Un Sang d'un Poete

Compared to Cornell's Rose Hobart, Jean Cocteau's, un Sang d'un Poete is a much more personal film, displaying a heterotopic space (Burgin), composed of the artist's own memory and experience. Although images are presented in a fragmented manner, the Cocteau's film appears less hypnotic than Cornell's since Cocteau provides a four section structure with accompanying titles: "The Wounded Hands or Scars of the Poet", "Do Walls Have Ears?", "The Snow Ball fight", "The Profanation of the Host". The narrator's words break up that hypnotic effect providing a foundation to which the audience might attempt to allegorise or attempt to make sense. This structure becomes problematic for Le Sang d'un poet in some ways contradicting Cocteau's quote that "a film is not a telling of a dream" .

The first and last part of the film appear the most absurd and abstract following the unexplantory logic of dreams. In the first the mouth of the painted portrait moves from the canvas to the artists hands. The latter depicts a woman, transforming into the statue of Orpheus similar to the one the poet smashes in the second section. Yet traces of Cocteau's experience of an artist are evident within these dream sequences. The poet becomes autobiographical figure of Cocteau who as an artist would no doubt have succumbed to the creative blocks and tortures of the artist. Similarly the transformation of the woman into god like figure of Orpheus, echoing the poet's death in part two, suggests the poet's desire to be immortalised as a great creative figure.

The middle section of the film in which the poet plunges into the mirror seems as if we travel with the poet into another dimension, a dream within a dream. Although quite surreal, these episodes aren't quite so random in so far as they tell of Cocteau's inspiration of an artist. Death seems to be a major theme in these two sections, the suicide death, and the accidental death in the boy in the snow, connects to Cocteau's personal childhood, for its difficult not to separate the man's suicide, with Cocteau's loss of his own father at a young age. Similarly the slowness of the action in the snowball fight imbues the incident with great pathos, almost as if Cocteau tells us an episode from his own childhood (except of course he doesn't die like the boy) When I saw this, it reminded me of other Modernists artists who had interwoven the stories of childhood into their art, in particular novelists like James Joyce in his partially autobiographical novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and W Somerset Maughn in Of Human Bondage. The slowness of both two sections, in particular the snow section, make these episodes appear less dream like, less hypnotic, they seem more like accounts of Cocteau telling the viewer his childhood life, the doorways like passages into his personal history telling of his past desires, delinquency as a teenage boy and personal loss.

So although the film attempts to mimic a dream like logic, Cocteau perhaps unintentionally interweaves his own personal dream into this film, for some of the best films, art and novels derive from an artist's own experience of life. Indeed even Freud wrote an essay on un Sang d'un Poete. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a copy of, however, I can imagine the contents of this film, are brimmed with symbols and events for which Freud would be able to psychoanalyse.

Wise Blood and Cinematic Writing

Wise Blood is one of those novels I found difficult to put down. The narrative flows in a sort of trajectory and much of this for me can be attributed to its form of cinematic writing. Fannery O'Connors descriptions within the text form very concise visual pictures in the way a director might describe their vision of a shot sequence within a film:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.

Even more so the third person narration seems to negate Hazel Motes view, judging by his actions and carefree nature, had the book been written from his perspective I'd imagine his voice to be like Jack Kerouac, traversing the American landscape. The objectivity in the writing, mimicking the lense of a camera that only shows but does not interpret what is occurring on screen. The sense of the author creating a distance between the character and the reader, does shroud Hazel in mystery, making him enigmatic which certainly encouraged me to continue reading the text in the hope of finding out more information about this character. I never did quite figure out his character.

Hazel Motes seemed for me less like a character from a novel then like a character who belongs in a cinematic history of fugitives. In the chapter where Motes goes to buy a car and then proceeds to drive it, was quite a cinematic episode. Afterwards O'Connor describes Motes driving in the novel as well as all the figures, and the sights he comes across:

In a second he got it going forward and he drove off crookedly, past the man and the boy still standing there watching. He kept going forward, thinking nothing and sweating. For a long time he stayed on the street he was on. He had a hard time holding the car in the road. He went past railroad yards for about half-mile and then warehouses....He went past long blocks of gray houses and then blocks of better, yellow houses. ...He went past blocks of white houses, each sitting with an ugly dog face on a square of grass. Finally he went over a viaduct and found the highway.

