The Spectacle of Sex in Strange days

Strange Days is a late 90's Film Noir/Sci-fi genre film by Katherine Bigelow, set in the near future. The first draft of the film was written by her former husband, James Cameron. The film deals deeply with issues of race and sex. It is owned by Universal Studios.

This is part of a series of papers I wrote for a Humanities class last semester.

The a central plot device to the film Strange Days is the use of the SQUID, an electronic device that records an individuals senses to a disk that can later be replayed for another persons pleasure. The use of the SQUID can help people experience things that they would likely not experience otherwise; sexual encounters, theft, etc. The SQUID becomes the ultimate spectacle replacing not just visual images but all of a persons senses. “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.” What is the world view that has materialized in Strange Days? That men dominate women, and white men dominate all. The film presents a bleak future in which LA has become a police state, and powerful men buy and murder for control.

Here we see Tom Sizemore as Max experiencing the SQUID.

It is the men who dominate in the film; record producer Philo Gant who keeps tight control over his women, Max dominates over the singer Faith and the other women he rapes. Women have no control over the film. Faith is a shell of a woman, who has been battered emotionally and physically by the men in her life now has become a compliant shell. She obeys whoever is the biggest male that can guarantee her a form of safety. She leaves Lenny for Philo Gant who can give her wealth and promises her a career, then she leaves Philo for Max who guarantees her safety from Philo’s abuse. Each male is a step in a spiral downward. She is destructing and taking place in it. Many of the men are obsessed with replay through the SQUID’s. Max uses it so that when he rapes and kills women they are forced to watch it from his perspective. Philo Gant has SQUIDS planted on persons under his employ so he can keep tabs on his assets. The SQUID, a spectacle, becomes a source of control. Controlling not only by surveillance, but now what other people experience.

Spectacle becomes a greater factor for Lenny, Philo Gant, and Max. They have become seperate and distant from other people in their lives. Max lies about who is; claiming to be Lenny’s friend while setting him up. Philo Gant can’t communicate or connect with people so he keeps tabs on them with SQUIDS’s on spies; using brute force to keep those who oppose him from falling out of line. Lenny can’t get over the past he had with Faith, his ex-girlfriend; he replays disks of them interacting over and over. This creates further distant between him and Faith, because he objectifies her as well.

Faith becomes a spectacle to Lenny obsessing over her. He creates a distance with her by stopping interacting with her, replaying SQUID imagery of her. Faith tries to talk to Lenny, but Lenny never listens to her. He objectifies her in his mind, she no longer is a person but a spectacle. DeBord writes that the spectacle “is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.” SQUID replays and sneaking into Faith’s performances are ways of playing out the experience he wants, neither situation is real. Lenny creating a spectacle of Faith rather than interacting removes himself from her life. McKenzie Wark writes of those who play video games, a form of spectacle, but then remove themselves from making history because of it. Lenny too removes himself from a positive history of Faith by clinging onto the past in a literal form of recorded SQUID disks containing those memories.

Watching the film I realized that I was like Lenny, holding onto memories of a former girlfriend and turning them into something they were not. She was a different person, and so was I. Like Lenny I became slightly pathetic and unable to act. Those memories of my former love had become a spectacle of their own, keeping me moving in a direction that I had chosen; not one that I necessarily wanted. DeBord states, “the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.” I, not just a state or overseeing organization, created a spectacle in my own life to keep myself and the status quo moving; similar to Lenny.

The film depicts men objectifying women over and over; in both personal ways-like Lenny, pornographic ways-the buyers, and sadistic ways-like Max. There is a separation between the sexes, they never see woman as more than objects for the majority of the film. Strange Days isn’t largely pessimistic about men, however. The end shows Max connecting with Mace. Mace who is as just as powerful and intelligent- if not more so- than any of the men in power, is thrown down in the film like the other women. When Lenny is able to stop making a spectacle of the past he is able to move on and connect with Mace.

International Films as Culture

In class I hear some professors pointing out the cultural differences found in foreign films. I find this odd. Having taken anthropology and psychology classes, as well as being familiar with the ideas of Joseph Campbell, I find myself disagreeing with my professors in this view. While yes, many foreign films are different than American films I believe that there are more elements in common.

