mainstream cinema is made to gratify a much wider demographic than experimental film. it does this by having archetypal narratives which allow for a passive audience. experimental films challenge mainstream conventions by turning them on their head or completely rejecting them. Un Chein Andalou, directed by Luis Brunel, was made on the basis that they would take inspiration from their dreams and reject anything that had any meaning. watching this film requires an active spectatorship as the film can seen as being avante garde. in the sequence where we see the man falling off his bike, there is a high angle shot of him from a balcony. we assume he is dead by the reaction of the woman in the next shot. the film then cuts to him lying in the bedroom and is alive; he sits up and we get a mid shot of him looking in horror. these jumps in time are not explained and appear to have no structure or narrative. in the mainstream film 'Wild at heart' by David Lynch, has a jump in time that is captioned "18 months later". this tells the audience where in time they are now being show, and keeps its non linear structure. experimental films like un chein were the first to include non linear structures but over time it has become popular and used in mainstream cinema but done in a very different way. from theses examples we see that the spectatorship in experimental film is more high brow and challenging than that in mainstream, mainly because experimental films are not made to make loads of money from, but made to challenge the spectators perception of the film and its meaning.
'Experimental Film requires a different kind of spectatorship.' Has this been your experience? [35]
Experimental films are full of strange mixtures of images, situations, words and expressions that may not tell a cohesive story but, in the end, don't have to in order to achieve an emotional goal. This type of film therefore requires the spectator to shift their conventional cinematic expectations to accommodate more radical narrative techniques, themes and meaning construction. Un Chien Andalou, the infamous 1929 surrealist short film from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, attests to this. Now add your personal response and discussion of spectatorship issues Chris Marker became known internationally for the short film La Jetée (1962). It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. Now add your personal response and discussion of spectatorship issues
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a work that maintains all of the mystery, tranquility, unpredictability, and personal attachment that is ever present within the world of dreams. Now add your personal response and discussion of spectatorship issues
A good response will:
Take into account the technical elements of cinema construction
Be aware of the themes of film (an ability to construct meaning)
Acknowledge that the film will challenge the spectator
Discuss the techniques that the film employs
Respond on a personal level
Discuss an understanding or a lack of understanding
Understand that confusion or boredom/lack of interest by be a response
Be able to recognise experimental approaches and debate the use of film techniques opposed to pre-determined ideas of more formal mainstream cinema
My Response
Un Chien Andalou, the infamous 1929 surrealist short film from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, attests to this. throughout the film i was constantly trying to find links between characters and discover some kind of narrative. the film does take on themes of religion and attacking society but adopts a surrealist style. it also plays around with the film its self by making strange unconventional cuts to shock and unease the audience. the part where the man holds the woman's head and goes to cut her eye, the film then cuts to a full moon with clouds passing through it, then cuts to the same shot but with him actually slicing a pigs eye. this challenges the audience greatly as in 1929 people would not be used to seeing such gruesome things and more used to line narrative with non experimental cinematography and editing. i believe that this sequence lacks in pace as the shot of the moon takes far too long and is not smoking. also when watching the film i didn't entirely understand it. i thought parts, like the the cutting of the eye, were pointless and had no meaning.
Chris Marker became known internationally for the short film La Jetée (1962). It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. i did not enjoy this film at all. i thought that the pace of the montage did vary but was always too slow. the shot type in the photographs did change, and did carry the narrative which was made present by a use of voice over narration; unlike un chein where we did not have any form of narrative. also la jetee does have a linear narrative making it more mainstream in that sense but not in sense that it uses still images throughout. the monotonous voice over made it difficult for me to enjoy the film as there was a number of times where i simply stopped listening. it definitely does take a different kind of spectatorship from the normal mainstream film. the part when the images of him and the woman were at the zoo, i thought went on too long. the narration at this point had stopped and there was just the images, each being shown for at least five seconds which got very boring as the framing of the pictures was nothing interesting, nor was the miss en scene.
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a work that maintains all of the mystery, tranquility, unpredictability, and personal attachment that is ever present within the world of dreams. the themes in this film tackle a womans perspective of themselves and how they see themselves through the mans eyes. this pre dates Laura Mulveys 'male gaze' theory, but can be linked to it as the cloaked figure with the mirrored face constantly repeated the same actions, then at the end we see it is the man who has been walking up the stairs and putting the rose on the bed. the mirrored face has huge significance, as the woman will look at the figure from a low angle shot, and see herself. also i noticed that the film revolves around three main areas in the house; kitchen, living room and bedroom, all of which can be said is where the woman is found. the ideology of the themes is very outdated now as we have moved on from that patriarchal society that was seen over 60 years ago. the experimental technique i enjoyed watching was when she enters the house for a third time and see the figure walking up the stairs, through a long shot. she then goes to follow but there is then a high angle shot of her walking up the stairs to the bedroom. as she begins to walk the camera tilts from left to right and at the same time she falls against the wall giving the impression that the whole set is tilting. contextually i believe that this shows the woman's sickness and weakness as she is essentially following the man to the bedroom, possibly to please him.
