott of his newspapers, bought advertising space in rival papers to publish a statement of principles ("The Hearst Papers Stand for Americanism and Genuine Democracy," etc. ) and an hom- mage to the Mercury Theatre's "declaration of principles" published on the front page of the New York Times Sunday drama section on August 29, 1937, thanks to Welles' friendship with Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson.<br />-400<br />gazing at a photograph of the Chronicle's top-flight staff, which, they admit, has made it the most successful newspaper in the city. The camera moves in close upon the picture and then back out to reveal the group, suddenly animated and sitting for another photograph six years later— this time to commemorate their joining the staff of the Inquirer en masse. A raucous banquet sequence follows, in which the dining table is photo- graphed in extreme depth, with ice sculptures of Leland and Bernstein in the foreground at one end, Kane in the background at the other, and the new staff members occupying the space in between. During the revelry, Leland expresses to Bernstein his concern that these new men, so fresh from the Chronicle and its policies, will change Kane, and the scene dissolves into another one of Bernstein and Leland uncrating boxes of sculpture that Kane has been collecting on a European tour. It is revealed by Bernstein that Kane may also be "collecting" something (or someone) else. A dissolve brings us to the interior of the Inquirer office some time later, on the day of Kane's return from Europe. The staff attempts to present him with an engraved loving cup, and he awkwardly leaves them a notice announcing his engagement to Miss Emily Monroe Norton, the niece of the President of the United States. The staff watches from the windows of the Inquirer Building as Kane and his fiancée drive off in a carriage; and the second narrative draws to a close with Bernstein speculating to Thompson that maybe "Rosebud" was "something he lost."<br />Thompson next pays a visit to Leland, who has become a somewhat senile (but still intelligent) old man confined to a nursing home. Indeed, the dissolves into the Leland narrative flashback are among the most lingering in the whole film, as if to suggest the sluggishness of his memory ; and not a little of the film's impact derives from this flashback technique of narration, which permits us to see all of the major characters in youth and age almost simultaneously. Like those of the other characters, Leland's narrative is chronological but not continuous. Initially, he relates the story of Kane's first marriage in a sequence which convincingly compresses the relationship's slow decline into a series of brief breakfast-table conversations linked by swish pans and overlapping sound—that is, a lightning mix. Next, in a much longer flashback, Leland describes Kane's first meeting with Susan Alexander and Kane's subsequent political ruin at the hands of his opponent, "Boss" Jim Gettys (and as a result of his own stubborn, egomaniacal refusal to withdraw from the race). Of particular note is the scene in which Leland confronts Kane after he has lost the election. The entire sequence is shot in depth from an extremely low angle (the camera was actually placed in a hole in the floor to make the shot), so that Kane looms above both Leland and the audience, a grotesque, inflated parody of the politically powerful figure he has so desperately tried (and failed) to become. Drunk, and disillusioned with his idol, Leland insists that he be transferred to the Chicago office, and Kane reluctantly consents. The final section of Leland's narrative concerns Kane's marriage to Susan Alexander and her singing debut at the opera house he has built for her. The lengthy vertical craning shot from Susan performing abjectly on the stage to the stagehand holding his nose occurs here, as does Leland's long, deep-focus walk from the back of the Chicago Inquirer newsroom to the extreme foreground of the frame, where an embittered Kane finishes Leland's bad review of the performance, and summarily fires him.<br />-402-<br />Here Leland's narrative ends, and Thompson returns once more to the El Rancho nightclub. Again the camera travels up from the poster of Susan Alexander, cranes through the sign, and dissolves through the skylight to a medium close shot of Thompson and Susan sitting at a table. Susan, who has finally agreed to talk, begins her story with a flashback to a session with her voice coach, Signor Matisti, which occurred shortly after her marriage to Kane. Susan, Matisti, and a pianist occupy the foreground of a deep-focus shot of a large, expensively decorated room. Susan's voice is so bad that Matisti refuses to continue the lesson, but at this point Kane emerges from a door in the back of the room and walks toward the group, becoming larger and larger as he moves toward the lens. When he reaches the foreground, he browbeats both Matisti and Susan into continuing the humiliating session, until a dissolve brings us to the second version of Susan's singing debut at the Chicago Municipal Opera House. We have already seen her performance from Leland's point of view in his narrative, and now we see virtually the same events from Susan's perspective as she looks out into the vast and terrifying void of the audience, invisible beyond the footlights. Her aria begins, and as she attempts to fill the huge theater with her frail voice, * Welles intercuts subjective shots of Matisti frantically coaching her with audience reaction shots (contempt, boredom, disbelief) and close-ups of an aging Kane peering grimly toward the stage. When the performance ends with very light applause, Kane claps loudly, as if to fill the hall with his solitary accolade. A dissolve brings us to Kane and Susan the morning after in a Chicago apartment, where Susan shrilly denounces Leland for his bad<br />____________________<br />* In 1973, at a symposium at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Bernard Herrmann pointed out that Susan (or, rather, the singer dubbing her voice) actually could sing, but only modestly. The high tessitura overture to Salammbô, the fake opera Herrmann composed for her debut, was purposely designed to exceed the capacity of her voice and create "that terror-in-the-quicksand feeling" of a singer hopelessly out of her depth at the very outset of a long performance. (Quoted in Sound and the Cinema, ed. Evan William Cameron [Pleasantville, N. Y.: Redgrave Publishing, 1980], p. 128).<br />-404<br />review—actually completed by Kane. We learn that Kane has fired Leland and sent him a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, which Leland has retruned along qith the pompoulsy idealist “Declaration of<br />Principles” that Kane had printed in his first issue of the New York Inquirer years before. We also learn that Susan's singing career has been imposed upon her by Kane, who insists that it continue.<br />There follows a rapid montage of dissolves, overlaid on the soundtrack by Susan's voice, in which Inquirer healines from cities around the country acclaiming Susan Alexander's meteoric rise to stardom are lapdissolved alternately with shots of flashing call lights, Susan onstage, increasing rate until a klieg light suddenly fizzles and goes out, cutting off Susan's voice and leaving us in total darkness. Moments later, we slowly fade in on a deep-focus shot of a darkened room: in the extreme foreground is a near-empty galss of liquid and a spoon (this particular foreground object is reproduced not through deep focus but in-camera matte shot); in the middleground Susan tosses in bed, breathing heavily; in the background a door flies open and Kane bursts into the room, barely foiling her suicide attempt. Susan is treated by a discreet doctor, and Kane promises that she needn't sing again. Now we fade to Xanadu, some time later, where the final portion of Susan's narrative takes place. Here, in deep-focus shots that grotesquely distance them from one another across the breadth of a palatial chamber, Kane and Susan pursue a series of conversations that show them to be utterly at odds. Kane has become a cynical domestic tyrant and Susan a virtual prisoner of the estate; she passes the time endlessly working and reworking jigsax puzzles—a metaphor for the mystery of identity in the film. Against Susan's will, Kane arranges a spectacular:y extravagant weekend “picnic” in the Everglades, where the two break openly and he slaps her. The next day at Xanadu, Susan announces to Kane that she is leaving him for good; he begs her to stay, but, realizing Kane's nearly constitutional inability to return love, she refuses and walks out the door. Susan concludes her narrative by advising Thompson to talk to Raymond the butler, who "knows where all the bodies are buried," when he visits Xanadu. The camera moves back and up, dissolves through the skylight, and pulls back through the El Rancho sign, reversing the movement of its entry.<br />Dissolves bring us to the gate of Xanadu and then to the interior for Raymond's brief narrative, which begins where Susan's ended. It opens not with a dissolve but with a shocking straight cut from Raymond (Paul Stewart) and Thompson on the stairs to a close shot of a shrieking cockatoo, behind which we see Susan in the middleground emerging from the same door she has begun to walk through (from the other side) at the end of her own narrative as she leaves Kane and Xanadu. Raymond's flashback then depicts the violent tantrum Kane throws as she departs: he staggers about Susan's bedroom like some mechanized madman, smashing furniture, mirrors, cosmetic jars, and all manner of trinkets and bric-a-brac until his hand finally comes to rest on the glass globe with the snow scene that we first saw at his death in the beginning of the film and later saw in Susan's apartment when they met. We hear Kane whisper "Rosebud!" and watch him shuffle slowly out of Susan's demolished room, past a gauntlet of staring servants and guests, and down a huge hall of mirrors as Raymond's narrative concludes.<br />Now Thompson and Raymond move down the central staircase into the great hall of Xanadu, where we see in long shot that a multitude of reporters, photographers, and workmen have assembled in a mass effort to catalog and liquidate Kane's huge collection of objects. The camera pulls back to follow the two men as they pass through the hall, discovering as it does so newspeople photographing both the treasures and trash of the Kane collection—Renaissance sculpture, Kane's mother's pot-bellied stove, Oriental statuary, the loving cup presented to Kane by the Inquirer staff on his return from Europe, priceless paintings, a myriad of jigsaw puzzles. Thompson's colleagues ask him whether he has discov- -406-<br />ered the meaning of "Rosebud." He replies that he hasn't and that, in any case, he no longer believes in the quest: "I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess 'Rosebud' is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece."<br />Thompson and the others leave to catch the train back to New York, and a lap dissolve brings us to an aerial view of the hall, with the camera shooting down over the vast collection that stretches away into the distance. Another lap dissolve brings the camera a little closer to the collection as it begins to track slowly over the entire mass of crates, statues, boxes, and belongings—the ruins and relics of Kane's loveless life— which, from our aerial perspective, resemble nothing so much as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The shot continues for some time until the camera reaches the humble possessions of Mrs. Kane and dollies down gracefully into an eye-level shot of her things. We see a man grab a sled and, in the next shot, throw it into a furnace at Raymond's command.<br />We dissolve to a close-up of the burning sled and can read on it the word<br />-407<br />Rosebud" just before the letters melt away in flames. A dissolve brings us to an exterior long shot of Xanadu at night, as we first encountered it, with smoke billowing from its chimneys. The camera tilts up to follow the smoke, dissolves to the chain link fence surrounding the estate, and pans down slowly to the "No Trespassing" sign with which the film began.<br />Thus, Citizen Kane concludes with the mystery of its central figure unresolved. The identity of "Rosebud" is clearly inadequate to account for the terrible emptiness at the heart of Kane, and of America, and is<br />meant to be. Its power as a symbol of lost love and innocence lies in its very insufficiency, for the "missing piece" of the jigsaw puzzle of Kane's life, the "something he lost," turns out to be an inanimate object, and a regressive one at that. In its barrenness, "Rosebud" becomes a perfect symbol of Kane's inability to relate to people in human terms, or to love, and the ultimate emblem of his futile attempt to fill the void in himself with objects. In the film's two-hour running time we have seen Kane from seven separate perspectives—those of the newsreel, the five narrators, and the concluding reprise—and we probably have come to know more about the circumstances of his life than the man would have known himself. We know what he did and how he lived and died, but we can never know what he meant—perhaps, Welles seems to suggest, because, like "Rosebud," he was ultimately meaningless, or perhaps because reality itself is ambiguous and unreliable. In any case, it is the quest for meaning rather than its ultimate conclusion that makes Citizen Kane such a rich and important film.<br /><br />Influence<br />In the year of its release, Citizen Kane was a radically experimental film—fully twenty years ahead of its time—and was widely recognized as such by American critics. But it failed at the box office less because of its experimental nature than because of an aura of fear in Hollywood created by attacks on Welles and RKO in the Hearst press. Hearst was still living, and his vassals attempted to suppress what they correctly took to be an unflattering portrait of their master. Though they were unsuccess- ful in preventing the film's release, the adverse publicity made it difficult for Kane to get bookings and advertising. * As a result, the film did poorly outside of New York City and was withdrawn from circulation until the mid-fifties, when it played the art house circuit and began to acquire a more sophisticated audience. Since then, Kane has been voted the "Best Film of All Time" in five successive international polls (Brussels, 1958;<br />Sight and Sound, 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992), and there is every indication that its critical reputation continues to grow.