Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 47, November 2003
Cara O'Connor
Ethics, Ambiguity, and Multi-Frame Narrative in Julie Talen's _Pretend_
_Pretend_
(2003) Directed by Julie Talen
USA, Digital Video, 80
mins I *The screen is split
horizontally. A family of four eats dinner together, and two
views, one slightly higher than the other, turn circles from
the center of the table. Focus on the top half and you are
eye to eye with Dad and Mom; shift your gaze downward and
you're in line with Sophie and Ellie, their two young girls:
Sophie talks, Ellie talks . . . Mom's arm reaches for the
serving spoon. Mom talks, Dad talks . . . The girls speak
about their day of pretending: Says Ellie, 'I'm not Ellie,
I'm a mommy'. Says Sophie, 'I'm not a mommy, I'm a Pirate.'
Sophie looks, Ellie looks, Dad works on a poem . . . Mom
asks Dad a question. You forgot to go to your job interview
. . . again. Eight bodies, four individuals, rotate across
the screen, by turns defensive, disappointed, worried and
restless.* In July 2003, at the
Walter Reade Theater, the New York Video Festival presented
a feature length movie called _Pretend_. A first feature by
writer-director Julie Talen, _Pretend_ belongs to a small
but growing category of films that use the split-screen for
narrative purposes, [1] films that provoke certain
questions: Why is a different sense of judgment sometimes
invoked when watching two or more framed events together on
one screen? And what is required of the narrative itself,
for this shift to occur? In an attempt to answer these
questions I would like to examine the relationship between
the use of multiple frames in _Pretend_ and the ethical
philosophy of sustained ambiguity put forth by Simone de
Beauvoir. In _The Ethics of
Ambiguity_ Simone de Beauvoir argues that we are born in the
midst of others, without whom the world itself would never
begin to take on meaning. She takes the ontological
principles of existentialism (as developed in Sartre's
_Being and Nothingness_) and key elements from
Merleau-Ponty's work on phenomenology, [2] and adds
to these a groundbreaking theory about the reciprocal nature
of embodied subjectivity. Beauvoir posits that the existence
of separate 'others', and their free ability to disclose
meaning, is an absolute prerequisite in order that the
subject, *I*, exist -- an 'I' whose freedom consists in
pursuing projects through which she transcends the immanence
of facticity. Beauvoir proposes we learn to consider others
not as obstacles whose needs annihilate our freedom, but as
separate subjectivities whose difference and distance from
us produces the conditions that shape our own projects and
give possibility to the world: 'we must here again invoke
the notion of Hegelian 'displacement.' There is an ethics
only if there is a problem to solve. And it can be said . .
. that the ethics which have given solutions by effacing the
fact of the separation of men are not valid precisely
because there *is* this separation. An ethics of ambiguity
will be one which will refuse to deny *a priori* that
separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each
other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid
for all.' [3] Beauvoir rejects the
attempts by previous philosophers to unify and obscure the
'tragic' ambiguity of mind-body separation. Any philosophy
which relies on truth systems based on absolute values is
destined to arrive at an ethics that fails where it most
needs to succeed: in the humble realm of lived experience.
To the extent that ethics understands human-being as the
only justifiable end, the goals of ethics are to show us how
to protect humanity by guarding against its use as a means
to other ends. The only ends to which humans can justifiably
be put are those of human freedom. But the word 'freedom' is
open to interpretation. Beauvoir proposes, both in _The
Ethics of Ambiguity_ and in _The Second Sex_, that authentic
freedom should be defined not as merely the freedom to be
alive, but as the freedom to transcend oneself by pursuing
projects in a world of others who are also similarly free.