Before filming we agreed that we wanted to go with the techniques that are seen in Chungking express. We decided that we would show two characters that are alone and unable to connect. At the start I shot them separately walking into the sunlight, this was to give the impression of a new day and hope. I then over layered the footage so we got a blurred effect making the two look distant. The close up of Seamus was to emphasise his vacant eyes and his isolation. The fact that he walks slowly and lights a cigarette implies that he has nothing to do but stand and do nothing. The close ups of Beth show a longing for Seamus, as she looks over her shoulder to keep glancing at him. The camera the tracks round her to an over shoulder shot allowing the audience to see what she sees. Again the blending of the footage was to show what she is thinking of and what she sees.
The long distance shot of them visually shows the distance between tem and how Seamus doesn’t interact with her yet she still looks at him. It makes the audience question what is wrong with him? we then have a reverse over shoulder shot looking back at beth as she moves towards him. there is a quick cut as she puts her hand on his shoulder allowing the audience to see his shocked reaction. as they hug i sped time up and made the circling motion give a dream effect to the two shot of them. the music is non diegetic throughout making the whole film a montage sequence. also like Chungking express, we get the silent visuals and music making almost a music video. after they hug i used a reverse zoom dolly with Seamus' eye as the centre point, telling the viewer that the physical contact was all in his head. this shot also addresses the audience directly as he looks straight into the camera.
Wednesday 23 October 2013
the maddona whore complex is a reccuring theme in martin scorsese's films. does this make him an aeutur?
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scorsese by jim sangster - pg 190,191 quote " scorses secretly worried if it was wise to commit hiimself to making yet another gangster movie. powell quickly realised what had drawn scorsese to the subject was a fresh approach to the whole gangster lifestyle." " production designer kristi sea was amused when scorsese told her early on of his belief that the picture 'never should have been made by anyone but an italian'".
A man with a madonna-whore complex is a man who will sleep with and lust for a sexual and beautiful woman but he will never respect her as "wife" material and he will never marry her. In his eyes, she is tainted, impure, unworthy of the status of wife---yet he may possess passionate and contradictory feelings for her. He may even be in love with her but will never allow himself to be with her in any real sense.
He will look for a "good girl" to marry---usually a woman who is cold sexually but, for example, is good at "wifely" domestic things: cooking, cleaning, homemaking in general, etc. A proper, pure "madonna" type woman who will bear his children.
Martin Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in New York City, and was raised in the neighborhood of Little Italy, which later provided the inspiration for several of his films. Scorsese earned a B.S. degree in film communications in 1964, followed by an M.A. in the same field in 1966 at New York University's School of Film. During this time, he made numerous prize-winning short films including The Big Shave (1968), and directed his first feature film, _Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)_.
He served as assistant director and an editor of the documentary Woodstock (1970) and won critical and popular acclaim for Mean Streets(1973), which first paired him with actor and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro. In 1976, Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), also starring De Niro, was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and he followed that film with New York, New York (1977) and The Last Waltz (1978). Scorsese directed De Niro to an Oscar-winning performance as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), which received eight AcademyAward nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and is hailed as one of the masterpieces of modern cinema. Scorsese went on to direct The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993),Casino (1995), and Kundun (1997), among other films. Commissioned by the British Film Institute to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, Scorsese completed the four-hour documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) (TV), co-directed by Michael Henry Wilson.
His long-cherished project, Gangs of New York (2002), earned numerous critical honors, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Director; theHoward Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004) won five Academy Awards, in addition to the Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for Best Picture. Scorsese won his first Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), which was also honored with the Director's Guild of America, Golden Globe, New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and Critic's Choice awards for Best Director, in addition to four AcademyAwards, including Best Picture. Scorsese's documentary of the Rolling Stones in concert, Shine a Light (2008), followed, with the successful thriller Shutter Island (2010) two years later. Scorsese received his seventh Academy Award nomination for Best Director, as well as a Golden Globe win, for Hugo (2011), which went on to win five Academy Awards.
Scorsese also serves as executive producer on HBO's series "Boardwalk Empire" (2010) for which he directed the pilot episode. Scorsese's additional awards and honors include the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1995), the AFI Life Achievement Award (1997), the Honoree at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 25th Gala Tribute (1998), the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), The Kennedy Center Honors (2007) and the HFPA Cecil B. DeMille Award (2010).
