FM4 - Spectatorship - 'Bodysong': Experimental and Expanded Film/Video

Simon Pummell's unique documentary 'Bodysong' uses a collage of images to present a portrait of life from the moment the sperm pierces the egg, until death. Home movies, famous film images, and other sources have been tapped to supply the materials. The film attempts to embrace the entire spectrum of human existence by including pictures of disease, violence, and decay. The film includes a soundtrack recorded by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.

Surrealism - Spectatorship - Experimental and Expanded Film/Video

Surrealist Cinema (Brief History/Background)

Based in the Paris avant-garde movement of the 1920s, surrealistic films unconventional style dealt with issues concerning the merging of the conscious and unconscious worlds. Juxtapositions of random images are often filmed in non-sequential displays thus opposing the dominant forms of Hollywood narrative cinema. Opposed to conventional forms of narrative and realistic storytelling, the surrealists sought to shock the subconscious through the juxtaposition of random non-sequential images dealing with death, sexual desire, cruelty and violence. While the style violates and openly rejects traditional, linear narrative and psychological logic, it does create its own dreamlike meaning. The initial artists who based their films in this controversial style were Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali (Un Chien Andalou); Buñuel would continue much of his career in this vein with films like L'Age d'or, The Phantom of Liberty, and Belle de Jour.

Although the actual movement died out towards the end of the '20s, surrealism has had a profound effect on all of cinema, due to the film's 'dream filled' use of images. The style remains popular through the work of contemporary directors such as Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books, A Zed & Two Noughts), Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik), the Coen Brothers (Barton Fink), and David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire).

Dali saw surrealism as ‘a traumatic and violent disequilibrium veering towards concrete irrationality.’ Film spectatorship is seen as similar to ‘conscious hallucination’, in which the body undergoes ‘temporary depersonalisation’ and robbed of ‘its own sense of its existence'. The viewer becomes nothing more than two eyes fixated upon the screen, with a limited and guided gaze. Vision therefore becomes more complex and the connection and meaning between images becomes obscured. Often this is seen as being a violent shock to the eyes. Time and space are fractured by dislocated and mismatched cuts, which ultimately question the certainty of seeing.

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams." - Luis Buñuel

David Lynch 'Eraserhead': Spectatorship - Experimental and Expanded Film/Video

Many writers have tried to sum up the story of Eraserhead, but few have been able to accurately convey what exactly is happening. It is no secret that Eraserhead is a film that defies an easy synopsis. You don't watch the film per se, but rather experience it. However, one of the best attempts to describe it comes from the director himself who once summarised the film as "a dream of dark and troubling things.”

Eraserhead is an urban nightmare set in an industrial wasteland "reminiscent of the paintings of the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger” whose works contain images of decaying biological matter and people trapped in machinery, becoming one with industry, much like Lynch's film with its bleak landscapes of buildings and factories with no signs of nature present. The motion picture's protagonist, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a rather odd fellow who wears a black suit with a white pocket protector and white socks to match, his hair styled like some sort of electrified pompadour a la the Bride of Frankenstein (1935). As the film opens, we gradually learn that Henry is on vacation from La Pelle's factory and after a particularly gruesome and rather humorous dinner with his girlfriend Mary X and her strange family, he learns that she has given birth to a premature baby. The rest of the film shows how Henry comes to terms with this situation and copes with all of the problems inherit in rearing a child in an area that can only be referred to as an urban hell.

Now this all sounds pretty straight forward right? Well, Eraserhead doesn't quite play out in this linear fashion. The film follows its own leisurely pace in order to let the rather nightmarish mood and creepy atmosphere slowly work its magic on the viewer. And this is where the film loses or keeps its audience. You are either captivated by its often disturbing, yet somewhat beautiful images, or repulsed by its rather negative and pessimistic worldview. Either way, Eraserhead is an unforgettable film guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction, which is what a good film should do.

David Lynch first conceived of Eraserhead as a black and white film. "Black and white takes you kind of far away. Some things are said better in it, some feelings come across better.” He wanted to capture the feeling of fear and alienation that he had felt while living in Philadelphia and using black and white film stock would convey this mood effectively. The first image that appeared to Lynch was that of a factory where the insides of someone's head would be used to make pencil erasers – an image that would later survive to the final cut and provide the title for his film.

Read more @ Radiator Heaven Blog

American Avant-Garde - Spectatorship - Experimental and Expanded Film/Video

For more information and comment on early American avant-garde filmmakers visit The Dancing Image Blog.

Extract below:

In the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, there was a very clear divide between the mainstream and the avant-garde in cinema. While the modernist obsession with abstraction and experimentation swept the other arts, making celebrities out of artists who defied or reinvented conventions, when it came to movies, you either told a story - with a budget and release schedule provided by the Hollywood system - or you disappeared into the margins. Yet talent thrived on those margins and the postwar era saw the growth of a vital underground cinema, fostered and facilitated by institutions like Amos Vogel's Cinema 16, an inexpensive film society in New York (Vogel and his views of cinema will be the subject of the next installment in this series, going up Sunday evening).

Three figures - Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage - probably had a bigger impact and wider reach than any others, and so here I will focus on three of their early works: Deren's At Land (1944), Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964), and Brakhage's Cat's Cradle (1959).

FM4 - Single Film - Critical Study: Fight Club

Read this critical debate on 'Fight Club' director David Fincher's films that appeared in Slant Magazine. Film critics Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard assess the directors filmmaking career including other notable work such as 'Se7en', 'The Game' and 'Zodiac'.

FM4 - Single Film - Critical Study: Fight Club

Crisis of Masculinity?

