Narrative Assignment: (500) Days of Summer Scene

(The components of my lesson plan can all be found here)

In an attempt to illustrate the constructed nature of narrative dialogue, my plan is to begin by introducing students to this clip.

Following which, we watch it again, with a shot-analysis to pull us out of our suture, and to help us see how many different camera set-ups are contributing to this scene. 

At which point, the students are each given a copy of the script for the scene, and are taught how to bracket a script.  After bracketing to suit their own direction, and creating a shot-list, they are (equipment allowing) to shoot the scene in groups of 3-4.  If they have access to and knowledge of editing software, they can edit their own scenes together.  If not, the teacher could edit together a sequence using shots from each of the groups (showing a purposeful break in continuity).  

As an advanced option, the students can intentionally break continuity by inserting something visible into each separate shot (different object for each shot).  I would recommend using something larger and more visible than the heart stickers used in my example video.  The initial plan was to use different colored ties on Tom, and different hats on Summer, but my intended bucket of props fell victim to a short person who felt that every bucket should be filled with a garden hose.  This was our improvised backup.  Ideally this process would both illustrate how narrative dialogue scenes are constructive, and help students deconstruct them while watching them, and also heighten their awareness of continuity issues in production, and the planning and attention required to maintain continuity in a completed scene.

It's kind of difficult to differentiate the importance of recognizing these concepts in a student's experience as a viewer/spectator and the importance of learning about these concepts by attempting to enact them.  It feels like there is almost a chicken and egg cycle of primacy there.  After having tried to do this, a student is far better equipped to recognize these processes in action in the media they consume, but it is conversely helpful to try to identify the processes in existing works before trying to recreate them.  In that sense, it is kind of difficult to nail down the primary learning outcomes for an activity or even a curriculum like this.  Whether the purpose is to increase media literacy, or to build skills for media production makes a difference in where focus will be spent, (and the two outcomes are not necessarily contradictory, but a focus on one over the other would change the way a unit was taught).    

Punishing Feminine Desire in Vertigo

In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson is performed as a quintessentially Freudian Male, with deeply narcissistic impulses pervading his relationship with the 2(3) women in the film he maintains relationships with.  Though as Mulvey[1] points out, his narcissistic voyeurism creates a perfect opportunity for both the scopophilic pleasure and the narcissistic impulse of the cinematic audience.  For both Scottie and for the audience he carries with him, Madeleine/Judy is the object that brings that scopophilic pleasure in looking.

While Scottie’s rather pathological infatuation with Madeleine is treated sympathetically as par for the course, (after all, he’s given the task of spying on Madeleine and Linda Williams[2] explains that, in cinema, too look is too desire.) But the desires of the women in the film (Midge, Madeleine / Judy) are all punished in the course of the film.  While their desires are not treated as inexplicable (they are, after all, falling in love with the normative heterosexual hero/optimized alter-ego of the viewer) they are not treated as justified in their desire in any instance.  Whereas Scottie’s only potential turpitude, pursuing a married woman, is blotted out by the revelation that he’d really been interacting with Judy, pretending to be Madeleine. 

In his desire, and his three-dimensional action as he pursued Madeleine-then-Judy and then manipulated her as an object-to-be-viewed for his pleasure, all the narrative devices seem to sympathize with him.   Only an analysis removed from the language of the screen might find him rather guilty of Judy’s accidental death.  By contrast, Midge is punished for her unreciprocated desire by continual dehumanizing rejection, especially after her satirical self-portrait is poorly received, and ultimately by Scottie refusing to recognize her or return her gaze during his hospital stay. Scottie clearly views her as a mother figure (even calling her mother), and treats her advances as Oedipal.  Theoretically Judy as Madeleine is punished for desiring Scottie by being separated from him after the murder of the real Madeleine is completed.  While Judy’s death at the end of the film is also a narrative punishment for her complicity in Madeleine’s murder, it is also more effectively a punishment for her desire for Scottie, and for the wrenches she threw in his scopophilic enjoyment by allowing him to “fall in love” with a non-entity.

