SO LONG FAREWELL

STANLEY KUBRICK INSPIRED DAWSON TO GO TO FILM SCHOOL

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943) inspired a film version of the novel, both of which have inspired people to put together the Ayn Rand Institute. East of Borneo (1931) inspired Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936). The potential of the movie camera itself inspired Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929). The romantic magic that plays out in the sphere of the domestic on screen inspired Vanessa's own romantic and sexual fantasies. And Charles and Ray Eames inspired me to watch the Nanny Diaries (2007), instead of obscure, mind numbing, films as soon as I leave university forever.

The space of the cinema itself – all dark, and silent, and warm and private and public – inspires first dates and old dates and no dates. Sharing. At the drive in movies, it inspires 'heavy petting'. In the darkness of the theatre it inspires a stolen kiss. It inspires individuals to eat popcorn and go alone to a space, sit, watch, observe and absorb, and not feel lonely. When screened in a dark room at an adult shop, they inspire masturbation or emotional cheating while their wife sits on the couch at home fantasying about a Johnny Depp.

Once in a pub I met a boy. He had a twin sister. We talked a lot. We asked the bar staff for a pen. He wrote my phone number on a coaster. We talked and laughed and flirted and I stared at his ears; they were really pretty. We parted ways with a handshake. The cinema inspired me to run out of the pub and down the street, grab his shoulder, turn him around and kiss him – the cinema even inspired me how to kiss – and then run away again. I never did return his calls.

The cinema inspires me to soundtrack my life. With my iPod in my ears – when breaking up, flying away on an aeroplane, falling in love, people dying – I play a song as loud as I can, and let the tears drip down my face without wiping them off or let my body laugh with joy uncontrollably as the music plays.

Drama queen?

Todd Solondz and Ozu inspire the divine in the domestic space. Once something is put on the big screen it is hailed, justified and stamped with beauty – or ugliness - which is beauty.

'City Symphonies' inspire travel and adventure, and take the tedium out of train journeys. Tourism and living in the city. A drink at the pub. Wearing an old hat. They inspire travel for those that cannot travel, but don't make them sad, but happy.

Movies can inspire societal progression without even knowing it. Objectivism or even anti-racism, they can inspire those without a voice, to be able to sign their names into the history books, like Anna May Wong. Hell, Stanley Kubrick inspired Dawson to go to film school.

They inspire people to kill. Apparently.

They inspire people to obsess over the Pitts and Jolies and Clooneys and Brandos and immortalise the James Deans.

In sickness and in health and in marriage and in love and in comedy and in sadness and in hatred and in lust and in agony I shall honour thee cinema.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY...TO THE POWER OF '10'

I forgot that people learn about science.

Charles and Ray Eame's film Powers of 10 (1977) (here is just the first section of the film) literally sucked me into space (twice), threw me back down to earth (twice), pushed me deep under the surface (twice) and taught me a thing or two about the universe, film making and modernism.

I shall reflect on 10 random thoughts which materialised during my viewing:

1. QUESTIONS OF SCALE AND MISE EN SCENE: Scale and mise en scene have been a preoccupation in this course. I felt that this short film demonstrates the obvious notion, that when it comes to cinema, we can only see what is inside the frame. There is a world outside of the frame, and one deep under the camera's ability to focus. The image of the atom, and the image of the universe look the same - this ambiguity between the mind bogglingly big and the inconceivably small, gestures to the way that films can illustrate these similarities and provoke us to ponder such things.

2. CINEMA AS FORMULAIC: I began to think of notions of 'the formula' as the powers of 10 were recited as we journeyed out of the Earth's atmosphere. While the Eame's film was obviously supposed to be artistically educational, I read the powers of 10 as an extended metaphor for the ways in which we repeat and multiply filmic cliches. I squiggled on the image above of When Harry Met Sally (1989) because, the way the Eames film was repeated (see no. 7) with slight variations, reinforced the idea of cinematic repetition on a commercial scale. There is nothing particularly 'new' about calling Hollywood formulaic. What I think is interesting though, is the way in which we gravitate towards formula. I think there is something beautiful, safe and comforting about modernism and perhaps as a postmodernist society, we find solace in repetition and a knowledge that like one plus one equals two, Meg Ryan plus Tom Hanks equals love.

