Category Archives: theory

Dream-like states in films

“We experience the cinema in a state of double consciousness, an astonishing phenomenon where the illusion of reality is inseparable from the awareness that it is really an illusion.” —Edgar Morin on the film experience.

New article at Wikipedia on oneiric film theory.

In a film theory context, the term oneiric (which means “pertaining to dream“) is used to refer the depiction of dream-like states in films, or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state to analyze a film. The connection between dreams and films has been long established; “The dream factory” “…has become a household expression for the film industry”[1]. The dream metaphor for film viewing is “one of the most persistent metaphors in both classical and modern film theory”[2], and it is used by film theorists using Freudian, non-Freudian, and semiotic analytical frameworks.

Filmmakers noted for their use of oneiric or dreamlike elements in their films include Luis Buñuel [3], Wojciech Has [4], Andrei Tarkovsky [5] , Lars von Trier [6] Krzysztof Kieslowski (e.g., The Double Life of Véronique from 1991) [7]and David Lynch (e.g., Mulholland Drive)[8]. Film genres or styles noted for their use of oneiric elements include 1940s and 1950s film noir and surrealist films; moreover, oneiric elements have also been noted in musicals, thriller and horror films and in comic films such as Marx Brothers movies [9]. The French surrealist playwright and director Antonin Artaud argued that the American burlesque genre, with its bizarre, lush, costumes, and its mixture of dancing girls, comedians, mime artists and striptease artists, has oneiric qualities[10]. —Source

I was very fond of the Ado Kyrou books

Eros in the Cinema (1966) – Raymond Durgnat [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In a 1977 interview Durgnat said about Kyrou: “I didn’t read very much film criticism until I started teaching film regularly around 1964! There wasn’t much to read. I was very fond of the Ado Kyrou books.” If Raymond Durgnat can be compared to some of the more exciting French film critics such as Ado Kyrou, his publishing house Calder and Boyars can be compared to that of Eric Losfeld’s. [Jan 2007]

Influences: There are various people whom I read with interest because, whether I agree with them or not, there’s a genuine person speaking from a calibre of experience, not an automatic scanning mechanism. I’m thinking of Pauline Kael, who I rarely agree with; of Robin Wood, who I sometimes agree with; of Manny Farber. And Parker Tyler. At the other extreme, I’m very interested in certain theorists, particularly Jean Mitry and Edgar Morin. –Raymond Durgnat in a 1977 interview.

Pure examples of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room on one of my favourite subjects, by way of John Carey, one of my favourite nobrow art and literature critics whose The Intellectuals and the Masses was one of the more enlightening reads of 2006:

 

I’m currently reading John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts?, a book designed to provoke all art-lovers into a steaming maelstrom of outrage. …

Carey will ultimately dismiss the distinction between high and low art as impossible to maintain, but I think we can do something better than that with it. First of all we have to stop seeing the categories of high and low as being mutually exclusive. Quite a lot of operas, for instance, will include elements of farce, or romance, or pantomime, just as a television cartoon ostensibly for children, like The Simpsons, is a fantastic example of relentlessly subversive, parodic, allusive elements disguised under a sugary outer coating. So it’s incredibly rare, in my opinion, to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art. What we get is far more complex and mixed up than that. The way I would distinguish between those high and low elements, is to see ‘low’ or commercial or mass media art as being formulated in order to satisfy the desires and expectations of its audience. Take Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance books, for instance. … The whole point of these books is that they comfort and reassure readers by providing them with exactly what they want. By comparison, we might define those ‘high’ elements of art as the ones that challenge or question our expectations, whether they be about the world we live in, or the way that an artwork ‘ought’ to be put together […]

I like litlove’s analysis of what makes the difference between high and low culture:

  • Low art comforts, satisfies and reassures audiences’ expectations
  • High art challenges and questions audiences’ expectations

