Monday
1. Filmmaker as Author
2. Art Cinema as Film Practice
3. Introduce the Film
4. Break
5. Watch Film
We’ve talked about the
filmmaker earlier in the
semester…
• Hitchcock, Welles, Sirk, De Sica
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Certain stylistic consistencies across their work
Obsessions, themes, particular M-E-S
“Signatures” or elements of a signature style
Meaning of a film originates from a single
individual and their conscious choices
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Spike Lee
Martin Scorcese
Ang Lee
Sophia Coppola
Wes Anderson
Dario Argento
Film as an individual’s
self-expression
cinema becomes a means of
expressing one’s inner self
Filmmaker/director as AUTHOR
• Auteur -- serious writer, novelist
• “caméra-stylo” (camera as pen)
• auteur = the artist whose personality was
‘written’ in the film
Auteur theory
• Auteurism
• Auteurist logic
• Birth of scholarly study of cinema
Auteur criticism first found in :
• Cahiers du Cinéma - French film magazine,
1950s
• Andrew Sarris (American critic)
• Movie (British film magazine)
Director as unifying force
• Meaningful coherence emerges when Director dominates
(Sarris)
• Director not the sole creator but he/she is the unifying and
organizing presence (Robin Wood)
• The force of a director’s sensibility can make up for faults
(lesser writing, poor acting, etc.) and thus redeem a film
(Bazin)
The logic of auteurism
• If a film is made by director who is more an
genuinely an artist (an auteur), then it will be more
likely to express his individual personality than
other films made by less artistic directors.
• The auteur critic’s job = to indentify thematic or
stylistic consistencies across one film and then the
entire life’s work a of director (trace ‘signatures’).
• By reading an entire oeuvre we find recurring
elements -- the unconscious.
Logic of Auteurism
presumes
• Film = art
• thus a film must made an artists
• since, art = an expression of the emotions,
experience, and world-view of an particular,
individual
The idea of the artist
• Romanticism’s notion of the artist,
– Essentially opposed to society, achieving personal expression in
the face of hostile environment
(Triumph over Hollywood System)
• Reflects Western culture’s emphasis on individualism and
self-expression
• Artwork = a reflection of the unified, cohesive will of one
person
Regressive aspects of
Auteur Theory
• A return to the romanticist notion of the artist as the
definitive source of a film’s meaning
• Removes films from their social/historical context.
Decontextualizes the film.
• Ignores the role of the spectator. Don’t viewers bring
meaning experience to the text? Texts change meaning
over time. Resistant readers. Trash, cult, camp.
• Neglects the role of ideology. The otherwise hidden
cultural structures of meaning and power.
“The Art Cinema as a Mode of
Film Practice”
• AC is distinct film practice
– In-between Rio Bravo and Mothlight
The films included in the category of AC
are vast
(look different, cover different topics)
but DB believes that they share certain
features. He aruges thatAC is a formal
practice.
As a specific formal practice,
AC has…
– a historical existence
• situated in history, has a history
– a set of formal conventions
• coherent style
– a particular viewing practice
• a spectatorial protocol
• AC defines itself explicitly against the CHN
and especially the c-e linkage of events.
• Linkages are looser, more tenuous in the AC
film.
• Resolution not revealed. Lack of closure.
What motivates AC’s narrative if
not c-e?
• Realism
• Authorial expressivity
The 2 Levels of
Art Cinema’s Realism
• Objective: Shows us things. Real locations. The
Body. Contemplates real problems.
• Subjective: Introduces us to subjective vision,
psychologically marked narration. Characters are
psychologically complex figures that guide the
vision of the film
AC’s characters are realistic -psychologically complex.
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Characters lack defined desires and goals.
Act for inconsistent reasons
Choices are vague or nonexistent.
Drifting episodic quality to art film’s narrative
• Characters wander, events lead to nothing.
“The Hollywood protagonist speeds
directly toward the target;
lacking a goal the art-film character
slides passively from one situation to
another.”
