Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 21, June 2004
C. Jason Lee
Scanning Occulacentrism Across Continents:
_The Seeing Century_
_The
Seeing Century: Film, Vision, and
Identity_ Edited by Wendy
Everett Amsterdam:
Rodopi,
2000 ISBN
90-420-1494-6 210 pp. In her Introduction to
Volume 14 in Radopi's Critical Studies series, Wendy Everett
makes the point that during the 20th century sight conflated
with cognition and understanding. For Everett, notions of
identity are changing due to globalisation and becoming
increasingly paramount. Many of the essays in this volume
deal with these complex issues concerning identity, and the
most interesting do so with regards to gender. The book is split into
three sections: the first, '(De)constructing History:
Memory, Language and Identity', contains three essays
concerned with autobiographical film; the second, 'Imaging
the Self: Personal and National Identities', contains six
essays on films from six countries (Iceland, Ireland,
Sicily, Romania, Spain, and Senegal); the final section,
'Gendered Visions: Sexuality, Identity, and Representation,
contains five essays traversing three continents.
In the first essay in the
collection Phil Powrie discusses Terence Davies's _Distant
Voices, Still Lives_ (1988), attempting to explain how,
through the use of the photograph, this film obliges the
spectator to confront the spectre of time, and the joy and
pain of memory. The contemplation of the family is
elaborated via Barthes's work on the photograph, the violent
father being the one who has the capacity to freeze-frame
the family. Powrie points out that the 'family portrait'
here occurs five times while the mother is replaced in the
photograph by the pony. What makes the film so distinctive
and evocative is the music. Music returns the spectator to
childhood, to the mother. A great deal has been written both
on Barthes's work on photography in _Camera Lucida_ and on
the mourning of his mother, more than on any other subject
in this field. The use of the theory does not go deep enough
but there is something here for those coming to the work of
Davies for the first time. Following this is Peter
Wagstaff's article on Georges Perec's _Recits d'Ellis
Island: histories d'errance et d'espoir_, which again
focuses on memory and stillness, which was made in
collaboration with Robert Bober and broadcast on the French
channel TF1 in two parts in November 1980. Ellis Island,
which over its history received sixteen million immigrants
into the US, is depicted not as the beginning but as the
end. As Wagstaff puts it, this is a reflexive documentary
film haunted by death. The film is a pretext for a
reflection on continuing themes in Perec's work: the need
for identity based on family, community and tradition; the
nature of memory in this; the primordial role of language in
defining identity and providing order; and the theme of loss
through which all the other themes are filtered. Importantly, Perec's own
mother was taken to Auschwitz with no record of her ever
being discovered, and his career as a writer, screenwriter,
and filmmaker has the undercurrent of articulating this
absence. The question is how to cover such an enormous
movement of people, and this is achieved through lists and
numbers that control the chaos. Two percent of people were
turned away while three thousand committed suicide at Ellis
Island. Perec's family history contains this despair and is
evoked in his work here. There is a montage of past and
present, black and white and colour, which relates to the
1950s French documentary filmmaking of Georges Franju, Alain
Resnais, and Chris Marker. Again Barthes is referred
to, as the photograph is concerned with time and mortality.
For Wagstaff, Alain Renais's 1955 film _Night and Fog_ casts
a long shadow over Perec's film. While the first part of
Perec's film contains early photographs and segments of a
tour guides spiel, the second shows interviews with
Americans of European origin who now revel in their
memories. Wagstaff emphasises Perec's lack of memories,
which leads to an absence of mawkishness. The last time
Perec saw his mother was when he was seven, suggesting all
of this is a search for her. Again, importantly, for this
analysis as a whole and filmmaking and criticism in general,
for Perec the image and word is all there is to be said.
