Favorite Books on Cinema - Part 1

I'm current writing a new article and was returning to some of the books that had the most impact on me. Not a top ten list - just some books I often find myself citing and thought I would share.

The one I always keep returning to is Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).

 

 

I discovered this book when researching my MA thesis on Abbas Kiarostami. Then I was assigned to read it for a film theory course I took when I was working toward my Ph.D. 

Mulvey is mostly know for her article on the male gaze in Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure. There are some great chapters in that book. But 24x is the one that I constantly return to. 

I love the chapter on Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin, where she compares their writings on photography and film, respectively. The last two chapters on the possessive and pensive spectator are also really good and provide some very interesting insights into new technologies and cinema. 

I think one of the key points of her book is that cinema has a ghostly secret - the still frame. Digital media has changed our relationship to cinema because we now have the technologies to halt the flow of images which "opens a space for consciousness" (186).

 

 

Reading Lost's Walkabout

In my television theory class, we watch the episode "Walkabout" from the series Lost as an approach to studying semiotics - the study of signs. This posting contains spoilers!!

Roland Barthes:

Using semiotics is the basis on how to conduct a close analysis of a film or a television series. Roland Barthes's work on Mythologies is one of the founding texts for this type of analysis. And to keep things simple, I will focus on the terms: denotative and connotative. 

Denotative Meanings:

Denotative is the surface level of a sign. For example, if I see a stop sign while driving, I know to stop my car. It is a sign that we can all agree upon - at least I hope we do.

Connotative Meanings:

Connotative is the secondary level of a sign. This means there can be multiple meanings of a sign. For example, I could read the sign "snake" not only as a slimy reptile, but as "sin." The surface reading (denotative) of a snake means a reptile and it slithers. The secondary reading (connotative) of a snake could mean "sin," or it could mean "friend." I preferably would not like to think about snakes at all! But you get the point...

Rhetoric: Making Your Case Convincingly

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. A connotative approach to studying film or television involves how well you can argue your case. This means when you unpack secondary meanings (connotations), you have to make your case convincingly. To do this, you must inventory the signs of a film and or television episode.

"Walkabout" Example

Lost is a television series about the survivors of Oceanic 815 stranded on a mysterious island. "Walkabout" is an early episode in the first season that focuses on John Locke (Terry O'Quinn), a mysterious man who decides to hunt for a boar after learning the survivors had ran out of food.

"Walkabout" involves Locke's journey into the mysterious island. This odyssey entails a physical component (find and kill the boar), and an interior component (Locke's re-birth). We can track these two registers by inventorying the episode's signs.

Locke's Wheel Chair

The wheel chair is more than simply a means of transportation; it is also about Locke's backstory and his internal struggles before he crashed on the island, which is told through flashbacks. His wheel chair has an added charge of meaning when we learn that Locke can walk after surviving the airplane crash at the end of the episode.

Movement and Stillness

Locke is shown a number of times lying on his back, looking at his feet. Movement has multiples meanings, especially when you consider the title of the episode: "walkabout." It is a spiritual renewal for Locke.

Re-Birth

Locke is re-born as he learns to walk again. The fire framed by his wheelchair at the end of the episode helps to communicate this at the connotative level. He is no longer the same person we saw in the episode's flashbacks.

There are many connotations I could have discussed in this episode. But I chose signs that are tied to a specific theme: Locke's re-birth as a "walkabout" in his hunt for the boar. At the end, he successfully kills the boar and provides food for the survivors. At the same time, Locke's soul is nourished by the hunt in the form of a walkabout.

The Pleasure of the Text - Video Essay

The purpose of this video essay is to apply Roland Barthes theory of text of pleasure and text of bliss to the realm of visual and performative arts. 

 

 A question I pose is what emotional effects do these sounds and images produce for the viewer?  And do they reflect the textual effects Barthes describes in The Pleasure of the Text?

The first part of the video examines Barthes distinguishing between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss (which is also referred to as the readerly and writerly text). Barthes argues that the text of pleasure is a closed text because it situates the reader in a comfortable and pleasurable position.   For example, a majority of Hollywood films would fall under the text of pleasure, because they aim to situate the viewer as if they are right in the middle of the action without drawing attention to the production of the image unfolding on screen.

The text of bliss disrupts one’s readership—revealing gaps, ruptures and disturbances within the text.  Barthes postulates that the text of bliss is jouissance (pure enjoyment) because it breaks down the unity of the signifying chain.   Another way to put it is that the text of bliss attempts to go beyond meaning.  As Barthes notes, “it unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language” (14).  The text of bliss finds itself in close association with the surrealism and avant-garde art. 

The last part of the video explores Barthes’ final concept in The Pleasure of Text, which he describes as the “grain the voice.” Barthes states that the “grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of art of guiding one's body…. [T]he language aligned with the flesh [is] a text where we can hear the grain of the throat” (66). For Barthes, the grain of the voice is not the language that speaks the body, but the body that speaks the language.

I found the grain of the voice concept breaking away from the binaries of the text of pleasure and text of bliss.  The grain of the voice demonstrates how text of pleasure can register moments of abstraction or bliss or even transcendence.  I believe the last clip on Ian Curtis from the post-punk new wave group Joy Division performing “Transmission” exemplifies how his passionate singing captures the grain of the voice—how Curtis’ body language attempts to go beyond meaning within the realm of pop culture.

Victor Turner - The Anthropology of Performance

In Victor Turner's essay "The Anthropology of Performance," he argues that change involves a re-adjustment, and that this re-adjustment is ceremonial, what he sees as being theatre or performance. 

 

Turner breaks down four phases of public action:  Breach, Crisis, Redressive Action and Reintergration. For Turner, change within a culture occurs when a threshold has been crossed.  As he notes, "From the standpoint of relatively well-regulated, more or less accurately operational, methodical, orderly social life, social dramas have a 'Iiminal' or 'threshold' character. The latter term is derived from a Germanic base which means 'thrash'  'thresh,' a place where grain is beaten out from its husk, where what has been hidden is thus manifested" (92)

This passage from Turner is very similar to Roland Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice.  For Barthes, the grain of the voice, which he argues in "The Pleasure of the Text," (which happens to be the subject of my video essay) is when the voice aligns itself with the flesh or body. It is at point where meaning is shifted to the energy of the performer. It is when the body becomes the voice.   

Musicologist such as Simon Frith and Richard Middleton have tuned into Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice for its political implications in music. For example, Frith interprets Elvis Presley's body and hip shakes in his early performance on television in the 1950s disturbing and disrupting the status quo. Here, Turner's conception of performance fits well with Barthes' grain of the voice. Elvis' transgressive body language shook up the way we think of the performer and performance.