Copy protection? Margulies on forging auteurism

Chantal Akerman oversees a vocal recording for a musical in Les Années 80 (The Eighties, Akerman, 1983).

An interesting observation about auteurism by Ivone Margulies, author of the great book Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, in an interview by Ricky D Ambrose posted on the Tisch Film Review website (my emphasis):

My weakest work is when I try to discuss an idea without paying attention to the form. I don’t see the two as separate. Formalism for me is someone like Bordwell, who really is describing a shot; he’s so good at what he does, and it’s helpful. I’m not putting it down at all, but formalism ends there. You can’t be halfway. If you’re fully a formalist, you’re not just a formalist. There’s a way in which you need to return to the filmmaker, to what she is doing, and to be particular. I’m an auteurist in that sense; I think that people have their signature and that it cannot be forged. And that comes back to the idea of the long take, and questioning why are there people that are weaker at using it than others. And Akerman, too, is not always good. There are points where she seems almost Mannerist.

While I concur with Margulies' background point, here, about the particularity of individual human experience, and thus of biography (cf. J. P. Sartre's '"Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry '), I am not sure I agree with her about the resistance to forgery of auteurist signatures.

If 'signature' is what is repeatedly recognisable as such by a critic, then it is difficult to argue, in broad terms, that it could not be copied or appropriated by others. But is there a part of 'signature' - some deep mark of authenticity, some very particular aspect of the film artist's handling - that cannot be 'captured' or reproduced?

Yet another definition

“Auteur…it’s a word halfway between amateur and autocrat.”

from Overheard at The Auteurs

Viral replication: Virgil Widrich's Copy Shop

I spent some of my happiest hours in some of my most formative years working in a photocopy and print shop, at the same time as pondering questions of originality and copying as part of PhD research into notions of authorship. So, for me, a truly must-see film was Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich 's dizzyingly virtuosic Copy Shop (2001). This film 'consists of nearly 18,000 photocopied digital frames, which are animated and filmed with a 35mm camera' (see the 'Making of Copy Shop' HERE). Its full-length version is quite widely available as part of the Cinema 16: European Short Films (2006) DVD.

Below is the little essay about Copy Shop reproduced on its website. Along with the video interview with Widrich embedded beneath it, it's an interesting example of what I call (following Timothy Corrigan's conceptualisation of the extra-textual notion of cinematic authorship - 'the commerce of auteurism') 'Directing Cinema' discourse, the phenomenon by which the director (or the 'ghost director' - i.e. a film marketing department) attempts to 'direct' (us) before, during, and (as here) after the film's production.

Identity and the cinema
Cinema enables the viewer to adopt an "alter-ago" for a while, safe in the knowledge that, no matter what happens, the film will be over at some point. This alter-ego can "slip into" one or more of the characters on the screen. In movies, identification is usually achieved by using "subjective shots" so that the viewer sees what the character "sees", thus merging with the character. A sequence of this kind usually looks like this:
A) Objective shot: The character looks past the camera

B) Subjective shot: The camera shows what the character sees

C) Objective shot: The character reacts to what he/she has seen

"Copy Shop" takes this a step further: the viewer is identified with a character, who then proceeds to lose his own identity.

1. Objective = Subjective
In the cinema, one important rule must be adhered to so that the viewer registers the change from an objective to a subjective angle, at least subconsciously: the difference between objective and subjective angles is that the one watching must never be directly visible in a subjective shot. In "Copy Shop" this rule is deliberately broken. The same shot is used first as an objective angle, and again later as a subjective angle, i.e. the same perspective can be perceived by different observers. For example: At the beginning of the story "we" (objective shot) see Alfred Kager wake up and go into the bathroom.

In a later scene "we" (objective shot) see Alfred Kager standing in the bathroom looking into the bedroom. "We" see what Alfred Kager "sees", and for this exactly the same shot is used as was used at the beginning: a doppelgänger, who looks like Alfred Kager, is lying in bed (subjective shot), wakes up and goes into the bathroom.

In a still later scene, when there are already three Alfred Kagers, the objective view of Kager standing in the bathroom and looking, which has already been seen, becomes the subjective view of Kager observing a doppelgänger standing in the bathroom, who is in turn watching, in a kind of subordinate subjective shot, as a further doppelgänger lies in bed, wakes up and goes into the bathroom. The first two thirds of the film give the viewer time to come to grips with the game. As long as the viewer knows who is "who", it is also perfectly clear to him/her which of the identical characters is the real Alfred Kager. It is not until the final third that the film gathers speed to such a degree that the identifications become confused.