But I disagree with the statement “it’s incredibly rare to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art.” I believe that the overwhelming majority of cultural artifacts lack this ambiguity, unresolvedness and ambivalence; this simultaneous jarring and soothing I desire so. Coming back to the proposed low art/high art definitions, the keywords are audience and expectations, but also — from the perspective of the author — demanding (of the audience), which reminds me somewhat of Walter Benjamin’s assessment:

The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. –WAAMR, Walter Benjamin, 1936

The keyword in Benjamin’s quote is demanding:

As I wrote in the introduction of my Literature/literature page:

Literature is a term (­like taste, culture, quality and style) that carries its own value judgement: Literature (with capital L, also called literary fiction) is associated with serious, complex, difficult and demanding works like Modernist literature (e.g. James Joyce) and experimental novels (e.g. Nouveau Roman).

On the other side of the spectrum are popular fiction and genre fiction, which are perceived as easy, accessible and of low literary merit.

Jahsonic.com aims to show that good works can be found in high and low literary genres, and the more interesting works are to be found where high and low intersect (Cervantes, Stephen King, Simenon, Georges Bataille, …). [Oct 2005]

 

Litlove’s invoking of romantic fiction also reminds me of a recent post by TeachMeTonight who is teaching a romance fiction class and who demonstrates that there is still a divide between literary fiction and genre fiction and thus between low and high culture:

This quarter at DePaul I’m teaching a brand new class on popular romance fiction. … In a curiously appropriate twist, my course competes for students this quarter with another Senior Seminar for majors: a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s as though my colleague Jim and I had agreed to divide the literary world between us, with one course focused on what is perhaps the most highly-regarded novel of the 20th century (indeed, the book voted “best novel of the century” a few years back) and the other devoted to the most popular genre of the 20th century. By some odd coincidence, the students in my course are all women. I guess the boys have better things to do. […]

A final post by cultureby.com which divides cultural critics in those who defend and reject high/low culture:

Be it resolved:

that commercial culture is compromised culture

Pro:

F.R. and Q.D. Leavis
Robert and Helen Lynd
Richard Hoggart
Helmut Minow
John Berger
Christopher Lasch
Neil Postman
Noam Chomsky
Hilton Kramer
Stuart Ewen
Christopher Lasch
Thomas Frank
Benjamin Barber

Contra:

Lloyd Warner
Herbert Gans
John Carey
John Docker
Warren Susman
H.S. Bhabra
Robert Thompson
Tyler Cowen
Charles Paul Freund

See also: culture war – ‘high culture’ – ‘low culture’

 

 

No Borges, no Verne, no Wells

One of my favourite reads of last year was Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970). It introduced me to a whole range of primarily French 19th century literature and its dissection of genre is one of the best you’ll find anywhere. The book has its shortcomings too, but these have more to do with the tautological nature of genre construction which is inherent in the notion of genre itself (see here).

I also read Borges’s The Book of Sand last year and I am currently re-reading it. Borges is a master of mixing the real with the imaginary and I was surprised to find no mention of Borges in The Fantastic.

So I did a search for Borges+Todorov and stumbled on this article by Lew on the excellent Depauw website where I had spent time before. From Lew’s assessment of Todorov’s book, the keyword is “sample”:

Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, this attempt to ruin its reputation takes as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux: “At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately, it appears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology—and not even a useful one.” I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought—one moreover which has spawned divergent tendencies, since every author has his own “vision” of the subject—I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Fantastic. The author begins by deriding the investigator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works. Todorov’s “sample” of works discussed, as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy: all of SF is represented by two short stories. We get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffman, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka—and that is about all. What this structural account proclaims to us as the bounds of the fantastic is really quite an antique piece of furniture: the bed of Procrustes. –Stanislaw Lem via http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/lem4art.htm [Jan 2007]

Sade and graphomania

I’m still viewing Marquis and since it reminded Richard Scheib of Quills who notes that

“Both [Quills and Marquis] get inside de Sade’s urge to write no matter what, using sheets and his own blood, although Marquis makes far less melodramatic fuss about the frustrated creative urge than Quills does.”

