(Crazy) Subject vs. (Grizzly) Object

In Warner Herzog's film Grizzly Man,  Timothy Treadwell's role frames an interesting dialogue between the role of subject and object as we have discussed in both section and heard discussed in lecture. Treadwell almost ironically becomes the subject of the film immediately, though the first shots are of the beautiful Alaskan landscape. The bears he encounters (many of whom he strangely names strikingly human names such as Melissa), seem to become the vehicle with which he steers his own problems. His frequent confessions towards the camera, the framing of his awkward figure, and close-up talks with us -the viewers- about his problems with drinking, sex, etc. capture the subtle self-indulgence the film really reveals. One wants to sympathize with the almost pathetic efforts he makes to befriend anything - even the foxes when the bears grudgingly walk away from him - yet his violent and aggressive outbursts and modern society leave hints that hey, he might just be a nutter. 

Though viewers want (and begin watching the film believing that Treadwell himself wants) the film to focus on the plight of the bears themselves, we rapidly begin to objectify the bears and bring our own subjectivity to play in understanding Treadwell. The bears are in some ways sidelined by the dominant and clearly batty character of Treadwell. Is he mad? Is he harming the bears? (consider the notion of the camera as a weapon-- is he revealing too much?) Where has he come from? Why does he keep touching his hair? (another indication, in my mind, of his desire to make this into a "MTV Real World Alaska" confessional) The questions continue. 

What is at once Herzog's documentary and re-piecing together of Treadwell's footage becomes an odd confessional, displaying the quirky life of a man who really, it appears to me, just wanted to be the crocodile hunter. 

The sad irony in that, of course, is that they ended up in similar places. 

Narrative Transitivity-Intransitivity and Film

One of the things that I found most interesting from this week's readings was the concept of narrative transitivity in film. Peter Wollen refers to narrative transitivity as one of the seven cardinal virtues of hollywood cinema, and this is quite obviously true, but what is it about cinema that makes narrative transitivity so pervasive? Other art forms that typically involve narrative don't seem to have any particular hang ups about rejecting narrative. For example, poetry is a widely accepted form of writing. Typically modern poetry does not have any particular narrative structure. It requires analysis to derive meaning. Unlike a novel there is usually no particular narrative, and yet the general public accepts poetry as a valid form of writing. Even in novels the break down of narrative has been accepted (take Burroughs' Naked Lunch for example). It seems that, within the world of writing, everyday people can enjoy poetry, non narrative novels such as Naked Lunch, and a typical narrative story alike. Within the world of literature all of these forms are widely accepted as equally valid. Why then does film have so much trouble in bridging this gap? Why are films that exhibit narrative intransitivity so difficult for the general public to accept? (especially when narrative intransitivity is pervasive and generally accepted in other art forms such as literature) Perhaps it is the relative newness of film that causes this difficulty and with time and the efforts of directors such as Godard the difficulty may disappear, but perhaps it is more pervasive than this. Film is an entertainment industry. It is closely tied to both consumerism and entertainment. These ties will influence both the expectations of the public and of the studios producing the films. The cost and scale of film production is much greater than that of poetry or a novel. Films that subvert the typical narrative structure of hollywood film tend to become categorized as "art cinema." Which is highly negatively correlated within the public sphere, tied to snobbery, boredom, and the substitution of imagery for any "true meaning." Though it is unclear to me why cinema has trouble overcomng the seven cardinal values of hollywood cinema it does seem like, as Wollen points out, Godard is a step in the right direction. by directly opposing many of the typical expectations of film and challenging the audience Godard is opening up the realm of possibility for expression through film. It is only once these seven cardinal values are finally deemed unnecessary (or at least not so necessary as they are now) that film will be able to truly flourish as an art form.

Weekend Accident.

I feel that the most interesting scene in Weekend was the accident between the convertible and tractor. The dialogue between the two characters shifted from who had the right of way in the realm of traffic to who had the right of way within the realm of society. The middle class bourgeoisie woman believes that the accident was intentional and defends her status. She subjects the "peasant" to verbal abuse and claims that he is jealous of her status. The scene is most interesting when the woman turns to Corrine and Roland as witnesses. Corrine and Roland become the oppressors of the situation, and cause the woman to now take the role of the oppressed. Ironically the peasant and the woman are now united as a result of being oppressed. The part of the scene I fail to understand is the panning to the smiling and laughing peasants. This movie deals with many arguments in Wollen’s Godard and Counter-Cinema. The scene is choppy, flashing between images of the argument, Roland and Corrine, and shots of peasants and the group of actors as a whole.