2. The frame as a copy of the original
"Copy Shop" shows a protagonist fighting for his originality as an individual. But in "Copy Shop" not even the frames are originals; they are only copies. This is done not only to express the fact that the cinema copy is the usual kind of copy for movie theatres, but also that the frames are really and truly "copies" in the literal sense of the word. The technical realization of "Copy Shop" involved the transfer of every single frame from the digital video tape into the computer once the shooting had been finished, from where the frames were printed out on a black and white laser printer and then filmed again with a 35mm animation camera. Thus video becomes paper, paper becomes film and the story of "Copy Shop" is brought to life again "copy by copy".

3. Cinema as a copier
"Copy Shop" is about a copy centre, in other words about the duplication of single pictures which are whisked through machines (in this case copiers) at ever increasing speed. The speed of this duplication, which rises to 24 frames a second in the course of the story, represents an acoustic and optical correlation to the related process of a film projector’s operation. Kager, the hero of "Copy Shop", fights not only against his doppelgängers, but above all against the pictures that they copy and thus against the film in which he is forever entrapped.

Thanks a lot to Joanna Kerr for telling me about this film. And thanks to Virgil Widrich, its brilliant director.

Incidentally, the new Cinema 16 - World Short Films (2008) has just been released.

Headless auteurism! Lucrecia Martel in London

La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman director Lucretia Martel and producers Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar at the film's North American premiere at the 46th New York Film Festival, October 6, 2008

Sorry it's been a little too quiet round here again, this month. Next Tuesday (nasty cold permitting) I am due to give a paper at a Screen Medias and Cultures Research seminar in Cambridge, and I've been hard at work on it beyond cyberspace, along with fulfilling some other commitments (book reviews and suchlike; plus other blogging, of course).

I will be talking about the 'experience of auteurism' in contemporary film culture, and Pedro Almodóvar will be my principal example. In this paper, it's important to talk about a director I love, as experiences of 'director love' (alongside auteur desire, as Dana Polan so wonderfully called it) are precisely what I am looking at. I am sure to write more about this topic here, after the talk.

Next to Almodóvar, the other director whose work I love -- more than most others, at any rate -- is the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, and next week I will finally get to see her new film La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman which will have its UK premiere as part of the seventh annual Discovering Latin America Film Festival. Martel will be at the screening at the Tate Modern's Starr Auditorium (or 'the filmwomb', as I like to think of it).

Martel's latest film has inspired both utter devotion and ridicule (see Peter Bradshaw's article on it for today's Guardian Film Blog: 'How I lost my head for The Headless Woman'). It also seems to have provoked, albeit on a much smaller scale, the kind of polite but frenzied attempts to nail down its central enigmas unwitnessed since Michael Haneke's Caché deliberately foxed many a metropolitan-elite film audience a few years ago.

If you've seen the film, or if, like me, you are impatient to experience it, then you might like to read by far the best English language film review of The Headless Woman of the many I've read: that by Michael J. Anderson for his great weblog Tativille (one of the best websites out there for elegantly written and judicious film criticism, by Anderson and his partner Lisa K. Broad - thanks to Sergio Dias-Branco for his original tip, way back when, to check Tativille out).

If you are just regularly curious, below is the trailer for the film (sorry not to have been able to locate a version with English subtitles). Hasta la vista.

'Antonioni: Extreme Aesthete of the Real'

A quiet month at Directing Cinema draws to a close (quiet here at the blog at least; noisier with the book, thankfully). But I wanted mark a chilly, damp beginning to Autumn in East Sussex with a warm and sunny recommendation for an article by a friend and former colleague of mine: James S. Williams, Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. James Williams has written on major authors and filmmakers such as Marguerite Duras, Albert Camus, Jean-Luc Godard, Roland Barthes, Jean Cocteau, Cyril Collard and Claire Denis.

