Showing papers in "Substance in 1974"

On Fritz Lang

Abstract: An amazing fate, Fritz Lang's, and fraught with paradox. Like Stroheim, he was one of the foremost directors, yet not an actor embellished by the surprising prestige accorded every wretched performance; he was like Sternberg, yet without a woman like Marlene at his side; like Murnau, dying (forty years ago) a death wrapped in mystery; in a sense, Fritz Lang was the first in his day, solely for his work as a filmmaker, to have become cinematic legend. There is Welles, of course, again an actor, whose reputation (being at least mythic) rests upon having provoked America. And there is Hitchcock. But the myth here is concealed beneath a sociological facility, an imagery which hides the essential man. In a sense Lang alone incarnates, decisively yet abstractly, the concept of direction or mise-en-scene. Nor is his life foreign to this idea: his opposition to Goebbels, his flight from Germany and his disillusioned return after twenty years of exile in America; the way he visibly poses, from the filming of Siegfried, as scenarist of destiny -all this gives Lang a quality of violent compaction. This is the horizon which protects the pure and rigorous image of cinema par excellence. From Les trois Lumieres in 1922, each of Lang's films confirms his status as a great artist -the greatest, with Murnau, of the German filmmakers. Twelve years later he is in Hollywood. Enmeshed in the gears of the American machine, he produces twenty-three films: a little more than one per year. Even though he often turns down one project and chooses another, he films every possible Hollywood subject: psychological and social drama, detective and adventure stories, war films, Westerns; he does everything but American or musical comedy, and he touches on that in You and Me. Lang becomes a Hollywood director; the independent author of Metropolis reluctantly shoots a remake of La Bate humaine. He is a great director, praised for his exceptional rigor and keenness. Nothing more. The grandeur of Hollywood amply rewards the absence of critical distance.

Bataille and Communication: Savoir, Non-Savoir, Glissement, Rire

Abstract: A multiplicity of dual oppositions structures Bataille's system. These oppositions are individually developed according to a stable, repeated configuration. The specificity of Bataille's categories, considered as a factor governing their substitutive invocations and multiple contexts, is perceptible only as a function of this specialized configuration of opposition. The purpose of this essay will be to describe certain structures of opposition found in Bataille's text, in the context of their relation to that zone of his system which may be termed "knowledge". On a most basic level, the Bataillian opposition may be described as a confrontation of two terms which places in question the ontological status of the space designated by their proximity. The terms, whose immediate relation is given as nontoleration, will be further articulated by Bataille according to a model of compressed intimacy or contiguity whose violence will be described as a mise en jeu. This mise en jeu is simultaneously a mise en question. For instance, the terms "continuity" and "discontinuity" will designate a concept of ipseity whose radical closure is in question. The terms "prohibition" and "transgression" will describe, with their complement "ddpense", a concept of "escape from closure" whose possibility or accomplishment is in question. The terms "savoir" and "non-savoir" will designate a mode of cognition whose status as a reification is in question. These oppositions, along with such others as

All Films Are Political

Abstract: The polemic initiated between Cinethique and Les Cahiers du Cinema involves, like most polemics, a few ridiculous and paltry aspects that we won't even mention. Its very origins, from what the arguments of the two reviews allow us to guess about them, seem too obscure and ignoble (fear of competition at Les Cahiers? Ill humor on the part of Cin'thique faced with publication by Les Cahiers of Eisenstein's theoretical writings; and the adoption by the latter of the theses of Change, the rival review to Tel Quel whose ties with Cinethique seem close?) for us to dwell on them at any length. What is interesting is that this polemic has induced both publications to state, each from its own side, the bases of a true theory of cinema criticism. And, curiously, while one would expect to see violently antagonistic positions facing off, we find on the contrary, confirmation of the proximity, often extreme, even the coincidence of the points of view that are expressed. This naturally leads each of the editorial staffs to congradulate itself on these convergences, as if it were a question of a rallying to its own assertions. Yet it is right under the circumstances to point out the prior appearance of Cin"thique's first

Critical Investigations: Language Games: (Post) Modern (Isms)

Abstract: Shall I always torment myself and will my mind never, 0 Lord, come to rest in any certainty? Like an invalid turning over in his bed in'search of steep, I am restless from morning till night, and at night my anxiety awakens me. I am anxious to know what I shall be; I do not even know what I want to be, but I do know that I must choose. I should like to progress on safe and sure roads that lead only to the point where I have decided to go. But I don't know; I don't know what I ought to want. I am aware of a thousand possibilities in me, but I cannot resign myself to want to be only one of them. And every moment, at every word I write, at each gesture I make, I am terrified at the thought that this is one more ineradicable feature of my physiognomy becoming fixed: a hesitant impersonal physiognomy, an amorphous physiognomy, since I have not been capable of choosing and tracing its contours confidently.

The semiotic parole

Abstract: MILAN: A clean, white Cathedral, in the middle of a rather broad piazza totally free from cars and abandonned to tourists and to a myriad of pigeons always ready to fly away as soon as someone passes by. On your right, immense inarticulate sculptures of iron blue, black, red -, which stand out sharply against the background of the Italian-orange City Museum; still and quiet, the sculptures vibrate only in the early morning while trolleys pass by and transmit their metallic murmur on the deserted piazza; the noise surprises the few pedestrians who, at those early hours, are walking across it to have a quick breakfeast coffee con Zecce, and croissants in the immense Motta cafe just beside the gaping mouth of the Victor Emmanuel Arcade: the abyss of fashion. Deserted at that time, but crowded and murmuring later in the day. As a matter of fact, the heart of the city and the second heart of the Congress. Since at night Italians are packed here, talking with passion about politics, football, inflation, food, because it is specifically the parole place, and in its deepest sense, in its most phatic function: la parlotte (chit-chat), it is hardly surprising that one compares this huge arch to a mouth.