<br />The influence of Citizen Kane upon the cinema has been enormous and nearly universal. The film's impact did not begin to be felt until after the war, when its use of low-key lighting and wide-angle lenses to achieve greater depth of field influenced the visual style of American film noir and its flashback narrative technique began to be imitated in more conventional films like Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946). There were also imitations of Kane's structure and / or theme: George Cukor's Keeper of the Flame (1942), Max Ophüls' Caught (1949), and, after the art house revival, José Ferrer's The Great Man (1957). Directors like Britain's Carol Reed (Odd Man Out, 1947; The Third Man, 1949; An Outcast of the Islands, 1952—all highly Wellesian films) absorbed much of the film's visual and aural textures; and, according to François Truffaut, the young French cinéastes who would later form the New Wave found in Kane's 1946 Paris premiere the ultimate justification of their reverence for American cinema.<br />Kane's most important and pervasive influence, however, did not begin to be felt until the mid-fifties, after the advent of the widescreen processes, when European critics—notably Bazin—discovered in it (and, less emphatically, in Renoir's films) the model for a new film aesthetic based not upon montage but upon the "long take," or sequence shot. The primary concern of the long take aesthetic is not the sequencing of images, as in montage, but the disposition of space within the frame, or mise-en‐scène. Welles is today regarded for all practical purposes as the founder and master of this aesthetic (in the same way that Eisenstein is regarded as the founder and master of montage), though its lineage can be traced as far back as Louis Feuillade. Finally, Kane was the first recognizably modern sound film; and it stood in the same relationship to its medium in 1941 as did The Birth of a Nation in 1914 and Potemkin in 1925— that is, it was an achievement in the development of narrative form, years in advance of its time, which significantly influenced most of the important films that followed it. Through deep-focus photography, Kane attempts to technically reproduce the actual field of vision of the human eye in order to structure our visual perception of screen space by means of composition in depth. Through its innovative use of sound, it attempts to reproduce the actual aural experience of the human ear and then to manipulate our aural perception of screen space by distorting and qualifying this experience. And in both respects, though the technology is not the same, Kane brilliantly anticipates the contemporary cinema of wide- screen photography and stereophonic sound.<br />-410-<br />Contrary to popular belief, Kane was anything but a financially extravagant production. The entire film—cavernous ceilinged sets and all—was made for 839,727 dollars, * with a remarkable economy of means: for many scenes Welles and Ferguson converted standing sets from other RKO pictures, and, in the Everglades sequence, they actually used jungle footage from Son of Kong (1933), complete with animated bats. Nevertheless, the financial failure of the film stigmatized Welles as a loser in Hollywood, and he was never again permitted to have total control of an industry production. †<br /><br />WELLES AFTER KANE<br />Welles' second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), is one of the great lost masterworks of the cinema. Like von Stroheim's Greed (1924) and Eisenstein's Que viva México! (1929-31), The Magnificent<br />Ambersons was taken out of its director's hands and radically recut to satisfy the exigencies of the new wartime economy as perceived by the Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs (see pp. 439 and 442). While Welles was in Brazil shooting footage for a semidocumentary entitled It's All True, cosponsored by RKO and the State Department, RKO cut The Magnificent Ambersons from 132 to eighty-eight minutes and provided it with a totally incongruous happy ending shot by the film's production manager, Freddie Fleck. **<br />Flawed though it is, The Magnificent Ambersons remains a great and powerful film. Adapted by Welles from Booth Tarkington's novel, it parallels the turn-of-the-century decline of a proud and wealthy provincial family with the rise of the modern industrial city of Indianapolis. It is an unabashedly nostalgic film whose mise-en-scène is carefully calculated to create a sense of longing for the past. Although he was no Gregg Toland, cinematographer Stanley Cortez's high-contrast lighting and deep-focus photography of the interior of the Amberson mansion produced some of the most beautiful sequence shots ever to appear on the American screen. Like Citizen Kane, the film is constructed largely of long takes, with much spectacular tracking movement of the camera, and Welles' revolutionary use of the lightning mix and sound montage exceeds even his ____________________<br />* This figure includes postproduction costs. Only about 7 percent of it, or 59,207 dollars, went to the construction of Kane's record number of 116 sets. By contrast, the many fewer sets of The Magnificent Ambersons cost 137,265 dollars, or about 13.5 percent of that film's total budget of 1,013,760 dollars.<br />** In addition, one scene was reshot by the editor, Robert Wise, and another by Mercury Theatre business manager Jack Moss. For years it was thought that the forty-five minutes of cut footage might exist somewhere in the vaults of Paramount Pictures, which had bought portions of the RKO feature library in 1958, but in The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Robert Carringer maintains that RKO burned the negative trims and outtakes for lack of storage space—a relatively common practice at the time. There is still the possibility that an original preview print might surface someday, but in its absence Carringer provides a textual edition of The Magnificent Ambersons, using the March 12, 1942, cutting continuity to indicate what was excised from the original version of the release print, what scenes were reordered, and what new footage was shot by others and integrated into the film while Welles was in Brazil.<br />† Welles' notoriously difficult personality also figured in his alienation from (and of) the American film industry.<br />-411<br />own earlier work. Though the eighty-eight-minute version which has survived can only hint at the epic sweep of the original, The Magnificent Ambersons as it stands today is a masterpiece of mood, decor, and composition in depth. It is also a remarkably intelligent and prophetic film which suggests (in 1942, and in a story set in 1905) that the quality of American life will ultimately be destroyed by the automobile and urbanization. The Magnificent Ambersons, distributed on a double bill with a Lupe Velez comedy, was a commercial disaster. So was Journey into Fear (1942; released 1943), a stylish adaptation of an Eric Ambler espionage novel set in the Middle East, starring Welles and the Mercury Players, and co-directed by Welles (uncredited) and Norman Foster (1900-1976).<br />With his third box-office failure behind him, Welles was recalled from Brazil and removed from It's All True, which was never completed; the Mercury Players were given forty-eight hours to clear off the RKO lot. Originally entitled Pan-American, It's All True was to have been a fourpart anthology feature shot on location in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, with the purpose of promoting hemispheric cooperation as part of FDR's anti-Nazi "Good Neighbor Policy." (Behind the venture was Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and a major RKO stockholder; in neither role did he lack self-interest-see note, p. 439. ) The project was terminated for various financial and political reasons, and much of the film's negative, including a Technicolor carnival sequence shot in Rio, dumped into Santa Monica Bay. * This<br />____________________<br />* In 1985, eighteen to twenty hours of Welles' Brazilian footage, including three Technicolor sequences, were found in an old RKO vault by Paramount Pictures executive Fred Chandler (Paramount having bought Desilu Studios, which had earlier acquired RKO's production facilities). This was used to produce a twenty-two-minute documentary on the film's central sequence, "Four Men in a Raft," which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 1986 and attracted considerable attention. (In the same year, a Brazilian docudrama, Nem tudo e verdade [Not Everything Is True, directed by Rogerio Sganzerla] recounted the film's troubled production history from a Latino perspective. ) Over the next six years, an international team of production artists, archivists, and scholars led by Los Angeles-based film- maker Myron Meisel put together a ninety-minute documentary feature on the making of<br />-412-<br />was the beginning of a long-standing antagonism between Welles and those who ran the American film industry, an antagonism which was never fully resolved. Welles returned to broadcasting and the theater for the remainder of the war, though his striking performance as Rochester in Jane Eyre (directed in 1943 by Robert Stevenson, whom Welles seems to have influenced) did much to establish him as a popular film actor (a circumstance which would later permit him to finance his own productions when times got hard, as they frequently did).<br />In 1945, Welles returned to Hollywood to direct and star in The Stranger (1946) for the newly formed International Pictures, but was required to adhere closely to an existing script and a pre-arranged editing schedule. Welles submitted to the condition, and the resulting film is an intentional if preposterous self-parody about the tracking down of a Nazi war criminal (Welles) who is, somehow, posing as a master at a New England prep school and is married to the headmaster's daughter (Loretta Young). Technically, the film is fairly conventional, and Welles regarded it as his worst. Nevertheless, nationally distributed by RKO, its commercial success helped him to land a job at Columbia directing his brilliant and exotic essay in film noir, The Lady from Shanghai (1947; released 1948), which starred Welles and his second wife, Rita Hayworth (1918-87). This bizarre film of corruption, murder, and betrayal is cast in the form of a thriller, but its theme is the moral anarchy of the postwar world. Though its intricate, rambling plot is almost impossible to follow, * cinematically the film is one of Welles' finest achievements: the haunting sequence shots of the assignation between Welles and Hayworth in the San Francisco Aquarium, the perfectly cut chase in the Chinese theater, and, most of all, the montage of the two-way shootout in the hall of mirrors which concludes the film have become textbook examples of Welles' genius. Because of the obscurity of its narrative, The Lady from Shanghai was a financial failure, and Welles became persona non grata in Hollywood for nearly a decade.<br />____________________<br /> It's All True which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1993. At the film's core are reconstructed versions of "Four Men in a Raft" and Technicolor sequences from two other segments—"The Story of the Samba" and "My Friend Bonito"—which show an extraordinary film artist working at the height of his creative powers.<br />* A fact abetted by Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, who held up the film's release by a year (it was originally completed in 1946) while it was re-edited, redubbed, and rescored under Welles' supervision.<br />-414-<br />In order to continue making films, he was forced to exile himself to Europe, but before he left, he turned out a final Mercury Theatre production—a nightmarishly expressionistic version of Macbeth (1948) shot in twenty-three days on papier-mâché and cardboard sets for the B-studio, Republic Pictures. More Welles than Shakespeare, with Welles playing Macbeth, the film still manages to convey an atmosphere of brooding evil and to create a convincing portrait of a man driven by ambition beyond the bounds of the moral universe (a characteristic theme of both Shakespeare and Welles) in a culture which has only just emerged from barbarism. Originally 112 minutes long, Macbeth was cut to eighty-six minutes by its producers after Welles had left for Europe, and the sound‐track—in which the actors spoke with Scottish burrs for verisimilitude—was rerecorded to "Americanize" the accents. This recut, redubbed version was the only one known in the United States until 1979, when a UCLA archivist discovered the original among the university's collection of NTA Film Services (Republic's distributor) nitrate prints. In 1980, Macbeth was restored to its original form through a joint endeavor of UCLA and the Folger Shakespeare Library, complete with the Scottish‐ accented soundtrack and an eight-minute overture by the film's composer, Jacques Ibert. Among the most startling discoveries within the missing footage was a ten-minute-long take of continuous dramatic action, probably the first ever attempted in a theatrical film Hitchcock's Rope went into production a few months after Welles' film was completed).