 

That non-entity is telling.  At the end of the film we still know next to nothing about Madeleine Elster or Judy Barton, both dead.  We are acquainted only with how their deaths have impacted Scottie.  As Mulvey quoted Budd Boetticher, “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does.  In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”  Any further backstory or explanation of Judy Barton’s relationship or interactions with Gavin Elster might have made her more of a three-dimensional character, but in this narrative she functioned purely as an object for exhibitionist pleasure, so such character development was foregone.

In a way, Scottie is excused for having fallen in love with a murderer, because as she was pretending to be Madeleine, and portraying a person given to fits of possession or insanity, that insanity had the same effect that “blindness” had on the silent-film heroines discussed by Williams.  Her trance-like state portrayed the same lack of autonomy and desire that Williams correlated to literal or figurative blindness in virginal heroines.  The Madeleine/ Judy character doesn’t even speak until almost 40 minutes into the film.  She is simply viewed, and is certainly on display (on about 6 levels). With her bleached blonde hair and her white coat, she oscillates between appearing virginal and ghostly.

Judy’s guilt narratively justifies Scotties’ rather bizarre behavior. Mulvey explained that “The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman.”   Thus her role as a murder-accomplice becomes symbolic of the threat of castration.  The guilt or shame universal to women.

“The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object.”  Mulvey here describes every motivation of Scottie’s character in the second half of the film.  As he finds Judy, then literally forces her to re-enact the death of Madeleine.  He also punishes her as a guilty object, both through the process of grooming her to re-perform her role as Madeleine, and then by making her re-enact Madeleine’s death with him by going to the top of the tower, and ultimately by placing her where she would re-enact Madeleine’s death with her own death.

But Judy’s guilt never takes too much precedence.  If she were too inexcusably wicked she’d be more powerful or more interesting than Scottie.  Her threat is lobotomized, to where she’d be almost sympathetic if she were allowed to be real.  But the softening of her guilt ultimately functions only to justify Scottie’s attraction to her as an object, and his exhibition of her to the audience.  “The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look.”

 

Judy is even seen to be participating in her exhibitionism (both as Madeleine and as Judy) willingly, with the motivation of desire for Scottie.  Once she actively pursues this desire, telling Scottie she’ll conform to all the changes he demands if he’ll “just like me.”  Then Scottie’s masochism kicks into high gear.  That this scene coincides with the necklace clue that allows Scottie to solve Judy’s mystery, and punish her for it, suggests that perhaps Judy was being punished for desiring Scottie, and for having foiled his sadistic infatuation by having attracted him under false pretenses and having rendered the already threatening female object too threatening by making it a deceit.

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[1] Laura, Mulvey. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. N. pag. Print.

[2] Williams, Linda. "When the Woman Looks." The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas, 1996. 15-34. Print.

Generic Ambiguity – playing with audience expectations in The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon provides an interesting case study for genre analysis, as it is credited with a role in catalyzing the era of Film Noir and as the film itself uses, plays with, and resists genre-based audience expectations.

It is worth noting that this film was seminal in establishing both Bogart and Huston’s careers. Audiences were not familiar with either of them when this film was released in 1941, less than 2 months prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and engagement of the US in World War II.   A retrospective understanding of eminent historical events and of the legacy of Bogart’s career playing a litany of variations on Sam Spade affect a modern viewer’s engagement with this text in a way impossible for its contemporary audience to chew on. The film is now, in several ways representative of a style (and arguably a genre) that was not yet established upon its release.

The film opens under the pretext of a detective mystery, but following the generic shift of the novel on which it is based, the hero of this mystery is flawed and proletariat, speaking in jargon and functioning under a fallen pretense of the society in which he works.  Prior to this film, and even in previous film adaptations of the same novel, the hero and his worldview were significantly softened and romanticized.  Huston’s achievement here may have been in finding a way to cinematically express the pessimistic realism of hard-boiled writers while avoiding conflict with censors or the Hayes Code, and establishing a pattern for all of Film Noir to follow. In some ways he cinematically introduced, what Schrader termed the "narcissistic, defeatist code"[1] of protagonists created by Hard Boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett.