776
“What is essential to any such organizational
scheme is that it be sufficiently loose in its
causation as to permit characters to express
and explain their psychological states.” 776
• The search, a trip, making of a film
• Autobiographical, fantasies, dreams
• Hero = supersenstive individual
Realism of time and space
• Violations of time and space happen for two
reasons
1. b/c of unpredictable and daily reality.
• The intrusion of the accidental or the unexpected
seems like real life.
• THE OBJECTIVE.
2. b/c of subjective reality of complex characters
• THE SUBJECTIVE. Psychological experience.
This commitment to both
objective and subjective
verisimilitude
distinguishes
AC
from
HCN.
Authorship
• AC forgrounds the author (director) as a
structure in the film’s system.
• The concept of authorship unifies the text.
• Author is a formal component, the
overriding intelligence organizing the film
for our comprehension.
• AC director has creative freedom denied
his/her Hollywood counterpart.
• The Viewer watches an Art Film, s/he finds
order not from the narrative but from the
stylistic signatures in the narration.
• Authorial presence comes forward to the
viewer.
• Auteur theory emerges with AC.
After proving that realism and authorship are
what unify the Art film, he then steps back
and says isn’t there an inherent contradiction
here?
• How can a film index the real and also index
the intrusion of the director? How can film
be motivated by the real and authorial intent?
• Ambiguity is the device that solves this
contradiction. Keeps things uncertain.
Ambiguity
Satyajit Ray
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Often listed as a key AC auteur.
Most famous director outside of India
The Apu Trilogy
For many years, these were the Indian films
best-known to western audiences
Pather Panchali
(Song of the Road)
• Bengali -- regional ethnic group and language
• State funded
• First Indian film of international success
– Represents India to the world, first hand experience
– Is this a film for Bengalis or for the international
community?
• Commercial film industry in India vs. Art Cinema
Questions for taking notes
• Does this film fit DB’s definition of AC?
• Does this film look like Neorealism? How might
we compare it to BT?
• How does this film represent poverty?
– Does it glorify the poor? Make the simplicity of the
impoverished life seem noble and gorgeous in a
problematic way? Or does it try to counter the idea that
impoverished lead empty lives?
Themes and other things to look
out for…
• Village life versus Modern life
• Transfer of emotion onto objects
• Memory -- both thematically and also our
own as we watch.
Wednesday
• My offices hours canceled today.
Appointments available.
• Exam
• Paper #2 Due: Monday at start of lecture.
Pather Panchali
“Best Human Document.”
stunned by a moving, humanist
masterpiece by an unknown from
a part of world that had produced
little if any cinema seen by the
judges.
• A humanist cinema.
– Universal experience of being human. Cultural
difference is important but shared human condition
transcends all difference.
• A humanitarian cinema.
– Raises consciousness through narrative. Exposure to
certain themes and conditions evaded by commercial
cinema.
– Filmed with a “tenderness” for the human life?
Triggers sensitivity in viewer?
– What politics are connected to this approach?
Humanitarian aid? Charity work?
My hypothesis
• Post-WWII new understanding of humanism and
new understanding of what it means to go to the
cinema.
• The otherwise passive activity of viewing massmediated images (e.g., film-going) is re-imagined
as an engaged activity.
• Eye-witnessing becomes a form of political
involvement in the world.
• Emphasis on vision as the means of international
connectivity.
• What’s the relationship between the rise of a
global humanism and the image of poverty?
• Does humanism need mediated-experience
of human suffering to establish the universal
value of human life?
• Why are their other ways to quantify human
life?
The Politics of Critics
Aestheticizing Poverty
• Communicating a world in need is a central value
for mid-century critics and commentators across
the west.
• An ethical imperative to recognize the beauty and
transcendent humanity in cinemas of poverty.
• Cinema as a testament, and the film critic as a kind
of social advocate.
• Generating sympathy. The film spectator’s
charitable gaze = a precursor of humanitarian aid,
a subjective ground for humanitarian aid.