Ace in the Hole (1951): “This Billy Wilder film was so tough and brutal in its cynicism that it died a sudden death at the box office, and they re-released it under the title Big Carnival, which didn’t help. Chuck Tatum is a reporter who’s very modern–he’ll do anything to get the story, to make up the story! He risks not only his reputation, but also the life of this guy who’s trapped in the mine.” All That Heaven Allows (1955) America, America (1963) An American in Paris (1951) Apocalypse Now (1979) Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) The Band Wagon (1953): “It’s my favorite of the Vincente Minnelli musicals. I love the storyline that combines Faust and a musical comedy, and the disaster that results. Tony Hunter, the lead character played by Fred Astaire, is a former vaudeville dancer whose time has passed, and who’s trying to make it on Broadway, which is a very different medium of course. By the time the movie was made, the popularity of the Astaire/Rogers films had waned, raising the question of what are you going to do with Fred Astaire in Technicolor? So, really, Tony Hunter is Fred Astaire–his whole reputation is on the line, and so was Fred Astaire’s.” Born on the Fourth of July (1989) “An example of how Universal Pictures wanted to make special pictures Cape Fear (1962) “The original was so good. I mean, you’ve got Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Polly Bergen, it’s terrific!“ Cat People (1942) Caught (1949) “There are certain styles I had trouble with at first, like some of Max Ophuls’ films. It took me till I was into my thirties to get The Earrings of Madame de…, for example. But I didn’t have trouble with this one, which I saw in a theater and which is kind of based on Howard Hughes [protagonist of The Aviator].” Citizen Kane (1941) “Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them—it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air.” The Conversation (1974) Dial M for Murder (1954) Do The Right Thing(1989) Spike Lee’s film was the kind of risky production that drew Scorsese to Universal Pictures when it was run by Casey Silver and Tom Pollack. “Then Pollock left,” says Scorsese, “and it all changed.” Duel in the Sun (1946) The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1921)
Europa ’51 (1952) “After making The Flowers of St. Francis, Rossellini asked, what would a modern day saint be like? I think they based it on Simone Weil, and Ingird Bergman played the part. It really takes everything we’re dealing with today, whether it’s revolutions in other countries or people trying to change their lifestyles, and it’s all there in that film. The character tries everything, because she has a tragedy in her family that really changes her, so she tries politics and even working in a factory, and in the end it has a very moving resolution.” Faces (1968) “[Director John] Cassavetes went to Hollywood to shoot films like A Child is Waiting and Too Late Blues, and after Too Late Blues he became disenchanted. Those of us in the New York scene, we kept asking, “What’s Cassavetes doing? What’s he up to?” And he was shooting this film in his house in L.A. with his wife Gena Rowlands and his friends. And when Faces showed at the New York Film Festival, it absolutely trumped everything that was shown at the time. Cassavetes is the person who ultimately exemplifies independence in film.” The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) “This Rossellini movie and Europa ’51 are two of the best films about the part of being human that yearns for something beyond the material. Rossellini used real monks for this movie. It’s very simple and beautiful.” Force of Evil (1948) Forty Guns (1957) Germany Year Zero (1948): “Roberto Rossellini always felt he had an obligation to inform. He was the first one to do a story about compassion for the enemy, in this film–it’s always been hard to find, but now there’s a Criterion edition. It’s a very disturbing picture. He was the first one to go there after the war, to say we all have to live together. And he felt cinema was the tool that could do this, that could inform people.” Gilda (1946) “I saw this when I was 10 or 11, I had some sort of funny reaction to her, I tell you! Me and my friends didn’t know what to do about Rita Hayworth, and we didn’t really understand what George McCready was doing to her. Can you imagine? Gilda at age 11. But that’s what we did. We went to the movies.”
The Godfather (1972) “Gordon Willis did the same dark filming trick on The Godfather as he had done on Klute. And now audiences accepted it, and went along with it, and every director of photography and now every director of photography of the past 40 years owes him the greatest debt, for changing the style completely–until now, of course, with the advent of digital.” Gun Crazy (1950) Health (1980) Heaven’s Gate (1980) House of Wax (1953) How Green Was My Valley (1941) “I appreciate the visual poetry of [director John] Ford’s film, like in the famous scene where Maureen O’Hara is married and the wind blows the veil on her head. It’s absolute poetry. No words. It’s all there in the image.”