It was an interesting episode, in so far as I've never come across a novel before that has described a character driving with that depth of narration. Its almost quite documentarian in that it appears as if we are going along this journey with Hazel Motes in present time as we read the words. Yet this event echoes a long line of cinematic films, in particularly Godard's 1960 film Breathless (A Bout de Souffle), whereby Godard shows an extended sequence of the young criminal, Michel, driving after having stolen a car. The camera swerves around the interior of the car, mediating the audience's perspective of the outside, from Michel's perspective, as he goes past rural countryside, women on the road and his frustration at being stuck in traffic behind what he presumes to be a slow female driver but is roadworks.

Similarly, Godard's documentarian film making style, places the viewer at a distance, the viewer never quite connecting with Michel in the same way O'Connor denies an understanding of interior emotions of Motes in Wise Blood.

The act of driving is visually represented through a catalogue of film history particular in America, where the road journey narrative holds a myth, and a symbol of the fugitive character who having been exiled from mainstream society, seeks refuge by travelling to the American South. Hitchcock in his films Psycho and Vertigo portrays characters driving away running away from their fear of their secrets being exposed. There also exists a whole genre of American road movies for instance the recent Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde that have also been satirized in Chevy Chase National Lampoon films which feature the highway as the backdrop to its characters. Perhaps O’Connor's Hazel Motes belong with the characters within such road films. They are fugitives, loners, self destructive, rebellious characters, who can’t quite fit in with the society they live within. The heart of the American landscape and the extensive roads naturally become the space for these individuals traversing from civilized normal society, into the heartland, where dark past secrets can lurk hidden.

The Films of Charles and Ray Eames

The films and designs of Charles and Ray Eames resonate with many people in today’s design world on so many different levels that had I never encountered these films, I would never have noticed their significance. Last week I picked up a copy of Oyster Magazine (an Australian art/fashion/design magazine for a youth audience) which published an article on an anniversary exhibition of Charles and Ray Eames works in America which had occurred earlier this year, suggesting that the ideas of this design duo are resonant within contemporary design today.

Personally I have always considered furniture and their design to be products of mass consumption, and as commodity items since my family work within the furniture design industry. Only in last century with the advent of modernism in art history - I'm thinking of Le Corbusier's modern architectural designs and the German Bauhaus school - has architecture and furniture been conceived as a way of bringing avant garde art into everyday life condensed in the mantra of Louis Sullivan, an American architect who stated “form follows function”. Modern artists were recognising the potential for objects since Marcel Duchamp challenged the artistic canon with his introduction of the Readymade, transforming the domestic coat hook or urinal into an object by simply proclaiming an item to be a work of art. Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box installation deconstructs the nature of everyday commercial item, expressing his idea about simulacra in so far as he believed the mass reproduction of an item or image inevitably results in their death of meaning. Alan Kaprow, a 1970s New York installation artists would create dialogue about the object through his replications of living spaces within art galleries. As these artists demand contemplation on the aesthetics of everyday objects as art, so too do the films of Charles and Ray Eames films. Kaleidescope and House After Five Years of Living urge us to consider these “anonymously designed” objects imbuing them almost with a personality of their own, as they impact on the individual living, working and engaging in that space. Charles and Ray Eames house also epitomises influence of modern design, the colour scheme evoking Piet Mondrian straight line and colour aesthetic.

Within contemporary postmodern society our identification of these objects as mainstream products of mass production for instance the chair, or a house as evocative of a display home within the pages of catalogues, industry magazines or advertising, is far removed from the early experimentation with furniture. There exists a heightened awareness of these objects as commodities and hence they become valued in terms of their commerciability. Yet Karl Lagerfield's fashion designs for Chanel illuminate the blurring of the boundaries between high art and a commodity "low art" object. Consider the following Chanel Be@rbrick released last year.

A bear reminiscent of a larger version of a child's lego figure, turns into a modern day sculptural piece, erring on the status of Adorno's kitsch object and collectable predominantly by adult. The Be@rbrick is a result between collaborations between design houses and MediCom Toy Incorporated, the company behind these savvy Japanese toys. Suprisingly an Eames Be@rbrick exists as well http://bearbricklove.blogspot.com/2007/02/eames-by-design_929.html . Watching the Eames films reminded me of the difficulties in finding the boundary of art, design and the commodity object within the paradigm of 21st century Western culture.