<br />In moving to Europe, Welles lost the great technical and financial resources of the Hollywood studios, but he gained much in creative freedom. As a result, his European films tend to be technically imperfect and imaginatively unrestrained. The first of these was another Shakespeare adaptation, Othello (1952), with Welles in the title role; the film was made over a period of four years from 1948 to 1952, while Welles financed the production by acting in other people's films. With interiors shot all over Europe and exteriors shot in the ancient citadel at Mogador, Morocco, Othello is a film of light and openness—of wind, sun, and sea—as opposed to the brooding darkness of Macbeth and The Lady from Shanghai. Continuously recast, reshot, recut, and redubbed, Othello nevertheless won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival when it was finally completed in 1952. * (Welles bequeathed the rights to Othello to his daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith, and in 1989 she embarked on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar restoration project with Chicago-based filmmakers Michael Dawson and Arne Saks. The restored Othello, based on Welles' original nitrate negative, was released to mark its fortieth anniversary in 1992; the original dialogue track was remixed<br />____________________<br />* Actually, it shared the prize with Renato Castellani's comedy Due soldi di speranza (Two Pennyworth of Hope, 1952).<br />-416-<br />with newly created sound effects and a digital rerecording of the original score. )<br />Welles' next film, Mr. Arkadin (British title: Confidential Report, 1955), a failed attempt to remake Citizen Kane in European terms, was shot on an extremely low budget during an eight-month period in Spain, Germany, and France. On the French Riviera, a down-at-the-heels adventurer named Van Stratten is hired by the mysterious European business tycoon Gregory Arkadin (based on the real-life war profiteer Miles Krueger, and played by Welles) to piece together the details of his buried past. Van Stratten's Kafkaesque quest takes him all over Europe as he interviews the people who possess the secrets of Arkadin's past life, only to discover at the end of the film that he is the finger-man in a murder plot whereby the tycoon is systematically destroying all who can reveal his criminal past as soon as they are identified. Poorly acted, written, and recorded, with Welles himself dubbing in the voices of most of the other characters, Mr. Arkadin is an ambitious and intermittently brilliant failure.<br />No such difficulties attend Touch of Evil (1958), for which Welles returned to Hollywood for the first time in ten years. Universal, still a minor studio, had signed Welles and Charlton Heston to play the leads in what was to be a conventional police melodrama, and Heston insisted that Welles also direct. Welles accepted the job and was permitted to rewrite the script, turning it into a nightmarish parable of the abuse of power in a dark and sinister world. Shot against the garish background of Venice, California, Touch of Evil is another study of a man like Kane, Macbeth, and Arkadin, whose obsession with control causes him to transgress the laws of the moral universe. Hank Quinlan (Welles), a police captain in a seamy Mexican-American border town, has spent thirty years framing murder suspects about whose guilt he had "a hunch" in order to insure their conviction. He ultimately runs afoul of an honest Mexican narcotics agent (Heston) who exposes his practices and indirectly causes his death. The grotesque, inflated, and yet somehow sympathetic Quinlan is superbly played by Welles as a man whose once strong character has been utterly corrupted by an obsession.<br />As a director, Welles demanded the impossible from the cinematographer Russell Metty (who also shot The Stranger) and got it. The film opens with a continuous moving crane shot (unfortunately obscured in the release print by the credits), which begins with a close-up of a time bomb and ends with the explosion of the device in a car nearly two and a half minutes later, making it one of the longest unbroken tracking shots attempted before the advent of the Steadicam (see p. 1). Later, Metty was required to track his camera from the exterior of a building through a lobby and into a crowded elevator, and then ride up five floors to shoot Heston greeting the occupants as the doors slide open from within. There is also significant use of deep-focus photography and sound montage for the first time since The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Like Welles' previous films, Touch of Evil was shot in high-contrast black and white. Ignored in every country but France (where it won the Cannes Grand Prix) in the year of its release, Touch of Evil is today considered a Welles masterpiece whose technical brilliance and thematic depth bring it close to the stature of Kane. When it was released, the film was cut from 108 to ninety-five minutes under the supervision of Universal postproduction head Ernest Nims to make its editing continuity easier for contemporary audiences to follow. * In 1976, the deleted footage was restored by Universal, and Welles' original version was released for distribution in 16mm and, subsequently, on video cassette. The restoration resolves certain obscurities of dialogue in the 1958 version and provides for a fuller characterization of the film's protagonists.<br />But the film's financial failure in 1958 confirmed Welles' status as a pariah in Hollywood; he returned to Europe, where French producers offered him an opportunity to direct a film based on a major literary work of his choice. He selected Kafka's novel The Trial, published in 1925. Despite budgeting problems, The Trial (1962) became the only one of his films since Kane over which Welles exercised total control. His customary visual complexity notwithstanding, the results are disappointing. Shot in black-and-white in the streets of Zagreb, Croatia (then Yugoslavia), and in the fantastic Gare d'Orsay in Paris, the film finally fails to evoke the antiseptic modern hell of Kafka's novel, perhaps because of some disparity between the world views of the two artists.<br />____________________<br />* As Nims would later remark: "He [Welles] was ahead of his time. He was making those quick cuts—in the middle of a scene you cut to another scene and then come back and finish the scene and then cut to the last half of the other scene" (quoted in Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography [New York: Viking, 1985], p. 428). Specifically, Nims recut the film's first five reels to conform to conventional continuity practice, deleted certain auditory shock effects Welles had devised for the soundtrack, and added several inserts shot by Universal contract director Harry Keller (b. 1915—The Face in the Mirror, 1958). See John Belton, "A New Map of the Labyrinth: The Unretouched Touch of Evil," Movietone News,<br />no. 47 (January 21, 1976): 1-9, and no. 48 (February 29, 1976): 23.<br />-418<br />Welles' next European film and his last completed feature, Chimes at Midnight (British title: Falstaff, 1966), is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Returning to an idea that he had first tried in his 1938 Theater Guild production Five Kings, Welles assembled all the Falstaff parts from Henry IV, Parts I and II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry V, and linked them together with a narration from Holinshed's Chronicles (the medieval source of Shakespeare's history plays) to create a portrait of the character as his privileged friendship with Prince Hal passes gradually from affection to bitterness, disillusionment, and decay. Like Citizen Kane, it is a film about decline and loss, and like The Magnificent Ambersons, it is full of nostalgia for a vanished past; but it is as much the work of an older man as Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons are the work of a younger one. Shot in Spain (for financial reasons) over a period of several years, Chimes at Midnight is superbly photographed and acted, with Welles at his best in the title role. Its moving crane shots have been widely praised, and the lengthy montage sequence depicting the Battle of Shrewsbury has been favorably compared to Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin (1925) and the Battle on the Ice in Alexander Nevski (1938). Yet Chimes at Midnight is anything but technically extravagant. It is rather a quiet, elegiac, and dignified film whose restrained style and austere black-and-white photography correspond perfectly with its sober themes of human frailty, mortality, and decay.<br />It is no longer possible—as it was, perhaps, even several years ago—to speak of Orson Welles as a director important for a single, if monumental and awe-inspiring, film. Welles produced five masterpieces—Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, and Chimes at Midnight—and his Shakespearean films, extravagant and eccentric as they sometimes are, represent major contributions to the genre. In Citizen Kane he gave us the first modern sound film and effectively pioneered the aesthetic of the long take, or composition in depth. All of his films of the forties significantly anticipated the contemporary cinema of widescreen photography and stereophonic sound. But technological wizardry notwithstanding, Welles produced a body of work which deserves to be ranked with the great narrative art of our century.<br />Welles was a traditional moralist whose major themes were characteristically those of classical Western literature: the corrupting nature of ambition; the disparity between social and psychological reality; the destructive power of self-delusion, appetite, and obsession; and the importance of a sense of the past. Confirming these thematic concerns was his intermittent work from 1955 until his death in 1985 on a version of Don Quixote set in modern times (a more or less complete work print of which is currently being restored by Welles' companion and collaborator Oja Kodar). Stylistically, however, Welles was always an innovator and a radical experimenter—an authentic American expressionist with a decidedly baroque sense of form which has profoundly influenced the course of Western cinema.<br />In his latter years, he made several attempts to become an active part of that cinema again, in collaboration with Kodar, as his principal scriptwriter and actress, and the cinematographer Gary Graver, most notably in the still unreleased The Other Side of the Wind. This three-hour color film, which Welles described as "96-percent finished" in 1979, stars John Huston as a Welles-like director contemplating his career in flashback at the end of his life. In a tribute presented to him by the American Film Institute in 1975, Welles showed some provocative footage from it in an unsuccessful attempt to raise money for its completion. Between 1978 and 1985, he worked on The Dreamers, a romantic adventure story based upon two of Isak Dinesen's Gothic Tales, but only a few scenes of it were actually shot.<br />When he died, Welles was working on a long-cherished project—his own adaptation of King Lear in video, with himself in the title role and Kodar as Cordelia—which also remained unfinished. Welles' death on October 10, 1985, was mourned around the world, appropriately, as the passing of a twentieth-century American genius. It is difficult to know who or what to blame for the wasteful attenuation of his later career, and it is probably better not to try. But surely Welles would have appreciated the irony in the fact that only his death would make a whole generation of Americans aware that its favorite public fat man and talk-show raconteur was the single most important architect of the modern film. As Jean-Luc Godard observed of him at the height of the French New Wave, "Everyone will always owe him everything." *<br />____________________<br />* Quoted in Michel Ciment, "Les Enfants terrible," American Film (December 1984): 42. Welles made several important films of less-than-feature length as well. The Immortal Story (Histoire immortelle, 1968), based on a novella by Isak Dinesen, was written and directed by Welles for France's nationalized television company, ORTF. Running fifty-eight minutes, it was Welles' first film in color and stars Welles, Jeanne Moreau, and Fernando Rey. The Deep (also called Dead Calm or Dead Reckoning) was written and directed by Welles, and was shot by Gary Graver off the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia between 1967 and 1969.<br />Based on the novel Dead Calm by Charles Williams, the film stars Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Laurence Harvey, Oja Kodar, and Michael Bryant. There is a plot summary of The Deep, based on an early version of the script, in James Naremore's The Magic World of Orson Welles, Revised edition (Dallas: SMU Press, 1989); The Deep was completed but remains unreleased because of continuity gaps resulting from the death of Harvey in 1973 and the undubbed part of Moreau. In 1969 Welles shot an abridged color version of The Merchant of Venice in Trogir, Yugoslavia, and Asolo, Italy, which was completed, edited, scored, and mixed, but remains unreleased due to the theft of two of its reels; Kodar is currently at work<br />on a reconstruction. Finally—and most significantly—Welles wrote and codirected with the French documentarist François Reichenbach F for Fake (1975; released in France as Vérités et mensonges, 1973), a hybrid documentary about the dynamic of fakery. It focuses on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory; his biographer (and the fraudulent pseudobiographer of Howard Hughes), Clifford Irving; and Welles himself, who as director of the film, is the chief illusionist among them. According to William Johnson in his Film Quarterly review of F for Fake (Summer 1976), the film provides a "commentary on the ontology of the film medium" and that medium's "specious realism." In 1978 the documentary Filming Othello (also known as The Making of Othello) was produced for West German television by Klaus and Jeurgen Hellweg; it featured interviews with the cast and crew of the 1952 Mercury Films Production and narrated footage of the original film—all of it directed by Welles.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-60420180675012222572007-05-04T07:54:00.000-07:002007-05-04T08:02:05.734-07:00"Meandros" por Johan van der KeukenMeandros<br />por Johan van der Keuken<br /><br />[«Meandres», texto publicado originalmente en francés en la revista Trafic nº 13, París, 1995. Traducción: <a href="mailto:flv@otrocampo.com">Fernando La Valle</a>.]