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Attention viewers: the cinema is young.
Our course is called 'cinematic modernism', and to reiterate the obvious, this is because cinema and modernism go hand in hand. There is hardly something which we may call the cinematic baroque, cinematic classicism or even romanticism for that matter, in the sense that we refer to other forms of art, music, architecture and fashion.
To take a personal example, of the 'baby-face' of cinema, in my family there have only been three generations of cinema goers.
1. My Nonno (grandfather), who (with two rings in pocket, to make sure my Nonna (grandmother) had a choice) proposed to my Nonna in the movie cinema. My research has been unable to uncover exactly which film the proposal occurred after. In these days, it didn't seem to matter what the film was.
2. My parents, who went to drive in movie cinemas on balmy summer evenings.
3. And me, who when moving to Sydney took pleasure in attending the cinema by myself, as a gesture of (some sort of) coming of age.
I shall like to think of Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) as a 'birth' of sorts – like the short, memorable scene in his film – of medium and message; of the cinematic experience, cinema making itself and, of the "kino-eye". In short, the birth of both a manifesto, and the medium of film making, which, has the ability to lend itself to the very notion of the manifesto, for reasons, which I shall point out.
At the beginning of Vertov's film, he clearly states; "Attention Viewers: This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events". The film's use of experimental angles and 'random', absurdest, non-narrative visible events; such as a birth, a homeless man and a scene at the pub, where the camera man enters the beer; all combine to present us a piece of art, to muse upon the potential of cinema's "total separation from the language of literature and theatre".
It could be argued that it is the relatively 'newness' of the medium of cinema – even today – that lends itself to revolutionary, artistic purposes, more easily accepted than other mediums such as literature or music. Unlike a discordant sound in the middle of a Mozart work, or a symphony (such as that which accompanies Vertov's intentionally discordant work, was (and still is) able to be - what I'd like to call - 'comfortably revolutionary', as he was working with a new and malleable medium of cinema. Like Vertov's self conscious opening sequence where the camera captures the empty cinema fill up with people, we become reminded that even today there is something distinctly modern – and thus 'new' – about the cinematic experience.
At its most base, the notion of a 'manifesto' is a declaration of intentions and objectives for a certain object, thing or political party – in this case, it is the purpose of Vertov's film. As far as I believe, a manifesto is ultimately a Homo sapian construction and cinema, as Vertov presents it to us, demonstrates how naturally the camera simulates 'real human experience'. Unlike symphonies, theatre or poetry, the sensual and systematic behaviour of the camera has the potential to mimic 'the real', and go above and beyond it.
For Vertov, the "kino eye" is about occularity; the notion of the camera being fused to the eye of the man – they are one of the same machine; "our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man" [1]. Man With a Movie Camera was his manifesto for this idea.
I'd like to start by saying that if the baby, shown being born in Vertov's film, were born today, the chance that its first glimpse of this world being daddy with a movie camera, is quite probable. I think this raises interesting questions about "kino eye" and the inability to escape it in our day and age.
I'd like to consider questions about the potential inversion of the "kino eye" in our contemporary context. What happens, when it is man fused to camera not the other way around. As a culture we are not all at one with a movie camera, however what the eye of the camera has captured, becomes inescapable in our own experience of the world, hence its fusion to us. How may you or I ever imagine a city like New York, without envisaging what we've already seen at the movies? Will I ever look at the Eiffel Tower, but through the eyes of the many films I've seen before it? I've never been to Berlin, but Vertov takes me there in angels that I may or may not experience when I see it for myself. I will not be able to help but tilt my head this way and that when I go there – because the camera has taken me there first.
I think this sort of 'inversion' of the "kino eye" is especially relevant to our experiences of the modern day urban city - for they have become recurrent characters in themselves over the course of movie making.
But then again, if the camera and the man are one of the same machine, can we invert them in a 'postmodern' context?
Perhaps not.
Vertov writes:
Kinochesto is the art of organising the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object [2].
When I think back to my Nonno, proposing to my Nonna in an urban movie theatre all those years ago, I see the marriage proposal playing out rhythmically in black and white. I feel the beat of the credits of the romantic, black and white film, rolling over in the background, with their silhouettes shadowing the screen. Then I see a distinct frame beginning to form around them both, like they're in a movie too, and I'm watching them sitting in a cinema, just like the one in Vertov's film.
Except the man with a movie camera is an inescapable imaginary being in my head.
REFERENCES:
[1]Annette Michelson (Ed), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,1984, p.8.