In the Eames' Powers of Ten film they blend science and art, the camera zooming outwards. In this film, the scale of human to the cosmos is questioned alongside science’s concern with observation, data, statistics. Although I have never seen this film as some people in the seminar may have, the exactitude, the documentarian aspect, and the objective monotone voice of the narrator, are reminiscient of films I watched during high school on mysteries of the Universe. Charles and Ray Eames propose in this film the pedagogical function of film to illuminate the multifaceted scale of the human to the Universe, here one no longer needs to abstractly learn about concepts but can visually be shown images of the milky way, our galaxy. This ties in with the ontology of film and photography, as a way of capturing time and aspects of nature hidden to human vision. Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction makes an analogy between the role of the director as analgous to a surgeon, in so much as modern technology has unconcealed what was once hidden to the eye, the surgeon operating can get a glimpse in the intricacies of the human body, in the same way a director can capture everyday life on a microscopic level.

The films of Charles and Ray Eames approach modern film from a sociological phenomenon, and places film as a space in which to explore developments within design and science. Although the breadth of films viewed in Cinematic Modernism have explored films which contribute to the linear development of modern cinema through experimentation with the medium, reaction to Modern urban life and its impact on the human individual, the Eames' film innovatively chart the history of design, art and science through a cinematic medium.

The portrayal of "otherness" in King Kong and Piccadilly

Having recently watched King Kong, i was taken by the way in which it explores facets of the other and the portrayal of pacific cultures as primitive, uncivilized and in binary opposition to a Western, developed nation. The journey into uncharted territory is first devised by film producers with the intention of travelling to make an epic film in the East. They immediately envision and hold an expectation for finding something wild especially in the way the female character is instructed to scream into the camera purporting to see a beastly creature.

Ironically they do find a larger than life creature on remote Pacific islands. The portrayal of difference and the juxtaposition of the East and West set up a power dynamic. The sweeping long shots of the natives and their erratic framing as a group on camera present them as irrational, the gaze of the camera is very much from a eurocentric point of view. I immediately thought of Uncivilized a film I saw in a first year English course(which I've noticed other students have too), that portrayed in single shots the individuality of the Western individuals yet tended to group natives in collective shots displaying their ethnicity, their otherness. The West hold up the East as a spectacle shown in the way King Kong is brought as a specimen and displayed on stage. The spectators sitting in the audience, presents the artifice of the cinema, selfconsciously reminding the audience that this is only a show and mimics the real cinematic audience.

Part of the fascination with the East also resides on its ability to be a threat to Western civilisation impinging upon the known, the rational and everyday existence of Western humanity. In Piccadilly, when we first see Sho Sho dancing in the kitchen, she is shrouded in an air of seduction, yet she poses as a risk to the flow of kitchen management . Even the Chinese characters she writes is subversive and is suggestive of the threat from another linguistic system to a Western one. The yellow filter through which most of the film is projected, was interesting, in that I thought it contained a subliminal message about the threat posed to the West by the East. Yet unlike Kong, towards the end, of Piccadilly, I thought the film does instil some sympathy and pathos for the death of Jim. In King Kong, the a beast appears revered and worshipped in the East but when the travellers encounter him he is viewed as an otherworldly beast embodying sublime terror so much so Ann screams for many minutes on screen. Furthermore when Kong is carted into the Western world he erupts havoc and posits a threat to both public life, in the way the camera glides over the destruction of the city, and private life since Ann is plucked from the interior space. The Americans to whom King Kong poses a threat to, seem only interested in Kong as a beast and a subject of scientific investigation.

In many of the tutorials the issue of scale in cinema has been raised. This film is interesting in that it suggests the relativity of scale. Compared to human, Kong is proportioned to overpower the individual, scale is a point which contributes to his sublime qualities. Yet when Kong climbs the Empire State building his scale is undermined by man's great architectural structure. Indeed Kong assertion as a threat is corrected by their intelligence and plan by the city council to use Ann as bait perched upon the Empire state building, and planes, a testament to man's invention in conquering flight, to swoop around Kong. The last line of the film "the aeroplanes got it" suggest the ultimate power of a human and Western kind's ability to wield the machines of their design to correct the imbalance of power of beast and man.