3. CINEMA AS EDUCATION/GRAND NARRATIVES: Modernism, rationality, repetition, hydrogen, helium, lithium and the Periodic Table. This mode of the educational video is one that is familiar to all of us. I found Powers of 10 an important edition to the study of cinematic modernism as it was a sobering reminder that film is not just about 'The Cinema'. The fact that this 'teaching' about the universe is playing out in a film, and that the 'teachings' are inherently modernist in their didactic purpose, demonstrates ways in which knowledges are created and transmitted. I've read that now the accurateness of the film is considered slightly off. But, only slightly. Obviously, there is not an educational film about how the world is flat, as cinema was not around. In saying this, I mean to draw attention to the idea that cinema and accurate scientific thought about the universe seem to emerge simultaneously in my historic understanding of things.

4. THE SIMPSONS: When this Eames piece began to play, I had the distinctly Burgin-ian feeling that I had seen this it somewhere before. I concluded, that it was highly similar to a lot of films I was made to watch in high school and that was probably where my feeling of deja vu came from. When wanting to watch the film myself at home, I typed Powers of 10 into YouTube, and surprisingly did not find the original version available, but The Simpsons version staring at me (which you can view here). It is almost a little obvious and banal to point out when The Simpsons steal from popular culture, as there are probably less books and films that have not been referenced on the show than those that have.

5. AUTHORITY: What struck me most hypnotically in The Powers of 10 was surprisingly not the images themselves or the bazaar music, but the deep, resonating male voice over. I associate this voice over with 1960s news readers, The Brady Bunch and a time when rationality, was not placed inside inverted commas aka 'rationality'.

6. MY PLACE IN SPACE: There is a book that my parents used to read to me as a child - My Place in Space (I can't remember who wrote it). Anything to do with images of stars, planets and rockets always brings me back to this book, and I always get the childhood feeling of being very, very small and non-important. This comes back to questions of scale also - child or adult, big or small, space always makes me feel tiny and stupid. Films have the ability to reach into your memory box.

7. BOREDOM:I found Charles and Ray Eame's films the most boring, tedious pieces of work I have sat through since Rocky (1976). To have to sit through two 'versions' of this film was excruciating (I never did watch any Rocky sequels). To be honest, I saw very little difference between the two so called versions. I think there is something to say for boredom and the cinematic experience. I began to reflect on the notion of walking out of a movie and wondered how often people do this? I've only walked out of the cinema once, and the film that I walked out of - What the Bleep Do We Know (2004) - was a little Eames-ish. I find the cinematic space one of entrapment. If you're in the movie theatre with somebody else, you need to whisper to each other and make a decision to walk out - it becomes a kerfuffle of an operation. Furthermore, there is the fact that you have payed for the experience and therefore you are somehow compelled to sit through it. I think cinema is coercive and often non-consensual.

8. INNER/OUTER SPACE: Interiors and exteriors have also been a reoccurring theme in the films that we've been watching. What I found interesting with this film, was that the Eame's did not seem interested with these notions at all. When it comes to interiors and exteriors, one must be interested in the surface of things to a certain extent i.e. the city scape, or inside someone's bathroom. However, in Powers of 10 there was a sense of extremes, of what lies above and beyond the surface. Instead of interior/exterior, we were presented with inner/outer space.

9. LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS: Perhaps it's my consumption of groupie and rock'n'roll biographies, but my vision of the late 1970s, when this film was produced, is clouded in a haze of hallucinogenic drugs. This film had a psychedelic element to it. I imagined drugged out film makers smoking and tripping, staring at the stars and wanting to capture it in a movie. I blocked out the daggy music, and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds became my soundtrack to the film. The Eame's seemed a bit straight and uptight through, judging by their chairs.

10. MAYBE I SHOULD STUDY SCIENCE NEXT YEAR: Modernity is about the rational, the true and the provable. I liked the way this film tickled a part of my brain that doesn't have a tendency to put inverted commas around everything ('rational', 'real', 'objective'). I decided that I'm not going to watch any more films in the unit.

Sorry Tokyo Story.

THICK SKINNED? "I WANT TO SUCK YOUR WISE BLOOD".

I like the word "cinomatograph". When I say it aloud, I hear Gary Oldman as Dracular whispering it into Mina's ear, in Bram Stoker's Dracular (1992) and I feel a movement under my skin, a shiver run slowly all the way down my spine almost as if he is breathing on my neck, not Mia's.

In an article by Anne Rutheford (at Sense of Cinema) entitled Cinema and the Embodied Affect she writes that "[c]inema is not only about telling a story; it's about creating an affect, an event, a moment which lodges itself under the skin of the spectator". She goes on to say, in relation to the affectation of cinema that:

Skin is indeed a pivotal concept here, If we take the metaphor of the epidermis as our model for spectatorship, how do we understand it? Is it a container, keeping in the subject and keeping the object out, on the other side? Is the spectator thick-skinned, impervious to the vibrations set up on the screen on all but the most blatant level, or is the skin permeable, a membrane that mediates a contact with the world, a tactile being in the world, that can respond to the flux of textures, of temperatures, can glow, can bristle and tremble, can even relinquish its boundaries in an osmosis of feeling and sensation?