[2]Ibid, p. 8.
With the absence of a monkey, ape or giant gorilla in Piccadilly (1929), I found myself turning to an analogy of the experience of silent cinema, with the image of the 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' monkeys in mind, to compensate for this gaping hole. I especially found myself hovering over the 'speak no evil' monkey – for it seemed topical for a silent film, whose characters are mute of spoken word.
It is my up most intention to avoid any racist analogies in this post, at the same time as acknowledging the attitudes (not limited too, but) expressed by those such as Ernest Fenollosa in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry. In 1918 He wrote: "The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it…master it or it will master us" [1]. With Fenollosa's comments in mind, I began thinking that although there is no King Kong to fear in Piccadilly, there is certainly an anxiety surrounding the 'other' in the form of a potential 'beast'.
No King Kong, but an Anna May Wong.
Besides the novelty of the rhyme, upon contemplation I discovered that Wong's analogous relationship to the King Kong (1933) gorilla, is quite interesting.
Wong, as both a Chinese actress and female Chinese lead (Shosho) in Piccadilly, literally and symbolically stomps – not over the exteriors of the city, like King Kong does in King Kong – but, all over the interior spaces and lives of the characters who inhabit Piccadilly, England 1929. It could even be said that she treads all over the film maker E. A. Dupont himself. Both Wong and Shosho become both a manifestation of the anxieties expressed by Fenollosa, as well as potentially triumphant over a particular form of hegemonic film making.
When saying that Wong as Shosho stomps all over the interiors of Piccadilly, dances in a distinctly Chinese, and hypnotic and sensual manner putting Mabel out of work and seducing Valentine, subsequently wreaking havoc with both these character's personal lives. I'm referring to her function as a character, and the series of literal and symbolic actions she carries out. Shosho calls the shots when it comes to her costumes, contract and love interests. The jealously and rivalry which she causes amongst the men and women who surround her, make her rise from the scullery both tragic and triumphant in relation to Piccadilly's interior digesis. Unlike King Kong, Shosho is small, dainty and obviously human – however her racial 'otherness', the fear of this otherness and the conquering nature of her very self, makes her the biggest beast in this film. Questions of scale aren't raised per see in Piccadilly, but scale in relation to the supposed potential of race, such as the Chinese at the time, are certainly present and are hauntingly echoed in the "master it or it will master us", mentioned previously.
In class Melissa drew attention to Anna May Wong's signage of her own Chinese name in the film, when Shosho signs the contract with the club. The presence of this calligraphic moment to me marks Wong's (not Shosho's) final destruction or conquest, over any potential hegemonic readings or implications that E. A. Dupont may have intended himself or that film critics might hail. Anny May Wong's lingering smirk is not necessarily Shosho's knowingness, but her own.
A few years later than Piccadilly, came Charles Chauvel's "Jungle Film" (if it may be called such) Uncivilised (1936). A film set close to home, where a lone white man 'Mara the White Chief' has lived his entire life with a tribe of Aborigines, but has managed to retain his 'civil white ways' (including wearing jeans). Beatrice Lynn, a white author (through a series of kidnapping and dramatic events) comes across him, and the adventures begin.
The reason I bring this film up in relation to Piccadilly, is that it is a sound film, not a silent film. When it comes to films of this period – at the threshold of silent and sound – a basic comparison of these two, made me return to my three wise monkeys. When watching Piccadilly, I really felt that the potential for agency, screen presence and subversive power was much stronger in silence than in sound for a Chinese actress such as Wong, during this time.
In Uncivilised the Aboriginal people are literally the monkeys – at one point they can be heard saying "ogga booga" (yes, ogga booga). Wong herself and as Shosho, which I've likened to having a King Kong like presence, is anything but a monkey. In fact in her final scrawl she makes her definitive, human and Chinese mark on the film. Wong's je ne sais quoi, would be lost in a spoken script dictated by white 1930s hegemonic discourse.
The choice of Dupont to film Piccadilly as a silent film, I believe works in favour of its sustainability within the body of work on cities of the time. Piccadilly could of potentially been seen – with a little more speaking and subsequently hearing – as Evil.
But, it becomes nothing of the kind.
References:
[1] Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry, San Fransisco, City Light Books, 1936, pp. 3-4.
The story goes that in 1936 the surrealist artist Salvador Dali attended Joseph Cornell's matinee screening of Rose Hobart (1936) at the Julian Levy Gallery:
Halfway through the film he began shouting 'Salaud!' - bastard - and overturned the projector. Reportedly, Dali ruefully explained his actions…'My idea for a film is exactly that …I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it'[1].