The ultimate nature of the film remains ambiguous throughout, as romantic elements struggle against gritty pessimism.  The ambiguity is ultimately tied up in the mystery of Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s compulsive lies and in uncertainty to how Sam Spade will ultimately respond to her.  In establishing the plot and mystery over the course of the film, several possible solutions are proposed, each of which, if “proven” would create parameters of a given moral code for the film, and thus define it’s genre quite differently.  Each proposition varies based on the level of romanticism versus realism in the characters of Sam and Brigid as well as in the amount of corruption revealed in each character.

If Brigid’s initial lie about her "sister" had been true, the film could have been a straightforward crime drama with a heavy dose of innocuous romantic involvement. "Good guys" and "Bad Guys" would have been easy to identify and categorize.  But each time Spade resists believing her façade and her character becomes increasingly morally dubious, the implications for the moral order of the entire film are that its reality becomes increasingly dark, dangerous, and pessimistic.  The introduction of the possibility that Sam will engage in behavior as corrupt and self-serving as that of Brigid or the more overt criminals Kasper, Joel, or Wilmer, creates a terrific range of possible moral orders for the film, within the film. 

The film concluded in perhaps the perfect place to catalyze the Film Noir movement.  Brigid was revealed as an intractable black widow type femme fatale, but Sam’s actions cast him instead as quintessentially “hard-boiled.”   Ultimately he is a lone wolf – resistant to the allure of Brigid’s dangerous romanticism; a little bit lawless, but fundamentally incorruptible at some limit.

 

This moral order, where climactically the protagonist can be trusted to resist corruption, but every other character (and the world of the film at large) is suspect, seems like the perfect signature for nascent Film Noir. 

The Maltese Falcon is absent many of the more visual, semantic elements usually attributed to Noir films.  Its lighting in particular is even and unexpressive, but in syntactic elements, many of the structures required for Noir to take off were strongly introduced here; particularly the tension between pessimistic realism and romanticism and the sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist’s narcissistic pessimism and acceptance of his flaws as benign in relation to those of others. (A palatable entry of the anti-hero?)  

It seems that the moral order of the universe of the film is an additional syntactic element that may be used to identify genre, as it certainly relates to the audience’s expectations of any given text.  Altman said that “the audience for a genre film is sufficiently committed to generic values to tolerate and even enjoy in genre films capricious, violent, or licentious behavior which they might disapprove of in real life.” [2]  This would seem to be because the audience has an acceptance and expectation for a moral order in the universe of a given genre’s reality that they accept is different from that of their reality.  If, however, an audience came to a film text prepared to accept a given moral order and were then presented or affronted with a contrary one (as might have occurred in the Maltese Falcon had Sam ultimately proved corruptible), it would likely leave the audience considerably unsettled. 

That potential for unease has certainly been exploited intentionally in more recent times, but in 1941 the gritty pessimism of Sam Spade may have been just enough Noir to be widely acclaimed and accepted and to jumpstart a decade of deep darkness and high style. The counter-cultural acceptance of this defeatist morality works, according to Altman, "When we are in the world, we follow its rule; when we enter into a genre film, all our decisions are self-consciously modified to support a different kind of satisfaction."  The Maltese Falcon appears to have introduced, in large measure, the "satisfaction" possible in Film Noir, and with it's unexpected commercial success, created a "world" and a moral order that audiences were willing to re-enter repeatedly, embracing its "overtly counter-cultural acts" in order to experience the kind of satisfaction that came from watching Sam Spade soundly reject romanticism, living by the moral order of a "narcissistic, defeatist code".

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[1] Schrader, Paul. (1972) Notes on Film Noir, Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 1. Spring, 1972.
[2] Altman, R. (1996) 'Cinema and Genre', in Nowell-Smith, G. (ed) 1996 The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.276-85. 

How Green Was My Valley; How much of Ford?

If, as Sarris stated, the Auteur Theory is in a “pattern of constant flux,” [1] then it seems rather problematic to use any defined parameters of what constitutes an Auteur to prove the Auteurism of any given director, writer or other film artist or technician.