There is no room for analysis. Next, Christopher
Shorley's article on Louis Malle's _Au revoir les enfants_
stresses how the film is an interweaving of experience,
recollection, and narrative. This contrasts with the
previous article, for here memory is more obviously
malleable. For Shorley the final extradiegetic narration by
Malle is exceptional in impact, making the film jump forty
years in an instant. Shorley discusses the work of Lynn
Higgins, who claims it matters less what the film's
protagonist Julien knows in 1944, than what Malle knows in
1987 and what we know with him. Memory certainly changes, on
a personal level and nationally, with a shift in France's
memory about itself. Henry Rousso's study of
'the Vichy Syndrome' appeared the same year as _Au revoir
les enfants_. Rousso identified four phases in France's
collective memory of the Occupation years, ranging from a
mourning phase from 1944 to 1954, to an emphasis on the
Resistance, to finally an obsession with Jewish memory and
concern with the Occupation in France in the late Eighties.
Other films have explored the issues in a complex fashion,
such as Marcel Orphuls documentary -_Le Chagrin et la
pitie_. Malle's earlier co-written _Lacombe Lucien_ (1974),
a fictional film concerning a young collaborator, did not
endorse the myths of 'resistancialism', and for Rousso led
to later works such as Jacques Audiard's --_Un Heros tres
discret_ from 1996. This article points to the political
aspects of memory and autobiography, the personal and the
collective, while all three in this first section cover
memory in relation to photography and how the image itself
becomes iconic, always signifying death yet offering hope to
the living. The 2nd Section marks a
shift from personal to national identity with the editor's
article on the Icelandic film _Cold Fever---_- (1994), the
fourth feature film by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson. Everett
places the film within a European tradition, with its
emphasis on transition and change, one of many narratives of
migration and transgression, with mass migration stressing
the ambiguities of borders and cultural identity that have
been enhanced since the Second World War. The generic form
of the road movie is alluded to, this film satisfying the
four main criteria: breakdown of the family unit and
destabilising male power; the protagonist at the mercy of
the road; the car containing a human and spiritual reality;
and the escapist aspect of technology linked to masculinity.
Astushi crosses Iceland and his self is opened up, and for
Everett the film subverts the standard myths of the road
movie, highlighting the conflicts between European and
American popular culture. Despite her comment from Barthes
that it is the modern Gothic cathedral, the Citroen car
(particularly the film's DS and the DX) is even more iconic
than Everett allows, as it is consistently voted in the top
three cars of the 20th century. For Everett, Iceland's
landscape represents the inner spaces through which Atsushi
progresses. Personal and national identity blur, as do
divisions between self and other, inner and outer. Therefore
the subject of the film is Iceland, not the central
character. We learn that there are more writers, more Nobel
Prize winners, more sheep, and more beautiful women per head
in Iceland than anywhere else. For Everett, the spaces of
Iceland are its identity. As nothing can be represented
directly it transgresses the limits of any map. The pure
white screen gives the filmic spectator creative freedom.
Everett highlights Lefevbre's work on space but she could
have gone further in explaining this unmappable freedom and
its relationship with forms of madness, memory, and film.
Gretchen Bisplinghoff's
article on Mike Newell's_ Into the West_ (1992) examines
Irish identity. The film's characters, Tito and Ossie,
discuss whether they are cowboys or Indians. It is explained
that Britain colonised Ireland at the same time as America
and the natives of both at the time are equated. We are
taken through a swift history of Ireland and Irish cinema
(which can be found easily elsewhere). There is a split
between the city of Dublin and the land to the West, the
film playing with all the myths of the Western. Just as in
the previous article, the obvious point is made that a
physical journey can also be a spiritual one, but here the
male process of redemption comes through removing memory of
females in the film. The next article, on
national identity, concerns Italy, with 1988 being seen as
the crucial year which divided an older generation of
filmmakers, such as Bernardo Bertolucci and the Tavian
brothers, from emerging figures of 'New Italian Cinema'.