Esthetics and Politics in Cinematic Language

Abstract: France one of the most debated -and perhaps most controversial -issues in literary criticism has been the rapport between literary structures and social and economic ones. In certain circles, it became almost axiomatic to equate realism with capitalism. It took some time before a similar equation between realism and capitalism entered the world of cinema. True, such an equation had already been made in the 1920's: Dziga Vertov and other Soviet Futurists had condemned traditional psychological, realistic drama and film as the "opiate of the people". But the demands of the Futurists were forgotten for nearly half a century, and it wasn't until the late 1960's -largely under the May-June events of 1968 -that a number of film critics, as well as directors, once again began to react against realism on political grounds. This critical orientation was found principally in three journals: Les Cahiers du Cinema (which passed into new, more militant hands as a result of the May-June events), the newly founded MarxistLeninist review Cinethique, and, of course, Tel Que1. Among the directors most associated with this approach was Jean-Luc Godard. Although the various theoreticians did not agree on all issues by any means, they would have concurred, I am sure, on the basic premise that realistic film was an ally of capitalism insofar as it created an illusion of reality which served to mask the real facts of existence -ideological and social -from the viewer.

Film Study in Paris

Abstract: "You've got Hollywood, why did you come to Paris to study film?" This question definitely wins the prize as the most frequently asked by French people who find out I'm an American studying film in Paris. And each time it inevitably recurs, I smile and try to steer the conversation off into another direction, perhaps taking it as a cue to ask, "Ah do you like American films? Howard Hawks?" Because to explain why and how not only Americans, but students from many countries are drawn to Paris to study film, to explain this considering the difficulties of finding a projector which functions at a Paris university or renting a 16 mm film in this country, to explain that studying film here means studying French intellectual thought during the day and frequenting the Cin6matheque by night, all that is beyond my day to day conversational patience. And I find my interrogators are usually much happier reliving Scarface anyway. But on the other hand, if any of you, reading this, are really interested in hearing what it's like studying film in Paris, I'll try my best to capsulize. Imagine, if you will, Barthes' first session of his seminar for American students. He strolls in, briefcase in hand, sits down, takes out a cigar, surveys the room, and when he begins, it is with the acknowledgement that there are cetain periods in certain countries when thought, for some reason, moves faster and farther than in other times or in other places and "the last twenty years mark such an accelerated period of intellectual work in France." We'll come back to Barthes and the ironic mixture of modesty and self-awareness which allows him to present and analyze his own work as if he were his own most apt student/critic, but for the moment, let's consider that opening statement which is so obvious that it can only seem striking as a degree zero starting point. For it is in those same twenty years that cinema has become an object of serious study in France. The thought directed towards film has evolved in these years, undergoing the same permutations of approach witnessed in other areas (literature, history). The theories abound,

Semiology & Film Criticism: "Children of Paradise"

Abstract: The number of writings in Anglo-American film journals on semiology and the cinema has risen exponentially in recent years. Basically this outpouring has gone in two directions. First, there have been many translations, principally from the French, of the basic statements of Christian Metz and others.1 However, more importantly Anglo-American writers have begun to re-interpret, extend and modify the work of their French counterparts. Chiefly centered around the British journal, Screen, these writers have attempted to incorporate semiotics into auteur and ideological criticism.2 Both types produced fall under the heading of film theory and aesthetics. These writers have only rarely attempted to apply the concepts they have developed to the analysis and criticism of one specific film. Metz's analysis of Adieu Philippine is a unigue extended analysis of a single film using semiolical tools. This discussion will attempt to partially fill in this gap of knowledge. The film to be examined in this case will be Marcel Carnd's Children of Paradise (1945). Proceeding this will be the development of the two major concepts to be applied in the analysis. The other major semiotic concepts employed will be accepted as they are currently used by Anglo-American theoreticians. Due to the length of the film under examination and complexity of the analysis, only six shots from the film will be scrutinized. A complete analysis of this film would require book length.

JEAN MITRY on FILM LANGUAGE

Abstract: Before linguists turned their attention to film, filmmakers, critics, and enthusiasts-turned-theorists--among them Sergei Eisenstein, Louis Delluc, and Jean Mitry--engaged consciously if sometimes naively in the investigation of film as a language. Linguists has since provided a vocabulary and an approach to the question of filmic signification, precipitating enormous progress in the theory of film and much partisanship. Lines are now clearly drawn between the old guard, responsible, in Stephen Heath's words, for "the flow of (ideologically complicit)1drivel that currently and massively passes for 'film criticism'" and the avant-garde or "scientists" of film theory, the semioticians. Jean Mitry's monumental Esthitique et psychologie du cinrma has been called the most comprehensive statement by the old, and Christian Metz's essay, "Le cinema: langue ou langage?" the first of the new.2 Mitry's work is hoped by Metz to be "l'aboutissement de toute une epoque de la reflexion sur le cinema"3 characterized by works highly intuitive and sometimes insightful on the "cinema" in general. Metz and others would replace film theory in the tradition of Eisenstein, Bazin, Balazs and Mitry with specific and scientific investigations of filmic signification. The difference is founded in method and focus. Mitry will explain film; Metz will determine the cinetext. But Mitry's specific analysis of the process of filmic signification is in large part praised by Metz,4 who accepts much of it as a point of departure for his own work. Indeed, Metz and Mitry occupy central positions on a continuum of claims relating to film and language. On that continuum there are film theorists and linguists who deny film the status of language because it is a mere recording device, or because filmic signification fails to conform to patterns of verbal signification. There are those for whom film is a"ianguage"despite its essentially free and uncodified structurations. There are those who find a certain ele-