Williams has just had an article on a non-francophone director published in the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57). It's available online if you have a subscription or JSTOR (etc) access. The article is entitled 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real'. The abstract reads as follows:

This essay assesses Antonioni’s oeuvre in its totality, focusing in particular on its constant negotiation of two extremes: documentary and melodrama. The essay argues that Antonioni’s is a visionary project which, by achieving a genuine encounter between art and technology, extends an earlier tradition of the European avant-garde. [hyperlinks added]

What I think is especially valuable about this essay is that it treats Antonioni's film techniques, across all of his work, in much more detail than most other studies (and, certainly, than all other studies I have read of academic article length). It manages to make, as many other works do, plenty of interesting observations about Antonioni's themes, but it does not subordinate an exploration of formal aesthetics in the process: its focus remains assuredly and insightfully on how Antonioni’s techniques 'resensitize us to the world' [p. 53]

Williams notes that Antonioni's 'highly ambivalent aesthetic attitude to documentary reality was already visible at the beginning of his career':

Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.

[...] however hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [p. 50]

Williams' article is especially good, I feel, on Antonioni's deployment of melodrama in the interests of 'an exploration of the processes of human perception and modern subjectivity':

Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [p. 52]

In a section of the article entitled 'A New Techno-Aesthetic?', an insightful connection is made between Antonioni's melodramatic techniques and what fellow Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his famous essay, 'Cinema of Poetry', called Antonioni's free indirect subjective [p. 55 - see Patrick Keating's useful article online HERE for a good discussion of Pasolini's essay).

I'm not teaching about Antonioni's films to students at the moment, but, if I were, Williams' beautifully written and gloriously illustrated essay would be top of the class-reading list. Please don't just take my inevitably biased word for it: take a proper look at it yourselves.

Other online resources I have used previously in teaching about this Italian director are given below.

HERE's a link to the excellent bibliography of materials on Michelangelo Antonioni provided by the UC Berkeley Library.

And below are some links to other, good, online articles:

• James Brown, "Michelangelo Antonioni." (profile and film survey) Senses of Cinema
• James Brown, "Il Grido: Modernising the Po." Senses of Cinema
• Gregory Solman, "L'Avventura." Senses of Cinema
• Absjørn Grønstad, "Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up." Film Journal
• Jack Turner, "Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text." Other Voices
• Fiona A.Villella, "Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point." Senses of Cinema
• Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal

Mike Figgis blogging

I am very much enjoying following British film director Mike Figgis's guest blog for Film in Focus (the Faber & Faber film site). Catch it while you can.

Figgis's company website - red-mullet.com - is also worth a visit. And while we're in the linking business, here's Figgis's commercial showreel (via QuickTime). Boy oh boy, can you can read his signature there...

Mamet on directing film

Short but good Bloomberg interview with David Mamet (Night Talk, July 2006)

On of my favourite writers on film directing is film director David Mamet. He's not my favourite film director, but his short, insightful and peppery book On Directing Film is a very good read and, along the way, argues for the 'objectivity' of film directing; it's a kind of self-help guide cum film-school-degree-zero.

Here are some of the key snippets from that book on what Mamet thinks that film directors (should) do:

‘The main questions a director must answer are:

• “where do I put the camera?”and “what do I tell the actors?; and a subsequent question, “what’s the scene about?”'
• (On Directing Film, p. 1)

• ‘The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
• The work on the set is nothing. All you have to do on set is stay awake, follow your plans, help the actors be simple, and keep your sense of humour. The film is directed in the making of the shot list.
• The work on the set is simply to record what has been chosen to be recorded. It is the plan that makes the movie.’
• (On Directing Film, p. 5)
  

• ‘It is always up to you to decide whether you are going to tell the story through a juxtaposition of shots or whether you are not.
• It’s not always up to you to decide whether or not that process is going to be interesting.
• Any real technique is going to be based on things within your control. Anything that is not based on things within your control is not a real technique.'
• (On Directing Film, p. 103)

Mamet has also made a film about filmmaking: the wonderful State and Main (USA, 2000). Here's the trailer:

Posted on YouTube (link HERE) by lidiablogspot on May 8, 2008

[See also Matt Zoller Seitz, 'From the short stack: David Mamet on the Steadicam', on the great The House Next Door blog]

Good Directing: The Dark Knight 2

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, USA, 1942)

My series of discussions of 'good directing' continues today, as promised, with my drawing on VF Perkins' article 'Moments of Choice', first published in The Movie, no. 58 (Orbis Publishing, 1981) and republished online (link HERE) by the Australian film journal Rouge (issue no. 9, 2006).

I do this because it's hard to begin discussing good directing in relation to a particular film without a detailed sense, in advance, of what the potential components of a good directorial performance might be. One of the best, and certainly the most detailed, senses of this, I believe, can be derived from Perkins' subtle understanding of mise en scène as the complex film texture (my phrase) that emerges from many 'moments of [directorial] choice' (his phrase).