Ernest Hampson looks at the Sicilian film-_The Uncle from
Brooklyn_ (1995) by Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco, a
surrealistic attack on materialistic Italian society. For
Hampson there has been a Sicilian revival, with the
naturalistic dramas of Aurelio Grimaldi and Marxo Risi, the
historical reconstructions of Pasquale Scimeca, and the
mafia musical _Time to Die For_ (1996) by Roberta Torre.
Hampson explains that Cipri and Maresco are radicals, as
their work is unique in an Italian context because it
completely rejects mainstream production's obsession with
elegant pictorialism, conventional narratives, and dramatic
denouements. Everything in _The Uncle from Brooklyn_ is
reduced to a minimum, with the portrait of the Sicilian
condition presented in a style characterised by abstraction.
There are no crowds, cars, or any form of authority, with
only the coffins mass-produced. There are also no women and
children, producing an apocalyptic postmodern reality.
Anne Jackel tackles recent
developments in Romanian cinema, pointing out that, with the
nationalisation of the Romanian film industry in 1948,
approved adaptations were the main film product. Even when
Ceaucescu's regime silenced filmmakers, the Buftea studios
outside Bucharest produced twenty to thirty films a year.
The 1989 revolution allowed exiled filmmakers back, but
brought the industry to a halt due to political and economic
paralysis. The law of the market economy replaced the law of
censorship. The new pro-government Romanian press attacked
directors such as Mircea Danieluc, Lucian Pintilie, and Dan
Pita for damaging the image of Romania. 1992 became a
significant year with Pintilie's _The Oak_ and Pita's _Hotel
de Luxe_. _The Oak_ is a social satire of Communist Romania
while _Hotel de Luxe_ is a dark parable concerning
totalitarianism, and both films had to be financed from
abroad. Other than horror films made with northern American
partners, there was little compromise by Romania filmmakers
in the first half of the 1990s, with over half the films
made between 1990 and 1996 set around 1989 and concerning
individuals searching for a new identity. The parallels
between issues concerning _The Oak_ and the Balkan conflict
are also highlighted, showing the importance of cinema. The
conclusions are depressing. With a few images of Romanian
orphanages on international TV screens and cinemas closing
down whilst multiplexes spring up, the country has
disappeared from global consciousness. Next, Maria Cami-Vela's
work on Pedro Almodovar's _The Flower of My Secret_ calls
for a re-examination of his work with regards to Spain's
move from dictatorship to democracy. The article reveals how
Almodovar subverts national and Catholic myths promoted by
the Franco regime. With regards to Spanish identity, there
are the tensions between Europeanisation and
macro-regionalism that are brought out in this analysis of
the film, adding to the wider debate. Then, Patrick
Williams's work on Senegalese director Djibril Diop
Mamberty's _Touki Bouki_ and _Hyenas_ stresses the conflicts
between urbanised modernity and utopian rurality. Filmmaking
itself, Williams maintains, is so quintessentially western,
modern, technological, and, above all, profoundly enmeshed
with capitalism. Yet Mamberty in _Touki Bouki_ uses a
modernist style to provoke. Williams utilises Marxist
theory, concluding the catastrophic dimension of history
comes more readily to post-colonial cultural producers than
to those in the overdeveloped world. The narrative of
_Hyenas_ -- concerning guilt, betrayal, revenge, and
individual and collective responsibility -- is grounded in
an image of catastrophe visited on Africa in the form of
imperialism and the schemes of the World Bank and the
IMF. Section 3 is perhaps the
most interesting of the book, and engages with sexuality,
identity, and representation, the first essay by Susan
Hayward being an analysis of Luc Besson's _The Fifth
Element_ (1997) and the spectacular. The saviour figure
Leeloo is a hybrid. The cyborg, through its
transgressiveness, as Hayward puts it, exposes the
ideological constructedness of otherness that is based in
the principle of deferment. But here we never get to read
Leeloo's body as transgressive. Her virginity will redeem
the capitalist world. She is not threatening at all, and,
Hayward agues, this is a misogynistic representation in a
film that parodies genre and stereotypes, raises issues
about race and the permanency of male sexuality, but stops
short of challenging the social order. Leeloo is a child,
not a sexualised woman, and a conventional
character. Lorna Fitzsimmons' work on
film versions of the Faust myth furthers the discussion of
sexuality, identity, and issues concerning creativity.
