Notes on the creative process

Hasty notes on filmmaking

i) Personal vision and reality

In The Man Who Left His Will on Film, the last footage of the filmmaker who committed suicide - shots of landscapes and scenery - is criticized by other filmmakers as bearing neither political nor artistic vision. But how does anyone graft themselves (their personality, their ideas, their politics etc.) into what is essentially captured objectively through the lens? Can one truly manipulate reality through an objective lens? The film asks the reverse of these questions - if reality can be manipulated to suit a personal will, how seriously should we take reality? In the film, politically-committed students shoot protests and demonstrations as documentaries of current rebellion. But this political reality is often confused with the protagonist's personal reality; eventually, neither realities seem real.

Yet, 'vision' is a relatively recent notion (and a fairly Western one at that too) and explains the crisis of authorship that plagued artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Art after Warhol conveniently ignores all the problematizations it was subjected, emerging as even more defiantly metaphysical and author-obsessed (a recent visit to the Whitney's Biennale only enforces this fact). That is why, to us, the filmmaker who commits suicide in The Man Who Left His Will on Film remains an enigma. His 'vision' is always absent; when the main characters Motoki and Yasuko try to retrace his footsteps, they only find a shadow of him constantly escaping them...

ii) Morality

Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool allows its characters to wander into real street protests at the end of the film, inevitably politicizing its earlier story of journalistic integrity. Yet, is it the documentary aspect that validates the fictional or vice versa? At the same time, it is because we know that the documentary footage is real (the threat of violence to actress Verna Bloom is extremely real) that we feel worried for Bloom's character. Should we then feel concerned for Lamberto Maggiorani, the star of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, because he was chosen for the fact that his life parallels that of his jobless and desperate character? Does this casting benefit De Sica (in making the audience feel for the character) or Maggiorani instead? Where is the conscience in all this?

At the same time, Shohei Imamura dramatizes a very real missing-person situation in his docudrama A Man Vanishes, using the real people involved in the case and letting them 'act' out their emotions for the camera. Imamura himself steps in front of the camera at the end of the film to ask the audience: are their emotions any less real because of their acting? Is truth revealed or obscured through the camera?

The camera imposes a machinistic volition onto the world that inevitably changes reality, neither tending toward truth nor toward the artist's intention. As Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer has proven, the act of placing a camera, choosing its location, leaving things in or out of the frame, deciding when to start and stop recording is a moral act in itself, because it affects the lives of the people in front of it. What is the responsibility of the filmmaker when confronted with this fact? Is it to ignore (as Jonathan Caouette in his iMovie life drama Tarnation) or to acknowledge as Rouch does? Is there an apolitical camera?

iii) Subject/object

It is inevitable that the filmmaker and the world enters into a subject-object relationship. It is the filmmaker (subject) who 'captures' the world (object) and shows it to an audience (subject) that apprehends the film (object). The filmmaker always wants something out of the world that the world has to involuntarily give up. In narrative cinema, this is made more complex with the introduction of other factors. It is not a reality that is extracted but a reality that is constructed (through syntactic structures).

In La Belle Noiseuse, the painter Edouard Frenhofer tries to find the quality that disturbs/pesters/irritates him out of his model Marianne. But there's a fundamental difference between pen and camera. The pen doesn't record an indecisive movement or stroke and, like the brush, has its own will - ink smudges and water flows. The camera, however, does not have its own will - it simply records. Where in painting, a stroke can ruin or make a masterpiece, a camera is forever slave to the reality (space-time) before it. Frenhofer tries to create 'a tactile painting'; aren't all filmmakers also trying to create 'a tactile reality'?

The fixed gaze is necessarily erotic. It expresses a desire to extract, to dominate, and to tame the object in the subject-object relationship (filmmaking, film viewing and film criticism are erotic ventures). If a wandering gaze does not have a fixed locus (the world, acentered), the fixed gaze (the frame) is one that assigns meaning/gives the world representation in one or more signs. The objects independently do not have meaning; it is the gaze that assigns them its importance and turns them into signs whose depths are to be read/understood/penetrated. The signs in cinema - by virtue of the frame - becomes almost an obsession; they are fetishized, assigned more 'truth' (or objective reality) than other linguistic signs. The need to extract their 'essence' - both on the filmmaker and on the viewer's part - indicates a violation, a change in its quality.

That is why, in The Man Who Left His Will on Film and many other Oshima films, sexual violence figures so much: Motoki rapes Yasuko to impose his will on her (just as filmmakers/viewers impose their wills on reality); Yasuko is raped in the end by random strangers when she tries to disrupt Motoki's rendition of objective reality. Similarly, in La Belle Noiseuse, Frenhofer puts Marianne in all manners of bizarre poses to extract a specific quality out of her. The result is a form of violation, as we can see in this exchange:

Liz: "First he wanted to paint me because he loved me, and then... Then because he loved me, he didn't want to paint me. It was me or painting, that's what he said."

Julienne: "I don't understand. It wasn't a question of life and death."

Liz: "Why not? They say when you're drowning you suddenly see all your life. All the forgotten memories. In a fraction of a second. Is it really possible to capture a whole life on the canvas of a painting? Just like that... with a few traces of paint. It seems unbelievable, but actually this is what Frenhofer was searching for."

Julienne: "You mean this is something shameless?"

Liz: "Yes that's it... shameless. It's not the flesh that's shameless, it's not the nudity...it's something else."

What the artist needs is to tame the untame-able (metaphysics, truth), film the unfilm-able (emotions, politics etc), bring himself to the extremes. But this creates a whole set of problems, issues with phemonenology, semiology and morality that the artist has to overcome.

What is the filmmaker's responsibility to the object then? Frenhofer's painting irrevocably changes Marianne, making her discover things she never knew about herself. Soon, the painting acquires an almost mystical quality, almost like an incantation that would change their reality. Cinema is an incantation too, only all the more potent since it uses space and time as its canvas. Filmmakers are almost involuntary in this creative process; Frenhofer mentions that it is not what he wants out of Marianne that is important, but what the painting wants out of both of them - they are merely involved in its own creation, and it is this letting go that most artists fear. Filmmakers have even less control over reality - the camera is even more objective than the pen - and so overcompensate by having many other functions (production design, sound design, acting). In spite of this, a film gives birth to its own reality.