I will begin by snippeting (in their original order) what I think that 'Moments of Choice' sets out as the component parts of fine film directing in classic, 1930s-50s Hollywood films - 'Old Hollywood', as Perkins refers to it below.

[Just to contextualise the first snippet in my list, Perkins opens his article with a remarkable discourse on Orson Welles's expensive choice to build a set for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) 'inside the largest available refrigeration plant', showing the lengths to which some Hollywood directors went in achieving their 'vision'. He concludes that passage with this next sentence.]

• "The very breath of an actor can be made significant when the director places it in an expressive relationship with the other aspects of the scene."
• "[D]irecting a film is always about making choices of this kind – hundreds of them every day and at every stage in the translation from script to screen."
• "Many of the choices are matters of craft. The director works to make the scenes vivid and varied, so as to achieve an arresting presentation of the characters and their story."
• "The most promising script, judiciously cast, will still fall flat if the director is unable to get all the elements of the production working together – either in harmony or in lively contrast – so that the end result flows when it is played to an audience. If it does not work on the screen, we are likely to think that there was not much of a story or that the performances were lacking. But often the fault lies in the director’s inability to find a style that brings the material convincingly to life. Just as often, it is the director who should take the credit for our belief that we have seen a credible and forceful story with colourful and engaging characterisation."
• "Old Hollywood was well aware how much its product stood to gain, as entertainment, from a style that rendered its drama effectively and made it look, move and sound as if it had a sense of direction."
• "[Old Hollywood] expected directors to be capable production managers and to complete their work on time, on budget and without major damage to studio morale. But it also valued and rewarded the ability to control performance, image and editing so as to create moods and viewpoints through which the story could persuade and grip the audience."
• "Physical aspects of production like décor and dress can help the actors to feel themselves into their roles. But the detail of performance that brings the characters to life – movement, gesture, intonation, rhythm – has to be established on the set. Here the director’s job is, particularly, to hold each and every moment of performance within a vision of the scene as a whole so that the impact and effectiveness of today’s scene is not achieved at the expense of what was filmed last week or what remains to be shot. The continuity of the end product is, most often, an impression that has to be constructed and protected in spite of the radically discontinuous method of shooting."
• "The pacing of a scene may seem just right in itself, but how will it look when the audience reaches it halfway through the film? Directors work in the knowledge that nothing is right ‘in itself’ but only in relation to the developing design. Balance and proportion are crucial."
• "[I]n movies everything is designed to be filtered through the eye of the camera and remade in the patterns created on the cutting bench. [...] The camera’s frame and the editor’s scissors provide the means whereby the director carves a particular path through the world constructed on the set. [...]Selection and sequence are the keys to viewpoint that the director controls. [...] Cutting and camera movement are both means through which direction shifts and manipulates viewpoint."
• "[T]he expansiveness of a film style is so much a matter of balance, of what happens when you put together, in a particular way, a posture, a facial expression, an off-screen voice and a camera viewpoint. At the very centre of the director’s job is this task of co-ordination. Direction works with the various talents of highly skilled artists to ensure their contributions meet in a coherent design."

I would further summarise Perkins' points as follows. Fine film directing in 'old' Hollywood involved:

1. Taking responsibility for 'expressive relationships'

2. Achieving the 'vivid and varied' presentation of characters, scenes, and story as part of the translation from script to screen

3. Getting the end result to 'flow' when presented to an audience; including taking responsibility for the appropriate shifting and manipulating of spectatorial viewpoint, as well as for the 'developing design' -- the pacing, balance, and continuity -- of the end product as a whole.

4. Ensuring that the contribution of all the creative participants in filmmaking meet in this coherent design, thus achieving, in the final product, a style which, amongst other things, might give a particular film a rich sense of direction.

