March 13, 2011

FROM BEŞ VAKİT TO KOSMOS: BECOMING ANIMAL IN REHA ERDEM’S FILMS
by Ali Deniz Şensöz

 
In the last twenty years new Turkish film directors put their unique style on screen and now we can talk about different waves in young Turkish cinema. Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki Demirkurbuz determined the new independent Turkish cinema and in the meantime production companies started to produce mainstream films. In this modern era new directors like Özcan Alper, Seyfi Teoman and Hüseyin Karabey created the second wave, telling stories in a more political context. In between, Reha Erdem kept on making films as he tried to create a unique form of storytelling on screen.

During the progression of his filmography it can be seen that there is a serious evolution in his cinematic style. In his first film A Ay (1990), he gave the first signals of a search for a new experimental cinematic narration which creates an expressionist visual poetics. Stylized black-and-white visual structure was combined with the voice-over of a young girl to set the mood of nostalgia in an old wooden house in Prince Islands. Afterwards the director came up with Kaç Para Kaç (1998), which involved more conventional filmmaking than his debut film. It is one of the rare films that used Istanbul as a functional background in storytelling. We as audience could have found glimpses of his auteur touches, which are more visible in the films he made after Kaç Para Kaç. Korkuyorum Anne (2004) was the turning point of Erdem’s filmography. In a really conventional and dynamic story, he succeeded in injecting his unique style, especially by using extra-diegetic music. That was the first time the director deliberately overused non-diegetic music to set the tone of the film. This was a very “Turkish,” or we can call it “oriental,” story set in a really old neighborhood of Istanbul. In spite of this local origination point of the story, the film goes into the territory of a universal theme which explores the relationship between a human being and his/her body. Then that leads us to the question, “What is a human?”

In 2006, the director shot one of the most revolutionary films in the history of Turkish cinema in terms of cinematic style. Beş Vakit (2006) tells the traumas of three teenagers growing up in a village set in the skirt of a mountain on the Aegean coast. This slow-paced film combines hypnotic visuals with Arvo Part’s haunting music to create an uncanny and sometimes disturbing atmosphere, the consequence of brave cinematic narration choices that have never been used to describe village life in Turkish cinema before.

Hayat Var (2008) was the film where Erdem pushed his limits and brought his style to a new level, creating a totally nonexistent Istanbul in an indescribable time and space. The experiment of deconstructing classical storytelling uses a shattered narrative structure which directly reflects the shattered state of the teenage girl’s mind and body. This nonlinear and shattered narrative structure was also repeated in his latest film Kosmos (2010), which probably will be the defining work of his filmography in the near future because of the sense of “loss of control” of narrative as a filmmaker. We can’t talk about a reality in this film on any basis. Even the leading character Kosmos looks like he fell down to earth from a different time and space. The conventions and the expectations of the audience are totally subverted, which gives no glimpse of reality to the audience to connect with the character and the story. Thus Erdem reaches his aim of creating a visual narrative that pushes the limits of cinema.

Beş Vakit was the last turning point in Erdem’s films, as he entered fresh territory which has been influenced by new Asian cinema. In his declarations he mentions directors like Tsai Ming Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has been inspiring him for the last ten years. His style of filmmaking changed profoundly; his last three films became formalist experiments which try to explore new horizons in visual storytelling. In this formalist system especially the sound design of films becomes as important as mise-en-scene and visual creations. This essay will explore and analyze Erdem’s latest three films with a formalist approach, trying to conceptualize these three films under Mikahil Bakhtin’s notion of “chronotope.” After defining Erdem’s (non)specific time and space in his films, I will focus on audio tracks and  investigate the function of self-conscious sound designs starting from Beş Vakit. Due to the foundations of the audial analysis, I will try to describe the phenomena by using Gilles Deleuze’s article, “Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming Imperceptible,” which will lead me to a conclusion about the creation of the animalistic sensitivity and criticism of the glorified human existence in Erdem’s films.

