au revoir les enfants (1987)

The magic of the voice reaches men's secret feelings. He translates historical philosophy into the language of the people. He has the ability to call up long forgotten history and make those who hear him feel as if they had always known about it.

What is worth staging? This question has bothered me ever since I began to think myself, along with the medium, out of existence. If the cinematic pursuit is one toward the capturing of pure-presence, why ever depict a story? What should be left to exposition and what necessitates its fleshing out and staging? Why didn't the mass populace embrace the Ben Jonsons or George Chapmans of the world in the same way as the William Shakespeares? Assuming the historical-collective prefers to watch, of all possibilities in all the culture of the past, entertaining people doing entertaining things... then, what? And why? Normally, this tendency toward populist dramatic-poetic novelty is observed as a massive short-coming of the given society, or sign of its decadence; however, this argument seems to disregard a sweeping trend across time (seen in the commonality between the handful of artists who, by quality alone, act as representatives of their century), attributing to one's taste what may be of nature.

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.

Something is worth staging. What? And what is the worth? Why sit through someone walking up the stairs, fumble their keys, and enter their apartment? Why watch the daughter point her finger and teary-eyed scream at her dead-beat father in that hand-held, shot / reverse-shot, highly-emotional 'pivotal' sequence? Why montage? Why idle? Why scripted discussions? Why hold back any information at all?

We connect with the frame through the eyes of the characters. Say, as a filmmaker, you have a piece of blurry footage for whatever reason: if the eyes of the actor are fudged to the extent that the spectator can not lock with its gaze, the image is unsuitable for classical dramatic emotional-transference. Although the direction of the gaze eventually moves around the frame to observe finer details of the composition, it is with the eyes of the characters that the gaze always returns to, and ultimately where the strongest view-point of the work is embedded. We lock on from eye-to-eye; close / medium / wide — we make eye contact. What is going on? I notice two things within myself: through the eyes of this other individual I see myself reflected, conjuring a 1) personal association - automatically feeling-up and relating my own experiences, history, and local consciousness / unconsciousness while being moved by my 2) natural empathy (emotional responses to pain and pleasure). The result of a Cinematic experience seems to be the inner sensation of an emotional-temporal symphony, a sculpted wavey-trace of minutely conducted bursts of adrenaline, affirming rhythmic pulses of positivity and negativity relating to my life and world-view, — this, over the course of two hours. What is remembered are impressionistic strokes of sensation, sketches of minutiae, pictograms, sometimes the idea behind the arrangement, and usually never the dialogue. Hitchcock once noted that the film of the future will be a box the individual spectator can hook themselves up to and injected with chosen emotions as they imagine themselves doing anything as anyone.

What's to be made of this?

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - the Thoughts.

One's life is a finite amount of images, no matter how vast.
In the end, each image would have mattered and held its significance.

heart of glass (1976)

They are hypnotized.

dead of winter (1987)

No perception is without memories :: Wherever an image has once been, it carries with it that trace in every new encounter, and so on, to other encounters... In the usual course of a montage of images, certainly one of linearity, the 'next' image is a modifier of the previous image but in a strict line of continuity so that what you understand is causation and consequence... Every shot, sequence of shots, series of sequences and entire films have two directions. One is toward the reality it depicts and the other toward the composition and enunciation of that depiction...

There is the frame.
The frame is usually a cut-out, an extract, an excision from the pro-filmic. The frame establishes a border between what is on-screen, within the frame, and what is off-screen, beyond it. This ensures a homogeneity. It implies a continuum between the on-screen and off-screen. The one is simply a fragment of the other as a part is to a whole. Every fragment refers back to a unity...

'Montage,' Sam Rohdie —

love letters (1945)

the adventures of baron munchausen (1943)

Our fundamental delusion today is not 'to believe in what is only a fiction' .. 'to take fictions too seriously.' It is, on the contrary, not to take the fictions seriously enough. You think it's just a game? It's reality. It's more real than it appear to you. People who play video games, they adopt a screen-persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is in reality I'm a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. This would be the naïve reading. I want to appear stronger, more active, because in real life, I'm a weak person. But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I'm not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it's only a game, it's only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual-space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self. We need the excuse of a fiction to stage who and what we truly are.

— Slavoj Žižek, 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema'

independence day (1996)

the Welcome Wagon.

Someone I know made the comment of how well this film holds up as a pan-and-scan full screen VHS copy on a tiny television. Seeing as how, at least for a few months, this was the primer for what American Imperial Cinema should look like :: sweeping, bold, clean and richly photographed, densely designed (visually and sonically), with elaborate special-effects [i.e.: explosions], starring the children of the most prosperous and decadent society on the planet, and of a populist mindset — in other words, Hollywood, — it's interesting to consider where the spill-over attraction lies. I suspect part of the appeal is Emmerich's play with forms and shapes; stylish and elementary in his characterization and scenario-design, his aesthetic field is also one of pop-simplicity, following a logic of red / blue / yellow, the frame constantly riddled with distinct and giant squares, rectangles, circles [in the sky], triangles, etc. The device of the Welcome Wagon embodies this ideal — in an attempt to communicate with the alien-ship, an army helicopter is outfitted with a panel of alternating lights, as if anticipating a reaction simply by the threshold of language and intent; meaning before meaning, making visible the drive hidden within meaning: an acknowledgement of the unconscious foundation of communication, the act itself. Utopian-Era American Cinema proved so effective because of its understanding and refining of this knowledge.

underworld (1927)

Bvt when the people sawe, that Moses taryed long or he came downe from the mountaine, the people gathered themselues together against Aaron, and sayde vnto him, Vp, make vs gods to goe before vs: for of this Moses (the man that brought vs out of the land of Egypt) we knowe not what is become of him. And Aaron said vnto them, Plucke off the golden earings, which are in the eares of your wiues, of your sonnes, and of your daughters, and bring them vnto me. Then all ye people pluckt fro them selues the golden earings, which were in their eares, and they brought them vnto Aaron. Who receiued them at their handes, and facioned it with the grauing toole, & made of it a molte calfe: then they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee out of ye lad of Egypt When Aaron sawe that, he made an Altar before it: and Aaron proclaimed, saying, To morow shalbe the holy day of the Lord. So they rose vp the next day in the morning, and offred burnt offerings, & brought peace offrings: also the people sate them downe to eate and drinke, and rose vp to play.

— the Geneva Bible, Exodus 32:1-5