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Film-Spectator Relations - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Horkheimer and Adorno
        
        "Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so they can cope with it again," (p.109).
        
        While Horkheimer and Adorno has a very zealous feel to it, there certainly feels like their some truth to their description of capitalist predation on a public who craves to break out of the hum-drum, also created by capitalism. I am hoping to work in a career in film and it pains me to see the avarice of corporations attacking the foundations they stand upon, especially with recent writer's strikes demanding comparatively paltry sums.
      - Kracauer
        
        "Travel is one of the best means for a society to maintain a permanent state of absentmindedness, which prevents that society from coming to terms with itself. It asists fantasy along mistaken paths: it occludes one's perspective with impressions; it adds to the wonder of the world, so that the world's ugliness goes unnoticed," (p.299).
        
        A new question I have after this weeks readings is to what extent have we, as movie-goers, bought into the immersion? Do we crave escapism to a much higher degree than previous generations who had limited, or even more distantly, no movie access to delve into?
        
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DFzWmBVNbU
      - In Strike (1925), the "little shop girls" have gotten a taste of revolution but the dose is too strong. The film makers have truly gone "a little crazy" and instead of returning the audience to capitalist ideals, they are now thinking. No longer is it about the individual but it is about the collective.
    - - Gunning
        
        "The Edison Company seemed particularly aware of this [...mini-spectacle pause in the unfolding of narrative...], since they offered their plagiarized version of this Biograph film (How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns) in to forms, as a complete film or as seperate shots, so that any one image of the ladies chasing the man could be bought without the inciting incident or narrative closure," (p.387).
        
        This is totally new information for me on early film. The idea of selling single images is like selling a single page of a flip book. Without the other pages for context, it become a drawing. It changes the media from film to photography depending on the tastes of the consumer.
      - Crafton
        
        "Gags provide the opposite of epistemological comprehension by the spectator. They are atemporal bursts of violence and/or hedonism that are as ephemeral and as gratifying as the sight of someone's pie smitten face," (p.363).
        
        Does the gag have to be divorced from narrative? The classic films of Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy have something of a narrative but the story line isn't the main point. Would the following film be a gag or a narrative? In it's simplest form, the main character just wants his lighter back.
        
        https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325743/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
      - Sullivan's Travels (1942) uses a Gag in the shanty town scene that doesn't not move the narrative in any way.. It's purpose is entirely to create an attraction.
    - - Vertov
        1."What comprises the dynamic effect of a painting? The eye follows the direction of an element in the painting. It retains a visual impression, which then collides with the impression derived from following the direction of a second element. The conflict of these directions forms the dynamic effect in apprehending the whole," (p. 50)
        
        Do the two elements have to be conflict? Can they not work together toward a common goal? Or is Vertov using conflict in place of relationship? The relationship of two elements in a painting (or film) can give impression and dynamic effect regardless of if they are in "conflict".
      - Eisenstein
        
        "I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of this or that visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera and is directed by it to those successive points of the action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the film phrase to the height or depth of resolution," (p.16)
        
        I was only subconsciously aware of the power of suggestion the filmmaker has on the audience. Focal points obviously draw the attention of the audience but I did not consider that unlike theatrical plays, the audience of a film will experience the same forced focus. I know this doesn't always apply however, as there are films I can think of where the focus is left open using deep focus or another cinematographic device to allow the audience freedom.
        
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUhvCQT0Jqs
      - Born In Flames (1983) utilizes synthesis by positing two conflicting scenes back-to-back that force the audience to think about their correlation. In the first, we see men rioting over unemployment and in contrast, we see a peaceful woman being layed off
    - - Carroll
        
        "Thus I take it that the point of Baudry's use of Plato's cave in "The Apparatus" is not to enhance the central argument about the casual relevance of regression to film, but rather to mount a coordinated but independent argument to persuade us that the recent invention of cinema is really a manifestation of a long-standing, transhistorical, or instinctual desire of the sort that psychoanalysis is fitted to examine. That is, the discussion of Plato's cave is meant to convince us of the appropriateness of psychoanalyzing cinema and it is not, properly speaking, part of the argument by analogy that concludes with the assertion of regression as key to the cinematic apparatus," (p.784).
        
        Carroll rips into Baudry's argument incredibly well. The critique is poignant especially in the case of Baudry's attempts to utilize interdisciplinary theorists to study film. It all feels like a stretch from Plato to Freud to film theory. It also feels very conspiracy theory in trying to link very disparate things like dreams and film. I could see this starting out as a random musing that somehow got evolved into a scholarly argument.
      - Baudry
        
        "Sleep, he tells us, 'from a somatic viewpoint is a revivescence of one's stay in the body of the mother, certain condistion of which it recreates: the rest position, warmth, and isolation which protects him from excitement' [emphasis added]," (p.769)
        
        This makes a lot of sense, especially the explanation of sleeping in fetal position. That return to pre-natal safety that manifests from our subconscious during sleep.
        3.
        
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF16eA7sdqo
        I have to troll Baudry a bit after reading Carroll.
      - Tati's Playtime gives the audience the feeling of being dreamers and having no control over where the images are going to go. Perception becomes reality over the course of the film and the "Merry-Go-Round" scene feels completely normal at the end.
    - - Mulvey
        
        "The actual image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the content and structure of representation, adding a further layer of ideological significance demanded by the patriarchal order in its favourite cinematic form -- illusionistic narrative film."
        
        I had never heard of the Male Gaze before this class so this concept is very new to me. I have noticed in the past the recurring theme of damsel in distress and the role of female characters in film being flat and only needed for a particular purpose in the narrative but never connected it with the psychoanalysis and theory.
        
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA3Ww0sG7JY
        
        Can't find a clip that has english subtitles so for context: The main character's friend (red shirt) is explaining he is supposed to ride on the front of the bike and be macho. He goes on to explain what macho is including references to Sylvester Stallone in Rocky and how a guy is expected to take control, of women and situations. In subsequent scenes he gets humbled and then told the truth from the female main character.
      - While the sleeping woman from La Jetée (1962) is on screen, the audience is subjected to fetishistic scopophilia as we gaze upon this woman who is the love interest for the main character.