January 5, 2011

THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN: SUNSET BOULEVARD, NORMA DESMOND, AND ACTRESS NOIR
by Matt Mazur

"The whole enterpise exudes decadence like a stale, exotic perfume. You might not want to smell it every day, but then in 1950 you didn't get the chance: it was certainly a change from oceans of rosewater, lilies of the San Fernando Valley, and the scrubbed, healthy look."

Film Critic Pauline Kael on Sunset Boulevard (Staggs)

When I decided at age 30, much later in life than most traditional college-age students do, to seriously pursue a combination of cinema and gender studies, I wanted to commemorate the occasion by getting a tattoo. When I received news of my acceptance into an Ivy League film program, I knew the time was right to pay homage in ink to an image significant to both of my interests: to women and film. I seriously considered analyzing such classic images as Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara silhouetted in dusky orange twilight at the end of Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Bette Davis' chillingly fixed, veiled close-up in The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941), and Lillian Gish being driven mad by the gusting Texas dirt storms in The Wind (Victor Sjostrom, 1928).

But finally, when I was hard-pressed to settle on what I believed to be the most truly iconic female image in the history of cinema, there was no other choice than to exalt, in black-, white-, grey-, and red-inked glory, Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in the final frame of director Billy Wilder's classic 1950 film noir Sunset Boulevard. Since I was a child, I had been alternately horrified and captivated by this elusive cinematic image, the implications of it, the nuance of it, the horror of it. As someone a generation older than most of his classmates, seeking his own comeback of sorts, I could relate to the character's tenacity, confusion, and anger at the parade of horribles her life had become, how it all just kind of got out of hand and made her crazy and slightly agoraphobic, yet still very chic. I found the image both compelling and inspiring, and, oddly enough, I identified with it. And so now, Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond is forever immortalized on the entirety of my upper right arm, looming large when I wear short sleeves, and gazing at me in the mirror when I step out of the shower, forever frozen in that haunting final frame in a moment of transcendence and delivery, eternally ready for Mr. DeMille to shoot her close-up.

To begin any proper conversation on Sunset Boulevard, the most logical starting point, aping Wilder's own narrative structure, is the end of the film.

Former silent movie star Norma Desmond has gone mad, driven insane by jealousy and a black romantic obsession with captive screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden). Joe, after spending time as Norma's kept boy/employee, has had enough of her outrageous, unreasonable whims, as well as her futile desire to make a grand Hollywood comeback, holding him prisoner while working on a dream script that will never be produced. Norma, too, has had enough of gigolo Joe, who tells her he is leaving. "No one leaves a star," she croaks like a poison toad. The cracked actress shoots him, multiple times, and as we are shown in the film's first scenes (in an expertly noirish flashback), Joe dies and his body ends up floating in the pool of Norma's sprawling estate. In a brilliant echo of the film's temporally adventurous structure, Wilder's script, by the end, finds Norma lost in time as well, playing Salome to an audience of embarrassed newsreel reporters and policemen whom she believes to be the crew of her newest picture, her comeback. At the top of the stairs, Norma thanks them all from the bottom of her shriveled heart for coming to watch her play this important scene, and begins to gesture in haunting, antiquated ways that left the language of cinema many decades before, as her eyes go transparent, exposing her madness for both the newsreel cameras and the spectator.

"Yes! I was there," exclaimed co-star Nancy Olson (who played ingenue Betty Schaefer) of the two-day shoot for the film's final haunting sequence. Fifty years later, her recollections are as clear as the filtered, cold water Wilder had pumped into the Desmond pool that Joe would eventually find himself floating in face-down: "It was a mob scene, reporters and photographers, and Billy was directing everybody – but Erich von Stroheim was also directing Norma Desmond for the newsreel cameras" (Staggs, 123). Norma's trusty butler Max (von Stroheim) instructs the "cast and crew" to all play along to get her out of the house, and as he calls "action" to Norma, who has been sequestered away in her room preparing for her big scene, the room falls silent, just as on a film set run by Cecil B. DeMille himself. The actress slowly descends a twisting marble staircase, dripping in sequins and baubles, as though she is descending straight into the inferno of Hell.