To give an example of a difference I will point out the Japenese film Tokyo Story. My professor, Lau, highlighted the fact that the director Yasujiro Ozu risregards the "180" rule. This rule states that there is a line in a room and the camera can only show what is on one side of it. This helps to establish a continuity on a more subconscious element for the viewer. This way the characters on screen always look at the same direction, as if we were talking to them or they were on stage. Ozu will place the camera in a room where ever he pleases, so the characters will face to the right of the screen, and without moving, suddenly face the left within an edit. Now, I will contend that this could be viewed more as a "trend." Since film is relatively knew, and a capitalist country like ours allows for very little experimentation, of course filmmakers in other cultures are going to do something subtle as break the 180 rule. Most of the Japanese films I have watched, and even the more modern ones have not done this.

My teacher also explained that many of us in the audience, being "Western," may not understand the film, since it is about family, and modernization. This is absolutely wonk. Towards the end of the film the mother in the family died, and most of the children recovered emotionally from her death and went back to their busy lives rather quickly. At my Grandmothers death I was upset at the way her possessions were handed and bartered out the same way as in this film. I worry about my parents death, and I worry about life after they die. I worry about dissapointing them, not living up to their expectations. All of this is in the film. So how am I different from the eastern audiences that cried during this? I cried. My favorite How I Met Your Mother episodes dealt with Marshall loosing his father. This troubled me because I realised that I don't know what I will do without him. Visiting my Grandparents there is a conscious effort to try and cut pop culture and technology out of conversations, and many of us family members have failed to do so, leaving my Grandparents in the cold. They haven't caught up to modernity, and we have left them behind. So this element is not limited to Japan.

Joseph Campbell and other people that study story have noticed that you can break stories down into the most base elements. When you do this there are repetitive elements in all stories. There are different arguments that there are only 32 stories, and another for only two, (comedy and tragedy.) The human experience is very broad, and not limited to one nation, ethnicity, gender, ect. I wish people would open up there eyes and understand that. The only thing that seperates us is language. (I make this argument since technology can allow us to overcome geographic boundaries.) Film is in itself its own language, and like any language a director like Ozu can play with it. Regardless of the amount he has tweaked it there is a relatable human story there.

The Art of Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, along with cinematographer Greg Toland and writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, created in Citizen Kane a groundbreaking film in by how it uses film techniques. Montage, long takes, and matte shots were used before Citizen Kane. The complexity of the film takes us on a journey that goes in a full circle while drawing the viewer in. Welles created a fictitious story that is a mystery about a man who lived in the public but few people understood. Citizen Kane’s focus is on the title character whom is loosely based off of William Randolf Hearst, the media tycoon known for his yellow-journalism. We watch Kane start off idealistic, and then descend into muck-racking, politics, and scandal. The point of the film is to show this very public man in a more human light. Welles humanizes Kane, making him sympathetic despite his dictator like behavior. The story is told with an investigative reporter interviewing people who knew Kane in hope of finding the meaning of the word “rosebud.” While Welles weaves this story he artistically presents beautiful mise-en-scene to serve it.

Naremore writes, “Citizen Kane is fundamentally different from a film like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon: it doesn’t present seperate versions of an unknowable reality, but instead gives different facets of a single personality.”1 The story gives an energetic feel by jumping around time through the interviews. However, the flashbacks inside the film serve a linear function in the storytelling. Naremore continues “Kane’s biography is depicted more or less chronologically, through the memories and judgments of five characters who knew him at progressively later stages. We never have the feeling that these characters are distorting the truth... for all its interest in subjectivity and psychology, Kane has a rational structure; its a film about complexity, not about relativity.”2 In the bulk of the film we view Kane’s life in a chronological order, excepting the beginning when we witness his death; the reporter interviews people in Kane’s life who represent Kane at different stages of his life, from childhood to old age.

The screenplay Welles constructs with writer Mankiewicz is complimented by the visuals Welles creates with cinematographer Toland. Adding to the mystery of the film, and the surreality of Kane’s life. Naremore writes “Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera is an “inquirer,” and the periodic frustrations it encounters (a door closing, a light clicking out, a sled being pulled away) are like teasing affronts to our curiosity.”3 Welles uses the visual component of cinema to further the mystery of the story in our search for the meaning of “rosebud.” The visuals add to this mystery and also our knowledge of Kane in the shots by mise-en-scene. Such shots are: the table sequence wherein Kane and his wife grow farther and farther apart through the passing of time, or Kane standing between his political rival and his wife as he has to choose to follow his career or his family, and the large windows shot in deep focus that bear over Kane as financial problems weigh over him. The mise-en-scene gives us insight into Kane we otherwise would not have as an audience.

Presented in reverse order is Kane and his wife, wherein over time we see them growing further apart via there placement around the table.