<br /><br />Los cineastas que han ejercido influencia sobre mí son tanto cineastas de ficción como documentalistas. En este nivel, la diferencia jamás tuvo demasiada importancia. Lo que me interesaba, era simplemente el cine. Hitchcock, por ejemplo, en un momento dado. En algunos de mis films hay un trabajo de campo y contracampo, uno de los procedimientos clásicos del cine narrativo. A veces hay también una cierta frialdad –por ejemplo en «Le Masque» (1989, 55m)– que puede recordar a Hitchcock. Pienso en ciertos planos de Marnie, marcados por la incertidumbre: ¿se trata de algo real o es un sueño? En «Le Masque», hay una escena en la que el personaje central, Philippe, un joven sin techo, va a cortarse el pelo para lograr la tan ansiada apariencia burguesa. Luego, en el juego de espejos de una tienda de moda, se prueba el traje que debe servirle de "máscara" social. Se efectúan transformaciones sobre su cuerpo mismo, que son entonces "verdaderas", pero que resultan desmentidas por la escena siguiente, cuando encontramos a Philippe en el dormitorio del Ejército de Salvación, con su físico de presidiario. Esta ambigüedad, esta incertidumbre sobre el cómo de las imágenes, hace que el film se deslice, se aparte de las marcas y balizamientos del documental.Al filmar experimento también el placer de sorprenderme a mí mismo, de hacer films que sólo llegaré a comprender, quizás, diez años más tarde. En un corto como «On Animal Locomotion» (1994, 15m), por ejemplo, el interés, a mis ojos, es que se devela allí algo que me sorprende completamente. Pero la necesidad de su rodaje, en detalle, me resulta también patente: temáticamente se sostiene, hay allí cierta fuerza, aun cuando las razones de filmarme así, sosteniendo la cámara ante mí –fragmentos de mi cuerpo, mi rostro de bufón–, son irracionales. El film guarda un vínculo evidente con la obra de Eadweard Muybridge (Human and Animal Locomotion), el fotógrafo y precursor del cine que analizó el movimiento del cuerpo. Apuntando la cámara hacia mí, me convierto en mi propio Muybridge. Y lo que es aún más importante: necesitaba un contra-movimiento para las imágenes que se precipitan sobre mí, una contra-corriente para todo lo que viene del exterior. El interior, es el lugar del cineasta, su ojo, su cabeza, y yo diría que todo exterior exige un interior. Están las razones visibles, localizables, pero detrás de ellas se hallan los motivos más íntimos, que a menudo sólo se entrevén mucho más tarde.Para la velada de apertura de este Festival, estaba previsto exhibir «Sarajevo Film Festival Film» (1993, 14m). Me dijeron que este corto había conmovido a muchos, que en él se sentía, sin violencia evidente ni imágenes sangrientas, lo que podía representar vivir en tales circunstancias de sitio y de guerra, y que en este sentido el film superaba a documentos que en ciertos aspectos son mucho más fuertes. En este caso se puede decir que la recepción se halla por así decir estabilizada, algo que no siempre pasa. Mis films hay que presentarlos así: tienen que apuntalarse y desgarrarse entre ellos. Hay que dejarles un aspecto inesperado, misterioso; tienen que ser vistos, de algún modo, imagen por imagen. «On Animal Locomotion», por ejemplo, es un segundo film sobre Sarajevo, un film cuya recepción es completamente inestable. Se trata siempre de desestabilizar el modo en que se ven las cosas, para poder alcanzar, aunque más no sea por un instante, la experiencia.<br />* * *<br />Siendo muy joven, influyó también en mí un fotógrafo holandés, Ed van Elsken, cuyo primer album, Un amour à Saint-Germain-des-Prés, está organizado como un falso relato: una especie de tira fotográfica sobre ciertos marginales –pretendían ser "existencialistas"– en el París de principios de los años cincuenta. Una fotografía muy negra, muy cruda, y al mismo tiempo muy pictórica. El es en cierto modo quien me descubrió, cuando vio las fotos que había hecho a partir de mis quince años. Me animó, y prácticamente autorizó, a emprender y publicar mi primer libro de imágenes: Nous avons dix-sept ans. Fue la ocasión, para mí, de entrever un mundo nuevo, una libertad para salir de ese universo de clase media que era el de mis orígenes. Luego dedicaría Face Value (1991, 120m) a este fotógrafo, y filmaría su retrato, poco antes de su muerte. En él dialoga con su mujer, durante sus últimos días, formulando una suerte de religión a propósito de la vida material, ideas que me parecen formidables: "Esta enfermedad es mi pesadumbre privada, que intentaré llevar con elegancia hasta el fin. Todo se presenta de modo completamente lógico: uno crece, se desarrolla, se degrada, y eso es todo. Pero la vida es tan increíble que comprende ya su propio Paraíso. Hay quienes preguntan por qué venimos al mundo... ¡Pues para sacar provecho de la creación, por Dios! Si no eres capaz de ver eso, es porque eres una basura."<br />* * *<br />A mi llegada a París, en 1956, descubrí un libro extraordinario: New York, de William Klein (Album Petite Planète nº 1, Editions du Seuil, 1956). Al ingresar en el Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (Idhec), representó para mí un verdadero golpe a la mandíbula, algo inmenso. Con esa expresión, esas formas, parecían quebrarse en algún punto las barreras culturales, se abría el camino de algo nuevo. Y luego, hacia el fin de mis estudios en el Idhec, cuando tenía veinte años, en 1958, vi llegar algunos films de la nouvelle vague. La larga carrera en la playa, al final de Los cuatrocientos golpes, de Truffaut, fue quizás la primera vez que yo veía a un film abandonar resueltamente el contexto narrativo para instalarse en la poesía de una duración palpable: ¡qué golpe! Sin aliento, de Godard, fue aún más fuerte: había cortado donde se le antojaba, en medio de los planos, componiendo su film como una serie de jump cuts. Se permitía una libertad enteramente nueva. Comenzaba la era del travelling en silla de ruedas, con la impresión de que el cine descubría nuevos medios, se concedía el permiso de hacer todo lo que no enseñaban en el Idhec. A partir de allí, mientras desarrollaba mi trabajo (con el proyecto de un album fotográfico sobre París <a name="Anchor-A m-60145"></a><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#notas">[1]</a>, recorría la ciudad cámara en mano), la idea y el deseo de un cine totalmente físico comenzaron a acosarme; la idea de un cine "directo". A continuación vinieron las preguntas: ¿En qué tipo de relato se pueden integrar tales cosas? ¿De qué tipo de aparato formal habrá que servirse?Es en este sentido que me fascinaron los primeros films de Resnais: la búsqueda de estructuras para un contra-mundo. En la evolución de mi trabajo como compositor de films, he sufrido más la influencia de Resnais que la de Godard, aun cuando fue Godard el que me procuró ese momento liberador, enemigo de todo academicismo, y que me había causado un efecto de exaltación tan grande que no podía dormir. Allí estaban, resumiendo, la libertad de Godard, y la composición de Resnais: Hiroshima mon amour, Muriel, Hace un año en Marienbad, films a los que siempre retorno emocionado. Por un lado, Hitchcock; por el otro, Leacock. En pintura, Mondrian y Pollock, o Mondrian y Van Gogh: lo apolíneo y lo dionisíaco; quiero los dos, estoy siempre entre los dos. Pero para hacer avanzar la estructura de un film, quizás Mondrian es el que tiene más para enseñarnos: Resnais, Hitchcock, Ozu sobre todo, están del lado de Mondrian. El de Ozu es un cine muy poderoso. Sus films son como conjunciones de puntos de vista más o menos fijos sobre elementos perpetuamente reciclados: la callejuela, los cables telegráficos, los postes, las casas con sus tabiques de madera o papel. Espacios fragmentarios y codificados: espacios vitales nacidos de una relación entre elementos espaciales. Pasan pocas cosas, se diría, y de repente, una emoción inmensa. Allí sentí que se accedía a una esencia del cine. Es algo que no se debe solamente a los actores, más allá de todo su talento, de su emoción; tampoco al relato, cuyo recorrido es más o menos el mismo, siempre: la pérdida de alguien, a la que uno termina acostumbrándose, de acuerdo a una necesidad de la pérdida, aun cuando ésta sea muy profunda. Se trata en última instancia del aprendizaje de vivir, vivir con lo que uno tiene o con lo que ahora le falta, un aprendizaje que pasa a veces por momentos muy dolorosos, pero de una gran ternura. El encuadre es más bien duro, con una disposición del espacio que es a la vez física y mental. Como en el caso de Hitchcock, se trata a la vez del espacio de la acción, el del suspenso de la historia, y de un espacio interior, mental. Ozu hace esto con moderación, con humor, con sutileza. En Samma no Aji <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#notas">[2]</a>, <a name="Anchor-A mi-7005"></a>aborda el tema de la modernidad, que se cruza con el de la pérdida. Es el pasaje del sake al whisky. Hace algunos años, cuando tuve el placer de conocer el Japón, y miraba con avidez el paisaje urbano desde trenes de alta velocidad, reconocí los planos de Ozu. Las callejuelas, los colchones puestos a secar en las ventanas de las casas modestas. Es un espacio en el que se reconstituye el alimento de nuestra mirada. Mi trabajo respecto de lo real se sitúa en este doble movimiento: un ida y vuelta entre la ficcionalización y el retorno al mundo. Una mirada de reconocimiento sobre el mundo, en el doble sentido del término. La palabra reconocimiento se aplica muy bien a Ozu.<br />* * *<br />Comencé a hacer mis propios films con una cámara que me ofrecieron mis padres cuando dejé el Idhec, en donde no tuve ganas de seguir una vez que hube obtenido el diploma. Era una pequeña Bolex, que permitía rodar planos de 24 segundos. Había que volver a darle cuerda cada vez sin pérdida de tiempo. A partir de 1960 rodé con ella todos mis films iniciales. En 1965 había conseguido otra Bolex, con grandes cargadores, un motor, y un generador Pilotone, que me permitía rodar con sonido sincrónico. Fue con ella que realicé «Beppie» (1965, 38m). A partir de entonces, empecé a combinar secuencias con sonido sincrónico y con sonido libre. Hay que pensar que antes del cinéma verité el cine documental era una imagen con una banda musical, efectos sonoros o un comentario separados, no sincrónicos. Con el tiempo, surgió la necesidad de tener más colores en la paleta, y la sincronía sonora se convirtió en un elemento importante.La llegada de los films de Rouch, Les Maîtres-Fous, y sobre todo, Moi, un Noir, representó otro golpe. De repente, la idea de una "sintaxis cinematográfica", sobre la que abrigaba yo ya por entonces infinidad de dudas, resultó aniquilada en lo que a mí respecta en favor de una "sintaxis del cuerpo" que dictaba el encadenamiento de las imágenes y los sonidos. Más tarde, vendría también Eddie Sachs at Indianapolis (1961), de Leacock, Drew y Pennebaker, que me impresionaría sobremanera. El film giraba literalmente en redondo durante dos horas, siguiendo los virajes de una carrera automovilística. Aquel círculo era la forma gráfica de una escenografía extraída directamente de la contingencia de lo real.<br />* * *<br />Tenía entonces dos Bolex: la pequeña, la de cuerda, con la que seguía rodando muchos planos, y la Bolex mejorada, que tenía la mala costumbre de trabarse en mitad del rollo. Integré este defecto en «Hermann Slobe - L'Enfant aveugle II» (1966, 29m), donde la película trabada se convierte en metáfora de la dificultad de hacer cine, e invitación a captar los sobresaltos del mundo. La alternancia de ambas cámaras resume bastante bien mi posición en la corriente de los años sesenta: entre el lenguaje del montaje, que había dominado el documental de vanguardia (y que desembocaría en una suerte de pictorialismo comentado), y el cinéma-verité, que me fascinaba por su capacidad de adaptarse a la duración de los acontecimientos, pero que carecía de medios formales para describir "el mundo de las cosas". Llegué a un compromiso con ambos, aun haciendo incursiones en diferentes dominios narrativos o experimentales.A fines de los años sesenta, adquirí una Arriflex BL, verdadera cámara sincrónica, bastante pesada, pero con la que rodé sin embargo hasta fines de los setenta. A continuación, heredé algo de dinero y pude cambiar mi Arriflex por una Aäton. La Arriflex, con su peso, me impedía hacer ciertos movimientos, como elevarme, por ejemplo, de una posición en cuclillas. La Aäton permite mayor dinamismo.Entretanto, hubo films en 35mm: «Un film pour Lucebert» <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#notas">[3]</a> <a name="Anchor-17389"></a>(1967, 24m), «La Vélocité 40-70» (1970, 25m), y «Beauty» (1970, 25m). Pude explorar el color, composiciones con encuadres más amplios, una mayor variedad en profundidad de campo, y un sonido libre, distanciado, que aplicaba en capas, como un pintor. Todavía hoy me da la sensación de que este trabajo con el sonido es lo que aproxima el cine a la pintura.<br />* * *<br />Conservé siempre mi Bolex para tomas especiales. En La Jungle plate (1978, 90m), todo lo que tiene que ver con lo minúsculo, lo filmé con la Bolex. Permite manipulaciones interesantes, que todavía utilizo en algunos films: los cambios de objetivos, las sobreimpresiones rebobinando la película en la cámara, los ralentis o los acelerados. Actualmente la conservo en copropiedad con uno de mis hijos (Stijn van Santen, hijo de un primer matrimonio de mi esposa Noshka: vive conmigo desde los tres años), que se hizo cineasta. El hace cosas maravillosas, muy audaces, con esta Bolex, y eso fue lo que me dio ganas de volver a utilizarla para «On Animal Locomotion». Durante un seminario con Artavazd Pelechian, que tuvo lugar en Hamburgo en febrero de 1994, nos divertíamos mucho con esto: volvimos a pensar algunos temas del montaje en ocasión de mi ponencia con «Locomotion», en donde también recordé el trabajo de Jonas Mekas. Gracias a Alf Bold –que dirigió la programación del cine Arsenal, en Berlín, hasta su muerte en 1993–, yo había podido ver Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#notas">[4]</a>. <a name="Anchor-50014"></a>Al principio me pareció que eso no tenía ningún interés: esa imagen que saltaba... Pero Alf Bold me dijo: "Debes reconsiderarlo. Está verdaderamente bien." No lo olvidé. Es justamente ese temblor casi perpetuo de la imagen lo que la hace existir, entre la libertad y la incertidumbre.A veces desencadené temblores en mis films, como un efecto de puntuación, o de reacción emotiva. Cuando filmo a Le Pen, por ejemplo, me dan ganas de patear la cámara, de sacudir la imagen al ritmo de sus lloronas invectivas. Hay quienes opinan que ese efecto de Face Value es demasiado grosero, pero corresponde a una necesidad irreflexiva que experimenté durante el rodaje. Sea de buen gusto o no, fue mi manera de involucrarme: un temblor muy diferente al de Marker en <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/criticas/sinsol.html">Sans soleil</a>. Allí hay como una disolución del cuadro, una suerte de danza de la imagen: un encadenamiento de ideas, de frases, de juegos de palabras, pero también continuidades de luminosidad, de movimiento puro. Este efecto de vacilación procede probablemente del hecho de haber rodado Marker cámara en mano, con una cámara tan ligera que no podía estabilizarla, al tener sobre todo una distancia focal más bien larga. Pero supo sacar ventaja de ello. Es un gran trabajo musical, de música de la imagen. Fue a través del film de Mekas que me hice sensible a esta manera de trabajar. En él, todo circula. Y la Bolex volvió a estar así en la cresta de la ola.