November 4, 2010

CONTROL: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT CLAIRE DENIS' BEAU TRAVAIL
by Matt Mazur

Claire Denis’ Beau Travail sets Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in the otherworldly terrain of North Africa, pitting nature against gaudy modernity and the colonizer against the colonized. The friction is dually recorded by the character of Galoup (Denis Lavant), a somewhat devious authority figure who is as much a “colonized” gay man as the Djibouti citizens are colonized by the French Legionnaires who have set up camp in their city. He represents the serpentine “Claggart” from Melville’s work and is an outcast in the Legion, a specter haunting the beautiful young soldiers he is obsessed with and caustically reporting on their every move to the audience like a spy in the house of love. Throughout the film, Galoup provides viewers with a tangible, physical entry into Denis’ dream world and, in the end, he becomes the focal point of the director’s gaze, which is antonymous to the source material that favored the titular hero Billy, here transformed into Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin). But why?

Comolli and Narboni asserted that “every film is political” (689), and Denis’ is a work that can be peeled back onion-like, layer by layer, to reveal a stinking message perhaps not caught by a typical heterosexual spectator. Galoup has visions of heaven that feature firm young men in uniforms looking beautiful and smiling at him, and is drawn as the most evil character in Denis’ film; Sentain, on the other hand, incarnates good. Because it is implied that Galoup has homosexual tendencies or desires that he represses, and because she then chooses for him to end his own life by the end of the film, Denis’ motivations underlying the formal construction of her film must be interrogated.

Comolli and Narboni also said that “cinema is one of the languages through which the world communicates itself to itself” (689). So what is Denis trying to communicate to her audience by choosing to end her film with the final suicide? The white, heterosexual female director makes a strong filmic comment by inferring that the only way for this character to resolve his turbulent mind, addled by homoerotic thoughts, is to kill himself. I argue that this surprising scene, while in some ways recapitulating hegemonic notions of repressed homosexual suffering, reflects back upon the formal system of the film itself. The images of sexual gaze and longing which ostensibly saturate the film obfuscate a trenchant critique of colonial practice and domination. Unfortunately, this critique, while hardly submerged in the film, becomes itself repressed by a hegemonically heterosexist gaze which lingers only on the questions of sexuality, leaving the racial and political tensions of the film uninvestigated.

September 16, 2010

A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO THE SOUND DESIGN OF THERE WILL BE BLOOD
by Ali Deniz Şensöz

Bill Nichols attempts to clearly define the documentary mode in his book Introduction to Documentary, and while the terms and submodes he illustrates are creative and helpful, even he thinks that “documentary can be no more easily defined than ‘love’ or ‘culture'” (Intro, p.20). I found through my own research that the blending, intermingling and hybridization of Nichols’ submodes are nearly infinite, and that this discovery is, in fact, a more solid definition of documentary: to morph, edit, and represent actual events to suit the purpose of the filmmaker who wants to tell a story or show “a particular view of the world, one we may never have encountered before, even if the aspects of the world that is represented are familiar to us” (Intro, p.20).

Nichols says that the documentary form is a “fuzzy concept” and uses the analogy that “many disparate sorts of transportation devices can count as a ‘vehicle'” and so it is in the tendency I have uncovered in watching films about women’s experiences that actually function as “vehicles” themselves: star vehicles for their subjects. For my project, I initially chose to look at Lynne Littman’s 1976 Oscar-winning short film Number Our Days, in which anthropologist-ethnographer Barbara Myerhoff examines a small enclave of impoverished Jewish senior citizens living in Venice, California. The concepts of community and her own background in Judaism, as well as a self-projected future as one of these little old bubbes, posited Myerhoff as an authority on this subject.  Myerhoff inserts herself into the action, interacting with the participants and drawing out of them heartbreaking, madcap little histories that illustrate the plight of women who don’t have enough money to live a “normal” life – they worry about paying their rent, about where their next meal will come from, about the violence that surrounds their homes – problems that more affluent women their age do not share. They have been forgotten by “proper” society and consigned to a life of anonymity and poverty, and Myerhoff gives them power by turning the camera onto them and using her own voice to amplify her subjects’ voices.

