Eisenstein is alive and well

J.Weaver

Maggie Braine

Maggie Braine

Professor Jonathan Rattner

FILM 201: Film Theory

April 26, 2010

The cinematic visual is extremely powerful and extremely pleasurable. However, cinematic viewing can also be very objectifying, gendered and gendering. Feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, used psychoanalytic theory to analyze how the male spectator and patriarchal society construct a female identity on film. She argued that female characters are ruled by male desire and project an appearance that is “coded for strong visual and erotic impact (Mulvey 713).” In her book Fetishism and Curiosity, Mulvey observed how during the American commodity boom of the 1950s, industries, including those of Hollywood, marketed a representation of female sexuality that was tailored exclusively to the tastes of men. Mulvey wrote, “the new discourse of marketed sexuality and the new discourse of commodity consumption were articulated together [in cinema] (Mulvey 40).” In the 1950s comedy, The Seven Year Itch, Mulvey’s theories come to life as the overly sexualized female character is denied human agency. With the use of different cinematic devices such as the close-up, Technicolor and a duet of high and low camera angles, Marilyn Monroe’s nameless character in The Seven Year Itch is subjected to fetishization and paraded in front of the male gaze, turning her into an eroticized feminine object. While a case can be made that her dumb-blonde persona contributes to the Girl’s objectification, this paper will examine how the different cinematic mechanisms Mulvey discusses affect the male spectator and the creation of a feminine identity.

In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and book Fetishism and Curiosity, Mulvey explored how “the visual is central to subjectivity (Mulvey 712).” Discussing such psychoanalytic concepts as ‘the gaze’, phallocentrism, fetishism and scopofilia, Mulvey sought to define how sexual difference controls the visual. ‘The gaze’ is a form of voyeuristic pleasure and a fantasy of control that puts the male spectator in an active position of power. The female character on screen, unaware of the male spectator watching her, is put on display as a passive sexualized object with no authority to look back at the male. Putting the female on display emphasizes sexual difference, which in turn “assuages the threat of castration (Mulvey 718).” This threat of castration derives from Sigmund Freud’s castration complex, which explores how masculinity is constituted: ‘the gaze’ accentuates the female’s lack of male genitalia as she is put on display (with the phallus often symbolizing power), which emphasizes gender inequality and allows the male spectator to embody the masculine ideal. Essentially ‘the gaze’ transforms the feminine character into an object of reassurance.

In The Seven Year Itch, Monroe’s hyper-feminine form is displayed in front of the male gaze, objectifying her as a passive erotic spectacle. Monroe’s body is isolated for the male spectator and flaunted with exploitive camera angles so as to make her sexuality less threatening. However it also reminds the male spectator that even though Marilyn has child-like mannerisms and is completely oblivious of her sexuality, she has the body of a woman. For example, her very first appearance in the film isn’t even of her face; it’s her hourglass silhouette in the curtained front door. Here, the male spectator gazes at the shadow of her body (objectifying her) while she is unable to stare back. This is also an example of how the director Billy Wilder utilized the iconography of Monroe (her physical beauty) for the purpose of pleasing the male spectator with a recognizable sexual figure. As Mulvey once stated herself, “Marilyn Monroe’s image [was] an emblem of perfectly eroticized features that could be recognized immediately in a reduced form (Mulvey 47).” In another scene, Marilyn walks upstairs to her apartment in a tight satin ensemble. Even though the main male character, Richard Sherman played by Tom Ewell, is lustily staring at her backside as she exits, the panned out camera angle captures Marilyn’s figure from the perspective of the viewer. With her back to the camera, she can’t gaze back, making her a sexualized, vulnerable object. The male gaze is also expressed when Marilyn appears on television in the film during her Dazzle Dent Toothpaste commercial, taking away her power to gaze back at the male spectator and forcing her to remain passive.

To make her stand out to the viewer, director Billy Wilder played with a three-point lighting system, Technicolor and a combination of high and low angle shots to highlight aspects of Marilyn’s physical appearance and emphasize her presence on screen. While Marilyn’s platinum blonde hair, blue eyes, red lips and revealing costumes already make her stand out on screen, the use of Technicolor makes the jewel-tones pop, while the three-point lighting system enhances this effect. These two visual effects draw the attention to her physical appearance and give her the look of a doll, an object. Wilder used a duet of high and low angle shots to create the appearance of a stage (or even a dollhouse). By using these shot angles and, for the most part, filming most scenes indoors to paint the illusion and depth of a theatrical stage, Wilder placed all of the audience’s attention on the actors themselves. The use of Cinemascope widened the screen and emphasized this creative approach. Creating the illusion of a stage emphasized the idea of voyeurism and ‘the gaze’ because it is as if we aren’t just looking through at life through a cinematic medium but also through a theatrical medium. Since Wilder relied less on creative editing devices and dramatic camerawork, the vitality and suggestiveness of Marilyn’s performance gains greater significance and draws more attention to her figure in the space.

