Review: Scorsese's Hugo; Reality and Illusion

Scorsese's Hugo

From curioushairedgal's post 

The Magic Thing: The Artist, The Book of Illusions and The Violence of the Image

Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it had robbed the images of their purity (...)

It struck me that I was witnessing a 

dead art, a wholly defunct genre that would never be practiced again. And yet, for all the changes that had occurred since then, their work was as fresh and invigorating as it had been when first shown. That was because they had understood the language they were speaking.

They had invented the syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis, and except for the costumes and the cars and the quaint furniture in the background, none of it could possibly grow old. It was thought translated into action,

human will expressing itself through the human body, and therefore it was for all time(...) The flat screen was the world, and it existed in two dimensions. The third dimension was in our head. (Auster - The Book of Illusions, p.15)

Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz of Let me In

HUGO is a love letter to childhood and the movies, and childhood's  - whatever age - 

love of the movies.

It is also a story of separation and death, connection, reparation and reconstruction.

Hugo has rescued an automaton. A museum fire has killed his father, who was carefully repairing this beautiful artifact. It is his only connection with his dead father, an invisible ribbon tying them together.

AS Eric Packer in Cosmopolis spends his last day to get a "haircut", traveling through New York City traffic to go to the barbershop his father went to, and where he got his haircut as a child. Another invisible ribbon tying him to his dead father.

Scorsese Directing Hugo

Scorsese is tying himself to his own childhood, and his childhood love of movies and illusion that determined his future as an adult filmmaker. 

As nikola ties herself with invisible ribbons to robsessed, tying herself to her dead father and Old Timey Hollywood. 

And as someone I know ties himself to his dead father with baseball, DeLillo's book Underworld, because when he was a child his father took him to see DiMaggio play for the Yankees, and pointed out the great player in centerfield. An experience to become memory that is lost forever now with the advent of Moneyball, all illusion gone.

A long time ago I was reading psychoanalytic case studies of camp survivors of the Holocaust. One was with a woman who was a child with her mother at the selection platform. Her mother gave her a handkerchief (? some small thing) when she knew they would be separated. She never saw her mother again, but she held on to this "piece" of her mother. And she survived. The analysts have found that this "transitional object" was often the difference between life and death for the child's camp survival, and the  ability to have developed a self as an adult. 

Hugo is a philosophical statement about reality and illusion. Illusion wins hands down.

The Great Ben Kingsley with Asa Butterfield

Sasha Baron Cohen in an Astonishing Performance

The Magic Thing: The Artist, The Book of Illusions and The Violence of the Image

When asked about his motivation for making The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius replied that he simply tried to answer two questions. Why do we love movies? What made us fall in love with them when we were kids? It took ten years to make a movie in the format not used since the twenties.

It’s a challenge, of course, but it makes the story more powerful, more poetic and lyrical. Language is useful, but just that, useful. Yet it reduces communication as well. When a baby who can’t speak smiles at you, it touches you differently from an adult’s smile. Even with people you love, you don’t always use words to express important things. When you don’t need to talk it’s really powerful, I think.

In Auster's The Book of Illusions, Daniel Zimmer, a husband and a father prior to one plane crash, watches by chance a silent movie clip with a captivating star of the forgotten silent era, Hector Manning. Never a movie person, Zimmer is a professor to whom words have always been much more potent than images. And yet, in the midst of playing dead in his now empty home in Vermont haunted by his wife's smell and his sons' toys, paralysed with grief and loss, the sight of Hector's twitching moustache makes him laugh his heart out.

Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it had robbed the images of their purity (...)
It struck me that I was witnessing a dead art, a wholly defunct genre that would never be practiced again. And yet, for all the changes that had occurred since then, their work was as fresh and invigorating as it had been when first shown. That was because they had understood the language they were speaking.
They had invented the syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis, and except for the costumes and the cars and the quaint furniture in the background, none of it could possibly grow old. It was thought translated into action,
human will expressing itself through the human body, and therefore it was for all time (...) The flat screen was the world, and it existed in two dimensions. The third dimension was in our head. (The Book of Illusions, p.15)


And Baudrillard knows the heart of the image cult, the total visibility and total elimination of secrecy that has become so inherent in the fibre of our lives it goes mute and unnoticed.