Many of the shots are unique in how they are composed.Using a deep field of focus Welles creates layered shots that allow the takes to go long. He uses matte shots to allow himself to compose objects and actors in front of a shot that could not fit in front of the camera. The scene where Welles as Kane is writing on the typewriter with Joseph Cotten behind him made use of this technique.



Here is the shot of WELLES being placed by a matte shot in front of Cotten.









In the film Welles uses what Rudolf Arnheim calls “the constancy of form,”4 meaning that he takes common objects and distorts them. Naremore recognizes this ability in Citizen Kane when he writes “The real significance of Welles’s work was not in its phenomenal realism, but in its defamiliarizing, ‘strange-making’ qualities.”5


Here is an example of the "strange making" qualities in which a snow glob is shown in an extreme close-up, wherein we can see the house on the side and in a reflection Kane's nurse entering in.






Andre Bazin argues that there is a dichotomy in cinema between films that use montage and those that use longer takes, which he calls “reality.”6 Welles masters the long shot in Citizen Kane, such as the shot of Kane’s mother and father debating the ethics of giving young Kane to a mentor while young Kane plays in the background. However, Welles also uses the montage in the film, apparent when Kane’s second wife’s performance are cut together with and newspaper headlines, and Kane’s face are all cut together. This montage alludes to the passing of time, but it also builds an psychological idea. As Sergei Eisenstein wrote, “The combination of two ‘representable’ objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” 7

Welles draws upon film theory to enhance in telling his story. His gift as a filmmaker in knowing when to use techniques at the correct time. Welles and Toland masterfully compose their shots to give a heightened sense of emotion, bringing the film to a point of pure artistry. The filmmaking enhances the mystery and story, giving us an experience rather than just a story. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece because it weaves a complex and mysterious story that draws us in.

1 Naremore, James. “Citizen Kane.” Film Analysis, A Norton Reader. Ed. Jeffrey Geiger, and R.L. Rutsky. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2005. 348
2 Naremore, J. 348
3 Naremore, J. 346
4 Arnheim, Rudolf. “From Film as Art” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 285
5 Naremore, J. 344
6 Bazin, Andre. “From What is Cinema” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 42
7 Eisenstein, Sergei. “From Film Form” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 15

(And my apologies for any formatting errors, I am having trouble copying the text from Pages into a blog form.)

Ken Burns' Unforgivable Blackness

Ken Burns’s documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is about the world’s first African-American heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson rose to prominence during the early 20th century and created controversy by winning the championship title. At the same time that many African Americans were persecuted and limited in their position in society, Johnson went out and did what he wanted, disregarding social trends that were based entirely on race and social mores. Ultimately it was his lifestyle that proved his undoing. He provoked the political powers of the time. The film’s director Ken Burns makes documentaries about people he feels embodies aspects of America. Here Burns presents us Jack Johnson, a man who embodies the American idea: Stanley Crouch states in the film, “Johnson embodied the American idea of being able to go where you want to go on the basis of your ability.” However, despite Johnson fighting for this American idea, Burns also presents us a story wherein he is opposed by America. Johnson represents the fact that America has opposed the American dream out of bigotry and intolerance. He was a fighter for the heavyweight title, racial equality, and freedom.

Gary R. Edgerton writes in Ken Burns’s America about Burns’s biographies being “majoritarian rather than marginalized.” Meaning that they are larger than life people who show the majority of views and movement of America. Edgerton says Burns’s reasoning is to ask, “‘Who are we Americans as a people?’ This preoccupation with the elemental question--‘Who are we as Americans”’--could not be more relevant in an era when multiculturalism has become the source of sweeping and fundamental reappraisals of almost every aspect of national life.” Edgerton wrote this concerning the film Thomas Jefferson, but this line of questioning ourselves as Americans can be applied toward Unforgivable Blackness as well. J.B. Lewis writes in the forward of Johnson’s autobiography In the Ring and Out, “In the story of Jack’s life, there is an abundance of thrill and adventure, but there is also the ripened wisdom of years of experience.” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in the book Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, “He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing--no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female--could keep him for long from whatever he wanted. He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men.” He embodied the American spirit, his actions are what we aspire to be. However those that opposed him show America as it was and as it is.

Two schools of thought existed amongst the African Americans of the time, that of the militant black man, and that of Booker T. Washington. Geoffrey C. Ward quotes a critic of both movements who explains, “The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and depredations, it deprecates political action and preaches the doctrine of industrial development and the acquisition of property.... The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place. It believes in money and property, but it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain.” In the time of Jack Johnson, many of those in the African American community followed Washington’s school of thought, and were outraged as well as white Americans with Johnson’s behavior. White America had become used to Washington’s school of thought, and having submissive black Americans under them.