Brian Fry aptly paraphrases Dali, noting that he was furious because it was as if Cornell had stolen the idea, (presumably for such a hypnotic, pastiche, bricolage, film), from his "subconscious" [2]. With this in mind, I want to consider Dali's tantrum as a text in which to understand what Victor Burgin calls in The Remembered Film, "cinematic heterotopia" [3].
Burgin writes that what we can understand as "cinematic heterotopia" is a cinematic experience that is "constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media and so on", he goes on to add that for him (unlike Foucault) "cinematic heterotopia" can also manifest itself in the "psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as 'a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness'" [4].
In other words, cinematic heterotopia is the way in which we experience fragments of a film within space before/after we watch it as a whole (or perhaps never watch it), as well as all those tangible and subconscious, cultural bits and pieces of cinematic references and otherwise, which inform our conscious and unconscious viewing experience.
We're watching the film, peering through a kaleidoscope of our life and other films and the film itself and experiences and our subconscious.
Obviously, Rose Hobart plays into the notion of "cinematic heterotopia" in the sense that it relies on fragments and images from the film East of Borneo (1931), however, I want to attempt to further pry open the term of "cinematic heterotopia" itself by taking into consideration some other elements.
While viewing Rose Hobart my immediate reaction to, what I'd like to describe as the hypnotic pastiche of the film, was in the space of extra-textual "cinematic heterotopia" - it was the form of the film, not so much the content, that seemed familiar. For me, Rose Hobart felt like an extended trailer for a Hollywood film – not East of Borneo (1931) – but another film, where Rose was the shimmering star (or moon) and the Monkey didn't face such a fate. Rose's lingering gaze indicated that the film as a whole would have a rather sensual and sexual tone. When watching the film, Rose would make you feel both invited and unwelcome in peering through the curtain into her vulnerabilities – of both the character she was playing, and her real self. This trailer was too long, lacked voice-over, a sense of a larger plot, and (if I may add rather crudely) colour, but had the structure, pace and overall sense of a film preview.
Upon reflection, my reaction to Rose Hobart, was an attempt at situating my uneasy state – caused by what Fry describes as Rose's "semi-suspension, turning the film [East of Borneo] into...a sort of box" [5] – into a more grounded, non-suspended and familiar idea of the possibility of narrative cinema and Rose's place in it. Unsatisfied with a box, I wanted to tear it open and believe that what I saw was only part of a whole, a preview – not The Whole, which Cornell composed it to be. While Rose Hobart draws on fragments of East of Borneo, there is a real sense that Cornell wants this film to be whole, even if it is hard to accept this as viewers.
The term "manifesto" has recently been the focus of discussion in this course. I wonder if it is possible perhaps to think about Cornell and a film such as Rose Hobart, and avant gardism as a movement, as a manifesto of sorts, against "cinematic heterotopia" in the sense that the avant garde attempted to present the completely unfamiliar, the uncomfortable and something literally vanguard. Cornell's manipulation of East of Borneo, does all it can to make any fragments which we may have experienced in the 'original' into a now unfamiliar encounter. In presenting experimental films, of which there are next to no reference points for, the audience is forced to watch the film without the kaleidoscope.
Despite this, Dali certainly felt differently.
Sitting in Fisher Library with Vanessa after watching Rose Hobart on my computer, and now stoically working my way through Jean Cocteau's film Le sang d'un poete (1930) I found myself distractedly – in the tradition of detourmount – glancing to the screen to my left, which was showing Blade Runner (1982). I tried to imagine the student was a young film maker, watching Blade Runner for the very first time, in the same way that Dali had watched Cornell's film at the Julian Levy Gallery that afternoon. I then pictured the boy picking up the television, raising it above his head and then smashing it as hard as he could against the library wall and shouting; "Riddley fucking Scott stole this from my subconscious" and/or "Go to hell Philip Dick you got inside my head".
Much to my disappointment the boy did not have a tantrum.
Maybe you and I and that boy are just a little more accustomed to staring through Baudelaire's kaleidoscope [6] than Dali was.
Works Cited:
[1] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart" at, Sense of Cinema, Accessed: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html. Last Accessed: 6/8/07.
[2] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart".
[3] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 10.
[4] Ibid, p. 10.
[5] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart", Emphasis added.
[6] Burgin (2004), p. 10.
Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart can be accessed here.
Attention viewers: the cinema is young.