She agrees with Sartre that the individual is the foundation
of his or her own existence, but amends this concept to
encompass the idea that it is actually the encounter between
*separate* human beings that founds the recognition of the
individual self. It is only though our relations with others
that we are able to recognize ourselves as having both an
interior and exterior existence, an existence that we must
use as means of action and decision in the world. Beauvoir
acknowledges that Hegel understood this, but she departs
from Hegel because his solution to the problem of human
interconnectedness was to posit a historical, cyclical
system that denies the essential importance of individual
subjectivity. In order to move forward
in a way that increases the possibility of human freedom
there must be a deeply felt understanding of both our
fundamental interdependence and our need to *remain
separate*. In light of this philosophical goal, Beauvoir
points to literature for its unique ability to simulate an
experience of connectedness of separate subjectivities. Mary
Sirridge focuses on this in her essay, 'Philosophy in
Beauvoir's Fiction', where she quotes this passage from
Beauvoir: 'This is the miracle of
literature and is what distinguishes it from information: it
is that a truth which is *other* becomes mine without
ceasing to be other. I give up my 'I' in favor of the 'I' of
the person who is speaking; and nonetheless I remain
myself.' [4] A truth becomes mine
*without ceasing to be other*. Beauvoir is, of course,
talking about writing. And yet _Pretend_, while hardly alone
in exploring ethics through multiple subjectivities,
presents its narrative in a formal way that is especially
effective and exciting for those of us looking to understand
the interplay of phenomenology and ethics in cinema. It is a
'movie', which draws us into the worlds of others while
causing us to *remain ourselves*. Are there filmmaking
techniques which lend themselves more readily to the kind of
process Beauvoir is suggesting? And why should we expect
that such an ethical experience is possible in a darkened
theater? In his book, _The Reality
of Illusion_, Joseph Anderson draws upon the work of
Gombrich to show that much of what we experience in the
cinema can be attributed to pre-cognitive processes. Though
there is much to disagree with in his emphasis on biological
destiny, the book still presents useful points. He writes
that the human impulse to play is a deeply seated technique
for learning to cope with the dangers of reality. Pretending
and playing are 'framed' situations whose cues allow the
participants to know they are in a context of
experimentation free from the threat of irreversible
consequences. From this Anderson explains how narrative
films in particular stimulate the viewer by providing them
with a safe space: 'Humans . . . enter into
the make believe play of a motion picture, observe the
consequences of certain behavior, and share the emotions of
certain characters in the film, without being exposed to the
same extent or in the same way to the physical and/or
psychological dangers to which the film's characters are
exposed. A motion picture makes it possible for viewers, in
a purely cognitive space, to test the efficacy of certain
strategies . . .'. [5] Anderson's argument is
that enjoyment -- though subjective -- is not to be
dismissed as running counter to learning. Rather the
opposite, when one is immersed in a film-world there is the
possibility of learning quite a lot -- just as the child
learns about what to do in the real world through playing
make-believe. Perhaps he is wrong to assume that the
greatest pleasure in film is to be had through his so-called
'seamless' narrative, but it does seem that certain kinds of
narrative structures are particularly stimulating, and
because of the way we *learn* to learn, I am tempted to look
towards narrative strategies (loosely interpreted) as a most
basic and essential component of ethical
thinking. II Although there are highly
developed and active traditions of sculptural,
multi-channel, and multi-frame videos and films rooted in
explorations in the visual arts and experimental film
movements, there have been just a few in the history of
theatrically released features. Among the notable are
_Napoleon_, _The Thomas Crown Affair_ (1968), _Sisters_, and
_Time-Code_. [6] These films are all very different
from each other, but the uses they make of the split screen
do similarly ask the viewer to process momentarily disjoined
scenic spaces. And yet it is important to understand that
holding two or more ultimately reconcilable *points of view*
in the mind does not offer the same type of experience as
when we are asked to toggle between multiple *realities*
which are interconnected but can't be unified. I would like
to illustrate this point by briefly describing the uses of
multi-frame in these films, and the ways in which the films
fall flat, ethically speaking. In Abel Gance's 1927 film
the enormous face of Napoleon often fills the center screen.