The Hustler (1961) I Walk Alone (1948) The Infernal Cakewalk (1903) It Happened One Night (1934) “I didn’t think much of this Frank Capra film, until I saw it recently on the big screen. And I discovered it was a masterpiece! The body language of Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, the way they related–it’s really quite remarkable.”
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) Journey to Italy (1954) “After Rossellini married Ingrid Bergman he wiped the slate clean and left Neo-Realism behind. Instead he made these intimate stories that had a great deal to do with a certain intellectual mysticism, a sense of cultural power. In Viaggio [Viaggio in Italia is the Italian title], for example, the English couple played by George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman are traveling in Naples on vacation while marriage is faling apart, but the land around them—the people the museums, and especially their visit to Pompeii, these thousands of years of culture around them—work on them like a modern miracle. The film is basically two people in a car, and that became the entire New Wave. Kids may not have seen this film, but it’s basically in all the independent film of today.” 1954 Julius Caesar (1953) “This is another example of Orson Welles’ risktaking, with Caesar’s crew as out-and-out gangsters.” Kansas City (1996) “This is one of the great jazz movies ever. If you could hang on with Altman, you were going to go on one of the great rides of your lives.” Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Klute (1971) “There are movies that change the whole way in which films are made, like Klute, where Gordon Willis’s photography on the film is so textured, and, they said, too dark. At first this was alarming to people, because they’re used to a certain way things are done within the studio system. And the studio is selling a product, so they were wary of people thinking that it’s too dark.” La Terra Trema (1948) The Lady from Shanghai (1947) “The story goes that Welles had to make a film and he was in this railway station, and there were some paperbacks there and he was talking to Harry Cohn of Columbia and he said look, I’ve got the greatest film it’s called Lady from Shanghai, which was this paperback he saw there. And then he made up this story, taking elements of Moby Dick, where he talks about the sharks, and the whole mirror sequence in that picture is unsurpassed. I don’t know if Lady is a noir, but it’s awkward, and it’s brilliant.” The Leopard (1963) “Visconti and Rossellini and deSica were the founders of Neo-Realism. Visconti went a different way from Rossellini. He made this movie, which is one of the greatest films ever made.” Macbeth (1948) “This was the first Welles movie I saw, on television. He shot it in 27 days. The look of it, the Celtic barbarism, the Druid priest, this was all very different from other Macbeth productions I’d seen. The use of superimpositions, the effigies at the beginning of the film—it was more like cinema than theatre. Anything Welles did, given his background in radio, was a big risk. Macbeth is an audacious film, set in Haiti of all places.” The Magic Box (1951) “There were a number of people who felt that they had invented moving pictures. Robert Donat plays William Friese-Greene, one of those people, who’s obsessed from childhood with movement and color. Donat was a great actor. And this is a beautifully done film.”
M*A*S*H (1972) “I saw it at a press screening. That was the first football game I ever understood. Altman developed this style that came out of his life and making television movies, it was so unique–and his movies seemed to come out every two weeks.” A Matter of Life and Death (1946) “This is another beautiful film by Powell and Pressburger, but it was made after World War II, so people said, ‘You can’t use the word ‘Death’ in the title!’ So it got changed to Stairway to Heaven, that’s what it was called in America. Now it’s A Matter of Life and Death again.” McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) “This is an absolute masterpiece. Altman could shoot quickly and get the very best actors.” The Messiah (1975) “Rossellini’s last film in this third period, the last film he made before he died, is this beautiful TV film on Jesus. He had planned on making more such films, like one on Karl Marx. He thought TV was the way to reach young people, to educate them. But then of course TV changed.” Midnight Cowboy (1969) Mishima (1985) Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Nashville (1975) “Altman had a point of view that was uniquely American and an artistic vision to go with it. All his early work pointed to this movie.” Night and the City (1950): “It’s the essential British noir film. Harry Fabien, played by Richard Widmark, is a two-bit hustler running through the London underworld at night, and he always oversteps, particularly with the gangster played by Herbert Lom. From the very beginning you know Fabien’s going to fail, because he’s up against a power he doesn’t understand.” One, Two, Three (1961) Othello (1952) “It took (Orson Welles) years to finish this. There were tons of quick cuts, and there’s a wonderful sequence where two people are attacked in a Turkish bath, and it works beautifully. They’re wearing towels, and one is dispatched under the boards. It has a strange North African whiteness. It turns out that he was ready to do the sequence, and the costumes didn’t show up. So he said, let’s put it in a Turkish bath. He had the actors there! He had to shoot it!” Paisan (1946) “This is my all-time favorite of the Rossellini films.”
