Saturday, May 31, 2008

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.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Politics and Entertainment

I haven't been paying much attention to the rabid fan reviews of Iron Man online. But I was more than a little shocked to see the film's opening weekend gross reach over $100 million in the U.S. alone. Really? Iron Man? I was one of those who went to see it on its opening weekend, in a packed theatre filled with college students and more than a few overweight comic book fans. Did I enjoy it? I'm not sure. I think so, since I didn't doze off once. I could certainly appreciate it - its CGI was beautifully rendered, its pace was snappy. But its politics sit uneasily with me.

I'm not sure if any critic took up this issue, but it's not really a case of 'it's just a popcorn movie so chill the fuck out.' Iron Man is an overtly political popcorn movie; whether it is social relevance or propaganda, it is clever positioning nevertheless since its release coincides with the heat leading to the presidential elections. From the first scene, which begins in American-occupied Afghanistan, it puts itself right out there in the realm of current events; before the title is shown, there is already a 'beheading video' scene. Leslie Bibb's journalist role and her insistent questions on arms sales to 'terrorist nations' is an unsubtle jibe to the Bush administration. It is not that we are looking too much into the movie, the movie is so politically aware that it's alarming how everyone chooses to ignore all these politics just to be 'entertained.'

Hollywood, emblem of the capitalist system, does little to question its political conscience: anything that makes money goes, regardless of its politics. And so we see how, as the tide changes, Hollywood changes its politics accordingly. I won't comment on its current political inclinations, but Iron Man presents an extremely right-wing agenda that is, while critical of the current administration, conservative in many ways. It never questions American imperialism, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, implicitly assuming the stance that America is 'liberating' these countries from evil terrorists. Being American, it is natural for the film to protect its country's agendas (hence, like movies of old, it comes up with the simple equation: America = good, Foreign Other = bad), but these political problems are handled with such caricatures that it oversimplifies every issue. The terrorists are so vicious that they might as well be the grotesque xenomorphs in the Aliens series. Their ideology (thankfully Islam isn't mentioned here) is never stated; the simple fact that they are anti-America makes them threats that need to be exterminated.

Without the risk of being racist (at least the film portrays a 'good' Middle-Eastern in the beginning - ethnicities are fudged here, but let's give it the benefit of doubt), the film nevertheless gives us a village of innocent Afghans that need to be 'liberated' from evil terrorists, painting an altogether one-sided picture that is frankly no different from war propaganda movies. It is this extent of propaganda that makes me uneasy. If, even, the villain eventually shifts from the terrorists to an evil war profiteer in the end (ironically making capitalism the ultimate evil), it only goes to placate the bourgeois mentality of being just a little anti-establishment - the establishment here being the Evil Corporations that everyone hates (no matter that the movie itself was financed by several Evil Corporations).

The film definitely cannot be understood as anti-capitalist: the hero, Tony Stark, once was an amoral war profiteer, and is a huge capitalist himself. The filmmakers give him the best position to be in: although it must be said that he undergoes a 'character change' after his ordeal in Afghanistan, he nevertheless remains filthy rich. He can thus enjoy the best of both worlds, enjoying his wealth and luxury without a guilty conscience, because he is now a good guy fighting off evil for the sake of the world. It is in such scenarios that the film takes on Hollywood clichés by building an attractive reality that attempts to supercede the real world. How convenient it is that the superhero should live in a technologically sleek mansion with advanced gadgets (awesome!) and sleek cars (cool!), Hollywood's fantasy life exaggerated and updated for the digital age. It eliminates struggle of any sort, making girls want to be with him and boys want to be him. Exactly how can a film this shallow attempt to portray politics?

And speaking of gender stereotypes, this film puts Hollywood back 50 years in this respect, what with Gwyneth Paltrow's hapless but ever-supportive damsel and the air stewardesses that turn into strippers (though, I must admit, it was a ridiculously funny gag). Even the female soldier at the beginning is a deep-voiced butch. It is insufficient to say that the film appeals to teenage male comic book audience that fantasizes about being as rich and powerful (and also as noble) as Iron Man; treating this audience as stupid says much more on the part of the filmmakers than the audience - and it is alarming how people could swallow this wholesale.

Is Iron Man a bad movie? Certainly not, it is a lot better than many of the recent blockbusters by virtue of the fact that it actually is entertaining. But where does entertainment end and politics begin?

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Andy Warhol's Screen Tests


Sometimes, late at night when I can't sleep, I'd put on my DVD of Andy Warhol's screen tests. I'd set the speed on my DVD player to simulate the 18 fps they're supposed to be projected at. Slowly, ghosts of people long past would flicker on, resurrected once more to gaze into our world from their world of embalmed time. Though Warhol certainly intended the flicker rate of film to be part of his aesthetic, I'm not sure he'd totally disapprove of video, which has made his images democratic, and endlessly reproductive. These people, some celebrities, some never known, can now be summoned into our living rooms over the world, looking over at our lives with a little curiosity, a little sadness.

The fact is, the superstitions of ancient Chinese and Japanese people were right all along - once our image is photographed, we are dead at the moment, our doppelgangers condemned to roam in a spirit netherworld. Looking at the faces in Andy Warhol's screen tests feels like visiting a graveyard; these lives from half a century ago, wrested out of time, waiting; a memory, preserved forever.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Springtime



The camellia is blooming so violently it doesn't know it's weeping.