_Limit Up_ (Richard Martini, 1989) links the subjects of
race and ethnicity with the expression of sexual stereotype
and transgression, while _Faust_ (Jan Svankmajer, 1994)
exposes misogynistic aggression towards women. Elisa Bussi
on _The Piano_ (Jane Campion, 1993) points to the use of
fairy tale and archetypes in the narrative, particularly in
relation to journey, muteness/silence, the role of
confidant, feminine skills, husband as ogre, the tied or
severed hands, and the forest. She ends her chapter by
pointing to the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, and how
the wound can heal, how it is possible to grow new hands.
Perhaps more sociological and historical background to the
position of women in the 19th century may have enhanced the
detailed elaboration of the mythic. Interestingly, Steve
Wharton argues in his chapter on Collard's _Savage Nights_
(1992) that films that express a different form of sexuality
should not have to proselytise on this subject. The film
concerns an HIV-positive bisexual filmmaker Jean and his
friendship with Laura. Parallels were drawn and controversy
raged over the film as Collard was himself an HIV-positive
bisexual filmmaker. Wharton argues that, despite Jean's
apparent selfishness, the film is a medieval Morality Play,
with recognition and love for another becoming a cleansing
act, a moment of enlightenment. For Wharton, the handheld
camera, the improvised dialogue, and the naturalistic
pseudo-documentary approach creates a film that is
non-judgmental. Finally Raya Morag's
chapter on _Full Metal Jacket_, Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film,
argues that the film exploits the shift between US and
Vietnam psycho-geographic space, with the change in
mise-en-scene, the parallel traumatic events, and the
narrator's voice. It does so in a more complex fashion than
other Vietnam movies such as _Born on the Fourth of July_
(Oliver Stone, 1989). By doing so the film establishes the
masculine-feminine binary opposition as pathology, but
simultaneously offers no alternative, which, as Morag puts
it, is consistent with the anti-humanism of Kubrick's film.
Sergeant Hartman is associated with the Oedipal drama: the
infantilisation of the recruits and the confiscation of
their bodies, relearning day-to-day tasks -- with the
control of oral pleasures all underscoring this. There is a
rupture between maleness and masculinity, and even though
Susan Jeffords work on Vietnam War films concludes the work
to remasculinise American culture, for Morag she completely
overlooks this tension between maleness and masculinity. For
Morag, Jeffords unveils the unattainability of phallic
coherence and power. Anger towards the father figure is
directed through that figure toward the feminine. This is
revealed to be part of what Baudrillard argues to be the
pimping of difference, where racism exposes the temptation
to fetishize difference. Hartman is a racist in his
treatment of the other and otherness, and uses binarism to
advance training. Morag uses the term mask-ulinity to stress
that the mask is authenticity, the only option that exists.
Gender and trauma are connected, and for Morag none of this
is apparent in other films produced in the 1990s, which
transform trauma into simulacra and avoid confrontation and
encourage social forgetfulness. Overall _The Seeing
Century_ offers a number of varied readings of films and
national cinemas but never quite attains to what Everett
suggests it sets out to do, that is, to elaborate
specifically on how film constructs personal and social
identity. Perhaps this is an impossible task. Martin Jay's
seminal _Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought_ unfortunately goes
unmentioned, and the philosophical depth of the text is
minimal. What the book does achieve, particularly in the
work on gender and identity, and Romanian and Senegalese
film, is a furtherance of the complex sociological,
political, and historical debates about cinema. Lancaster,
England Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 C. Jason Lee, 'Scanning
Occulacentrism Across Continents: _The Seeing Century_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 21, June 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n21lee>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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