 Yet the inclusion of certain names in any theoretician’s pantheon of Auteurs also brings into question what the use of the name of that director implies.  Foucault indicated “unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts – separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence.”[2]  It is possible then, that the reason the films of John Ford are strung together for contextual analysis as one “work” is primarily because they are all brandished with his name, and that the trends and value binaries that are prevalent in his work are as much reflective of the cultures in which he functioned as of his unique personality or influence.  If it is true, as Barthes argued, that “The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture,”[3] then it might become impossible to separate the influence of Ford on the film from the influence of the contemporary culture and fashionable practices on the film from the influence of the contemporary culture and fashionable practices on Ford. 

While on the one hand, a practitioner like Sarris would likely look for similarities amongst Ford’s work to constitute a signature, Wollen would attempt to “reveal [an] author where none had been seen before”[4] by employing a deep textual analysis to identify “defining characteristics of an author’s work [that] are not necessarily those which are most readily apparent,” and while Wollen’s approach is more likely to effectively trace shifts over time in the more complex textual themes of Ford’s work, they still default to identifying these shifts with Ford as an author or defining influence, rather than more overarching cultural tensions, or even the effect of these tensions on Ford himself.

We know that over the course of John Ford’s prolific career, his personal political inclinations shifted significantly, and it is possible that this is reflected in the darkening and maturation of his work.  It’s certainly possible to attribute this shift as a catalyst for his revisionist Westerns.  Though, Foucault might point out there was also a World War and a number of weighty paradigm shifts happening world wide throughout that shift.  Whether Ford’s shift from portraying the “mythology of the American West to portraying the American West as a myth”[5] can be attributed to his personal disillusionment, to the disillusionment of the culture for which he created, to the increasingly complicated and benevolent relationship he had with the Navajo tribe he repeatedly used to portray “Indians” for good or ill in his films, or to the maturity of aging, is impossible to dissect and compartmentalize. 

How Green Was My Valley (was certainly steeped in visual and thematic stylizations that a Sarris-level Auteur definition would expect and that are fairly consistent throughout the films that Ford directed.  There was ample screen space afforded to ritual and routine, a plethora of purposely framed symbolic shots, (Mr. Gruffydd framed in a cemetery after Angharad’s wedding) an implied worldview within the performed text that women exist only in relation to men (evidenced by every spoken line by a woman, and reaffirmed by the text ending with the loss of the last adult male) , and a healthy dose of tension between archetypically opposing forces.  (Tradition vs. Modernity, Poverty vs. Dignity) It is certain that both Sarris and Wollen were able to find ample instances to analyze this film as a piece authored by Ford. 

But interestingly, Ford was brought into this project rather last second.  It was initially adapted from the Richard Llewellyn novel by Philip Dunne to be directed by William Wyler as a 4-hour-long epic.  The script was whittled down to include only Huw’s childhood while it was still under Wyler’s hand, and Ford made no notable changes to that script.  The only recorded changes he made to the existing plan were to re-cast Bronwyn and Angharad with 2 of his favorite actresses, and to bring on Arthur Miller as the director of photography.  This potentially complicates the application of the Auteur theory, but possible strengthens Sarris’ incorporeal argument that the temperature of the director on set, or the “élan of his soul” becomes manifest in the completed work.  Beyond his signature applications of mise-en-scene, few of the other tensions and themes consistent with his other work can be directly traced to his post-pre-production work, and if present, must then be attributed to his presence on the set, directing and conversing with the actors and crew.

If, in a film like How Green Was My Valley, the Auterism of John Ford managed to be manifest, it is possibly a testament to the more cinematic and less explicable features of the Auteur theory, proving that “ the structure is associated with a single director… not because he has played the role of the artist, expressing himself or his own vision in the film, but because it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual involved.” (Wollen)

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[1] Sarris, Andrew. Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962

[2] Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press, 1977.  Essay: “What is an Author?”

[3] Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Ubu Web Papers. 1967

[4] Wollen, Peter. From “Signs and Meanings in the Cinema.” The Auteur Theory. British Film Institute, 1997.

[5] http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2010janmar/ford.html