<br />* * *<br />Los artistas no tienen problema en decir que, en el pasado, sufrieron la influencia de éste o de aquél. Pero decir "me hallo actualmente bajo influencia", es mucho más delicado. Más delicado y más sutil: las influencias se convierten en un medio de reactualización, de rejuvenecimiento. Sin negar que envejecemos, podemos apreciar el hecho de participar de un cine joven. De nada vale crisparse y volver a intentar los mismos trucos de veinte años atrás. Tenemos menos fortaleza física, y eso hay que tomarlo en cuenta. Hay que observar el propio trabajo mientras se desarrolla, hacer evolucionar lo que hemos adquirido. En mi caso, se trata de una evolución con reciclaje. En el pasado, tratando de distanciarme de la etiqueta "documental", busqué por el lado del concepto de "cine temático". El cine que yo hacía se ubicaba en algún punto entre documental y ficción, entre "verdad" y montaje, entre filmación frontal y composición en ángulos oblicuos, y sobre todo, podía ser visto como un conjunto de relaciones dinámicas entre imágenes recurrentes susceptibles de ser consideradas como temas, sujetos, con los que se podía emprender un inventario: los mercados (habrá fácilmente una decena en los films de esta retrospectiva), las matanzas de animales, la carne cruda, las frutas; las ventanas, las fachadas, los bordes que marcan los límites de un territorio; las escuelas, la enseñanza y el aprendizaje; los retratos, las manos, el contacto táctil con las cosas, los instrumentos; los pies en marcha, el contacto con el suelo; los ojos que miran el ojo de la cámara; el bloqueo de los ojos, los ciegos, el bloqueo de los sentidos, los impedimentos y defectos físicos, los cuerpos que se fatigan en un movimiento repetitivo; el agua, el fuego, la piedra, el metal; el aire con sus cualidades luminosas y táctiles; el dormir; las pantallas.Hay así una memoria de las imágenes registradas en el pasado que funciona en el presente. Con los años, los films se aglutinan entre sí. Pero a pesar de esta actividad de la memoria, hay que volver a encontrar en cada ocasión la frescura del "filmar por primera vez". Hay que estar disponible para el "directo", es decir, para el carácter único y finalmente incontrolable de cada situación, si queremos que el film pueda sobrevivir al catálogo temático. De modo que este concepto de "cine temático", no deja de ser también algo enormemente restrictivo. Es cierto que se dialoga con los mismos aspectos de la vida. De tal modo, se "recicla", volviéndose uno a la larga un poco más exigente con la segunda toma: la otra toma, el otro movimiento, el otro ángulo, deben ser inventados. Entonces, consumimos más película. Rodando con la Aäton, la relación entre cantidad de película consumida y el film terminado evolucionó en mi caso, a lo largo de los años, de 1/7 hasta 1/10. Con «On Animal Locomotion», la reduje a 1/5, a causa de la Bolex: con la restricción de los planos muy cortos, se gasta menos en la filmación, y se aumenta el tiempo de montaje, condensando el tono fílmico.<br />* * *<br />Será entonces la especificidad de los medios lo que determina los caminos a seguir, hacia metas parcialmente desconocidas, y en una articulación progresiva del film. El estilo no es una característica homogénea, es un conjunto de vagabundeos, quizás de tics, a través de los que la persona del autor se mantiene en una precisa coherencia. El último momento de unidad antes del hundimiento, el último momento de una "visión del mundo", como se decía antaño: lo que recomienza sin cesar es la búsqueda de ese último momento.Comoquiera que sea, nunca fui de los que ruedan al principio una masa enorme de planos para luego armar el film en la mesa de montaje. Ni tampoco de los que dicen: "Escribo un film, lo ruedo, y lo monto en consecuencia." Ni una cosa ni la otra. El montaje comienza por la visión de todas las materias, que permite ya una evaluación de los elementos filmados: "Esto está bien; esto no vale nada", y una interpretación: "Ahí, me quedé afuera; quise hacer tal cosa, pero no se trataba de eso", o bien: "Ahí surgió algo mucho mejor, o más importante, que lo que había previsto." A continuación, uno debe encontrar, o volver a encontrar, las relaciones, poco a poco: recordar lo que ya ha hecho, lo que ha pasado, y sobre todo, que uno ha sido uno mismo. Quiero decir, no sólo una persona, sino muchas, con relaciones variables en el interior del yo, de acuerdo a condiciones y exigencias diferentes en cada instante del rodaje. Para conocer la naturaleza de lo que hemos filmado, importa saber quién se ha sido, y es en ese triángulo en movimiento que se delinean, se definen, los programas, así como la dirección y el sentido del viaje.Lo que es importante a mis ojos, en dos films tan distintos como «Le Temps» (1984, 45m) o «I ♥ $» (1986, 45m), es el viaje. Son films metódicamente opuestos. Uno reposa sobre la artificialidad: una serie de largos travellings en un mundo cerrado, donde se han colocado personas y cosas. El otro se presenta como una travesía "en directo" –llena de encuentros y de confrontaciones imprevistas– de cuatro ciudades del mundo. Pero ambos van hacia un pequeño no sé qué en virtud del cual, al final, todo deberá ser un poco diferente que al principio. Se trata de llegar al punto en que el cineasta y el espectador descubren que la mirada, o el sentimiento, han sufrido un cambio en el curso del film, cualquiera sea la longitud del viaje.«I ♥ $» puede ser visto como la búsqueda de una imagen compuesta y compacta del mundo visto a través del prisma del dinero. Una búsqueda cuyo costado abstracto debe salir a la luz. Pero esta abstracción va a entrar en contacto de todos modos con la vida física y mental de las personas, y la indagación de lo abstracto se convierte en la investigación de una imagen que de pronto está viva y es importante. Con «Le Temps» pasa lo mismo. Al final de los travellings en los espacios cerrados, llegamos a ver con una libertad nueva lo que acontece afuera. Yo quería que las miradas hacia cámara, las de la actriz solitaria, o las del niño que juega con sus padres y fija sus ojos en la cámara que gira en torno a él, fueran inocentes de la ficción para que rompieran el círculo. Mi deseo, mi apuesta, era la de volver aquí los ojos hacia algo muy inmediato, y dar a percibir un momento verdadero. «I ♥ $» tiene que ver con una pequeña historia erótica de mi juventud. Tenía doce años y estaba enamorado de una chica de mi clase. Para el montaje, quería establecer una relación entre esa historia y este mundo del dinero en el que el cuerpo no existe, del que ha sido evacuado, evaporado. Quería aproximar ese recuerdo de mi juventud y el de las pequeñas fuentes que hay en Amsterdam, cerca del monumento del general Van Heutz –una suerte de matón colonial, un verdugo de las Indias de comienzos de siglo–; quería establecer, entonces, una relación entre un mundo personal y una topografía de mi juventud: "Dos pequeñas fuentes en las que podía beber un niño." Esta escena de mi juventud me resulta muy conmovedora, ella viaja a través del film. Pero cualquiera fuese el lugar en que la ubicáramos, se convertía en un acto de complacencia insostenible. Cuando el cineasta se introduce en su propio film, siempre hay que desconfiar. No había ya ningún lugar para esta escena, que casi exigía ya una prolongación del film. También hay una escena en la que interpelo al director del Banco de Hong Kong, y que da la sensación de que no estoy a la altura de la fuerza y el poder de ese tipo. El pasa de inmediato a la ofensiva, mientras que mi voz sube un octavo, y apenas me atrevo a decirle algunas cosas duras y plantearle las preguntas molestas que tenía en mente. Ese es un momento clave del film. La secuencia tiene un montaje demasiado complicado: metimos allí demasiadas cosas. La imagen de la carne que queremos arrojar a la cara del tipo, queriendo impresionarlo con la cámara, con un encuadre en contra-picado: pero eso no le hace mella, se mantiene increíblemente firme. Yo estaba muy abatido, y todo eso hacía que, a continuación, se pudiese introducir mejor la escena de juventud, sin complacencias, y asimismo la idea de la fragilidad del personaje del cineasta, que ha adquirido su dimensión ficcional raspándose con lo real. Su dimensión "friccional", si se quiere.El film es un viaje al interior del viaje, muchos de cuyos elementos viajan a su vez. Pues el viaje también es la memoria: la mirada hacia lo desconocido de antes, hacia lo que quedó atrás en el camino ya recorrido. Lo que me interesa en el cine, no es sólo la memoria como elemento exterior al film (como en Marienbad: "¿No nos hemos visto en algún lado?"), en un universo ficcional independiente de él, sino también la memoria por asociación entre los planos del film y los de otros, similares o próximos. Mis películas tienen una consistencia que apunta a la introspección. Está la experiencia inmediata de cada imagen (habría que decir de cada imagen-sonido), la experiencia de cada transición entre dos imágenes, y la formación de pequeñas series, de agrupamientos, de amalgamas. De modo que sólo al final se puede ver el conjunto como un objeto surgido de pronto de un sistema de relaciones temporales, inmobilizándose al constituirse en un objeto condensado que sería para mí el momento de la verdad, el momento documental puro, en el que este objeto compuesto existe por su duración, que hay que vivir y ver de una manera por así decir visionaria. El documento sobre lo real quizás sea esto. No la realidad primaria de todos esos acontecimientos e imágenes, ni el carácter ficcionalizado, sino la materialización final de este objeto compuesto, en nuestra cabeza.<br />* * *<br />Pelechian procede más o menos de la misma manera: activar la memoria para, en un momento dado, recolectar el todo. Cuando vi sus films me entusiasmé mucho, aunque con algunas reservas respecto de la elección de la música, algo que por otra parte discutimos durante ese seminario de Hamburgo del que ya he hablado. Yo había leído que Pelechian hacía "montaje a distancia": pero eso es justamente lo mío, desde hace tiempo. Y también lo suyo, más tarde, porque hemos visto sus películas con veinte años de retraso. Es bien sabido que las cosas pueden surgir de manera simultánea. Pero creo que hay algunas diferencias entre él y yo. En la obra de Pelechian, hay tonalidades cósmicas, una investigación concerniente a las leyes inmutables del Cosmos. A este respecto, él da un ejemplo que me parece sorprendente: coloca dos cajas de fósforos a cierta distancia, y pretende, como por una especie de apuesta absoluta, que si desplaza una de ellas, la otra también deberá desplazarse, como si el universo fuera dirigido por una fuerza inmaterial, o submaterial. La apuesta apunta nada menos que a una ley que regiría el universo entero. Es un pensamiento que va de la materia hacia la magia. Mientras que en lo que a mí toca, se trata más bien de una magia modesta: sin duda que hay cosas increíbles, y el mundo es más mágico de lo que se piensa, más rico en posibilidades que la pequeña parte de él que nos es revelada.Pelechian propone la idea de una puesta en relación de grandes bloques de imágenes (el film más bello que vi en este sentido es Notre siècle, donde se trata justamente del espacio y los cosmonautas), con bloques enteros de sonidos. Grandes conjuntos de imágenes combinados con conjuntos sonoros. Como si lo real estuviera constituido por bloques, sujetos a reediciones. Algo que produce una gran impresión, pues induce la idea de un cuestionamiento de todo lo ya visto. Pero para Pelechian no hay relaciones conflictivas entre estos bloques de imágenes, mientras que para mí sí que las hay, y muchas. En mis películas el movimiento debe escapar al rigor de los cuadros para encontrarse con otros movimientos a lo largo de un sistema de líneas de fuga, y para constituirse, eventualmente, en un movimiento generalizado, pero no obligado. En Pelechian, en cambio, hay una primacía del movimiento: éste lo toma todo, nada se le resiste. No tenemos tampoco la misma concepción del cuadro: el mío busca imponer su rigor, o su equilibrio, a todo lo que no se mueve, pero que tampoco se encuentra en reposo. Se trata entonces de un equilibrio efímero, y de un rigor amenazado por el nerviosismo. Mientras que, con Pelechian, el cuadro sólo es percibido como estado posible del movimiento, posibilidad que se basta a sí misma en la medida en que hay allí una fuerza lírica puesta a trabajar.En el fondo, mi búsqueda concierne a todas las relaciones posibles entre imágenes y sonidos. Las imágenes entre sí, los grupos de imágenes, pueden ser afectadas por la mayor proximidad, o por la distancia más extrema, o incluso viajar de film en film, siguiendo un movimiento cíclico. Cualquier plano de un film puede cruzarse con un plano de otro film. Si hablamos de jerarquías, ninguna preexiste a la que se establece durante el proceso de fabricación de un film, y en el acto de su desarrollo ante el espectador. Todas las asonancias, todos los ritmos son posibles; todas las armonías, todos los conflictos. Para mí, los conflictos son muy importantes, porque son la prueba de que la experiencia real jamás es definitiva. Sigo siendo un cineasta materialista: el mundo existe fuera de nosotros, y nuestro sueño choca con él. El trabajo del cine es esta relación entre ambos: work in progress. Siempre.