This god-like persona is alternately flanked by a bird's eye
view of villagers, soldiers, or clouds. At other times we
see him leading his army to or from battle. To the left is
the view of their future destination, to the right the
smoldering village they have left behind. The triptych at
once projects forwards and backwards in time, creating a
sense that past, present, and future are all just components
of a pre-ordained reality. _The Tomas Crown Affair_ collages
simultaneous bank robberies to set a scene which might have
been confusing for the viewer had the editor been limited to
crosscutting. There are five scenes depicting five
distressed thieves. Combined with these images are eerily
abstracted rectangles of anonymous pedestrian traffic. All
this minutia is presented in relation to a suave,
larger-than-life protagonist as he waits calmly behind his
desk -- neatly foreshadowing the subsequent line of
dialogue: 'every crime has a personality, a
*something-like-the-mind* that planned it'. In de Palma's
_Sisters_, as with several others of his films, the
split-screen/multi-frame approach is used to convey
simultaneity of action that heightens feelings of suspense
and helplessness. This kind of dramatic irony is often
successfully effected by crosscutting, but by choosing to
set contrasting perspectives side by side (the hunter and
the hunted; the criminal and the journalist) de Palma is
able to take advantage of the calm of continuity editing.
This gives the viewer more time with each scene -- to
investigate, anticipate, or simply just feel nervous. In
_Timecode_ the screen is divided into quadrants. We follow
four supposedly unrelated characters as they move
separately, but in parallel times and adjacent places,
through the film's duration. The result of this tightly
interlocking structure is a different sort of suspense from
what we see in _Sisters_ -- it is the soap-opera type of
suspense, where the dramatic irony centers on the
cross-purposes of sexual and professional ambitions. But in
this case the collage of Hollywood dreams are conveniently
collapsed and finalized by an absolute act of senseless
violence. _Napoleon_ is unrivaled as
an achievement in the formal use of simultaneous
perspectives, but it uses its array of angles and cinematic
techniques to unambiguously reinforce *one* overwhelming
voice. The film marshalls its diverse riches towards the
singular goal of reifying a treasured object of official
French identity, the story of Napolean's charismatic and
tragic-heroism. _Sisters_, also a stunning film, gives us a
chance to play at being simultaneously in the place of
discovery and in the place of ignorance, and the effects can
be riveting -- but the known and unknown end up being two
sides of the same universal truth. _The Thomas Crown Affair_
might be aesthetically ambitious but conceptually it is a
silly and insidious stunt of romantic, masculine
wish-fulfillment. And what can be said about _Timecode_? The
dimensionless characters are nothing more than objects set
in motion, parts of a mechanistic universe of petty human
drives which react like puppets under Destiny's hand. It
should not escape notice that _Rashomon_, using just one
frame to tell its stories, accomplishes more for a
philosophical understanding of multiple perspectives than
these films could ever hope to do. Evidently the split
screen can create amazing impressions -- but none that
necessarily result in Beauvoir's sense of sustained
ambiguity. III Like the films I've just
described, _Pretend_ is structured by a narrative that is
fairly easy to grasp and could potentially reach a wide
audience. And like _Timecode_ especially, _Pretend_ uses a
digital editing to ambitiously work with multiple frames
throughout its entire length. [7] But this is where
the similarities end. _Pretend_ is the story of
'what happens' when Sophie, an industrious ten year old, in
a scheme to keep her parents from breaking-up, stages the
kidnapping of her little sister, Ellie. We follow Sophie
from the innocence of play to the realization and
suppression of an unbearable culpability for her sister's
disappearance. It is a relatively simple story that compels
us. But in order to follow the narrative we are required to
unify images separated by borders, to disentangle
overlapping sounds, to sort between abstraction and
literalness, past and present, dream and reality; we must
sift between the emphasis of repetition and the strange
shock of an undivided screen, and all in order to comprehend