The specificity of the image is that it is in some way a parallel universe - another world, another scene, in two dimensions - not to confuse with our universe in three dimensions, our real universe, the world of representation. This dimension less makes its magic and its power of illusion. All what reintegrates the image in the third dimension is a potential violence done to the image. Not only the spatial dimension of relief and stereoscopy, but even that of movement, of time (in the movie), or that of meaning and message - all that reintegrate the image in our world and destroys it as a parallel world. (The Violence of The Image)

Resist the noise, the perpetual rumour of the world, through the silence of the image. Resist movement, flow and acceleration through the stillness of the image. Resist the moral imperative of meaning through the silence of signification. Above all, resist this automatic overflow of images and their perpetual succession. Recover the "po-ignant" detail of the object, the "punctum", but also the moment of acting, of taking the picture, immediately passed, and always nostalgic. Opposite to the flow of images produced in "real time", indifferent to this other dimension of the becoming-image of the object : the time itself. The visual flux of actuality does not know anything but change, it does not know the concept of becoming, which is radically different from change : in this flux the image does not even have time to become image (as in the sphere of information thought has hardly the chance to becoming-thought) ... For this is the price of making objects appear: the disappearance of the subject. (The Violence of The Image)

Make yourself disappear

Pandora's Box

Edward Cullen as a "FLAT" character

 

Stephenie Meyer and Ayn Rand have been accused of writing "wooden" - read flat - characters: Edward Cullen, Roark, Galt (Galt rhymes with halt), are the most celebrity examples. It seems like Meyer is in good company eh? BTW Twilight has more than a few floating signs referencing Ayn Rand - Edward's bronze hair signaling Roark's unruly orange hair for one, inflexible integrity another. Still think Meyer is a dimwit running to the bank, folks? 

This "flatness" has tarred the actors playing the "flat" characters: Gary Cooper, Robert Pattinson for easy quote examples. It seems Diana Hsieh is not the only idiot in town, as almost every reviewer of Fountainhead and the Twilight movies says the same. She is in good company with twenty-fifth rate minds. Exactly where she belongs.

Saturday, 17 March 2012  darren writes of FLAT characters:

A "flat" character does not mean a "boring" character. It's a technical term in literary theory popularized by the novelist E. M. Forster in his monograph on writing titled "Aspects of the Novel." According to Forster, a "flat" character is a kind of token: his or her psychology and values do not grow, change, evolve, or come to any kind of crisis during the course of the narrative because characters — like plot points — have functions within the story; it is simply not the function of a flat character to steal attention away from the main character(s) — the protagonist(s) and the antagonist(s) — by growing, changing, evolving, or reaching any sort of "crisis" within the story in which they must exercise his or her will, and come to a decision — or initiate an action — that would be surprising, i.e., a new pattern of behavior inconsistent with their previous pattern. "Flat" characters remain who they were throughout the entire course of the story, because they are there simply to provide a particular kind of obstacle (or point of affinity) for the main characters. They are part of the stock-in-trade of every playwright, screenwriter, short-story writer, and novelist. They are a particular kind of narrative tool. 
For quotes from Forster go to the above link.


Meyer has solved her problem by making Edward Cullen a vampire. Vampires never change. They are frozen - read flat - where they were when they were changed. Forever.
Edward in the books and more so in the films exists to love Bella. Everything he does and says is to show his love for Bella when really he desires her so much he wishes to kill her and drink her blood until she is drained. (For a fanfic version see Hide and Drink by savage.)


In discussing the Hays Production Code of the 1930's Zizek  (RL p.84)....."it generated the very excess whose direct depiction it forbade.....The Production Code did not simply prohibit some contents, rather it codified their enciphered articulation, as in the famous instruction from Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters in Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon":


At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard...whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. (Fitzgerald,TLT, 1960,p.51)


Could we say that every time Edward Cullen is on the screen it is only  to desire Bella. 


A film flat character. A floating sign to assert and deny. 