Godard and the Foregrounding of Cinematic Construction

This is the second time I’ve had to watch “Weekend” in an MCM class. The first time, I was really blown away (and disturbed) by how different the film was from conventional cinema. This time, knowing what kind to expect, I was able to focus more on the formalistic characteristics of the film and accept it for what it is.

It’s amazing to me how “Weekend” manages to undermine all of what Wollen calls the “seven deadly sins of cinema”. Through his defiance of traditional cinematic practices, Gordard exposes the tools that cinema uses to construct meaning. This results in a profoundly un-pleasurable experience for the spectator since spectatorial pleasure is only possible through the disavowal of the cinematic apparatus. Godard disrupts identification with the characters in many ways. First of all, the main characters, Corrine and Roland are totally unlikeable –they are extremely shallow caricatures who are materialistic and casually murderous. Their despicable portrayal, lacking any semblance of depth, makes it very difficult for the audience to care about them. Furthermore, they constantly acknowledge themselves as fictional characters in a film. After killing Emily Bronte, Roland says that it was ok since she was an imaginary character. In another instance Roland says “What a terrible film, we only meet crazy people”. This foregrounding of the fiction constantly reminds the spectator that he/she is watching a fabricated reality. Perhaps most interestingly, Godard also separates the look of the camera from the look of the characters. In traditional cinema, the look of the characters is emphasized while the look of the camera and the look of the spectator are disavowed. Camera movements are intimately connected to characters and narrative flow, excluding extraneous information. However, in “Weekend”, the camera becomes foregrounded and takes on a life of its own. We are rarely given POV shots, eyelines often do not match, and tracking shots often entirely separate from the characters. In the traffic jam, the camera moves horizontally at a fairly constant velocity even as the central protagonists weave in and out of the frame. The movement of their car is not matched by the movement of the camera. Similarly, during the Mozart scene, the camera does a 360 turn totally independent of the characters and then self-consciously begins to turn in the opposite direction. This draws intention to the independence of the camera and is very disorienting. Also, immediately after a traveler rapes Corrine, there is a horizontal pan off to the side and we expect to see something new, but the pan reveals nothing. Instead, the camera moves back in the opposite direction. This seemingly pointless camera movement also foregrounds the look of the camera. It is also interesting that Roland, a central character, is casually killed off screen.

This is a counterblog, so it's good when it's bad.

Wollen’s article clearly denotes the methods by which Godard counteracts orthodox cinema. He chooses seven “deadly sins” of cinema and pits them against Godard’s seven “cardinal virtues.” It’s somewhat unclear why cinema is viewed in such a negative light here, but I think Wollen redeems himself when he says “Godard was right to break with Hollywood cinema…Nevertheless, I think there are various confusions in his strategy” (74). I’d like to interpret this statement to mean that Godard’s film is to be taken with a grain of salt. Besides the fact that I don’t think many people would like Weekend (since it’s literally the opposite of a [good] movie), I think it’s at least good for reflection by the film community. Filmmakers may be influenced by this (counter)film to make their own movies somehow better.
At the end of the article, Wollen somehow denies that cinema is good simply because it “cannot show the truth,” which is obviously not the point of orthodox cinema. Luckily, however, he admits that Godard did not achieve the revolutionary cinema he desired, as the counter-cinema he used was only a “starting-point,” since it cannot have an “absolute existence” as it depends on contrast with ordinary cinema.
In the end, it seems as though Wollen is saying that Godard has made a good start towards some revolutionary new form of cinema, perhaps attractive to the masses. It also seems as though he likes Godard’s films too much. They are interesting, but at the point where “unpleasure” succeeds, they literally become unpleasurable to watch. I guess it isn’t fair to call it a bad movie, when he’s trying to make an anti-movie. Maybe good anti-movies are bad regular movies, but then I don’t want to like anti-movies.

The Language Barrier and its Influence on the Experience of "Weekend"

In the context of a film such as "Weekend", in which its director envisioned a complete redefinition of the filmic ideal based upon the seven oppositions cited in Wollen, it is important to realize that nearly everything is done for a conscious and premeditated purpose. Within the bounds of the tried and true Hollywood film language that has long been standard and therefore "natural", any small tweaks to the formula are absorbed into the greater whole; they do not in any way define the film that contains them, which is itself comfortingly contained by a preordained and familiar lexicon of style and language. For Godard, on the other hand, the very idea of the creation of a "counter-cinema" necessitates that there be no such breathing room, no relaxation into the dangerous realm that is the mainstream. When a work of art is rooted not in any previous aesthetic, but in the definition through itself of an entirely new one, there is nothing to fall back upon, and therefore every detail is intensely relevant to the overall effect of the film and the future of the movement.