On this final matter of style, in the last part of his essay Perkins draws an interesting distinction between the full directorial achievement of ‘style’ and that of ‘manner’, as follows:

Many directors seem to have lived quite happily within these prescriptions [those of 'the classic ['Old Hollywood'] approach which valued formal design only so long as it supported the spectator’s involvement, understanding, pleasure and belief in the narrative' and in which 'quite strict notions of what was appropriate were in play'], being ready to exert their skills within a range of genres to achieve effective versions of the accepted manner. The limitation of such adaptable know-how was that it would seldom carry a film beyond the qualities of the package originally handed down by the studio. A movie directed by, say, Michael Curtiz would be neither more nor less than the sum of its carefully blended ingredients. Sometimes that was enough. It is no mean praise to say that Casablanca (1942) was as good as its script and cast.
But it is probably fair to claim that Curtiz’s best films achieve a dramatically effective manner, rather than a style. The various elements of the film are harnessed only to a reliable judgement of what will make the story work. More is possible. The films of Ophuls, Ray and Sirk, among others, are there to demonstrate how, with no sacrifice of movie-craft, the director can bind the movie together in a design that offers a more personal and detailed conception of the story’s significance, embodying an experience of the world and a viewpoint both considered and felt. At this point, manner becomes style.

Personally, I don't think it is possible to 'quantify', or indeed to 'qualify', very good, Hollywood, film directing any better than this.

In my next post in this series, I will turn my attention fully to Christopher Nolan's direction of The Dark Knight, and ask some questions of it, including the following:

• Will Perkins' thoughts, which were very much intended to be contextually specific (referring to the classic Hollywood years), help us to discern the extent of directorial achievement in Nolan's contemporary Hollywood work?
• Will they help us know what to do with an interesting issue raised by Len Esten (of the Illiterary Fiction blog?) in his comment about my first post on The Dark Knight: what of those moments where films seem deliberately to choose not to be 'vivid and varied' but, indeed, to be potentially ponderous and verbose (e.g. the 'psychiatrist sequence' near the end of Hitchcock's Psycho [USA 1960])?
• Do we need to have lots of information about the production process in order to apply Perkins' insights about 'moments of choice'? Or can his insights be applied retroactively, the choices, and thus their 'directorial quality', 'read' off the resulting texture of the finished film?

In the meantime, please feel encouraged to comment about these and other questions on this topic.

© 2008 Catherine Grant

P.S. There's an insightful and beautifully written blog post -- entitled Good Manners -- on television authorship and mise-en-scène (in particular relation to Kim Manners' direction of fifty or so The X Files episodes) by Sergio Dias-Branco, my very talented friend and former colleague in Film Studies at the University of Kent, the first of several upcoming posts by him on this important topic.

Ye Olde Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon

Just discovered that the rather fantastic goatdogblog held a (now so over) movies about movies blogathon. 28 films were written about, from the 1930s to the present day, ranging across lots of different national cinemas.

Plenty of films you'd expect to see in the list, including Mulholland Dr., King Kong (1933), Be Kind Rewind, and La Nuit américaine (also see HERE); and some I hadn't come across before: Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof) (Mario O'Hara, 1998), and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) (Guru Dutt, 1959).

Please visit goatdogblog for all the links to entries. I look forward to reading them, belatedly, and also to expanding my most active blogroll, as a result, over at Film Studies For Free.

My upcoming post about - On Good Directing: The Dark Knight 2 (see 1)- should be ready in the next couple of days (it's a little bit of a b l o c k b u s t e r).

Humberto Solás Dies

Sadly, the great Cuban film director Humberto Solás died from cancer on September 17th, aged 66.

There's a great and touching obituary by Latin-American film scholar and fellow filmmaker Michael Chanan in today's Guardian newspaper (online link HERE). For anyone who wants to know more about Solás's film work, including his wonderful 1968 film Lucía, there's a good study by Peter Rist (Concordia University, Montréal) for the Canadian online journal Offscreen (Volume 10, Issue 2 (February 28, 2006), accessible HERE.

In his obituary of the Cuban filmmaker, Chanan writes of Lucía:

Lucía was a tour de force: three episodes in three different cinematic styles about three women, each called Lucía, set during three different moments in Cuba's history. Lucía 1895 is shot in a histrionic style, influenced by the Italian director Luchino Visconti, replete with the extraordinary image of naked black liberation fighters riding out to meet the Spanish cavalry. Lucía 1933 turns to Hollywood models and adopts the more sedate style of domestic melodrama by Cukor or Kazan, while Lucía 196? takes on the hue of the nouvelle vague

Here's a (sadly unsubtitled) YouTube video of some sequences from Lucía, posted by videotrading on August 06, 2006. The video gives some sense of Lucía's radical form.

And, finally, here's a wonderful YouTube video of a Cuban television segment, posted by cedecom in July of this year, in which Solás talks about cinema and his career, including his turn in latter years to digital technology. Apologies, but it's also unsubtitled.