<br /><br />Notas<br />* En junio de 1994, el Festival Internacional del Cine Documental "Vue sur les Docs", en Marsella, organizó una retrospectiva de mis films. Hicimos un verdadero trabajo de presentación y de información. Para la ceremonia de clausura, participé, en un ambiente cálido, de un debate con el público que fue conducido por Marie-Christine Perrière y Bernard Favier, a los que agradezco aquí. A continuación tuve deseos de reelaborar estas palabras para hacer con ellas un texto que llamaré «Meandros», dado que me resulta familiar avanzar siguiendo una trayectoria angulosa, sinuosa, para pasar de una cosa a otra. Este movimiento determina a menudo la forma de mis films: ruedo en los rincones y tomo las curvas a gran velocidad.<br /><br />1. El libro Paris mortel fue publicado en 1963. [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#Anchor-A">volver</a>]2. Samma no aji, "El gusto del samma", 1962, último film de Ozu, que Van der Keuken cita con su título francés: Le Goût du saké, "El gusto del sake". En realidad, el samma es un pez estacional que se come a fines del verano. [T.] [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#Anchor-A">volver</a>]3. Lucebert (1924-1994) es uno de los más grandes poetas de la literatura holandesa del siglo XX. En 1948 se unió al Grupo Experimental de Holanda, luego al movimiento internacional Cobra. El lenguaje de Lucebert es visionario, aun cuando reposa enteramente sobre el aspecto material de las palabras. Crea la imagen del vidente que contempla un mundo al borde del abismo y continúa riendo. A partir de 1960, Lucebert se da a conocer como pintor, con una enorme producción pictórica. Hice sobre él tres films: «Lucebert poète-peintre» (1962), «Un film pour Lucebert» (1966/67), y «Si tu sais où je suis, cherche-moi», enteramente rodado en su taller, que permaneció intacto, tras su muerte en pleno trabajo. Este último film, rodado en mayo de 1994, lo uní con los dos precedentes para hacer un tríptico, Lucebert, temps et adieux, que cubre así un período de treinta y dos años, y que espero presentar en París en marzo de 1995. [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#Anchor-17389">volver</a>]<a name="notas"></a>4. Documental de Mekas (1972, 82m). Se trata de un diario fílmico que comienza con tomas que el director rodó en Nueva York a comienzos de los años '50, seguidas de otras del viaje de retorno a su pueblo de origen en Lituania en 1971, y que muestran sus reacciones ante los cambios sufridos por su tierra natal. Finalmente hay una secuencia en el campo en que Mekas fuera internado durante la guerra, y un viaje a Austria con el que culmina el film. [T.] [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050207182819/http://otrocampo.com/9/meandros_vanderkeuken.html#Anchor-50014">volver</a>]<br />© otrocampo.com 1999-2004<br /><a href="mailto:info@otrocampo.com">info@otrocampo.com</a>marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-44360424025557722082007-05-04T07:52:00.000-07:002007-05-04T07:54:23.337-07:00Privacy and Documentary FilmmakingPrivacy and Documentary Filmmaking<br />Journal article by Frederick Wiseman; Social Research, Vol. 68, 2001<br /><br />Privacy and Documentary Filmmaking<br />BY FREDERICK WISEMAN<br />I make documentary films based on unstaged events using the photographs and voices of people who are not actors and who are not asked to do anything other than give their permission to be included in the film. In this paper I will discuss some of the prac- tical problems involved in obtaining their consent and the rela- tionship of the procedures I follow to privacy issues.<br />First a brief introduction to the technique. My films are shot with a handheld 16 mm camera and a handheld tape recorder and microphone. There is no narration and the events are not staged. Most of the sequences are shot with natural light. Very occasionally it is necessary to augment natural light with a stronger lightbulb and perhaps five times in 35 years with a very powerful light called a sun gun.<br />Many but not all of my films are about public institutions. They are public in the sense that they are supported by tax money col- lected by public authorities—city, state, or federal—and exist to provide services such as education, health care, welfare, and police to the community. Some of the films are concerned with private institutions and the privacy issues take a somewhat differ- ent form. I will discuss some of the differences later.<br />I try to obtain permission from the people in the films to use their photographs and voices. Sometimes I receive permission before the sequence is shot, sometimes immediately afterward. If the person photographed objects to his or her picture or voice being used, I do not use it—even if the sequence is shot. Their objection has to be expressed either before, during, or immedi-<br />-41-<br />ately after the event in which they participate has been pho- tographed and recorded. I do not obtain written releases but ask for and receive tape-recorded consents. Some people are fright- ened of signing written releases phrased in formal legal language either because they are fearful they won't understand the lan- guage used and may be giving away more than they realized or because of the formal nature of the document.<br />The method is as follows. I ask the person whose picture and voice I want to record or have already recorded for permission to use their image and voice. I tell them that the tape recorder is recording and that I am going to explain to them the nature of the film I am making, the technique that I use, and where the film will be shown—for example, public television, schools, libraries, colleges, and some theatrical distribution in the United States (with the possibility but not the certainty of a similar distribution in other countries). I explain that often over 100 hours of film will be shot and that only about 3 percent of the material is used in the final film. I tell them that the film will not be finished for at least one year and that other than festival showing, the first pub- lic showing will be on public television in America.<br />I then ask them if they have any questions and, if they do, respond to their inquiries. I ask if they have understood my explanation and if so if they have any objection' to their picture and voice being used in the film. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people asked give their permission. When they do give their consent I ask them to give me their names and addresses, which are recorded on the tape. This gives me a contemporane- ous record of the consent of the participants.<br />*<br />I think that people agree to be in a documentary film for a vari- ety of reasons. Some want others to know of their experience. They hope that their behavior can provide a model of either what<br />-42<br />to do or what not to do. For example, women in a shelter for bat- tered women agreed to be filmed because they wanted other women to know that it was possible to get out of abusive relation- ships and also because they wanted to inform people unfamiliar with domestic violence about the nature of the relationship they were trying to escape. Another possible explanation is related to wanting to share the feeling of competence and a job well done with others. Some people filmed, like the doctors and nurses in a medical intensive care unit, want to participate in informing the public about the life-and-death issues they have to deal with on a daily basis and want to share their method and offer it for cri- tique. The doctors and nurses assumed that most people are unfa- miliar with the questions they have to resolve regularly and that presenting these issues in their complexity would contribute to public knowledge and help others to think more clearly about these questions.<br />Some people agree to participate out of vanity. Some from indif- ference. In hierarchical organizations like the army and police, par- ticipation may result from an actual order or a need to follow the dictates of a fantasy about the imagined need to comply with the orders of a superior. Some may consent for a combination of all these reasons. As I noted, my experience is that for whatever reason, nearly all the people asked agree to be in the film.<br />*<br />A sequence from a film I made about the Kansas City, Missouri police in 1968 illustrates the way privacy issues are raised. To make an arrest for prostitution in Kansas City in 1968, the police had to have a price offered and an act. The law made it almost necessary for a vice squad police officer to strip at least to his underpants and get in bed with the woman before, presumably, at the last minute, the arrest was made.<br />-43-<br />Such an event took place in a Kansas City hotel. When the vice- squad policeman led the woman from the hotel room she pulled away from him, knocking him over and fleeing. The policeman called other members of the vice squad, who were waiting in a police car in the neighborhood of the hotel. We were also in the vice-squad car. When the officers arrived at the hotel a bellhop informed them that the woman had fled to the basement. The police went to the basement looking for her. The basement was dark and I had available a powerful light called a sun gun; it would have been impossible to shoot any film otherwise. The police found the woman hiding under a pile of old furniture, dragged her out from beneath it, and then one of the policeman began to strangle her. Before she passed out the policeman stopped strangling her. The woman, gasping for breath, said to the policeman that he was trying to strangle her. His reply was that she was just imagining it. But it was clear from the film that the policeman was strangling the woman.<br />The sequence I described was shot on 16 mm film and a still photograph from the film accompanies this article. Another part of the same sequence included a visit by one of the vice-squad offi- cers to the hotel room of the women, where he examines her per- sonal belongings and takes possession of her address book. He looks through it and asks her if she is friendly with other women whom he says are prostitutes and whose names he has found in the address book. She is eventually taken to the police station and booked for prostitution. I asked the woman for permission when she was in the police car on the way to the station and followed the procedure I outlined earlier. The film, Law and Order, was shown on public television with an edited version of the sequence I have described.<br />Up to this point I have emphasized the consent I received from the woman who was arrested. However, there were others whose permission was needed. I had to have the permission of the chief of police in Kansas City to ride with the police and record their day-to-day activities. I also needed the consent of the individual<br />-44<br />From Law and Order<br />policemen and policewomen. In the six weeks I was with the Kansas City Police, no police officer ever objected to being pho- tographed and recorded. I did not take the same care to obtain their individual consents that I did with people they came in con- tact with and/or arrested. I knew that a letter had come from the chief to the captain in charge of the precinct where I worked ask- ing that all the officers in the precinct cooperate with the filming. Since the police are a hierarchical organization, the officers com- plied with the orders of the chief. It was impossible for me to know if they individually had strong objections. I could only assume that if they did not want to be filmed they would have found a way to avoid my riding in the police car with them. I also assumed that they were sizing me up in the same way I felt I was trying to form an opinion about them. Despite the hierarchical nature of the department, if the police felt that I could not be trusted, they would have found a way not to cooperate either by presenting subtle indirect obstacles or by going to the chief and saying that the film crew was interfering with their work.<br />-45-<br />*<br />Police activity in a democratic society is supposed to be trans- parent and any comment about police work is thought to be pro- tected by the First Amendment. It would be impossible, however, to obtain police cooperation for the kind of films that I make if they did not want to participate, despite the existence of the First Amendment. The courts have generally ruled that when a conflict emerges between the First Amendment and the right to privacy, the protection of the First Amendment is the dominant value. To obtain the permission of the individual officers it was necessary to talk with them about matters of common interest with the hope that they would come to the conclusion that I could be trusted to accurately report on their work. I also had to be sure that the con- versation concerned genuine areas of shared interest, otherwise I risked appearing to be condescending.<br />A strong argument can be made that in the police-prostitute sequence described, it is not necessary to have the formal consent of any of the participants. Certainly not of the police and perhaps not even the woman. Suppose, for example, that the woman did not give her consent or that she gave it but did not fully under- stand the implications of showing this aspect of her life on public television. Does that mean the sequence cannot be broadcast and also shown in other forms, such as videocassette, laser, or DVD? My view is that if the institution is public, in the sense indicated earlier, neither a tape-recorded consent nor a written release is necessary and that this police sequence and any others involving work performed or activities that take place in public institutions are fully protected by the First Amendment. In these situations the individual right to privacy is less important than the values expressed in the phrase, "the public's right to know."