Written by film studies luminaries David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Observations on Film Art is a well-read blog on all aspects of film aesthetics. Recently, they shared their thoughts on Intellect’s Danish Directors 2:
"Danish Directors, by Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg, has become a standard companion to the most successful “small cinema” on the European scene. Now it has a successor in Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fictional Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort, Eva Jorholt, and Eva Novrup Redvall. Once again, we get lengthy, in-depth interviews covering the value of film education, the vagaries of funding, and filmmakers’ creative decision-making. Lone Scherfig, Christoffer Boe, Per Fly, Paprika Steen, and many other major figures are included."
Christoph Schlingensief, acclaimed German director, actor, and artist, passed away on Saturday, August 21 in Berlin. One of the most controversial and innovative figures both in his home country of Germany and abroad, Schlingensief had been making art for three decades across a diverse range of fields, including film, television, activism, opera, and theater.
Born in 1960 in Oberhausen, Schlingensief studied philosophy, art history, and German. He then turned to acting and directing, receiving widespread recognition first for Germany Trilogy and continuing on to create a groundbreaking and politically engaged body of work. He was most recently developing ideas for next year’s Venice Biennale for which he was to represent Germany.
“Schlingensief was a hugely influential artist in Germany. His work encouraged the audience to think critically and creatively about issues like immigration, unemployment, homelessness, the rights of disabled people, and the Nazi legacy in contemporary Germany.”
In the folk musical, living means singing (and dancing), which arise out of everyday existence: Okhapkin's sweeping the yard turns into a lively dance; the policeman's whistle imitates the song of a nightingale; the Melkovodskites play not only folk instruments, but also the everyday artifacts that surround them (logs, jugs, saws, kitchen utensils), and their work (driving a wagon, pulling up a sail, steering a ship) passes naturally into song and dance. Singing or other artistic performance also denotes living rightly—that is, in harmony with the natural order—and all the townspeople are gifted in music or dance except for Byvalov. He cannot dance (his attempt at a lezginka in his office, after escaping the town's talent show, is unrhythmical and wooden); he cannot sing and at the Olimpiada performance he lets out a falsetto squawk. He knows nothing about classical music and claims personal acquaintance with a "Comrade Shul'bert," nor does he care about folk music, as evidenced by his rejection of Strelka's group and the poor quality of the balalaikas produced by his factory.
As a folk musical, Volga-Volga also incorporates aspects of the balagan or carnival street show, first adopted by Meierkhol'd and elaborated by Eisenstein in their theatrical productions, and therefore perfectly familiar to Aleksandrov, Erdman, Il'inskii, and others of Meierkhol'd's circle. Alesha lays bare the subtext by referring to Strelka's group as "your balagan." The film's prologue and epilogue (the verse introductions of major characters and moralizing conclusion) are double-coded as typical of folk performance, while remaining within the genre conventions of 1930s Western comedy films which employ introductory cameos and direct audience address in the coda of comedian comedy. In both instances, the direct address frame underscores the fictional aspect of the performance.
Advertising material published for the premiere of Volga-Volga plainly points to the one-dimensionality of the film's characters by depicting them all as comedic masks. Strelka's vigor and high spirits do not devolve from our understanding of her character, but simply function as her external tag. In the same way, Alesha represents reflexive choler, Byvalov self-importance and careerism, and the Lotsman boastful dissimulation. Byvalov, the most blatantly parodic figure of the film, displays a farcical resemblance to a pig: short, stiff neck, stocky torso, short legs and mincing gait, snub nose, and the dull glance of small, swollen eyes. Lest we miss the point, in the telegram-shouting scene, he is framed with pigs in the background and finally steps on one, precipitating swine chaos in the river.—Rimgaila Salys
Part Two: The Films of Grigoria Aleksandrov: The Radiant Path
Today, film scholar Rimgaila Salys leads us through a viewing of The Radiant Path (or The Shining Path) a Soviet musical comedy from 1940 by Grigoria Aleksandrov.
Although each of the heroines of Aleksandrov's musical films—whether Aniuta, Marion Dixon, or Strelka—is in some respect a Cinderella type who escapes obscurity, poverty, or degradation to achieve fame, deserved recognition of her talent, personal happiness, and—beginning with Circus—political consciousness, this persistent paradigm emerges in its most literal form in Aleksandrov's last musical comedy, The Radiant Path. Tania Morozova, an uneducated country girl working as a servant and nanny in a provincial town, is fired by her bourgeois mistress for disparaging her employer to a handsome new arrival, engineer Lebedev. Party organizer Pronina takes Tania in hand, sends her to literacy classes, and places her in a textile factory, where Tania gradually rises through the ranks to become a skilled weaver. After reading about Stakhanov’s record, Tania devises a plan to operate a greater number of weaving machines, overcomes the factory director’s opposition, and eventually sets a Stakhanovite record herself. She is awarded the Order of Lenin in a Kremlin ceremony and afterward, looking into a magic mirror, imagines her future as a people’s deputy and Lebedev's partner.