Goals for last unit of course:
• Exposure to key filmmaking practices
outside the mainstream
• Examine different approaches to depicting
social issues of a specific moment
– In particular, the politics of representing
humans struggling with economic hardship.
• These films not only introduce us to cultural
situations outside our own experiences, but they
also talk to us about the process of depicting those
situations.
• In different ways, they politicize what it means to
experience the world through cinema.
• Concerned with the description of their local
situations to a global audience.
• Challenge their audiences by asking them to
question conventional means engaging with the
outside world.
• All depict a specific place, usually in the present
• All concerning with politics of depiction, what it
means to represent real situations.
• Specific understanding of culture: cinema =
always a means of both social change and artistic
expression.
– Never simply agitprop (agitation propaganda)
• Political rhetoric
– Never art for art’s sake
• Devoid of political argument
– Never pure entertainment
Thus, when we’re analyzing a
film, we should ask not only
by whom?
from where?
how made?
about what?
but also: for whom?
For Whom? Can be answered in
several ways.
• Looking at the industrial history. Release
records, promotion, reception records. Who
went to film? How did they get there?
• Critical reception and film history. How the
film was received in the day and what
position it holds in film history.
• Look at the film itself
Look at the film itself
• What space does it hold open for the spectator?
(Form: cinematography and editing work to
establish terms of narration and spectatorial POV)
• How does it position the viewer in relation to
action? How does it orient its viewer to the world
on screen?
• Can this tell us something about how it imagines
its own audience?
For example, how would we
describe the address of Pather
Panchali?
•
•
•
•
Insiders?
Outsiders?
Both at the same time?
Switches?
Does Pather Panchali participate in these
ideologies of humanism?
Does the film present itself to the newly
engaged Western spectator?
Or does the film critique this position?
Or simply disallow us from identifying in this
way?
To answer these questions, let’s
look at a clip
• How are we positioned in relation to action in
general?
• What does this scene tell us about modernity?
What qualities does modernity have?
– Sound and image key here.
• Think about POV (and the ethnographic gaze) in
the long take from field back to the woods.
• How is the event of Auntie’s Auntie narrated?
Different from other film deaths?
Ray talks about seeing BT and
other neorealist films, as central
to his conception of what this
film would look like.
From watching the film, what do
you think Ray saw in these
Italian films? What about NR is
carried through to Pather
Panchali?
What does viewing this film as
an auteur’s masterpiece or art
cinema might occlude?
How certain motifs carry
historical significance.
• The legacy of English Imperialism and
Colonial Rule.
– Train, The Band, etc.
• The Partition.
• Modernization.
• Societal changes brought on by PostIndependence policies.
Motifs in
Pather Panchali
• Vision
– Modern technologies of vision vs. old technologies of
vision
– Apu’s intro = un-blanketing of eye
– Bioscope
• Modernity as sensory overload
– Train, wires, etc.
– Our relationship as spectators to this overload.
Motifs in
Pather Panchali (cont)
• End of traditional ties to place and birthplace
• Poverty
• Migrancy. The move to cities. The question of
mobility.
Historical Context:
Independence
– New society, concerns about civil rights.
– Caste system abolished official.
– Gender inequality
• The film’s critique of family, assumes an awareness of the
difficult roles accorded to women and girls.
– The concept of poverty as a social ill. Poverty always
existed.
• With Liberation, the becomes amplified as problem b/c of
nationalism and democratic society.
• 80% of population living in abject poverty.
PP centers around certain shifts
in society that come with
Independence
• Land rights influx.
• Zamindari system ends.
– Akin to European feudal system. Zamindars = landed gentry.
• Definition of community shifts radically.
– The elders.
• Extended family system in flux.
• Private Property in the film. Stealing, land
ownership, familial obligations.
stuck between two moments
• The Old Way = untenable, foreclosed
• The New Way = unknown, ominous
• The current condition = dislocation
Conclusion
Tension within the film (and within Ray).
It asks to be read as both
A. document of universal and trans historical
human experience
and
B. reflection on a specific historical situation