Peeping Tom (1960) “Michael Powell himself gambled everything on Peeping Tom and lost in such a way that his career was really ended. The film was so shocking to some British critics and the audience because he had some sympathy, sort of, for the the serial killer. And the killer had the audacity to photograph the killing of the women with a motion picture camera, which of course tied in the motion picture camera as an object of voyeurism, implicating all of us watching horror films. He was reviled. One critic said this should be flushed down the toilet. He only got one or two more movies done. He really disappeared. And now in England there are cameras watching everyone all over the street.” Pickup on South Street (1953) The Player (1992) “In the years before this movie, the age of the director who had a free hand came to an end. And yet Altman kept experimenting with different kinds of actor, different approaches to narrative, different equipment, until finally he hit it with this movie, which took him off onto a whole other level.” The Power and the Glory (1933) “Directed by William K. Howard and written by Preston Sturges, it had a structure that Mankiewicz and Welles used forCitizen Kane.” Stagecoach (1939) “Welles drew from everywhere. The ceilings and the interiors in John Ford’s classic western inspired him for Citizen Kane.” Raw Deal (1948) The Red Shoes (1948) “There’s something so rich and powerful about the story, and the use of the color, that it deeply affected me when I was nine or ten years old. The archness of the approach, and how serious the ballet dancers were … When they say, “The spotlight toujours on moi,” they mean it! The ballet sequence is almost like the first rock video. It’s almost as if you’re seeing what the dancer sees and hears and feels as she’s moving. It’s like in Raging Bull, where we never went outside the ring for the fighting sequences.” The Rise of Louis XIV (1966) “In the third part of his career, Rossellini decided to make an encyclopedia, a series of didactic films. This is the first film in that series, and it’s an artistic masterpiece. He shot it in 16mm for TV, and called it anti-dramatic. Yet, I screen it once every couple of years, and when you look at frames of it on the big screen there are shots that just look like paintings. Rossellini couldn’t get away from it, he had an artist’s eye. There’s nothing like the last ten minutes of that film to show the accumulation and the display of power. It’s not done through the sword or the speech, it’s done through the theatre he created around him with his clothes, his food, the way he eats. It’s extraordinary.” The Roaring Twenties (1939) Rocco and his Brothers (1960) “This Visconti film was also a major influence on filmmakers.”
Rome, Open City (1945) “I saw Italian movies as a 5-year-old, on a 16-inch TV my father bought. We were living in Queens. There were only three stations. One station showed Italian films on Friday night for the Italian-American community, subtitled, and the family would gather to see the films. My grandparents were there—they were the ones who moved over in 1910. So it became a ritual. [Director Roberto] Rossellini had an intellectual approach.”Secrets of the Soul (1912): “This was a silent movie whose flashback structure was unlike anything else. Secrets of the Soul looked almost experimental.” Senso (1954) “An extraordinary film by Visconti, another Neo-Realist masterpiece.” Shadows (1959) “I saw Shadows at the 8th Street Playhouse [in Manhattan], and when I saw such a direct communication with the human experience, of conflict and love, it was almost as if there was no camera there at all. And I love camera positions! But this was like you were living with the people.” Shock Corridor (1963) Some Came Running (1958) Stromboli (1950) “This too was a very important film of Rossellini’s second period. Very beautiful.” [During the shooting of Stromboli, the star, Ingrid Bergman, who was married to an American dentist, got pregnant with Rossellini’s child. She divorced the dentist, and became persona non grata in America].” Sullivan’s Travels (1941) “Billy Wilder told me, you’re only as good as your last picture. Sullivan, played by Joel McRae, is in the studio system, under that kind of pressure. He makes comedies, but one day he decides he really wants to make ‘Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?’ He puts it all on the line to learn about the poor. The resolution of the movie is very moving.” Sweet Smell of Success (1957) Tales of Hoffman (1951) “This was a great risk for Powell and Pressburger. In fact, they lost it on that. He had in mind a composed film like a piece of music, and played the music back on set during the shooting, so the actors moved in a certain way.”
The Third Man (1949) “Carroll Reed made one of those films where everything came together. It made me see, with Kane, that there was another way of interpreting stories, and another approach to the visual frame of the classical films…all those low shots, and the cuts.” T-Men (1947) Touch of Evil (1958) “Welles’ radio career with the Mercury Theater made him a master of the soundtrack. Just listen to this movie–you can close your eyes and imagine everything that is happening. (Young people should listen to the radio soundtrack of War of the Worlds, which was so effective that people got in their cars and started to drive away, because they really believed that Martians were attacking.)” The Trial (1962) “This is another film that gave us a new way of looking at films. You’re very aware of the camera, like when Anthony Perkins came running down this corridor of wooden slats and light cutting the image, blades and shafts of light, talk about paranoia!” Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)