<br />Despite this absolutist First Amendment view with respect to presenting on film the daily activities at public institutions, I try— even though I am not legally obligated to do so—to obtain the tape-recorded consents because I believe it is the ethical and fair<br />-46-<br />thing to do. The fact that people readily give their consent does* not necessarily mean that they understand the implications regarding the use of the material. One could argue that the only valid consent would be consent obtained only after participants had seen the final film and could see and hear how the sequences in which they had participated were edited and how they were placed in relation to other sequences.<br />This would be completely impractical for several reasons. It would give the participants individually and collectively a right to veto part or all of the final film. It would be impossible to find fund- ing for the film if the funding source knew that at the end of the editing the participants could prevent the film from being shown. Also, with some subjects it would be impossible 12 to 18 months after the filming to find all the people. I believe it is necessary to act on the same assumption that operates in other areas of the law and in medicine and indeed in most aspects of our lives. The assump- tion is that people who fall within the range of the various legal def- initions of competency have the ability to understand, evaluate, and act on a request to participate in a documentary film and that they understand the implications of their choice and decision.<br />The situation is different with respect to activities in private institutions. In these institutions I try to carefully obtain tape- recorded consents from the participants. While retaining some force, the "transparency" argument applicable to public places cannot so easily be applied to private institutions unless one can convincingly assert their "de facto" public role.<br />In a democratic society the need for the citizens of a commu- nity to have access to information about the way their public insti- tutions function takes precedence over individual privacy rights. The issue goes well beyond the need to protect the right of docu- mentary filmmakers to work. If it were otherwise, society runs the risk of the state closing down the sources of information necessary for citizens to make decisions about the way they want to live.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-88670216374123678862007-05-04T07:50:00.000-07:002007-05-04T07:52:45.953-07:00Sobre H. Farocki, por A. PaulsImágenes rigurosamente vigiladas<br /><br />Extraña lección, la del alemán Harun Farocki: créase o no, pensar en imágenes puede ser adictivo como una droga.<br />Por Alan Pauls<br /><br />De madre alemana y padre indio, Harun Farocki nació en la isla de Java en 1944. Estudió cine en Berlín. Entre 1973 y 1984 fue editor de Filmkritik, la revista de cine más influyente de Alemania. Dio a conocer la desconcertante potencia de su concepto del cine en 1969, con El fuego inextinguible, un documental que en plena guerra de Vietnam examinaba con parsimonia y desapego el proceso de producción del napalm. Desde entonces no ha parado de filmar –lleva ya unas 60 películas, de las cuales 12 son largometrajes–, de profundizar la pertinencia excéntrica delos temas que aborda y de perfeccionar una forma cinematográfica única, regida casi exclusivamente por el principio del montaje, donde la curiosidad periodística se entrelaza con la reflexión y engendra, en la huella de Godard, de Jean-Marie Straub o de Alexander Kluge, un “cine de ensayo”. Por su precisión, su escrupulosidad, su pasión por el detalle, los de Farocki son verdaderos documentales clínicos; exploran sus objetos con paciencia, con tenacidad, con una exhaustividad compulsiva que hace de su nitidez conceptual una forma nueva de la hipnosis o la alucinación. Los nueve films que integran la retrospectiva del Bafici dan una idea de la diversidad de los objetos que elige. Farocki se ha ocupado de las técnicas y prácticas de entrenamiento profesional con que el mundo del trabajo “domestica” a los desocupados (Solicitud de empleo, 1997); ha descifrado el modo en que la televisión registró el proceso que derrocó a los Ceaucescu en la Rumania de 1989 (Videogramas de una revolución, 1992); volvió sobre cierta legendaria ópera prima de Lumière para pensar la convergencia entre el cine y la fábrica como institución capitalista (Obreros saliendo de la fábrica, 1995); analizó el parentesco extraño, a la vez aberrante y despreocupado, entre la naturaleza muerta tal como la practicaba la pintura flamenca del siglo XVII y la que practica hoy la fotografía publicitaria (Naturaleza muerta, 1997); diseccionó el mundo bizarro de los diseñadores de shoppings, con sus ideas, sus estrategias, sus cálculos y sus delirios prospectivos (Los creadores de los mundos de compras); examinó las cámaras de vigilancia de las prisiones como emblema de la sociedad de control (Imágenes de prisión); y desplegó, en poco más de una extraordinaria hora de cine, la solidaridad que une la tecnología de la imagen con la tecnología de guerra a lo largo del siglo XX (Imágenes del mundo, epitafios de guerra, 1988).Pero esa diversidad de temas sólo subraya la obstinación con que la obra de Farocki vuelve una y otra vez al punto que la desvela: la imagen. De película en película, Farocki sigue las mutaciones que la industria de la imagen (el cine, por supuesto, pero también la TV, la publicidad, el “diagnóstico por imágenes”, las cámaras de vigilancia, la imagen de síntesis, las simulaciones digitales, etc.) introduce en todas las esferas de la vida, desde el trabajo y la política hasta el cuerpo y las relaciones intersubjetivas. Como el Godard de las Historias del cine, Farocki sabe que no hay un “afuera” de la imagen, y usa las imágenes para leer imágenes, para deconstruir el modo en que se fabrican, dialogan entre sí, circulan, afectan. El verdadero blanco de su cine es el poder de lo visible, es decir: el vértigo de la luz. Y de todos los instrumentos con que podría desmenuzarlo, Farocki elige el más simple, que es también el más eficaz y el más alucinógeno: la lentitud. De esa colisión –la velocidad del objeto y la mirada en cámara lenta-. procede el efecto droga de los films de Harun Farocki.La retrospectiva, que contará con la presencia del realizador, se completará con la edición local y la presentación de Crítica de la mirada, una antología de textos de Farocki.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8257899325651147906.post-10933863062317320182007-05-04T07:48:00.000-07:002007-05-04T07:50:31.759-07:00SIN FRONTERAS<br /><br /><a href="mailto:myanez@miradas.net">Por Manuel Yáñez</a><br />Publicado en <a href="http://www.miradas.net">www.miradas.net</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Sobre el derrumbe de la frontera entre documental y ficción</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br />En una reciente entrevista con la revista británica Empire, con motivo del estreno en Inglaterra de la película American Splendor (Idem, 2003), Joyce, esposa de Harvey Pekar (interpretados en la película por los actores Paul Giamatti y HopeDavis), comenta amablemente «Oye cariño, ahora nuestras vidas han sido justificadas. Han hecho una película sobre nosotros. Ahora somos reales» (1).<br />Ficción y realidad, documental y ficción, ficción y no ficción, registro y representación, verdad y mentira. No parece haber consenso en los términos adecuados para referirse a la aparente separación que delimitaría la ficción y el documento cinematográfico. A lo largo de la historia, se ha instaurado la convicción popular de que existe un cine de ficción construido a partir de la imaginación de un creador y otro cine fundamentado en la captura de una realidad determinada. Todavía después de un cine de la modernidad que mediante movimientos nacionales y olas cinematográficas proponía imbricar los conceptos de documental y ficción, el modelo que propugna la diferenciación del cine en dos mitades ha seguido imperando.<br />El cine, el arte más cercano a la realidad (su naturaleza fotográfica lo hermana esencialmente a lo visible y lo real) vive tiempos convulsos. Inevitablemente ligado a los cambios sociales, el cine comparte las dudas y confusiones de un mundo poblado por imágenes cuyas formas de poder (económico y político) han transformado su naturaleza hasta convertirla en parte esencial de la realidad en que vivimos. Hace tiempo que el cine perdió su estatus de principal posibilidad de expresión audiovisual. Ahora se encuentra vagamente situada entre múltiples formas de ocio, cultura e información que pelean por consolidarse como primeras en una jerarquía que les asegure el poder popular, político y económico.<br />Estos dos puntos fundamentales, su ontología y su estatus social, son los ejes fundamentales del debate actual acerca de la existencia o no de fronteras que separen la ficción y la realidad, el documental y la ficción. A continuación rastreamos el cine de los últimos años en busca de obras y autores que nos desvelen las claves o generen nuevas incógnitas sobre nuestro dilema.<br />La doble naturaleza del cine<br />Una de las figuras que en los últimos años más a aportado a la reflexión acerca de la naturaleza de la imagen cinematográfica es Abbas Kiarostami. La obra del cineasta iraní supone una de las más brillantes y misteriosas reflexiones acerca de los mecanismos mediante los cuales el cine mira y se relaciona con la realidad, en un acto tanto de respeto y fidelidad como de manipulación y transfiguración de esa verdad. Las películas que mejor ilustran la cuestión son las tres piezas que conforman la conocida como trilogía de Koker: ¿Donde está la casa de mi amigo? (Khned-ye dust kojast?, 1987), Y la vida continúa (Zendegi va digar hich, 1992) y A través de los olivos (Zir-e derakhtan-e zeytun, 1994). Tres películas que forman un juego de espejos deformantes a través del cual se van revelando, paso a paso, los mecanismos de reconstrucción que regían sobre la creación de la pieza anterior. Porque en cada nueva película lo que en la anterior era tratado como una verdad transparente se nos revela como una representación, una reconstrucción, una simulación. Así, cada película transforma el recuerdo y la naturaleza de su predecesora, cada paso supone un nuevo avance en nuestra pérdida de inocencia respecto a la condición realista de las películas que forman dicha trilogía. En cada paso hacia el abismo, cada personaje, cada situación planteada con la apariencia y la estética propias de un proceso de captura de una cierta esencia de la realidad se nos desvela como una completa ficción, como el resultado de un detallado proceso de construcción. Sin embargo, a pesar del efecto corruptor que conlleva cada paso adelante, se nos va desvelando simultáneamente la certeza de que a pesar del deseo de control absoluto que pueda tener un creador sobre su obra, es inevitable la filtración de los ecos procedentes de una realidad superior, esa realidad que el cine no puede esquivar, ya que es la materia prima a partir de la cuál se nutren sus imágenes. El azar se convierte en la manifestación más palpable de esa verdad detrás del mecanismo. Kiarostami construye sofisticados juegos narrativos que apoyados sobre la repetición y el rigor formal parecen encerrar a sus personajes en estructuras herméticamente cerradas, pero de la misma manera (como el reverso negativo de lo anterior) sus películas se abren a lo imprevisible, dejándose guiar por las misteriosas reglas del azar. Las largas tomas, el movimiento continuo y una cierta tendencia a alejarse de sus personajes para que disfruten de la libertad de los espacios abiertos persiguen la manifestación de la presencia de lo misterioso e inalcanzable como esencias de la realidad.<br />Otro artista fundamental para la definición de las coordenadas en las que se plantea el presente debate es Víctor Erice. Su obra El sol del membrillo reflexiona con brillantez y clarividencia acerca de la supuesta escisión del cine en dos partes. Así, como afirma Santos Zunzunegui, El sol del membrillo es «una prodigiosa síntesis entre Lumiere –el documental, la observación, la fascinación primigenia por el puro fluir del tiempo– y Melies –el escamoteo, la magia, el juego de manos–» (2). El último largometraje de Erice es una demostración de cómo la voluntad y el genio de un creador pueden derribar el muro que separa documento y ficción. Erice fija su mirada en el meticuloso intento de Antonio López por fijar el tiempo en su obra, la reproducción realista de un membrillero. Del contraste entre el trabajo del pintor (delante de la cámara) y el cineasta (detrás), veremos surgir con claridad los trazos que perfilan las reflexiones del último. Mientras López quiere paralizar una realidad y un tiempo en su obra, Erice parte del fluir del tiempo cinematográfico para desmenuzar la realidad. Sin embargo, su ambición como pensador cinematográfico encuentra en la mera captura de lo visible un límite que debe superar, por ello acude con naturalidad a la ficción, a lo onírico: al sueño. Es en el terreno de la ensoñación, recreado por Erice en la parte final de la película, dónde el pintor afirma «desde el lugar donde observo la escena, no puedo saber si los demás pueden ver lo que yo veo», y Zunzunegui nos advierte de «la conciencia de esa dificultad para aunar la certeza de la propia visión con la de los espectadores» (3). Podemos ver una reivindicación de la unicidad de la mirada del artista y de la libertad de la mirada del espectador.<br />Lo anterior contrasta violentamente con uno de los fenómenos propios de nuestro mundo actual, en el que ciertas imágenes (arropadas por poderosos intereses, desde industriales hasta políticos) han adquirido el valor de verdades universales, en realidades aparentemente incuestionables. Esto nos lleva a nuestra siguiente parada, la era de la sospecha (4).