The behavior of Johnson was that he was a celebrity flaunting his wealth, slept with only white women, and moved into white neighborhoods, further enraging white men. Ward states, “While most negroes struggled merely to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. At a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased. Most whites (and some Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual threat--profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.” Johnson’s individualistic personality isolated him from both black and white Americans. Johnson became a threat to white Americans, and their pride. J.B. Lewis writes, “Steeled by a determination that a man of [Johnson] race should not posses laurels so highly prized in the realm of sports, it was easy to marshal against him native prejudices, and back them with charges of deviation from the moral code and violation of certain statues.” They sought to use the Mann Act. Ward describes it in Unforgivable Blackness as having “barred the transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purposes.’” Ward continues that the “language of the act was loosely drawn, and both within and without the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation...there were those who believed that “debauchery” and “other immoral purposes” might be more broadly defined to include what the newspapers called “escapades,” sexual relations between consenting adults.” Ward quotes Congressman Seaborn Roddenberry in the book Unforgivable Blackness, “No... degradation in all the years of southern slavery possessed such villainous character... as the provision of the laws of Illinois which allows the marriage of the Negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain....Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit.” This was America’s reaction to the first black man winning the boxing heavyweight championship.

Ken Burns presents us the dramatic story of Johnson through cinematic storytelling. Edgerton writes about Ken Burns’s four plot structures for his epic documentary Civil War in Ken Burns’s America, “To start with, he employs narrative descriptions which primarily move the story along. These sections follow a simple chronology and are designed above all else to provide the audience with the basic historical facts and figures on what is happening and who is involved in the action at any given time.” The movie’s companion book of the same name, shares the writer Geoffrey C. Ward. The film’s narration, read by Keith David, follows the text of the book. It is only when we watch interviews with James Earl Jones, Stanley Crouch and Burt Sugar-- living specialists of Jack Johnson--that the film’s narration veers away from Ward’s original text. Most of the film follows the format given by the book for the narration.

Edgerton continues, “Second, he designs what he calls emotional chapters...which have the ‘ability to float between episodes.’ This category of scene is less bound by chronological demands than by its capacity to affect mood and engage an audience emotionally at strategic moments within the plot.” An effective emotional chapter in the film occurs after Johnson’s death in the film; Stanley Crouch reveals a personal story about Johnson arriving in his father’s gym. Johnson gets inside the ring with the fastest boxer there and wears him out. Johnson then leaves abruptly like a magician. Burns forms a story of Johnson to show his character; this gives the viewer a sense of the emotion of the mystery and legend that was Jack Johnson.

Edgerton explains the third type of scene, “Telegrams in a sense, are a mixture of both the scenes of narrative description, because they are bound to whatever event is transpiring in the story line at the time.” An example of a telegram is when Johnson goes to trial under the Mann Act. It is introduced by the narrator and moves into Belle Schreiber’s testimony against Johnson. We are shown pictures of Belle Schreiber and various shots of court houses, while an actress reads the transcript. This creates an illusion that we are witnessing the actual testimony. Then actor Samuel L. Jackson gives his voice to Johnson, and we hear Johnson say he never met with Belle in a hotel. Burns presents us exterior and interior shots of a hotel, suggesting Johnson is lying, that he did indeed meet her there. It could be any photograph of any hotel Burns is showing us, but Burns creates a situation in which we believe Johnson is lying in court.

Edgerton explains Burns’s fourth technique, “‘editing clusters.’ Burns “constructs editing clusters as his way of critically analyzing the various sides of a theme, question, or controversy that is central to a better overall understanding of his subject.” Burns will cut together relevant images with “a montage of commentators,” who give “conflicting and corroborating opinions, creating a collage of multiple viewpoints.” Burns uses this technique during the trial of Johnson by having Congressman Roddenberry give his opinion of mixing races, W.E.B. DuBois defend Johnson’s actions despite his disapproval of them, and using commentators like Stanley Crouch, James Earl Jones, and Randy Roberts. This conflict of opinions gives the audience a greater understanding of the trial and era from differing viewpoints.