This is all well and good when the film is displayed unedited and unmodified, as in Godard's native France, but problems arise as soon as it enters the hands of foreign audiences and distributors, who are not used to addressing the challenges of preserving these seemingly innocuous details, and may not understand or represent the director's intent. In "Weekend", it is primarily the ham-handed use of subtitles that fails to take account for Godard's stylistic choices as director. The idea of translation is always a difficult one even in mainstream film; it is difficult to preserve the particular meaning of a phrase, idiom or dialogue passage in a language for which it was not originally intended. Yet this issue takes on even more relevance in "Weekend", where Godard often can be seen to manipulate the audience connection through sound and speech. Particularly interesting is the interrogation scene, where Corinne recounts a bizarre sexual experience. In the background is an ebb and flow of cacophony, centered upon the honking cars outside and supported by a score that swells dynamically with bizarre and calculated jarringness, frequently obscuring the audible dialogue. This parody of melodrama in film and its accompanying music is also designed to further distance the audience from the characters, especially through a renewed awareness of the ridiculous nature of the filmic illusion. When screened without subtitles for audiences fluent in French, this effect can be fully realized, but much of this effect is lost for American audiences, where the included subtitles helpfully but counter-productively illuminate every line, even those that would be completely incomprehensible to the French audience it was intended for. We learn more than we are intended to, the narrative of the scene is given a flow and coherence it does not warrant or intend, and a key revealing element of our distance from the film is at least temporarily deferred.

This is just one example of the threats faced to some of Godard's techniques in the hands of those who do not fully comprehend them; but how would the director himself have addressed this issue in preparing his film for foreign audiences? Of course, this sort of question can be only speculation, but it is likely his approach to subtitles, the visualization and imagization of spoken language, would mirror his strict and calculated control over the image, as presented in the film itself. Indeed, his use of blinking, manipulated and cut-up words implies a familiarity with this visual interpretation of language and its potential uses to further his aesthetic ideal. One imagines a sort of visual "white noise" obscuring the subtitles to represent the sound that obscures dialogue, an aggravating gesture that would sit perfectly with a director never afraid to aggravate, disturb or jar his audience into greater attention and perception. While there are any number of ways he might have gone about this, one thing is clear: the language barrier creates a distinct challenge for a film such as "Weekend", challenging the many subtleties that make it what it is. We are left, then, with a question: who else but a director is qualified to make the sort of decisions that will influence the experience of his own work?

Weekend and Counter-Cinema

I found Peter Wollen's article about Godard this week interesting when I first read it and far more interesting after I watched Weekend on Tuesday night. What struck me about the film was how successful it was in being an abject failure when measured in traditional cinematic value. As Wollen argued, Godard actively sought out the seven cardinal values of old cinema, took their counterparts, and implemented them into his film. I think he achieved his goal fairly well; however, I still find Weekend as a whole pretentious and unimpressive and disagree strongly with Wollen's clear infatuation for Godard's work.

Weekend certainly denies psychological identification, destroys almost all of its narrative arc, uses intentionally repetitive and unrealistic language, breaks the fourth wall and actively prevents suspension of disbelief, and strongly avoids any form of character development. Again, by all measures, this is an apt response to the industry trends identified by Corrigan (as exemplified by catastrophic flops like Heaven's Gate), but I don't see this as any incredible achievement. There is a reason why values like identification, transparency, and single diegesis existed in most films of the time and still exist today - it is because they are essential components to being moved by a film, whether the emotion felt is pleasurable or painful. A rejection of these does not create a new ideal - it creates a film whose only audience is film critics and viewers.

This new subset of film (Godard's counter-cinema, basically) is just masturbatory and serves no real purpose, in my opinion. One could see my strong response as a rejection of that which I do not understand, but I think I have a decent grasp of what Godard is attempting to say; I merely fail to see its genius. I certainly did not feel this way about Third Cinema. It may be an unusual format for a Western audience, but it has a clear purpose and a definite audience. Counter-cinema, on the other hand, has an incredibly limited audience for its supposed social commentary. Pushing the boundaries of film is certainly laudable, but only when there is a purpose beyond just seeing how much real violence can be displayed for shock value or seeing how long an uninteresting scene can be dragged out.