Tania's ritual initiation into a higher world (she wears a white dress and the set is flooded with light) will both transform her into a leader who will now mentor others (the public context) and will allow her to love (the private sphere). Tania's flight to the mountains, coming as it does after the award ceremony, functions as the physical expression of transcendence, the upward vector signified by the paradigmatic "ever higher." Her travels take her from the Kremlin out over the city to distant snow-capped mountains, thereby uniting periphery and center before she returns to Moscow, the sacred omphalos, for the finale of the film. As Tania's song addressed to the country ends ("Hello, land of heroes, land of dreamers, land of scholars"), her white Kremlin dress is replaced by a dark power suit and she takes the wheel of the car, thereby actualizing her transformation from worker into leader and public figure. In the textile pavilion, Tania's suit is replaced by a less severe, but still business-like, pale dress covered by a dark duster, more appropriate to the love scenes that will conclude the film.
After her automobile flight, Tania returns to Moscow, to the Agricultural Exhibition, another symbolic space metonymic to the "fairy tale come true" of the entire land. The actual agrarian countryside is represented by the exhibition grounds as a well-manicured park. Although Tania's transformation is initially located in the future (underscored by the gilded mirror frame visible around the edges of the flying automobile scenes), as she descends to the Agricultural Exhibition, steering her car toward Mukhina's gigantic Factory Worker and Collective Farm Woman, the looking glass frame disappears, leading the audience to perceive the subsequent Agricultural Exhibition scenes as present reality. The mise-en-scene—actual exhibition grounds and fictional textile pavilion—together with Tania's metamorphosis into engineer and deputy to the Supreme Soviet, has collapsed time, staging the future in the present. The finale of The Radiant Path elevates the narrative to the symbolic register of Socialist Realist representation.—Rimgaila Salys
Part One: The Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Circus
Your faithful publicity spy at Cryptonym will admit that she has a near obsession with depressing films, the more they rip her heart out and stomp on it (in a thought-provoking way of course), the more she adores them. Yet, sometimes the bleakness is just too much and something playful and a little absurd is in order for a change of mood. This is where the musicals of Grigorii Aleksandrov come in.
In this first part of a three part series, Cryptonym has invited noted Russian film scholar Rimgaila Salys, author of The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov to introduce us to some of the fun and provocative films that were among the most popular works of Russian cinema in the 1930s and ’40s. For today's installment, Salys looks at Circus, an eccentric work from 1936.
For Aleksandrov, the transition from the pomp, pageantry, and pathos of the Hollywood musical to the Stalinist grand style and spectacle was a natural one. The successful musical—and especially the folk musical—expresses the ritual values of a society that coincide with the ideological values of the producer, in this case the Soviet State, so that Stalinist myths and their visual elaborations enter Circus naturally as a function of the genre. Aleksandrov's musical was perhaps the first Soviet film to give full and direct expression to the core myths of high Stalinism. Like many Socialist Realist heroes, Marion Dixon undergoes a painful rite of passage as part of her path to consciousness and incorporation into Soviet society. Her arrival in the Soviet Union may be seen as separation; learning about Soviet society in Moscow under Martynov's tutelage expresses the transition. Dixon suffers initiation, regression into chaos, and symbolic death via Kneishitz's public revelations regarding her illicit past. At one point he tells Dixon, "This city has driven you mad!" Madness is not excluded from the death-experience of the initiate. Traumatized by the public exposure of her past, Dixon runs away from the circus arena and literally faints from shame and horror. By forming a proper family with Martynov, she transforms her formerly illicit and dark sexuality into a healthy, wholesome femininity, figured by the white sweater and skirt of the fizkul’turnitsa. She is resurrected into the great Soviet family in the Red Square finale of the film. Her sexual "spontaneity" is first stabilized and made passive within the family unit and then transformed into consciousness and subsumed to the state patriarchy during the second finale.