Fight Club comments upon America's problems of meaning (e.g. indentured servitude to capitalism in a land of freedom, violence in a land of justice, consumer Darwinism in a land of community, meaning in a post-modern reality that understands all meaning as a relative cultural construct, etc.). In sociological terms, Jack, a white male, could represent the hierarchical leadership of the American patriarchy. "I was the warm little centre that the life of this world crowded around." America seems to love him, but he feels hurt and betrayed by his culture and the dulled-down consumerist dreams he has inherited.

We're consumers. We're by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty -- these things don't concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.

But according to Fincher, "We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore – a reworking of the hunter/gatherer myth. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created." Where does Jack go to discuss his problems? What community exists to support him emotionally and spiritually? Seeking guidance, Jack stumbles into a group for men with testicular cancer. He finds that a weekly session Bob's breasts rids him of his insomnia by allowing him to feel. But this apparent solution produces a new dilemma for Jack-crying men and then Marla interferes to complicate matters further.

FM4 - Single Film - Critical Study: Fight Club

For the Single Film Study - Critical Study: 'Fight Club' you will need to apply your own interpretation of the film (close analysis) with the critical approaches that have been used to understand the deeper meanings at work in the film: sometimes negatively or positively (reviews/debates).

As the film can be read in many different ways you will be required to construct an argument for validating your understanding; referring to theory and how it informs meaning/understanding is therefore a requirement of your answer.

Approaches will need to understand the complexity of 'Fight Club' in light of these differing readings and you will need to argue a case for your own personal opinions.

Content & Structure for ‘Close Study’ Analysis

Basic Analysis

• Jack /Tyler -Managing the spectator’s identification and sympathies (Spectatorship)

• Distinctive stylistic features and the look of the film (Colour/Editing/Camera/Performance)

• Motifs and their function (Mise-en-scene/Sound etc)

Theoretical Concepts

• The representation of modern urban and corporate life (Philosophy/Marxism?)

• The representation of masculinity and its threats (Gender/Postmodern Identities)

• Marla: women as object of scorn? Misogynistic? (Gender/’The Male Gaze’?)

Social Contexts

• A progressive film or a deeply reactionary one? (Opinions)

• The social and cultural context of production (Production)

• Critical and popular responses to the film (Reviews)

FM4 - Single Film - Critical Study: Fight Club

Fight Club as Feminist Cinema

Suggestions of homoeroticism begin to pop up all over the movie. Jack refers to his relationship with Tyler as "Ozzie and Harriet." Before Tyler burns Jack with lye, he slowly kisses his hand. Tyler's very occupation is suggestively feminine: he makes and sells extremely expensive soap. After almost every fight scene in the movie, the two shirtless fighters hug and clasp their sweaty and beaten bodies together. In this way, even hand-to-hand fighting, arguably the most basically masculine action possible, becomes homoerotic. When Tyler pays too much attention to another character, "Angel" (played by Jared Leto), Jack gets extremely jealous and beats Angel to a hideously deformed pulp, explaining, "I felt like destroying something beautiful." This is the only time the word beautiful occurs in the movie in reference to anything, and it refers to a man. Gender confusion continues to abound in the form of Bob (played by Meat Loaf), a former body builder who developed testicular cancer after years of steroid use, and now has "bitch tits," because his body "upped the estrogen." Bob is in this manner the very embodiment of the castration complex, right out in the open for the viewer to see.

In these ways, Fincher takes Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and creates his vision of the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk step-by-step using Mulvey's ideas and themes to create a feminist work in an almost entirely male-dominated plot.

Read more on this perspective here.

FM4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes/Site

This extract on Postmodernism and Consumer Society provides some useful quotes that may be applied to many of the topics for A2 Film and Media this year. 'Fight Club' (FM4) is the most obvious text but these concepts can be applied to other examples of Film/Television/Music throughout the year. Getting to grips with this type of theory and applying it to those examples will set your answers apart from other students who rely upon more descriptive responses.

Working with Frederic Jameson's categories (Postmodernism and Consumer Society)

(1) "the transformation of reality into images" (cf. Debord and Baudrillard)

(2) "the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents"

"the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (Jameson).

Pastiche and parody of multiple styles: old forms of "content" become mere "styles"

stylistic masks, image styles, without present content: the meaning is in the mimicry

"in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum" (Jameson).

No individualism or individual style, voice, expressive identity. All signifiers circulate and recirculate prior and existing images and styles.

The postmodern in advertising: attempts to provide illusions of individualism (ads for jeans, cars, etc.) through images that define possible subject positions or create desired positions (being the one who's cool, hip, sexy, desirable, sophisticated...).

"our advertising...is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and is inconceivable without it" (Jameson)

For more useful notes on postmodern theory visit here.

FM4 - Single Film - Critical Study: Fight Club

Read this analysis from the Metaphilm website. In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton’s character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give "Jack" more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. "Jack" is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Norton portrays the grown-up version of Calvin, while Brad Pitt plays his imaginary pal, Hobbes, reincarnated as Tyler Durden.

FM4 - Single Film - Critical Study: Fight Club

Here is an excellent essay with some very useful analysis on postmodernism, violence and masculinity in 'Fight Club'.

Extract:

Jack is the epitome of what most people would consider to be a nonentity. He, quite frankly, is boring not only to others, but he is even boring to himself. Jack is a living, breathing zombie, shambling through life on the most basic of automatic pilot modes. He goes from work to home, shifting his attention from computer monitor or gristly accident scene to the blurry brightness of the television or the brightly-colored and artificial IKEA catalogue. To further emphasize the fact that Jack is not an entity, Jack does not even have a real name. Jack is simply what he is called in the DVD's extended commentary and the name that fans of the movie have given him in order to keep from calling him simply Narrator (Edward Norton's role as listed in the film's credits). 

FM4 - Single Film Critical Study: Fight Club Booklet

Click on image to download resource booklet