Joseph Cornell's, 'Rose Hobart'

Joseph Cornell's 1936 surrealist film, Rose Hobart, dedicated to the star of East of Borneo was first shown as part of an art exhibition in which Dali is quoted as saying that it is as if Cornell had stolen the film from his unconscious. In its reliance on dream logic, repetition of images and music Cornell's film really echoed the famous 1928 surrealist film un chien andalou directed by Dali and written by Luis Buñuel. Commenting upon the associations of the moon with night, vision, the dream and the unconsicous, Dali's film features a notable scene of the moon interlaced by a woman having her left eye sliced horizontally by an unknown hand. Although perhaps not as shocking as un chien andalou, Cornell's layering of the repetitious music, deliberate slowing of the projection speed evokes the experience of one suspended in a dream state, encapsulating how one might cinematically represent the subconscious memory of the plethora of visual images we encounter in everyday life. As Victor Burgin's essay "the remembered cinema" suggests the repetition of images from cinema in our every consciousness or perhaps the scenes from East of Borneo in the montage such as when Rose Hobart moves towards the balcony enact what we may remember from popular media, they are fragments of images.

These carefully chosen, non linear sequence of images cut from the traditional jungle film, East of Borneo reflect mental process and the way memory, the consciousness and subconscious, carefully select images that we occasionally replay in our minds. Other moments in the film, when Cornell weaves in the image of people gazing up at the sky at the beginning of the film and then cuts to a clip from East of Borneo are akin to the distortions of one's own subjective experience in registering a particular memory. Slippages easily occur in the transition from the original text to the way we process visual information within the mental "interior", as Victor Burgin mentions in his article:


"These tend away from the causal linear progressions of secondary process thought towards the extremity of the dream - which, Freud emphasizes is to be understood not as a unitary narrative but as a fragmentary rebus....these residues are mental images." (Burgin, 14)

Box with image of Lauren Bacall

Bryan Frye's notion that the manner in which the screen of the film frames the actress, Rose Hobart is analogous to Cornell's boxes and can be contextualised within his penchant for making boxes dedicated to female actresses. Cornell seems to be seeking a dialogue between the actress for whom the work is intended and himself, the shots chosen inhabit a very active male voyeuristic gaze, particularly at the beginning as the camera moves so we see Rose lying on the bed, through a screen. The assemblage format of the film is almost like an archive of his obsession with Hobart, the clips for the piece carefully chosen by Cornell to evoke his creative idea for the film as a whole. As such his status as an isolated outsider artist, his insistence on the importance of childhood, is reminiscent of artists such as Henry Darger, who similarly through art sought to rearrange the world and recreate it from their perspective in a way thats very personal so much that we may never completely grasp the full resonance of its meaning.

Berlin: Symphony of a City and The Edukators (Symphony of Modern Revolutionists?)

In the discourse surrounding Berlin Symphony of a City, one critic, likens this documentarian montage to “a historical document, an insight into the patterns of life and living”. Whilst Wattman's film, provides a late 1920s glimpse of metropolitan Berlin, The Edukators, a 2004 film by Austrian director Hans Weingartner (notable director of Goodbye Lenin) strives to achieve in a similar but fictionalized vein, a take on contemporary Berlin from the perspective of three young left wing activists who echo the dissentients of German youths disheartend by their increasingly consumeristic capitalist society at the beginning of the noughties era.

Concerns over temporality seem to be an overarching theme in Berlin . The somewhat initially random images are conjoined by the repeated reminders of the human construct of time, notably in the inclusion of shots of clock time and the segregation of the film into five acts taking place from dawn to dusk. There is a sense of human control over the naturalistic setting via constrast between rural and the urban or the camera’s shots of ephemeral and fleeting moments as discussed in the seminar. As such this unique upclose insight gained becomes part of the film's aesthetic cinematic effect conveying to the viewer a sense of everday life in the public spaces of 1920s Berlin. That striking realism becomes apparent in The Edukators filmed entirely from a digital video camera, where the camera negates any point of view shots. Unlike Berlin, the film is driven by its linear narrative but the action appears documented in real time for instance when the male figures Peter and Jan are driving along real streets in Berlin and in the background an ambulance passes by. At the beginning of the film the central female character, Jules attends an anti-capitalism protest, the shaky actions of the camera capture the arrest of protestors as riot police move to break down the demonstrators. A sense that this is real pervades through this sequence, the viewer thrown admist the action as if occurring right before their eyes. The film seems to document the events through the course of a few days, these clues revealed in the stream of characters waking up or Julie’s night job. The natural style of acting, the sense of spontaneity also make this film very documentarian. Interestingly notion of the blurring of art and life is raised and in my background reading to The Edukators, I came across this article about copy cat acts inspired by this film which poses the question - what happens when life mimics art which mimicks life. Any ideas?