a splintered picture whose boundaries are never secure. In
order to hold onto the story we have to hold in tension
after-images that threaten to slip from memory, and at the
same time we are asked to accept changes in perspective that
contradict the diegesis we thought we knew. This is a lot to
ask of the viewer, but the demand is not gratuitous. The
work the viewer does here is continuous with the kind of
meaning the movie produces, and in this case the story grips
us, and is far less predictable than it at first
seemed. At the same time that we
follow Sophie's 'fateful' decision we also follow her
parents through the everyday banalities and poignancy of
breaking-up: *She looks down at her own
body as she undresses for bed. She is too near to herself to
be the object of any one's gaze. I'm tired, there nothing
more to say, and it is finally dark and quiet, I won't think
about 'us' now, I will only think of sleep. Dad watches Mom
from bed. The establishing view shows they are just another
couple going to sleep. The woman is turned away from the man
and she is wearing a t-shirt. Dad watches Mom's back. A
small space of memory appears above their bed. You used to
feel so differently about me. Within these new borders her
back is naked and soft, he reaches to touch it, she turns
towards him with a smile.* _Pretend_ relies on a
collage of scene-like fragments constantly changing in size,
number, shape, and texture. In addition to this there is a
high level of complexity in the soundtrack. _Pretend_
combines synchronized dialogue with electronic music, voice
over, direct address, and even occasional extra-diegetic
artifacts from non-linear sound editing. With such diverse
film/video/audio vocabulary working in tandem, the
split-screen effects singled out from the other four movies
are at least fleetingly present throughout this one. But
what is of interest here is an affect/effect generated in
Talen's movie *not* to be found in these other films. It
could provisionally be said that _Pretend_ offers up, framed
and ready for examination, the *ambiguous* relationship
between consciousness and the world. Each member of the family
has his or her own set of imaginary spaces. We watch them
try to interact through these always-separated mental
frameworks and we see the choices that result from
hopelessly private projections. The un-accountability of the
individuals in relation to their private worlds points to a
disastrous absence of trust between them. This communication
gap can be seen in Ellie's perspective, as well as the
alchemy of perspectives produced by the separation of
sisters. This separation, which occurs when Sophie escorts
Ellie into the woods where, in cooperation with Sophie's
plan, Ellie has agreed to stay the night alone: *Sophie is going to leave
Ellie. Two young girls make a pretend bed in the woods.
Their story is told by a pink-bordered box at odd angles to
the other frames. We are embarking on a heroic adventure.
But earlier moments haunt us. Ellie in four squares,
anxious, and uncertain; nested frames of trees and smoke;
spooky, sinister sounds. Sophie is turning away from us, she
is really going to leave, a rectangle of slowed down time
doesn't keep her with us. She doesn't even care, she is so
callous in her leaving. But she does look back. Sophie sees
Ellie's face, it fills its own square. Don't cry Ellie.
Ellie's eyes are full of tears, it makes it hard to leave
her, but we must, nothing can stop us. We're going, be good,
Ellie. We're going now . . . * At another point we are
alone in the woods with Ellie, whose child-fears have
already played themselves before us quite clearly. We now
enter into her game of make-believe. We are familiar with
her fears, and familiar with her attempt to transcend
them: *A stage is set on a small
folded blanket. Ellie sits on her makeshift bed animating
fuzzy and misshapen creatures who don't have anything in
common. She makes them say things by jostling them up and
down and using her quiet play-voice. 'I wasn't really
kidnapped, it was all just a game!' Ellie's voice gives over
to the sounds coming from a new frame appearing on the left.
In this frame there are real people who speak with real
voices. Well . . . the family looks real but they move
stiffly like paper-dolls. We knew everything, the parents
say, we knew what you girls were trying to do . . . She
plays silently. It would be silly to be afraid because
'everybody knows . . . you can't fool
grown-ups!'* A six-year-old's
make-believe is not going to be as subtle as her father's.