<br />La era de la sospecha. La estética del documental en la ficción<br />En su libro Fábulas de lo visible el crítico Àngel Quintana plantea cómo «en la "era de la sospecha", la realidad ha pasado a transformarse en algo absolutamente impenetrable y la visión del horror ha pasado a estar condicionada por una serie de decisiones políticas y económicas» (5). Según sus palabras parece constatarse que debatir acerca de los mecanismos para la representación o captura de una realidad determinada es, hoy en día, barajar discusiones que abarcan ámbitos tan diversos como la estética, la filosofía o la política. Quintana expone dicha reflexión en el marco de su disertación acerca de cómo la actitud de los medios de comunicación ha propiciado el surgimiento de una actitud de desconfianza y escepticismo del espectador actual respecto a una realidad que se sospecha suplantada. El poder de estos medios y el bombardeo indiscriminado de imágenes al que se ha sometido al espectador actual, ha terminado otorgando a ciertas imágenes el estatus de representación fidedigna de la realidad. De esta manera, cuando Steven Spielberg se plantea reconstruir el desembarco aliado en Normandía en el inicio de Salvar al soldado Ryan (Saving Private Ryan, 1998) «la cámara recoge la crueldad del combate igual que lo haría una hipotética cámara de televisión, situada junto a la tropa americana» (6). El mecanismo escogido para dar más verosimilitud a la reconstrucción es revelador. El cine a perdido la autonomía para crear su propio canon formal, como lo fue el clasicismo, y acude a la televisión en busca de una estética que el espectador ya asocia a un proceso de captura de la realidad. Encontramos también en otra muestra de cine popular norteamericano el poder de la tecnología para transformar y falsear un documento histórico perteneciente a la nueva fuente de transmisión de la realidad, la televisión. En Forrest Gump (Forrest Gump, 1994) Robert Zemekis nos demuestra que es posible manipular un documento sin que ello afecte a su apariencia de credibilidad. Toda la configuración escénica de los encuentros de Gump con Kennedy, John Lennon o Nixon nos remiten a unas formas de imagen y puesta en escena asociadas a lo real. Tanto es así, que es muy posible que si las imágenes originales, los personajes y el actor no fuesen tan populares el resultado del trucaje digital nos habría parecido verosímil. Más allá de las pretensiones lúdicas y el carácter simpático de este caso particular, es innegable que puede llevar a abrir una grieta en la confianza del espectador hacia las imágenes.<br />Podríamos considerar el nacimiento de una nueva conciencia, la pérdida de inocencia del receptor de imágenes, una conciencia que trastoca tanto los valores de la imagen cinematográfica como los principios de la percepción del espectador. Podemos percibir un sutil pero fundamental cambio en los ejes del diálogo entre ficción y documental. Nos encontrarnos ante un nuevo marco de discusión: mientras antes la discusión pivotaba alrededor del concepto de verdad, ahora el conflicto para el espectador es valorar la verosimilitud de las imágenes. Ya no se trata de diferenciar entre verdad y mentira (la realidad es impenetrable), ahora se trata de distinguir entre verosímil e inverosímil.<br />Ante esta situación, ¿puede un creador que pretende reflejar una realidad determinada pasar por alto las coordenadas que configuran el nuevo e informe código para la representación, reflejo o reconstrucción de la realidad?, ¿puede este creador ignorar que la imagen ha pasado a formar parte integrante del mundo real? Una nueva imagen cinematográfica contaminada tanto por la influencia de la televisión como por su propio pasado de experimentación con la idea del falso documental, no puede ignorar su nueva condición: debe asumirla y darse cuenta de que desde la autoconciencia de su propia fragilidad puede remover y desajustar los resortes y prejuicios de su nuevo espectador.<br />Michael Winterbottom, director británico que inició su carrera en el mundo de la televisión, es uno de los creadores que mejor ha trabajado sobre la conciencia del nuevo estado de la imagen cinematográfica. Tras practicar una estética documental en películas anteriores como Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) y 24 hour party people (2001), construye con In this world (2002), ganadora del Oso de Oro de Berlín a la mejor película, uno de los más hábiles ejercicios de filme fronterizo entre documental y ficción. Winterbottom se muestra consciente de todos los «intercambios y promiscuidades» (7) posibles entre ambas formas de expresión y de la riqueza que puede suponer la permisividad a la hora de violar los códigos que definen ambos estados de la relación imagen-realidad. Para ello, utiliza un mecanismo ultra-sofisticado: para derribar el muro de prejuicios que nubla la mirada del espectador, el director decide emplear un formato documental cuyo resultado debería ofrecer un reflejo limpio de la realidad, ese mismo reflejo del que ya no es posible fiarse. Entonces, se nos irán poniendo, una tras otra, trabas a la verosimilitud de la construcción narrativa que se nos presenta. Vamos descubriendo incompatibilidades entre la pretensión documental del filme y la posición de privilegio del realizador, fluimos de la interpretación del texto como una captura de lo real a la certeza de estar ante una reproducción de la misma, una reconstrucción de la realidad. Nos encontramos ante la duda sobre aquello que se ha convertido, por experiencia, en algo sospechoso. Dudamos de que lo que estamos viendo sea un auténtico documental, cuando los artilugios que conforman el auténtico documental han sido prácticamente desvirtuados. Esta especie de doble negación es, en la práctica, una herramienta de liberación total. Somos libres para fiarnos si queremos, desde la conciencia del engaño, y dejarnos llevar por el relato. Somos libres para dudar y disfrutar de la intensidad que puede producir una reconstrucción que reconocemos como tal.<br />Otra muestra reciente de utilización del formato documental para la reconstrucción ficcionada de un suceso real es Bloody Sunday (2001) de Paul Greengrass, ganador del Oso de Oro del festival de Berlín el año anterior a In this world. La película se plantea como la reconstrucción del trágico domingo sangriento irlandés. Se muestra fiel a los parámetros que definen la realización documental y las brechas que abre en la estética televisiva tradicional son más leves que en el caso de Winterbottom. Greengrass utiliza varias unidades hipotética y estratégicamente situadas en los lugares clave de la manifestación que terminó en masacre el 30 de Enero de 1972 en Derry. Quizás la ruptura más importante con el estándar televisivo la hayamos en la inmersión de la cámara del realizador en la intimidad de los personajes que elige como protagonistas de la función, elemento que intensifica el carácter ficcional del filme.<br />En este terreno encontramos también casos en los que el fallido intento de apropiación de una estética documental por parte de una ficción arruina el resultado de una película. El ejemplo es Noviembre (2003) de Achero Mañas. Los números teatrales que realizan los jóvenes protagonistas de la cinta por las calles de Madrid parecen supuestamente filmados en clave documental, pero el montaje de ciertas escenas, en particular la del espectáculo en el vagón del metro (en el que algunas tomas descubren que el número debió repetirse varias veces para ser filmado de una forma realista), evidencian la traición absoluta al pacto con el espíritu realista y combativo que invoca el filme.<br />Otros casos sobre los que no nos extenderemos, pero que constatan la viveza del conflicto son películas como Aro Tolbukin, en la mente del asesino (2002) de Isaac Pierre-Racine, Agustín Villaronga y Lidia Zimmermann o los falsos y divertidísimos documentales de Christopher Guest (Very Important Perros / Best in Show, 2000).<br />La filtración de la ficción. El documento ficcionado.<br />«Entre el cine y el mundo de las ideas no hay incompatibilidades sino múltiples convergencias» (8).<br />Esa es la creencia de algunos creadores que interpretan el cine como una forma de pensamiento. El ensayo fílmico es una forma alternativa de concebir el cine, cine como instrumento para la reflexión, liberado de los patrones del estándar industrial y de las estructuras narrativas cerradas. Un cine que a veces apunta a la realidad en busca de un lenguaje que dé forma a la reflexión.<br />Según Santos Zunzunegui, y en palabras de Goddard, existe una estirpe de «cineastas que superponen pensar, rodar, montar» (9). En ese camino que conduce del pensamiento a la imagen a través del rodaje y el montaje se haya instalada de forma irremediable la realidad. Por ello algunos de estos cineastas se mueven, tras un primer acercamiento a su trabajo, en los parámetros formales del documental. Sin embargo, el acercamiento que acometen a la realidad es diametralmente opuesto al de los realizadores del documental periodístico. Las imágenes del mundo dejan de ser el objeto central para convertirse en un medio, un vocabulario infinito (como defendía Pasolini), un lenguaje mediante el que construir un pensamiento ya fílmico.<br />Así puede entenderse el cine de Chris Marker. Magnífico rastreador de la realidad, Marker enmarca sus imágenes en flujos de forma y significación poética. En ocasiones entregado a la causa política (dando lugar a sus obras formalmente más académicas), ha alcanzado sus mayores logros habitando espacios híbridos en los que lo real (imágenes documentales) se funde con la ficción, que surge de los hilos o sendas narrativas alentadas, casi siempre, por una voz en off. La realidad se convierte en la materia prima, el significante, que luego se constituye en obra completa gracias a las partículas ficcionales que la articulan, formando el significado. Marker investiga conceptos como la memoria, la construcción de la personalidad de un individuo o de un pueblo, el propio cine o la muerte, siempre partiendo de lo real y lo concreto para su búsqueda de una reflexión más abstracta.<br />Otros cineastas han trabajado el ensayo fílmico partiendo de la realidad. Encontramos los diarios íntimos de Agnes Varda (Los espigadores y la espigadora / Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) de Alexander Sokurov (Spiritual Voices / Dukhovnye golosa, 1995) o de Nanni Moretti (Caro Diario, 1994), el canto fúnebre Las largas vacaciones (De Grote vakantie, 2000) de Johann Van Der Keuken, en el que filma sus últimos meses de vida, o la investigación acerca de la memoria y el paso del tiempo en los documentales de ficción de Jose Luis Guerín. También las prodigiosas reflexiones acerca de la memoria y la naturaleza del cine en la obra de uno de los más importantes y menos valorados cineastas españoles, Basilio Martín Patino.<br />Para acabar, me gustaría reivindicar a un director prácticamente desconocidos en nuestro país que ha colaborado lúcidamente al derribo de las barreras entre documental y ficción. Se trata de Artur Aristakisyan, realizador ruso que con su primera película, Manos (Ladoni, 1994), da un paso adelante en la perversión del documento en manos de la ficción. En este brillante ejercicio formal y narrativo, filmado en blanco y negro y en 16 mm, Aristakisyan nos enfrenta a imágenes documentales de mendigos que viven en la más radical de las pobrezas. Imágenes que aturden por el dolor que manifiestan, el dolor de la marginación, de la vejez, de la soledad. Vemos cuerpos sucios y deformados, y todo parece dibujar un paisaje mortecino y podrido. En realidad, toda la película se convierte en un llanto agonizante, pero también en una súplica esperanzada en la que un padre, mediante una omnipresente voz en off, le habla a su hijo todavía no nacido. Las palabras actúan como moduladoras del impacto dramático de las imágenes, intensificándolo cuando el padre confiesa a su hijo que la mendicidad, la marginación, la pobreza y la locura son las únicas vías para no ser absorbido por la maquinaria del sistema, para escapar de una sociedad que anula al individuo y lo destruye cruelmente. Pero también encontramos fragmentos en los que la voz, la herramienta de la ficción, amortigua el impacto de las imágenes, consiguiendo construir figuras de enorme belleza, conducidas por el carácter poético, a veces romántico, del relato narrado. En una reciente entrevista, Aristakisyan comentaba sobre su película que «la idea era hacer oír un monólogo y ver una realidad cómo si estuviéramos en un teatro. Es un teatro que permite ver la pantalla donde aparecen imágenes reales, con una luz temblorosa, anticuada. Para que la percepción del espectador sea revelada como una percepción teatral, y percibiendo la sensación de estar dentro del teatro puede conseguir salir de ese teatro. Y no lo contrario, que es lo que suele suceder» (10).<br />Y final...<br />En este texto se han descrito algunos de los caminos abiertos y aún por explorar por el cine actual. El cine no ha muerto. Su estatus de arte vivo se constata en el carácter mutante de sus formas y expresiones. Hoy podemos hablar de un arte más libre, menos encorsetado en clasificaciones que limitan tanto sus opciones como la posibilidad de pensarlo y analizarlo.<br />Este texto mutante se construye y se autodestruye simultáneamente, ya que los propios inter-títulos que definen y diferencian sus sub-apartados pueden, quizás, probarse como inútiles. Eso sería una gran noticia para el cine.<br />(1) "A new kind of hero", Empire, nº175, Enero 2004. (2) Zunzunegui, Santos, Lo viejo y lo nuevo, Otrocampo www.otrocampo.com(3) Ibidem.(4) Término acuñado por Ignacio Ramonet, director de Le monde diplomatique, en La teoría de la comunicación, Madrid: Debate, 1998.(5) Quintana, Àngel, Fábulas de lo visible. Barcelona: Acantilado, Quaderns Crema. 2003, p.258, Capítulo "La Realidad Suplantada".(6) Quintana, Àngel, Fábulas de lo visible. Barcelona: Acantilado, Quaderns Crema. 2003, p.279, Capítulo "La Realidad Suplantada".(7) Título de la conferencia que ofreció Carlos F. Heredero en el curso "Cine y Pensamiento: el ensayo fílmico" de los cursos de verano de "El Escorial 2003".(8) Doménech Font en el cuaderno de presentación del curso "Cine y Pensamiento: el ensayo fílmico".(9) De la conferencia "Abre los ojos" de Santos Zunzunegui en el curso "Cine y Pensamiento: el ensayo fílmico" de los cursos de verano de "El Escorial 2003".(10) Entrevista a Artur Aristakisyan realizada por el arriba firmante en el festival POSIBLE 2003, Barcelona.marianahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17497681802899227003noreply@blogger.com0