Strikingly, the prevalence of Berlin footage shot from a street level, as well as aerial shots, or close up shots of streets, railway networks, cafes, interiors of factories, workers and so forth illustrate the beginnings of this question of the use of surveillance in the modern city. Networks, circuitry, and interpersonal relationships are within Ruttmann's film, the major cohesive forces established by the series of shots showing the rail crossroads leading in all directions and aerial shots of the eerie quiet streets and rooftops. As such Berlin is well before its time in its references to surveillance in the modern city, via scenes of police martial power and eerily oblique aerial shots of the city. Individuals on the ground appear at times aware of the camera’s presence glancing at the camera with the knowledge they are being watched and at other times the camera obscured from view shows surveillance like footage.

The opening sequence of The Edukators shows footage of a family arriving home from their vacation to find the furniture in their opulent mansion rearranged, some even into Dada-esque configurations, one scene shows antique tin soldier figures dumped in the bathroom, even their stereo inside their refridgerator. This is the work of the primary figures of the Edukators, Peter, a alarm system engineer and his friend Jan, who are disenchanted by the increasing disparity between rich and poor within their society, monitor the mansions of the wealthy bourgeois and enter their targeted homes. The distinction from Wattman's film is the way in which surveillance in the public sphere such as Berlin is brought into the private sphere of the home. With a threatening tone, The Edukators stake their claim of private space of the wealthy, rearranging furniture and leaving a note “your days of plenty are few” or “you have too much money” in their attempt to ingrain a sense of fear among their targets. In a way their desire to shake and shift the private spaces of other individuals parallels their desire to fragment the structure of their materialistic society. In this way both films refer to surveillance, albeit much more candidly in The Edukators, as a power structure which one can utilise to rule over another and when anachronistically manipulated become a potent force used to momentarily destabalise the establishment of the modern city.

Although the documentary form is popularly used today in news, televisions, the use of documentary style, hand held cameras in popular cinema is still relatively rare; cinema verite style becomes a much more prevalent form used by independent film-makers. Aesthetically, the documentary style, popular in European cinema and convenient low budget independent films can be construed as a reaction against mainstream Hollywood cinema in much the same way French Nouvelle Vague directors utilised avant-garde techniques as a tool of subversion against the high polished films released by major Hollywood studios in the 1950s. (Notably in The Edukators the characters' departure to the country side in the second half of the film, the love triangle and the naming of Jules borrows largely from Truffaut’s film, Jules et Jim) The pervading sense of realism in The Edukators, heightened by directors cinema verite effects of the digital video camera, its deliberate destabalisation of the boundaries between art and life, its critique of consumeristic attitudes of contemporary society and rejection of mainstream cinema’s polished look mimics the protagonists disdain for their American capitalist influenced society which supports mainstream contemporary Hollywood studio system. The film certainly is striving to create an alternative cinema, attempting to get closer to the manner of Berlin: Symphony of a City and as such we could judge the latter film as avant garde even by contemporary mainstream cinema standards and a film advanced before its time.

Cinematic Modernism

Hey, i'm Yuye, a third year Arts student majoring in English and Art History. I'm currently interested in contemporary art, french new wave cinema and music.

I'm also taking Victorian art and getting through the texts, Great Expectations and Middlemarch as well as Victorian poetry. In some ways these texts provide a little introduction into the Modernism era as a precursor and it will be interesting to contrast between the different paradigms. I've chosen to take Cinematic Modernism largely because I've been interested in this era introduced through other similar units of study in Modernist art, and literature so naturally studying the avant garde film of this era appealed to me.