The success of the show "Flight to the Stratosphere" (the Soviet cannon is mounted on a car—much more modern) parallels the now successful love of the couple, whose cultural values—domestic and foreign, capitalist and communist—have been reconciled. The sexual transcendence of flight is now melded with national transcendence, just as Martynov's cupid wings have been replaced by the wings of Icarus. Dixon and Martynov make their entrance as equals, dressed in unisex aviators' jumpsuits, capes and Flash Gordon helmets, and descend the grand staircase to the rhythm of "Song of the Motherland." Symbols of Soviet air power abound, from propellers on the showgirls' tank tops to their imitation of whirring blades in front of a triangular bank of propellers to the stratospheric rocket itself. The glorification of military might is paradigmatic for the folk musical, as in Busby Berkeley's synchronized marching and flag waving in Footlight Parade (1933) and the battleship number of Born to Dance (1936). In the Soviet instance, feats of aviation, such as the rescue of the Cheliuskin crew, also signify communication and unity between the center and the marginal areas of the Motherland.—Rimgaila Salys
Horror movies revel in taking viewers into shadowy places where evil resides, whether it is a house, a graveyard, or a dark forest. These mysterious spaces foment the terror at the heart of horror films, empowering the ghastly creatures that emerge to kill and torment. WithDark Places, Barry Curtis leads us deep inside these haunted spaces full of shadows, creaky floorboards, and cobwebs in order to explore them—and the monstrous antagonists who dwell there.
In this wide-ranging and compelling study, Curtis demonstrates how the claustrophobic interiors of haunted spaces in films extend their power into the movie theaters and connect to the "dark places" of the human psyche. He examines diverse topics such as the special effects—ranging from the crude to state-of-the-art—used in movies to evoke supernatural creatures; the structures, projections, and architecture of horror movie sets; and ghosts as symbols of loss, amnesia, injustice, and vengeance.Dark Places also examines the reconfiguration of the haunted house in films as a motel, an apartment, a road, or a spaceship, and how these re-imagined spaces thematically connect to Gothic fictions.
Curtis draws his examples from numerous iconic films—including Nosferatu, Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Shining—as well as lesser-known international works, which allow him to consider different cultural ideas of haunting. Japanese horror films and their Hollywood remakes—such as Ringu and The Ring, or Juon and The Grudge—come under particular scrutiny, as Curtis explores Japanese cinema's preoccupation with malevolent forces from the past.
Whether you love the splatter of blood or prefer to hide under the couch, Dark Places cuts to the heart of why we are drawn to the carnage.
David Cronenberg Exhibition at the Rome Film Festival
Our colleagues at Intellect share this recent report from the Rome Film Festival
Mark Browning, author ofDavid Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker?, contributed to one of the text commentaries for a special exhibition, forming part of the 2008 Rome Film Festival. Chromosomes, featured fifty specially-enhanced close-ups, all with accompanying commentary, from a range of Cronenberg’s work, spanning over 30 years. It followed previous exhibitions on the work of Peter Greenaway, Michael Nyman and Atom Egoyan, all initiated by Volumina, a cultural body concerned with bringing Art and Film together in new and surprising ways. In 2005, they organized an exhibition to accompany Cronenberg’s lushly-illustrated, limited edition book, Red Cars, featuring a screenplay about the Ferrari dynasty and the battle for the 1961 Formula One championship. Browning’s commentary complemented a still from Spider, one of Cronenberg’s more underrated works. Links between Cronenberg and literature, the focus of Browning’s book, are particularly pertinent, not just in the light of Red Cars but Cronenberg’s keenly-awaited debut as a novelist, due for publication next year, provisionally entitled Consumed. The exhibition was at the Palazzo della Esposizioni in Rome.
With All Hallows Eve approaching, we invited our resident expert on ghouls and spirits and creatures that stalk dark cemeteries, Matthew Beresford, author of From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, to tell us what to beware of and how to stand guard against the blood thirsty phantoms of the night:
Very soon, strange and diabolical creatures shall arise once more. Along sidewalks and darkened streets Hell’s brood shall tramp their ghastly beat. Witches and warlocks, ghosts and ghouls, werewolves and vampires will stalk the night, visiting many of us as they come in search of, not blood as legend would have us believe, but candy! For on October 31st Halloween will be upon us once again, that age-old tradition where children don horror masks and costumes and venture out in search of treats. But although this celebration today is one of fun and good humour, and the creatures that haunt us on this particular night hold little fear over us, in the past it has been a different matter entirely. And of all the fantastical creatures evident at Halloween, none is more infamous than the caped and fanged harbinger of death, the vampire!
With election mania in full swing, we invited film scholar Michael Coyne, author ofHollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen, to provide some must-see film clips that reveal how politics and the popular media are often entangled:
There's a long history of the interchangeability of the celebrity of politics and the politics of celebrity. The most obvious examples are John Kennedy, the President with the movie-star face, and Ronald Reagan, the ex-movie star who became President.