But the editing of the sequences around Ellie's 'adventure'
show a terrain of fear which is complex -- overlapping at
times with adult versions of reality while at other moments
being bounded by a child's stage of mental development. The
video-language of _Pretend_ is sometimes specific to the
character's social circumstances and at other times less
easy to place. Abstracted and blurred rectangles, slow and
fast motion, multiple shots of the same perspective, and
other devices work to generate atmospheric effects that are
not easily attributable to one character. [8] As a
result there is a sense of varying levels of depth that are
not easily reconciled. There is the mental world of each
separate family-member; there is the Warhol-world of the
news-media; and there is a diffused and emergent world,
equally imaginary, but some-how mysterious. And yet this meticulous
examination of imaginary worlds is not limited to the story
proper. The ambiguous ethical failure of Sophie dovetails
neatly with the problematic idea of art as Play: Sophie
convinces naive Ellie that their scheme is no different from
playing a game; she convinces her parents, on the other
hand, that what is happening is REAL. Because she has failed
to create a framework, or a set of safe boundaries for her
make-believe, it is possible for the outside world to seep
in and destroy *more* than just the illusion. Ellie may be
playing Sophie's game by pretending to be lost, but she is
also really in the woods, and really alone; Sophie's
make-believe hasn't the power to maintain an insular world
for the girls -- a regulated system of cause and
effect. IV For something to be a game
everyone involved must know it is a game. And yet when we
want to effect a change it is often much easier to
manipulate the people who are against that change than it is
to reason with them. In situations of real oppression, when
there is no chance to bargain for a voice, in order to be
able to have any control over one's own situation in the
world it is necessary to defy, deceive, and sometimes do
violence in order to take the exclusive power of decision
from the hands of the other. On the grounds of its
being 'framed' and thereby separated from the rest of life,
art can safely give rise to feelings and thoughts which
people would not entertain in their outside lives. These new
feelings and thoughts have the potential to generate new
interpretations of 'reality' that can result in fresh
approaches to life's ambiguous problems. But this rarely
seems to happen, as the very separation which gives art its
power also accounts for its weakness. When we enter into a
fictional universe we do so knowing that we are pretending.
Isn't it the rule rather than the exception that viewers sit
in rapture in front of a screen, identify with the
downtrodden, the brave, the adventurous, only to step
directly from the darkened theater back into lives whose
comforts are largely made possible through oppression,
cowardliness, and lassitude? 'I remember having
experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the
impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque National in 1940.
But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of
the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of
any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the
infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted
to live in the midst of living men.' [9] An art experience can help
us recognize that we live in a world where there are no
absolute values, and art can show us how this very absence
of an overarching 'system' makes us all the more profoundly
attached to each other. But movies that are premised on
ready-made value-systems -- films based on such common
conflations as beauty with truth, evil with failure, or
character with destiny, won't be able to offer us the kind
of recognition we need. Rather, these films at best only
provide a welcome escape and a false sense of security. But
since people look to movies as a space for pretending -- and
because we want, perhaps need to have the space to escape
ourselves through play, there must be a playful attitude
towards pretending which can also teach us about
reality. 'If the director has done
his [sic] job well we are caught up in a seamless
world where events unfold causally toward seemingly
inevitable conclusions. The movie is not ours to 'read.' It
is ours to experience as we interact with its complex
program.' [10] Though his views are
rather conforming, Anderson is right to insist that we are
always watching something that has been *thoughtfully*
constructed for us by another (or a group of others). Though
movies are always open to multiple readings there is still
something finite in what is available for interpretation. As
an audience we can't deny being somewhat *directed* by the
voice we listen to. Still, we shouldn't be
confused about where meanings originate. The finitude of
possible meanings isn't inherent in the film but is the
result of the specific needs the situated observer brings to
the cinema in combination with the knowledge that the
filmmakers have of those needs. We move through the world
with intentions -- we therefore notice certain things and
ignore others. A movie can be made in such a way that our
wishes are only able to attach themselves ambivalently to
the objects and relations on the screen. When intentionality
can't find a ready-made object then the subject, compelled,
for instance, by her curiosity towards the 'outcome' of a
film's story, will work to cobble together another kind of
cognitive shelter. Under the right circumstances this
compulsion can awaken an ethical mindset, and set into
motion processes of interpretation that stimulates feelings
of social situatedness quite the opposite of the typical
sensations of isolated voyeurism. V If doubt is a doubling,
then in order to be doubtful you have to hold disunified
pictures in your mind practically simultaneously. You must
be able to toggle between possibles or else thinking is not
possible. This is what we do when we
try to make decisions. We struggle with disparate realities,
and try to understand where we are in order to freely move
on to the next place. There is a temptation to compare the
process of deliberation to other phenomena -- as un-thinking
bodies our instantaneous reactions to our environment can
also be spoken of as togglings, glancings, and gatherings.
