A Constant State

[aconstantstate]

L’Avventura dir. Michaelangelo Antonioni (1960)

A woman is presented as our main character. Then she disappears. Other characters search for her and then stop bothering. Her bereaved (?) lover and friend become lovers themselves. She is replaced in their lives by each other. Her story is replaced in the movie with their story of giving up the search. 

The film deliberately makes meaning meaningless. With the disappearance of the apparently protagonist, we’re left floundering, grasping for a story. The surviving characters mirror this. They’re left floundering and grasping as well. We watch them make up the new story for us as we go - they search, then they don’t, one resists the other’s advances then she doesn’t, they’re in love, then they’re not. They travel, then they don’t. It makes sense, then it doesn’t. Olivier Assayas points out that the film doesn’t judge it’s characters. They make morally questionable choices (becoming lovers mere days after the disappearance) but the film doesn’t condemn them for it. They’re in the process of making up meaning as well. Existentialism literally at work.

Ebert calls the film a “melancholy moral desert.” He’s not wrong, exactly. But the idea of morality doesn’t seem to apply at all, whether by presence or absence. The film is a sort of counterpoint to moralism. A thing happens, followed by other things. End. Ebert is drawn to the emptiness of the characters’ lives - idle rich doing idle rich things and finding them without meaning. As he writes, “It is impossible to be happy simply because one is ceaselessly entertained.” Again, he’s not wrong, but his reading is. It’s not a critique of bourgeois malaise and ennui. It’s a critique of meaning itself.

In some ways, it pairs well with Psycho: also released in 1960, also subverts narrative expectation. But, whereas in Hitchcock’s world when one story is lopped off two take its place, in Antonioni’s no story is possible or even desirable. Hitchcock’s “post-narrative” cinema is still muscular and action-oriented, even if cut loose from the customary protagonist anchor. But L’Avventura is fluid, languid, always on the verge of dissolution. It could float away on a sea breeze.

[aconstantstate]

Germany Year Zero dir. Roberto Rosselini (1948)

Something of the classical tragedy to this film. Edmund, like Macbeth and Oedipus, makes the wrong move in a moment of crisis. For this he must pay the ultimate price.

There’s a moment in which an illicit speech by Hitler is played on a record player in the ruins and it echoes out among the toppled walls and roofless buildings and assorted rubble of it’s own aftermath. A beautiful moment and a perfect instance of associative montage.

According to Rossellini, the whole film was in service of the sequence of the boy wandering along through the rubble, which was his initial inspiration. 

[aconstantstate]

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema - Laura Melvey (1975)

http://www.composingdigitalmedia.org/f15_mca/mca_reads/mulvey.pdf

Begins with assertion that woman’s lack of a penis is what makes male possession of one important - definition through differentiation/meaning made by comparison. Because men dominate industries of representation (visual/performing/media arts), women are then used as a vehicle for men to make meaning, rather than as agents for women’s own meanings (Mulvey: “bearer or meaning, not maker of meaning.”).

Looking is pleasurable. Freud called it scopophilia and identified it as an instinct related to sexuality. Inverse is also true - being looked at can be pleasurable.

While watching cinema, viewer is both a watcher and the watched in that they identify with the characters and engage vicariously, like a daydream or fantasy.

Looking is split: active (male) and passive (female). Looker and Looked-at. Female-characters rarely have agency enough to be the lookers.

The use of women as erotic looking objects is justified in film via the male hero: they move through the world of the film so that we can see the world (and women) of the film. The male acts as a “screen surrogate” for the male viewer -> the fantasy/daydream of power and control over the female objects in the film.

The women in the film still represent a threat. Their lack of penises remind the viewer that it’s possible not to have one (castration), and so the women must be neutralized somehow. Two ways:

1) Fetishize and thereby remove threat (Mulvey: hence the “cult of the female star”) or...

2) ascertain guilt, assert control over the guilty, and pass judgment (punish or forgive).

WORSHIP or PUNISH. Brings to mind Elliot Roger’s 2014 shooting spree which was kicked off with a video diatribe about women refusing to have sex with him and a written “manifesto” that included a planned “Day of Retribution” and “War on Women.”

Cinema is itself the gaze: “It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it.” This is what makes cinema unique from drama, stage shows, strip tease, etc. It directs/controls/comprises the gaze.

Generally useful conception of cinema: three different “looks:” 1) camera, 2) audience, and 3) the characters. Conventional cinema tries to deny the first two and create the illusion of objectivity.

Inverted order of THIRDNESS: the event, the recording, and the reception. Mulvey: “without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness, and truth.”

“The camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.” Classical cinema denies that an image is manufactured and that an audience has an active participation.