Tuesday, January 6, 2015

What is "Ideal" Cinema?

In the midst of the heated debates stirred by PK, one needs to look back and think about what is the purpose of cinema and what is "ideal" cinema? As film-makers, should we strive towards portraying reality or consider cinema as a piece of idiosyncratic  art 'authored' by the filmmaker? As viewers, do we project ourselves on the movie and 'create' personal meaning and interpretations from it? Or are these interpretations seeded by the film-maker? Are all possible interpretations of a movie under the control of a filmmaker?

This article reviews some of the ideas and theories present in the literature on media and film studies.

Is “Real” the “Ideal”?

Film critic Andre Bazin makes a distinction between “those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality”. He feels that any manipulation of the image or the dramatic sets and lighting stands in the way of releasing film’s true potential for realism. Reality has no place in this hallucinatory world of illusion; its beauty is in its dreamy detachment from the grounded, solid world outside the screen. 

 “Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness.” He appreciates neo-realism as “a kind of humanism” first and a “style of filmmaking” second. He seems much taken by the idea of shooting an entire film about a man to whom nothing happens for ninety minutes.

But it is equally as impossible to make a film without making some sort of statement and imposing some type of perspective on the viewer. It cannot help but express in some way the views and feelings of its creator. The very act of making a film is already tampering with reality by capturing it in an artificial form. The purest form of Bazin’s vision of the ultimate realistic film, with no visible montage, no plot, no artificial or suggestive elements, and no signals sent to the audience to aid in its interpretation, is perhaps contradictory to the very purpose of this art form’s existence.
In the 1850s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) condemned realism as a "war on imagination." 

For Bazin, this realism was enhanced through certain stylistic techniques and choices, including its tendency toward on-location shooting, which helped confirm the existence of a world beyond the screen. Deep focus and minimal editing promoted an ambiguity of vision that more closely resembled the spectator's perception of reality. Throughout the ages, Bazin argues, mankind has dreamed of being able to see the surface of the world faithfully copied in art. Bazin ascribes this wish to what he calls the "mummy complex" - an innate human need to halt the ceaseless flow of time by embalming it in an image. 

For critics such as Jean-Louis Comolli, realism was simply a bourgeois ordering of the world that served to maintain capitalist ideology, while for British feminist scholar Laura Mulvey realism, as all film forms, is structured by the unconscious of patriarchal society. Mulvey insists that film should not be understood as a record of reality, but rather as a reorganization of reality in a way that is fundamentally unjust to certain people, most particularly women and minorities because of its informing patriarchal ideology. 

Michael Iampolski, for instance, describes films as a series of "quotes" that interrupt the narrative and send the spectator back to other texts. Spectators understand what they are watching by patching together all these references, not by referring to a world off-screen. 

Auteur Theory and Authorship


Translated from the French, auteur simply means "author”.  Given that collaborative context, who might be considered as, or who might claim to be, the "author" of a film? If authorship is claimed, on what basis of evidence might the claim be made? Claims were made for the director to be considered the most likely member of the filmmaking team—in industrially organized commercial film production—to be the author of a film. However, this did not mean that every film director should be considered an auteur, or author, or the author of a particular film. Indeed, in many ways it could be said that the director as auteur should be considered the exception rather than the rule. 

Does a film need to have an author? Perhaps, to qualify as "art," a film needs an author, an artist. The question of authorship is important in every art form, whether for reasons of intellectual property rights and the art market or for reasons of status and identification. Painting and sculpture have usually offered reasonably clear examples of the individual artist as author, as have the novel and poetry. But other arts can pose considerable problems for straightforward identification of authorship. A playwright may be the undisputed author of a play text, but who authors a play text in performance? In the twentieth century, many theater directors claimed authorship on a par with playwrights (although television drama has usually preferred the writer as author). A composer may be the undisputed author of a musical score, but what about music in performance? 

CINEMA used a tool for propaganda in history


In countries like the Soviet Union, leaders recognized the power of film to influence social and political attitudes. Because of the inherent domination of visual images and the illiteracy of a good deal of the Russian peasantry, the silent cinema was an ideal tool for presenting ideas and information about the fall of the czar and the rise of the industrial and agricultural proletariat. Whereas Lenin had said that cinema was the most important art, Stalin wrote that "the cinema is the greatest medium of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Encouraged to produce epics that extolled the "leader of the Russian people.”

Leni Riefenstahl's landmark propaganda film, Triumph des Willens ( Triumph of the Will , 1935), still provokes controversy. Commissioned by Chancellor Adolf Hitler Triumph of the Will was meant to be the official documentation of the Nazi Party Congress of 1934. Yet the film also promulgated fascism and the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) as the bases for renewed German nationalism and patriotism. Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not sway the masses with arguments, logic, or knowledge, only with feelings and beliefs. Indeed, all the signifying mechanisms of the cinema—camera angles, lighting, editing, set design, and music—were marshaled to appeal to a malleable mass audience. 

What does Cinema mean to the spectator? Identity? Pleasure? Escapism?

Borrowing from semiotics and psychoanalysis, Metz sets out to show that the cinematic image brings together a series of visual, musical, and verbal codes that the spectator then deciphers in an attempt to make meaning. Film and the photographic image do not provide any type of direct access to the real, according to Metz, but are rather one instance of a symbolic system. Resemblance, in this view, is based upon codes and conventions; the screen is not a window onto the world, but a mirror, reflecting back to spectators their own ideologies and sense of identity.

A major source of cinematic pleasure for the viewer is scopophilia - the pleasure in looking and in being looked at. Scopophilia can develop into a perversion, obsessive voyeurism, which involves gaining satisfaction from 'watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other'. Scopophilic pleasure is available in the cinema, since the viewers watch in an enclosed world, where images appear apparently regardless of who is watching. Thus the spectators seem to be looking in on a private world, and can project their desires on to the actors. 

Modern cinema could be said to resemble Plato's cave in the way in which the viewer is immersed in a fabricated reality. They suspend disbelief throughout the time they are inside the cinema they become part of their chosen film, and as a result become the prisoners of a contemporary cave. The walls of the cave can be equated to our inner eye-lids where we view dreams while sleeping. When the dream story is being “projected” in the cave, we believe it to be true, at least for the moments we are engrossed in it.

Note: This review was as a part of a course on Film Studies I took at MICA (2011)

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