But we are not socially responsible for these kinds of
reactions. Anderson's research may serve to remind us that
there is no real ethics of the reflex, but fortunately for
us, films offer quite a lot more than just our own reflexes
back to ourselves. It might be the phenomena of seeing and
hearing that generates the sense of having time and space at
our disposal, but it is as ethical and socially situated
creatures that we move through the framed event -- an event
which gives us time and space through which to
*think*. In narrative film Time is
a prime material. There is almost always a character who
must make a series of fateful decisions -- and Time will
demonstrate for us whether or not the character will have
succeeded in making that ultimate *correct* decision. The
character is normally presented, in the third act, with some
kind of ultimate choice, and the resulting decision
encompasses all of his or her previous hesitations and
brings them into a single, defining climax. Given these
stakes, to watch someone deciding, and to watch his fate
unfold can be an edge-of-the-seat experience. But there is
another order of experience to which narrative movies have
rarely granted us access: the experience of facing (judges
that we are) the confounding impact of fluctuating worlds on
the characters who move through those worlds, and the
exhilarating responsibility of being always in-the-midst of
making decisions. In this kind of film the value of those
decisions can never be evaluated from the deathly-calm
standpoint of a final outcome. This kind of cinema could be
as provocative as any high-stakes adventure, though the
tension it produces hasn't the same systematic relation to
linear time. *Every wrong has a
personality, a 'something-like-the-mind' that regrets
it.* An important aspect of
this 'tension' -- a tension which, for Beauvoir is
continuous with freedom itself -- is the ability to imagine
the subjectivities of others without unifying or hardening
these thoughts into immutable facts that turn others into
objects. _The Ethics of Ambiguity_ suggests that there must
be an open-endedness to our sense of history which at once
accounts for its crimes while remaining aware of the fact
that memory is a constant event of interpretation. The past
must constantly replay itself in-tension with the present,
or it is a dead and useless past. To come to terms with the
failures in history we must know that even something as
personal as memory cannot be safely
self-contained. The fluctuations in
_Pretend_ take on a mesmerizing quality: in order to keep up
with the changes in perspective and visual texture, a sort
of abandon occurs. We become absorbed -- not by the story of
one character -- but in the transitions between the frames
that connect them. And yet something shifts towards the end
of _Pretend_. Just as we are growing used to this state of
'one-ness' with the story, its rhythm is subtly disrupted.
Sophie disturbs our absorption by addressing herself to
directly to us, her judges. A storytelling convention, the
direct address succeeds in bringing the audience back to
itself. But in the context of _Pretend_, with its array of
equally valid subjectivities, we are also brought back to
*Sophie*. Now it is Sophie who indisputably stands as our
'I' -- and because of this hyper-awareness, that keeps us
from losing ourselves in her point of view, she is not
simply *the* 'I' but the 'I' who *can't but be
other*. Our thwarted
identification with Sophie and our simultaneous inability to
escape privileging her point of view creates an experience
of 'I' similar to the literary ideal of which Beauvoir
speaks -- we are faced with a cinematic version of a
subjectivity that is irretrievably other. The difference between
_Pretend_ and other split-screen narrative films is not a
difference based solely on technique but on the
interrelation between the story being told and the
storytelling form. It is not just because of story-ideas nor
is it simply by aesthetic innovations that _Pretend_ sets
itself and its viewers into motion. It is the active part we
take in the unfolding of the narrative that makes us alert
to the ambiguity of embodied consciousness, and
consciousness's peculiar dependence on the separate
existence of others. As the story comes to a
close we are transferred by train from the world of Sophie
and her parents into the (future/present) world of *Adult*
Sophie. By taking up both the past and present-tense of the
story, Sophie's subjectivity becomes even more central. This
centrality throws into anxious question all of the previous
points of view we had encountered along the way. We begin to
wonder if _Pretend_ is really so complicated after all. Is
this a gathering of imaginary worlds or only the dream of
Sophie's memory? Is Sophie not only the
narrative's privileged subject but its *only* point of view?