Mulvey’s concept of fetishism is another mode of turning a woman into a reassuring rather than hazardous sexual object for the male spectator. “By building up the physical beauty of the object,” writes Mulvey, “transforming it into something satisfying in itself,” it creates a substitution that is a “complete disavowal of castration (Mulvey 716).” In film, Mulvey believes that the use of the close-up on the face or other anatomical part of a female character demonstrates this cinematic fetishism, which portrays the female as a sexual object. In Fetishism and Curiosity, Mulvey mentions Jean Baudrillard’s etymological analysis of the word fetish and how it relates to fetishism of the female form. She states, the word ‘fetish’ stems from “the Latin factitius… meaning ‘to paint, to adorn, to embellish’, and afeite, meaning ‘preparation, ornamentation, cosmetics’. He suggests that this etymology implies a homology between the fetishized figure of bodily beauty and the fetishism of the commodity. Both are constructed (Mulvey 47).” Essentially, this fetishism of Marilyn’s figure and beauty turns her into an object, a commodity. With America experiencing a commodity boom after WWII, Marilyn Monroe became a commodity herself on and off screen by exploiting her female sexuality and physique. The Seven Year Itch uses fetishistic close-ups of Marilyn’s body to transform her into just another commodity item like those mentioned throughout the film, such as Dazzle Dent toothpaste and US Camera.

In The Seven Year Itch, close-up shots of Marilyn’s different body parts demonstrate fetishism and objectification of the female form. Similar to ‘the gaze’, fetishism doesn’t allow the woman to look back at the male spectator: they must be passive, while the male actively dominates and controls them. For example during one scene in the film, there is an entire moment devoted to Marilyn’s bare legs when she is hiding behind the armchair while Richard answers the door. When her legs peek out from the side of the chair, the camera zooms in on them as she delicately picks up her stilettos with her red-polished toes. Another example is the famous scene where Monroe stands atop a subway grate in a white breezy empire-waist dress. As the train zooms by underground, the camera closes in on her bare legs as a draft blows up her dress. The camera cuts back and forth to Marilyn giggling as she stares into the distance, which makes this fetishism a voyeuristic pleasure for the male spectator because Marilyn is gazing aimlessly straight ahead with no idea of the spectator’s focus down below. This accentuation of body parts subordinates Marilyn’s character and reasserts a sense of control and power.

Although the Hayes Production Code restricted what could be shown on screen, Wilder was actually able to address sexuality directly under the context of fantasy. With the utilization of dream-sequences and a low-light sequence, viewers were able to recognize when moments of fantasy occured. When the audience is signaled that the activity in a scene is not really happening, it allowed Wilder to test boundaries. For example, in the scene where Richard imagines himself playing the Rachmaninoff concerto, Marilyn takes on a much more serious sexual demeanor. Dressed in a black and orange floor length glistening gown and smoking a cigarette, Marilyn seductively grabs herself, so taken by the Rachmaninoff piece and aggressively kisses Richard. By using fantasy sequences, Wilder was not only about to demonstrate aggressive sexuality without overstepping Production Code boundaries, but he also was able to make the male spectator feel like he was Richard Sherman and able to attain a woman like Marilyn. Using dream-sequence and fantasy places the male spectator in the mind of the male protagonist, making the fantasy his fantasy and the reality his reality.