Soon, while screening films such as Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer and Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok, as well as a treasured personal favorite, the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens, I uncovered a tendency in documentary film to hoist poor women into the position of objects of curiosity not unlike freaks in a circus sideshow, while simultaneously allowing their subjects, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to be the focus of something that would give them more autonomy with their public images. They are not like the women we see in fiction filmmaking. They are a new kind of woman: outspoken, dangerous, not traditionally beautiful, possibly unstable, impoverished, old or perceived as being “used up.” The filmmakers, while not always intentionally unkind to their subjects, brutally deconstruct these women for a rabid public’s insatiable consumption of stories of female oddities, turning their misery into narrative, their everyday life into something episodically structured to satisfy the spectator’s need for a relatable dramatic arc in all modes of filmed entertainment, but specifically the documentary.

July 24, 2010

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH AS A MYTHOLOGICAL COLLAGE
by Ali Deniz Şensöz

July 2, 2010

TODD FIELD'S LITTLE CHILDREN IN RELATION TO THE HISTORY OF CINEMA
by Matt Mazur

Sergei Eisenstein and Dialectical Montage

Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein saw the concept of dialectical montage, which he pioneered in films such as Battleship Potemkin, as “not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another” (FTC, 27). Diametrically opposed to his old-school countrymen Les Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, who saw montage as more of a way to stack the “bricks” of a film in symmetrical order (FA 18-19), Eisenstein’s prowess with this revolutionary technique was displayed succinctly in the opening two minutes of Potemkin’s “Men and Maggots” section.

The film opens with a turbulent sea full of waves out of control. After a title card quoting Lenin allows the audience to see the volatility of the political climate (mimicking the choppy waters), Eisenstein chooses to highlight a group of sleeping soldiers. By juxtaposing the men hanging in gently swaying pods, evoking babies being rocked in their cradles, the director suggests that any lingering innocence is about to come crashing down like the frothy waves above deck. These introductory images foreshadow the violent clash on the Odessa steps, but also indicate a pent-up rage against authority the seamen are harboring in their hungry bellies, a passion for revolt. An idea is gestating in their unconscious sleeping minds as they rock back and forth with the rhythm of the water and their reality, once they awaken, will become as turbulent as the churning sea.

Eisenstein uses dialectical montage in the first scenes to familiarize the audience with a world that they might not have yet seen or experienced, but Todd Field, in Little Children, uses his opening shots to bring the viewer into a world that might already be familiar: the suburbs. However, Field forgoes re-presenting the obvious and chooses to open the film with a blurry, fleeting tracking shot that is almost disorienting. There are flashes of nature glimpsed during these few seconds, warm sunlight and bucolic tree-greens are merged together to give the impression of a swamp. The lush emerald and gold immediately gives way to something more ordinary as it is revealed the shot is being taken from a car speeding down a residential street littered with cookie-cutter houses, BMWs, and backyard playgrounds.

These staples of suburbia then crash into the gleaming gears of a room full of loudly ticking brass clocks, bronze miniature statues and delicate antique china figures of children. They are possessed of exaggeratedly saucer-like dead eyes. Still and fragile, these figurines are meant to suggest the simultaneous purity and grotesquerie of real children and when set against the first shot, they beckon the viewer to slow down, change pace (or gears, as in the clocks), and to take a closer look at the evil that is lurking beneath the lacquered veneer of ceramic glaze that coats their bizarrely anachronistic costumes. Field borrows from the subliminal nature of Eisenstein’s opening imagery, mirroring the way he used seemingly non-connected imagery to suggest a tone and a mood of disquiet. But then he goes one step further, putting his two initial images into a contemporary context via a shot of a television news “reporter”, spewing directly to the camera in a confrontational style the same tired line about the sex-offender danger facing the new sacred cows of America: children.