I quote Rutherford's article, which outlines ways to understand the physicality of the cinematic experience – "embodied affect" as she calls it – at such length, for two main reasons, one personal and one practical. Firstly, her article had a profound affect on me, as it articulated and justified in an intellectual manner, the importance of theorising subjectivity, the body and cinema all in one. And, secondly because I think that this notion of "embodied affect" is an interesting way to consider Flannery O'Connor's 1949 novel Wise Blood in relation to the 'grotesque' and, in understanding her written text as inherently 'cinematic'.

Like everyone retains their own individual fingerprint, everyone's embodied reactions to texts are vastly different. I happen to be someone whom, up until until Wise Blood, have only cried twice and been deeply disturbed once (for those of you who studied American literature two years ago, you may recall the novel which disturbed me) by reading. However, when it comes to watching films I feel my emotions and my body react in such an intense and overwhelming way more often then not. Some may argue that it is my lack of imagination when reading books that cause this, but I think there is a case to be argued for something more.

When it came to my corporeal experience of Wise Blood I felt in my bones, just like I was watching a film. From Wise Blood's opening pages (as we explored in class) one is drawn into a filmic protagonist:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on a green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car (p. 3).

Like in a film (without voice-over) we only have what we can see at the surface; there is no psychology, no interior dialogue, no sense of motivation of character's actions. Unlike the grand psychological novel, which we're so accustomed to analysing, O'Connor strips us of psychology and gives us action – like a film.

My body shook most of the way through Wolf Creek (2005). And like this sensation, I felt an overwhelming feeling of disturbance and anxiety from this scene in Wise Blood. O'Connor writes:

Haze stood motionless with one hand still on the bow of the glasses and the other arrested in the air at the level of his chest; his head was thrust forward as if he had to use his whole face to see it. He as about four feel from them but they seemed just under his eyes
'Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to – sick as he is?' Sabbath said. 'Ask him isn't he going to take you and me with him?'
The hand that had been arrested in the air moved forward and plucked at the squinting face but without touching it; it reached again, slowly, and plucked at nothing and then it lunged and snatched the shriveled body and threw it against the wall. The head popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust (p. 129).

When I got to the end of this bit I looked away from the pages of the book and then covered my eyes - the new jesus had exploded right before them. Like the time my friend and I watched Silence of the Lambs (1991) in early high school, and she screamed and brought her hands to her eyes – covering them so she didn't have to see the atrocities. Why did I cover my eyes after reading this passage? I think there is a case to be made here for the cinematic affectation provoked in this scene – so much so, I didn't know how else to react.

Reading this passage, I felt as Rutherford did, about a scene in Mizogunchi's film, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939); "I experience the shot in my stomach, as if my stomach turns over. It's this other, visceral dimension that, to me, an aesthetics of embodiment has to explain", she writes.

Much as been written about O'Conner and her treatment and exploration of the 'grotesque'. In Wise Blood it is the written 'grotesque' coupled with the sense the reader gets of "metonymic slippage between vision, the image, the eye and the 'I' of subjectivity" (Rutherford, italics added), which make reading her book feel like watching a rotten movie. What is meant by this "metonymic slippage" is the process by which a spectator (as opposed to a reader) of a filmic image slips in and out of identification with not only characters, but the explicitly visual environment on both an emotional and psychological level. Rutherford uses the example of an image of a cliff – when we see it, there is an emotional affectation in the sense that we are simultaneous placed at the cliff itself, as well as the physical feeling that we may get from falling of it. The instructional, descriptive, and bordering on technical way in which O'Connor writes evokes this same affectation.*

For this scene (I even find myself calling it a scene, opposed to a passage) like a film, it can only show us action, not psychology, and this is why it feels so filmic – I watch as Haze's hands move from his glass and chest, thrust forward as he grabs the new jesus by the head, I can imagine Sabbath's (Asa's) expression, and watch in slow motion as the dead body collapses into a huge cloud of dusk.

And my stomach turns.

Perhaps my skin is not very thick.

* This is not to say, that in books (or poetry for that matter) that are not 'cinematic', don't have this affected ability. If one reads the word 'cliff' it is possible to also react in this way. However, what is being argued here is about the process between the visually encompassing and embodied affect, and how this is played out in Wise Blood.

References:

Anne Rutherford, "Cinema and Embodied Affect" at, Sense of Cinema, Accessed here, Last Accessed: 11/10/2007.

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.