‘The gaze’ is an expression of male power. In most industries and areas of society, society’s hegemonic gender norms give men positions of authority and privilege over women. The film audience is no exception. Films, as Laura Mulvey declared, are shot to please the male spectator and meet the needs of the male ego. ‘The gaze’, in fact, is constructed during production with different camera angles, lighting and costuming. ‘The gaze’ is utilized for the effects of transforming women into reassuring objects in an intimate relation to the spectator.” In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe’s character’s femininity is constructed based on masculine ideals. Visuality plays an integral role in this construction and manipulation of femininity as “a decorative layer, which conceals a non-identity (Mulvey 721).” For example, Technicolor, close-ups, creating the illusion of a stage with the use of high/low camera angle are devices used to place the male spectator in the position to actively dominate and objectify the passive female. Women are denied pleasure in cinema, while men control and dominate this pleasure sphere. Although some argue that films today, such as those in the romantic comedy genre, are shot more for the pleasure of women, it should be questioned whether this is the case or if women accept the constructions of femininity projected on screen. Although on the surface, things look very different in cinema, the values and ideals captured in the celluloid are arguably very much the same as those in the 1950s.

Link to Jeannette's final project

http://jennatt88.blogspot.com/

Final: Arnheim and Sound

Kristin Park
Theory Final

My project is an exploration of Arnheim’s argument against sound. Arnheim argued that the addition of sound to film is unnecessary and makes movies too close to our “experience of the real.” He believes that the addition of sound should be created in our minds. He also says that our mind organizes the world and takes meaning from it.

I am curious what Arnheim would think about cartoons. If the visuals were unrealistic, as cartoons are, would he still consider adding realistic sound to add too much to our “experience of the real?”

With this piece, I redesigned the accompanying sound using more realistic sounds. For example, the roadrunner makes the clattering noise you would hear if you saw on in the wild verses the “beep beep” sound assigned to it in the original cartoon. While the original is meant to be comical, the remake is meant to be about revenge and failure and death. Shakespeare’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech is incorporated and mixed with clips from The Godfather to help change the tone and the focus.
Arnheim also argues that the absence of sound puts more emphasis on what is seen. I posted this cartoon three times in order that you may consider his arguments for yourself. The first version is silent. The second it the original sound. And the third is my own design.

201 Final

Here's the link to my video. It's a bit blocky, but what are you gonna do?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKaTaF8e9h4

This was an interesting project for me. My background tells me that if you didn't spend days in the editing room, then you just weren't trying hard enough. While I still spent a significant amount of time mulling over this in the LRC, the majority of my time was spent taking stuff out... it turned out, in this case, that simple was better. While this video lacks tons of shots and cuts, I do feel that it is precise... everything is in its right and intended place.

Of course, there are things I would change looking back on it now, but I am proud of what I came up with. It's nothing like anything I would have made in the past, but it dialogues well (I hope) with some of the films we saw towards the end of the semester. I drew from James Benning, in particular, whose films I don't confess to truly appreciate but that I came to better understand by doing something in his vein.

What's amazing to me is the amount of stuff that was left on the cutting room floor. There were tons of extra shots that I gotten, all beautiful (I think), that simply didn't fit... that would've ultimately distracted from the point of this film.

Speaking of the point, try to guess what it is, cause I ain't tellin'.

Enjoy.

through the lens final

Matt Winkelried
Film Theory 201
May 1, 2010
Professor Jonathan Rattner
Structuralism and Experimental Film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hhw1XuYHLc