Adult Sophie, with her relation to the past, suddenly tempts
us to revise into a neat bundle all the previous
ambiguities. To make of it all a single picture of one
person's unresolved regret. But just as the safety of this
resolution is about to take hold, a distant voice
*re*-frames and *re*-introduces the conditions for
uncertainty. In the midst of Sophie's wishes and fears we
see the 'lost' Ellie playing with an imaginary boy: 'Is this
the world that Sophie sees?', she asks him. 'No,' he
replies, 'this is the world that *you* see.' Brooklyn, New York,
USA Notes 1. For a very insightful
overview and analysis of multi-channel films and television
shows, see Julie Talen's article, '_24_: Split Screen's Big
Comeback', _Salon_, 14 May 2002 <http://archive.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2002/05/14/24_split>.
In this article she lists movies which use the technique, as
well as discussing her own theory of the 'glance'. The
following -- in no particular order -- are feature length
movies (the majority from Talen's list) which use split or
multiple screens: _The Boston Strangler_ (directed by
Richard Fleischer); _The Pillow Book_ (Peter Greenaway);
_Timecode_ and _Hotel_ (Mike Figgis); _The Hulk_ (Ang Lee);
_Napoleon_ (Abel Gance); _The Thomas Crown Affair_ (Norman
Jewinson); _The Laramie Project_ (Moises Kaufman); _ Gone_
(Celia Dougherty); _ Chelsea Girls_ (Andy Warhol);
_Sisters_, _Carrie_, _Dressed to Kill_, _ Blow Out_, and
_Snake Eyes_ (Brian De Palma); _Numero deux_ (Jean Luc
Godard); _Run Lola Run_ (Tom Tykwer); _Requiem for a Dream_
(Darren Aronofsky); _ Jesus' Son_ (Alison Maclean); _The
Andromeda Strain_ (Robert Wise); _Wicked, Wicked_ (Richard
Bare); _More American Graffiti_ (Bill Norton); _Zentropa_
(aka _Europa_) (Lars Von Trier); _Charley_ (Theo Van Gogh);
and _Symbiopsycho-taxiplasm Part I_ (William Greaves).
2. See Monika Langer's
essay, 'Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Ambiguity', in Claudia
Card, ed., _The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. Simone de Beauvoir,
_The Ethics of Ambiguity_, trans. Bernard Frechtman
(Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1975), p. 18. This
book was first published as _Pour une morale de l'ambiguote_
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947). 4. Beauvoir, 'Simone de
Beauvoir', in Yves Buin, ed., _Que peut la litterature_
(Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1965), pp. 72-92. Quoted
in Mary Sirridge, 'Philosophy in Beauvoir's Fiction', in
Card, ed., _The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir_,
pp. 130-131. 5. Joseph D. Anderson,
_The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to
Cognitive Film Theory_ (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1996), p. 114. 6. _Napoleon_, Abel Gance,
1927 (235 mins, 1981 US restored version); _The Thomas Crown
Affair_, Norman Jewinson, 1968 (102 mins.); _Sisters_, Brian
de Palma, 1973 (92 mins.) _Timecode_, Mike Figgis, 2000 (97
mins). 7. In this essay I limit
my comparisons to non-documentary movies which qualify as
being 'mainstream'. But I think a closer look at narrative
works that straddle the border between fiction and
documentary or mainstream and 'experimental' --
multi-channel works like Godard's _Numero deux_ -- call out
to be examined in relation to the same question. 8. I want to remind
myself, and anyone reading this article, that
visual/stylistic effects should not be automatically assumed
to exist only to reinforce an authorial intention or
socio-historically derived meaning, but rather (and this is
true in _Pretend_) that the formal patterns also exert a
complex influence on the reading of a film, due precisely to
the fact that they sometimes present 'order without meaning'
(Bordwell, p. 305), and thus cannot be explained or
understood in relation to the story-proper. For an analysis
of this phenomenon see Bordwell's sub-chapter, 'Parametric
Narration', in _Narration and the Fiction Film_ (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 9. Beauvoir, _The Ethics
of Ambiguity_, p. 158. 10. Anderson, _The Reality
of Illusion_, p. 53. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Cara O'Connor, 'Ethics,
Ambiguity, and Multi-Frame Narrative in Julie Talen's
_Pretend_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 47, November 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n47oconnor>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