I considered Sade’s monomaniacal urge to write and looked up graphomania. I found this interesting quote from Milan Kundera’s 1979 Of Laughter and Forgetting:

Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). … Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society devlops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

  1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
  2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isoalation of individuals;
  3. the absense of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.

.. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void. But by a backlash, the effort affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside. … One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

This passage has reminded quite a few bloggers of the blogging phenomenon itself.

Coming back to Sade as a maniac writer, I wonder how Sade (2000) by Benoît Jacquot treats this graphomaniac tangent.

What makes a novel unfilmable?

 

Hollywood occasionally attempts to turn supposedly ‘unfilmable’ novels into blockbusters. The Hours, Fight Club, American Psycho, and even Adaptation, were all based on what were said to be unfilmable books; although all were adapted into critically-acclaimed films.

Greencine reports on a flurry of posts relating to the supposed unfilmability of certain novels, some of them prompted by the release of Tom Tykwer’s 2006 Perfume:

There’s Will Gore [With the recent arrival of ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ in cinemas, perhaps the myth of the ‘unfilmable’ novel can finally be laid to rest] on the concept of the “unfilmable novel” and “The Unfilmables: A List of the Hardest Novels to Film” at Screenhead [including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye].

In 2005 John Patterson already reported on film adaptations of ‘unwieldy’ novels in the Guardian:

“There is,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “a particular type of really bad novel that makes for a really great motion picture.” He might have been referring to such superselling potboilers as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind or, indeed, any number of middlebrow literary atrocities whose cinematic adaptations have entirely transcended their trashy sources.

In answer to my question ‘What makes a novel unfilmable?’, if I had to make a checklist of what makes novels unfilmable:

  1. plotlessness
  2. philosophical introspection (can be solved with voice-over)
  3. experimental fiction
  4. …………….

More on this later… In the meantime, if you feel like completing the list, please be my guest.

P. S. 1: now is a good time to reread Fuchsia’s comment on the ‘Nature of the 20th century reading experience’ where I asked: can one measure a book’s success by counting the number of film adaptations?

P. S. 2: My entry in the top ten of unfilmable novels:

  1. Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991)
  2. Do please submit your candidates in the comments …

P. S. 3: And maybe one last question: which films would resist successful novelization?

Cette belle suspension d’esprit

From a newly discovered Literary Vocabulary by K. Wheeler:

WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story. Perfectly intelligent readers can enjoy tall-tales about Pecos Bill roping a whirlwind, or vampires invading a small town in Maine, or frightening alternative histories in which Hitler wins World War II, without being “gullible” or “childish.” To do so, however, the audience members must set aside their sense of “what’s real” for the duration of the play, or the movie, or the book.

Samuel Coleridge coined the English phrase in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria to describe the way a reader is implicitly “asked” to set aside his notions of reality and accept the dramatic conventions of the theater and stage or other fictional work. Coleridge writes:

. . . My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (quoted in Cuddon, page 1044).

Coleridge may have been inspired by the French phrase, “cette belle suspension d’esprit de law sceptique” from François de La Mothe le Vayer, or by Ben Jonson’s writing where Jonson notes, “To many things a man should owe but a temporary belief, and suspension of his own judgment.” Cf. verisimilitude.

Truth and Todorov

Historian and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov argues in the French left wing newspaper Libération that the foundations of democracy are at risk whenever a country accepts – as the United States did with the war in Iraq – lies and illusion. An English translation of the article here.

Search string used: Todorov + Fellini, after seeing the following definition of the term felliniesque at Wikipedia:

“felliniesque” is used to describe any scene in which a hallucinatory image invades an otherwise ordinary situation.

This reminded me of Todorov’s definition of fantastic literature.