Through out the semester, we have explored, viewed and read different forms and styles of film that I have never encountered or really knew about. We began with formalist theories and film making, the goal of which is to depict the beauty of cinema, and its ability to be an expressive art form that can be manipulated. Formalism also focused on cinema’s ability to transform reality as the filmmaker believes or envisions it. Theorists we discussed, such as Eisenstein and Balasz, were keen on transforming this reality to a new imaginative universe through the use of editing and other post-production tools. We then went on to discuss a second film theory tradition we called realism. This concept of realism allowed the filmmaker to focus more on the look and the shapes of images that they are exhibiting on screen. The goal of realism is to break out the full potential of the world that we see. Among the realist theorists that we discussed were Tarkovsky and Bazin. They relied on the camera work more than editing tools. For example they would focus on long shots, not quick editing. Realist filmmakers and theorists ultimate goal was to use the power of the medium to capture the real world around us as it is, not how they transform it to be.
We then went on to a concept that I have never heard of or witnessed before. Structuralism is an approach that is very different from the formalist tradition and the realist tradition. Instead of focusing on the content of a film, structuralism emphasizes the structure of a film, and aims to completely change the viewer’s accepted and comfortable sense of perception with images and the way we see them on screen. In Zorns Lemma, by Hollis Frampton, the images are given to us in no specific order, however, as the film goes on each preceding set of images, the numbers becoming the words becoming the images, take over and become intertwined and signify a particular image from earlier in the film.
Leighton Pierce is an excellent example of an experimental filmmaker whose works draw inspiration from structuralist theory and filmmaking. His short film Glass (a memory of water), demonstrates structuralist ideals. His film successfully implements these ideas and creates a piece that definitely made me critically look at the film and experience multiple emotions. In an interview with Leighton Pierce, Pierce had spoken about how before he was a film maker, he was a composer and sound designer and with that he implemented sound into how he affectively used his camera and created shots. Glass used both visual and sound to effectively entice the viewer. I look at this film and I tried to incorporate similar methods of creating mood and feeling. By using the natural diagetic sound along with specific images I was able to create and intertwine emotions that are oppositional to each other.
My film does not exactly follow Frampton’s ideal, but has many similarities to Zorn’s Lemma. I took a series of shots that I thought were intriguing and unique and filmed them either in plain sight, or manipulated through the lens’ of sunglasses. This dichotomy was an attempt to play on perception: the direct shots are examples of a viewer’s “normal” perception, while the sunglasses try to change their perception. The film is not about any particular story, which is an element of the Structuralist tradition. I felt that there is beauty no matter how one sees these images. In my film, each shot length is not exactly equivalent to the next or previous one, but all the shots are roughly around 30 seconds long (give or take a second or two). In the piece about Zorns Lemma, MacDonald says that like many critical films, the experiences recorded in Zorns Lemma are not “conventional” filmic experiences. He was making it the viewers’ responsibility to understand and interpret the images on their own.
The goal that I was trying to reach with my film was to leave any messages the combined images made up to the viewers. I wanted the audience to feel either anxious or comforted by the images on the screen- and after having a set number of people and talking with many of them I asked them if they developed any of those feelings during the viewing. About half said they were comforted and the other half felt anxious. But my overall point of my film is directly in the title, “Through the Lens” meaning I want people to see things differently from one another, through their own what I like to call “lens.” I did this by structuring the film so that each image had equal opportunity to create the emotion to the viewer.
Each shot that I chose to use had a specific and internal meaning to them. My personal favorite shot was the shot of the swing set. I pushed the swings to give them the short natural look to them. I felt that by filming the swings I was capturing a lost childhood or the past that my generation once lived in and was specifically focusing on the memories of childhood, which were meant to sooth the audience and remind them of the life they use to live. This shot could also, however, make some people feel anxiety because of this lost childhood, so it functions both ways. In relation to that, I ended the film on that same swing set, only at a different angle, distance and through the lens. Providing the message that what is in the past is in the past and is unobtainable and I used the sunglasses to emphasize that the image in distant and can be sometimes cluttered by things (the lens) what lye ahead.
Studying different theories is important because it allows us to really think about why certain films are made the way that they are. The ways of making film has evolved as technology has evolved, and so has thinking about film. The history of film is important, and so is understanding the movements that changed the way that film has been made. These theorists taught us different ways of approaching film in terms of form, content, and purpose, but studying all of them was important. Over the course of this semester, the last thing we studied was the structuralist tradition, which allowed us to look at experimental films, which are the greatest example of the different ways of making films, and which allowed us to understand that there are different ways of making films for different reasons, and this is a long tradition. Personally, I am glad that we studied structuralism because it gave me a lot more exposure to experimental films, the theories that surround structure, and ultimately confidence in making my own experimental project, “Through the Lens”.

link for my video

Reset
My final project is a 6 minute video based upon set theory as applied to film, which we saw previously in Zorns Lemma. My idea was to create a set of routine shots from a man's life and repeat them multiple times, with each set being slightly different due to experiences the man has. The sets differ in the manner that they are shot (tripod vs fig rig vs handheld), the pace of the edits, and the visual appearance of the shots (saturation, contrast) depending on the experience that precedes the specific set. audio clips were taken from the movie Swingers and relate to the state of the main character. I was interested in exploring how the the principle of mathematical manipulation of a set by an operator can be applied to editing, and I wanted to show that an end product could be described by a set of transformations.

I was really hoping to investigate the idea of content coming from shape, whether it is content I intended or content the viewer finds on their own. The shots in the set were planned, but the "experiences" were not and for the most part came from shooting random places at random times or thinking of seemingly random sounds and later assigning meaning to them within the context of the film's structure. To this point all of the films I have made have been strongly narrative based, and this really pushed me to be more abstract.

here is a link for my video, censored somewhat from what was shown in class.

http://vimeo.com/11309418