Codes of Godard

Godard’s counter-cinema clearly opposes the seven conventions of Hollywood cinema, as seen by the table Wollen sets up on page 74.  I would just like to understand more precisely why this is so important.  Wollen’s closing paragraph points us most clearly in the right direction when he says: “The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed.  What the cinema can do is produce meanings, and meanings can only be plotted, not in relation to some abstract yardstick or criterion of truth, but in relation to other meanings” (82).  We have been trained to follow the codes of Hollywood cinema, which have thus become naturalized.  Godard wants to point out the film is just like another language.  The words in a dictionary are not concretely defined because they are defined in terms of one another.  Meaning is gathered with their relationships.  If I look up the word “boat,” the dictionary will direct me to a whole new set of words, which I could then also look up.  I think Godard is adding new words to the dictionary of cinema rather than creating a completely new language.  We only understand his new codes when we see they are reactions of the seven standard Hollywood “virtues.”  I guess that statement is slightly off, though, since I don’t completely understand all of his new codes…I think I have a better grasp of their purpose rather than their actual meaning.  Godard uses these new tools to challenge the viewers, make them aware of their idle consumerism by not allowing them to be sucked in by traditional cinematic codes that cater to laziness.  His codes seem as if they deal much more with the interaction with the audience and elements outside of the screen…he challenges rather than seduces.  

Technology's Role

Corrigan’s article discusses the advancement in technology’s ability to warp the position of the spectator. First he notes improved technology (in the context of special effects) taking on the role of a new sort of fetish for the spectator instead of “naturalizing” the film as the director perhaps had intended. However, I believe that this new technology both allows for naturalization as well as promotes fetishism, but I also question the definition of fetishism in this context and its relation to the Freudian philosophy behind the sexually driven fetish.
What intrigues me even more than the idea of technology as a fetish is Corrigan’s notion of technology as a means of literally handing control over to the spectator. I agree with Corrigan’s notion about the distracted action of “going out” to the cinema, however I disagree with his claim that this action of placing control in the hands of the spectator via the remote controlled cable or the VCR encourages “dispersing, rather than fixing subjectivity” in the domestic household (29). I believe that through the act of actively choosing the “narcissistic subject of their own active desires” through technological means, the spectator is voluntary subjecting him/herself to a position where he/she is more like to be entirely absorbed by the viewing. In this, I don’t see the “dispersing” of selection as a means of creating “image-fragments,” but rather actively specifying and creating a more intimate connection with the screen. Therefore, I see technological advancement as the main contribution to the formation of a gaping divide between the intimate effects of cinema and home-viewing – cinematic viewing has become entirely “distracted” while domestic viewing has become entirely “absorbed”.
I am, however, a little confused as far as Corrigan's classification of the Blockbuster audience. Is it "too large and diverse by the dominant blockbusters" (26)? Or where does the role of genre play in, because he later notes that these different types of film lead to differentiation.

In his article Corrigan explores the effects of the VCR and homeviewing on cinema culture.  Corrigan contends that watching a film in the domestic setting may create an "immediacy and complicity between the television image and the viewer" (27).  He quotes Ellis that the television spectator " 'glances rather than gazes at the screen' " (28).  I agree with Corrigan's argument and I think it is evident that the viewing experience of cinema is central to its character; thus, homeviewing has radically altered the relationship between film and spectator.  However, what is at stake when this relationship is altered? 

Joyrich notes that in traditional television theory the television is closely tied to the female and the female look.  TV, says Joyrich, "offers itself as an immediate presence, failing to produce a sufficiently voyeuristic position for its viewers" (159).  This argument becomes complicated when television and film merge, as has occurred as a result of the VCR.  It is interesting that both Corrigan and Joyrich quote Ellis to argue the "glance" fostered by the television.   Does the voyeurism of the filmic look degenerate to the "glance" of television when viewed in the home?  If so, does the film, too, become feminine and encourage the use of "hyperreality and a 'hypermasculinity'" (166) in its defense?  Corrigan argues that the central concern for "shareability" is a result of the VCR, but perhaps the subject matter of film itself has changed, too.  How significant does the viewing medium become?

I do not propose answers to these questions, but would rather like to open them to discussion.  For while I agree with Corrigan's argument that "the fragmented domestic performance and the public outing" (27) are two results of recent economic and technological developments in cinema, I think there are wider implications as well.  Furthermore, in the time since Corrigan was writing (1991) widescreen and flat panel tvs have become more available; now it seems we are trying to recreate the cinematic experience in our homes.  While the viewing experiences remain  fragmented in that they are relegated to the home, the movement away from the distractions of the small screen perhaps indicates a new nostalgia, one for the cinema when it was more than an outing to the megaplex.