Burns used careful research and storytelling techniques to convey the life and historical worth of Jack Johnson. The plot structure: narrative descriptions, emotional chapters, telegrams, and editing clusters convey the historical and the emotional aspects of Johnson in the film. Johnson becomes more than a boxer in Burns’s film, he becomes a symbol of America. He is an example not just of the American ideal of gaining rewards through hard work; but of the opposition individuals receive when they try. Through him we can better understand racism, bigotry, and intolerance, that has held, and continues to hold, America back from embracing individuals and those that pursue the American ideal.

Bibliography:

Edgerton, Gary R., Ken Burns’s America, Palgrave, New York, 2001

Lewis, J.B., Proteus Limited, New York, 1977

Ward, Geoffrey C., Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Vintage, 2006

The Balance of Film Art

Art is a form of expression; a way in which we communicate a story, a thought, emotion, or an idea with highlights to the skill and craft involved. In film persons can craft movies to create stories by shooting footage then cutting, arranging, and pasting it together; in an effort called editing. Shots have to be arranged, like paintings or photographs, in a way to help explain the scene. The shots and editing become different elements of the art, the same way paint and the brushes would be a part of a painting. A film has to be arranged skillfully and in a manner that is original and unique to itself to be called art.

The brush strokes of film would be editing. As a brush delivers and presents its audience with paint; editing takes and arranges footage shot somewhere else and gives them a cohesive story. Hitchcock states that “pure cinema is pieces of film assembled.”

Sergei Eisenstein argues that the intellectual power and emotional weight of a film is in the use of montage. He explains montage, “The old film-makers...regarded montage as a means of producing something by describing it, adding individual shots to one another like building blocks...But in my view montage is 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 (the ‘dramatic’ principle.)”

To Eisenstein montage is not just editing pieces of the film together, but rather an emotional segment in a film placed strategically to create a new idea using images by creating conflict through the use of editing. It allows film to become something more, to create something with those pieces that previously did not exist on their own. Those pieces are the shots, composed of the mise-en-scene.

Mise-en-scene could be compared to the paint in a painting; the composition of everything on the screen, the bare elements assembled in editing. Film composition uses techniques found in painting, drawing, and photography. Shots in a well crafted film are composed as skillfully as great music. Arnheim writes that “film art developed only gradually when the movie makers began consciously or unconsciously to cultivate the peculiar possibilities of cinematographic technique and to apply them toward the creation of artistic productions.”

Peter Wollen writes Hitchcock’s, “own menu of ingredients ran as follows: ‘Lighting creates mood, the camera dramatic impact, music stirs the emotions, colour has an aesthetic effect, widescreen provides showmanship and spectacle, all of the elements needed for the machinery of the production.”

All of these add to the visual elements of what the audience sees in a shot. Truly artistic filmmakers make use of changing the camera’s perspectives on recognizable objects, giving fresh takes with “constancy of form,” by shooting common objects in new angles.

Paul Begin writes “Mise-en-scene does in space what montage does in time.”

Therefore if montage creates new ideas that we would otherwise not surmise then so must mise-en-scene.

Arnheim states, “Film resembles painting, music, literature, and the dance in this respect-it is a medium that may, but need not, be used to produce artistic results.”

He says that a post card and military march are not considered art and just as most movies should not be considered art. With the possibility of being art, how should artistic merit of a filmmaker be deciphered? Begin writes that “Often a director’s style depends on his or her attitude toward mise-en-scene versus montage.”

Montage and mise-en-scene should not be viewed as competing elements, but pieces of film used to compose ideas and emotions the filmmakers are trying to convey. An artist knows the tools and techniques needed to convey the message and grasp a balance of montage and mise-en-scene appropriate for the particular film. Many films simply tell a story, when they become art is where the skill and craft excel.

Films have the capability of being art, and they have the ability to not be art. The deciding factors lie in the use of the elements, and how they are composed together, and the manner in which they are arranged. To shoot and assemble is not art, but to skillfully go about it and craft a movie in a way presenting the audience with ideas and ways of seeing things in an original way brings it to be. For film the main components of its art is the mise-en-scene and montage. When skillfully they are composed together they create a film that is every bit as artistically rendered as a well crafted painting.

Bibliography:

Begin, Paul. "Buñuel, Eisenstein, And The 'Montage Of Attractions': An Approach To Film In Theory And Practice." Bulletin Of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 1113-1132. Academic Search Complete. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

Rudolf Arnheim. “From Film As Art,” Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford, 2009)

Sergei Eisenstein. “Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram]” Film Theory and Criticism. (New York: Oxford, 2009.)

Wollen, Peter. "Theory And Practice." Journal Of Media Practice 6.2 (2005): 73-81. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 9 Feb. 2012.