But films have at times certainly tried to shape political opinion. One famous example of Hollywood's deliberate intervention into the realm of politics was Louis B. Mayer's and Irving Thalberg's filmed contribution to the 1934 campaign for the Governorship of California, in which they successfully depicted Democratic challenger Upton Sinclair as the candidate of malcontents, misfits, radicals and foreigners, and the GOP incumbent Frank Merriam as the stalwart protector of American home and hearth. Similarly, due to a series of devastating TV ads, Lyndon Johnson was able to present himself as the candidate of peace and stability in 1964, in contrast to Barry Goldwater, who was painted as reckless, hellbent on smashing Social Security and apt to provoke nuclear war. Who can forget the effectiveness of the infamous “Daisy Girl” ad, conjuring up the drama and terror of atomic holocaust, and representing LBJ as the world's great hope for peace?:
Searle reviews the history of the Black Audio Film Collective and its penchant for political discussion and debate:
The collective was heavily informed by film and psychoanalytic theory, by political discussion and debate. It is salutory to note how unfashionable these are, however much intense theorising there is in the exhibition catalogue. Sadly, much of it is likely to remain unread. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the group was the formulation of a poetic, a tone of voice, a particular kind of filmic space that resisted categorisation.
He also notes Eshun's commentary :
Kodwo Eshun, the group's most compelling commentator, writes that they "projected a stance of high seriousness with seductive stylishness." Stylishness could be serious too, and they always carried their seriousness with something much more than style.
James Parker recently reviewed Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco's Karaoke: A Global Phenomenon in the Boston Globe. Parker uses the book to trace some of the highlights of Karaoke's history. In the end, he offers his article as a tribute to karaoke-lovers: "I dedicate this one to the karoke-lovers, who will make tonight their own."
In Karaoke, Zhou Xun and Tarocco reveal karaoke's surprisingly complex history and significant cultural impact around the world. Originating in postwar Japan, karaoke soon spread to Southeast Asia and the West. Karaoke traces how the practice became a wildly successful social phenomenon that constantly evolved to keep pace with changes in technology and culture. Drawing on extensive research and international travels, the authors chart the varied manifestations of karaoke, from karaoke taxis in Bangkok to nude karaoke in Toronto to the role of karaoke in prostitution. Extensive personal anecdotes reveal the dramatic range of social experiences made possible by karaoke and how the obsession with performance and song has touched politics, history, and pop culture throughout global society.
Stalking remains popular today. Edel Kennedy writes in the Irish Independent that "Our modern attitude to love and relationships is breeding a generation of lusty stalkers," and quotes Bran Nicol's recently released Stalking from Reaktion Books: "Stalkers can find it particularly hard to read the implicit codes."
Award: Mad, Bad and Dangerous by Christopher Frayling
Christopher Frayling's Mad, Bad and Dangerous was nominated for an International Horror Guild award in nonfiction works produced in 2005.
According to the IHG site,
The International Horror Guild Awards are now in their twelfth year. Based on public recommendations, the juried awards recognize outstanding achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. Nominations are derived from recommendations made by the public and the judges' knowledge of the field.
From Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Moreau to Doc Brown in Back to the Future, the scientist has been a puzzling, fascinating, and threatening presence in popular culture. From films we have learned that scientists are either evil maniacal geniuses or bumbling saviors of society. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? puts this dichotomy to the test, offering a wholly engaging yet not uncritical history of the cinematic portrayal of scientists.
Press release: The West in Early Cinema by Nanna Verhoeff
The archetypal Western conjures up images of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, or even the Lone Ranger—the solitary cowboy shooting his way through uncivilized country. But in its nascent form, the Western was a complex genre that embraced surprisingly diverse themes. In The West in Early Cinema, Nanna Verhoeff examines the earliest films made between 1894 and 1915, and reveals how the films meditate on a world far beyond the West, speaking to the relentless march of civilization.
Laura Mulvey will speak at Wellesley College in Massachusetts on Wednesday, April 5, 4:30 p.m., in Science Center 277. A reception will precede the lecture. This event is free and open to the public.
Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birbeck College, University of London, will discuss the relationship between new media technologies and spectatorship. Her lecture, entitled "Discovering the Pensive and the Possessive Spectator," is based on her recently published Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image in which she argues that new media technologies give viewers the ability to control both image and story, so that movies meant to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be manipulated to contain unexpected and even unintended pleasures.