The truth is — and as always with cases of instinctual dislike I cannot exactly explain why — I don’t care much for Fellini who is considered according to the same Wikipedia article as “one of the most influential and widely revered Italian filmmakers of the 20th century and … one of the finest film directors of all time”. All time film equals 20th century film, too much praise indeed.

The last film by Fellini I watched was his vignette for the Boccaccio 70 collection. His contribution, starring Anita Ekberg just seemed downright silly. I liked the other 3 contributions except his.

I’d like to point out the irony of Todorov, who’s written about the unresolved hesitation between the real and the imaginary, should write about the notion of truth as it relates to Iraq and the U.S.A..

The notion of a canon is 20th-century heresy

Via Greencine comes this introductory chapter, of an abandoned book by Paul Schrader on the notion of a film canon:

The notion of a canon, any canon—literary, musical, painting—is 20th-century heresy. A film canon is particularly problematic because the demise of the literary canon coincides, not coincidentally, with the advent and rise of moving pictures. There is much debate about the canons but no agreement. Not only is there no agreement about what a canon should include, there’s no agreement about whether there should be canons at all. Or, if there is agreement, it is this: canons are bad—elitist, sexist, racist, outmoded, and politically incorrect.

Yet de facto film canons exist—in abundance. They exist in college curriculums, they exist in yearly 10-best lists, they exist in best-of-all-time lists of every sort. Canon formation has become the equivalent of 19th-century anti-sodomy laws: repudiated in principle, performed in practice. Canons exist because they serve a function; they are needed. And the need increases with each new wave of films. What I propose is to go back in order to go forward. To examine the history of canon formation, cherry-pick the criteria that best apply to film, and select a list of films that meet the highest criteria.

The model, of course, is Harold Bloom’s 1994 bestseller, The Western Canon. Mustering a mountain of hubris and a lifetime of close reading, Bloom proposed a canon of Western literature: books and authors who meet the highest “artistic criteria.” The Western Canon is also a screed against “the cultural politics, both of the Left and the Right, that are destroying criticism and consequently may destroy literature itself.” These cultural politicians, whom Bloom dubs “The School of Resentment,” count among their number Feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, New Historicists, Lacanians, Deconstructionists, and Semioticians (Bloom doesn’t flinch from making enemies). —Filmlinc

An online listing of Schrader’s 60 films can be read on Jeffrey M. Anderson’s website Cinematical.

More on Schrader’s canon by Donato Totaro here.

after repeated scans of the list I became less shocked at what was missing and began to appreciate what was there. Like the often overlooked Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film Performance. I began to smile and take perverse pleasure at the quirks and oddities of Schrader’s canon. For example, while excluding Eisenstein because his films tell us nothing about “what it means to be human or, to put it in grand terms, ennoble the soul,” he excludes such luminous humanists as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and all of neo-realism, while including such Italian films as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, one of the most cynical and nihilistic westerns ever made (but which I thought was one of Schrader’s most inspired selections), The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci’s bleak, terrifying account of Italian Fascism, and La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni’s paean to emotional fragility and human alienation amid Italian modernity (and by far the most pessimistic of Antonioni’s alienation tetralogy). I wondered how he could insist that the bar be raised as high as possible (“The higher the better”), and then include The Big Lebowski at number 40! While disappointed that there was not one horror film in the canon, from someone who has directed two (The Cat People, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist), I was surprised to find out that there are five westerns in his canon. With the inherent possibility of such contradiction and inconsistency, it became evident that canon formation is not for the feint of heart. Schrader should be applauded for providing a reference point for further generations to contest. After all, what type of a canon would it be if it did not? –Donato Totaro

Pierre Klossowski at Dennis Cooper’s

Pierre Klossowski special at Dennis Cooper’s.

I think his writings — esp. the novel trilogy The Laws of Hospitality (Roberte Ce Soir, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and Le Souffleur,) and his books on Sade (Sade, My Neighbor) and Nietzsche (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) are very worth your attention. –Dennis Cooper