Zizek - sigh

Review: Reading The Artist Through Paul Auster

The Artist

curioushairedgalCollapse

"And yet for all the changes that had occurred since then, their work was as fresh and invigorating as it had been when it was first shown. That was because they had understood the language they were speaking. They had invented a syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis, and except for the costumes and the cars and the quaint furniture in the background, none of it could possibly grow old. It was thought translated into action, human will expressing itself through human body, and therefore it was for all time (...) They were like poems, like the renderings of dreams, like some  intricate choreography of the spirit, and because they were dead, they probably spoke more deeply to us now than they had to the audience of their time. We watched them across a great chasm of forgetfulness, and the very things that separated them from us were in fact what made them so arresting: their muteness, their absence of color, their fitful, speeded-up rythms. These were obstacles and they made the viewing difficult for us, but they also relieved the images of the burden of representation. They stood between us and the film, and therefore we no longer had to pretend that we were looking at the real world. The flat screen was the world, and it existed in two dimensions. The third dimension was in our head." - Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

I keep asking curioushairedgal to post here but she always says, "not ready, not ready, not ready.

Well suck it up. It's called PASTE. 

Review: The Artist

The Artist

This is a perfect film.

Every scene in this movie is a film cliche you have seen before. 

But you are seeing that cliche in a brand new way, an original perception an artist director envisioned it to be seen by the viewer, long ago when movies were young, and some directors were seeing the film as an art form rather than as a box office entertainment only. 

A time when the possibilities of beauty were dazzling.

When the presence of beauty was a promise of happiness.

Stendhal

These original scenes have been copied, the copies copied, and copies of copies increasing and circulating endlessly. We have seen them thousands of times. 

An infinity of simulacra

But we have never seen them fresh before.

Bel Ami Review: Damage Control

Bel Ami Poster

DAMAGE CONTROL to Major Tom!

DAMAGE CONTROL to Major Tom!

Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod are good ol boys running a theatre company that does Shakespeare, Wilde, Williams, Inge, O'Neill in classic productions of a repertory theatre type experience. Much like Hedgerow in Philadelphia and Jersey and the semi-professional performing groups.

If you want to see cutting edge performance you go to Elizabeth LeCompte in New York City. She was married to Willem Defoe for many years and he starred in productions and kept them afloat.

She received a MacArthur Grant. Donnellan and Ormerod are more like provincial theatre in say Brooklyn, Queens, that perform the tried and true that we all love, but will never challenge our reality to uncomfortable levels. Even Godot does not do that now the way Beckett did in the 1950's when I used to go so often.

These guys have no stature and are middle aged classic repertory theatre people shoestringing it on grants and fund raising. The nostalgic plays we love do not support themselves and their productions, while classically excellent, they are what they are.

Donnellan and Ormerod saw a way to get out of this and into the big time world of critical filmmaking with a costume drama with great name recognition. This enticed the female leads and Rob Pattinson. 

Pattinson was their ticket to some fame and future in filmmaking. Just like Lawrence and Scummit, they are riding Rob's coat tails hanging on to the gold ring on the merry-go-round.

For some reason fangirls think they are serious players. They are not.

They are hoping to be by riding in on the horse named Rob Pattinson. They have changed the book to dilute its message in favor of SOFT PORN using Rob Pattinson's face, back muscles and bare ass, and thrusting, thrusting, thrusting! They are riding their horse home to win the race. This is a "fucking metaphor"! This is blatantly obvious to all the reviewers, but they criticize Rob's performance and his silly fans who want nekkid Rob and thrusting, thrusting, thrusting, rather than the pimping of Donellan and Ormerod, who also want nekkid Rob and thrusting, thrusting, thrusting!

There is no doubt that part way through shooting Rob connected the dots.

 He has been there many times before. He was a model. He knows when his face and body are being exploited. And they are in Bel Ami. These guys are slicker than Lawrence and Scummit, slicker than Condon who did the same.

The only good film he has made so far is Remember Me where he controlled casting, the script, production. He did not control distribution but this is the only time we have seen him in control. He knows what he is doing and he has been used by inferior directors. But he is complicit in this.

Cronenberg has nothing to get from Rob and everything to give. Just wait.

 Watch and learn.