June 18, 2010
ON JESSICA LANGE AND CINEPHILIA by Matt Mazur

“There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream.”

Frances Farmer

Through many years of careful analyzing of the facts, I have come to realize that had I not seen the film poster in question, my life would be completely different now. The (eventual) sheer profundity of such a seemingly innocent moment, where a young boy shares a formative glance with a movie star (in this case actress Jessica Lange playing actress Frances Farmer), never ceases to surprise me. Had I not been wandering aimlessly around the halls of Winchester Mall’s sad-sack movie theater in Rochester Hills, my seven-year-old mind racing after another viewing of The Empire Strikes Back, I might not have come to a complete stop in front of the most arresting image I had ever seen. The film art for Frances took my breath away and to this day, when I see it, I am taken back to that exact moment, feeling so small staring up at this larger-than-life, troubled goddess of classic cinema. I would repeatedly go back to the theater’s concourse just to watch this woman, half-dazed, trying to understand why she looked so sad.

June 15, 2010
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, R.W. FASSBINDER AND THE ACID ART OF ANTI-CHRIST MELODRAMA by Matt Mazur

“When I first went to the movies, they sat in their seats straight and leaned forward. Now they slump down with their heads back or eat candy and popcorn. I want them to sit up straight again.”

The Night of the Hunter director Charles Laughton, 1955 (Couchman, 129-130)

In The Ecstasy of Influence, writer Jonathan Lethem crafts a paen to artistic influence – or more accurately ripping each other off and recycling another artist's ideas – that says “appropriation” is inevitable when it comes to successfully realized, intertextual art (2007). Lethem even dares to suggest this should be viewed as a form of flattery. “Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master,” he writes, indicating that art itself is usually the catalyst that causes artists to be born.

In the world of film, the spectator can see this particular form of “adopting and embracing” (Lethem, 2007) at work within the canons of auteurs with wildly self-referential touches that recall their own past filmic endeavors (e.g. Pedro Almodovar's expansive use of tropes such as the mother, the drag queen or the nun across films and the genesis of future film plots in gestational form played out in his earlier works) as well as the incorporation and allusion to other great artists and works of art. “Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others,” intones Lethem, “but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses” (2007). Meaning: artists steal from one another, and this theft can make their own product even stronger. Cross-arts borrowing of source material can clearly be seen across individual auteurs' filmographies, across continents, and across genres, and it can most definitely be seen in the body of work of influential German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose films consistently dare the viewer to classify their genre and to spot their influences. Even in a claustrophobic chamber play such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fassbinder's usage of classic works of art in the film brings in a totally new dimension to his own work – an element of what Lethem calls “inspiration [that] could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced” (2007). Fassbinder not only literally imports a wall-sized, purposefully cropped image of Nicolas Pouisson's "Midas and Bacchus", but he also imparts the myth itself, and its central message: “be careful what you ask for” (Levine, 3/03/2010).

June 14, 2010
DREYER: TORMENTS OF THE SOUL by Thomas Frovin

Were someone to make a list of the most influential filmmakers of the last (film’s first whole) century, then they’d better have Danish auteur Carl Th. Dreyer (1889-1968) on that list. A very private man, Dreyer’s work spoke about the drama of life, and he tackled heavy subjects with delicacy and a seemingly intimate understanding of the torments of the soul, that has kept a freshness and currency to his films. A new homepage celebrates the director and opens his films up for a new audience.

Dreyer was an adopted child who grew up in a pious and pietistic family, but early on he abandoned his adoptive parents’ beliefs and opted for a career in the sinful, new movie industry. He is well known for his insistence on artistic integrity (and control!), a trademark that labelled him “difficult”, thus prohibiting him from actually making films in most of his active years. Instead, he was a champion of film as a critic and as a director of the legendary, still functioning “Dagmar” cinema in Copenhagen.