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.