Cool parody giallo trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHJ1C2JZ6f8
NB: The purportedly related videos are not work safe.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Thesis work #4
Neo-realism occupies an important position for Deleuze in his Cinema books. It represents the break-point between the classical cinema of the movement-image, the subject of Cinema 1 (2005a [1983]), and the modern cinema of the time-image, the subject of Cinema 2 (2005b [1986]). Prior to engaging with these works, which will form the core of my Deleuzean reading of Leone, Argento and Questi's key films, I would argue that it is necessary to discuss Deleuze's thought in general and the place of the Cinema books within it.
The first reason for this is that Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 present an encounter between the "industrial art" of cinema and philosophy, an encounter that leads Deleuze to develop a number of "concepts" around the cinematic "image". As such, we need to first see how Deleuze understands art and philosophy, along with what he means when he talks about a concept. The second reason is that while beginning by repeating Andre Bazin's question "What is Cinema?" Deleuze concludes the Cinema books, having provided his answers, by asking his own question: "What is Philosophy?" (2005b: 269). This would serve as the subject and title of his next work, co-authored with his frequent collaborator Felix Guattari. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari present their understanding of philosophy and how it differs from art and science, along with explaining the concept. The third reason is that, besides the likes of art, philosophy and the concept, the Cinema books are replete with references and allusions to Deleuze's earlier works, both his own and those co-authored with Guattari: For example, Dziga Vertov's films present the "molecular" woman and child (2005a: 41) thereby implying that other filmmakers must have presented their "molar" counterparts. Likewise, if "the infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane [plan] of immanence." and "The image exists in itself, on this plane" (2005a: 61) then we are talking about a distinction between the planes of "immanence", as explictly mentioned, and "consistency", as its implied other. On the same page and elsewhere (81) Deleuze also refers to the "machine assemblage" of movement-images, later further referring to the "always deterritorialised" quality of cinematic images (98) and thus their inherently "rhizomatic" quality of being able to be connected in "an infinite number of ways" (113). In the same volume Deleuze also refers to Kafka (102-104). Kafka is mentioned again in Cinema 2 in relation to the work of Third World and minority filmmakers as instances of a "minor cinema", comparable to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the German-Jewish-Czech author's position as a writer of a "minor literature" (2005b: 209-211). Not all of these concepts are relevant for the purposes of my discussion of Leone, Argento and Questi's films and their relationship to postmodernism. Deterritorialisation and the minor, for example, are more useful than the molecular.
The most important concepts in Deleuze's work, the ones which appear and and reconfigured time and again within it, are arguably difference and becoming/immanence. These are ideas which have been marginalised within the wider tradition of western thought, in favour of sameness, being, identity and transcendence. In earlier works such as Difference and Repetition (19??), Deleuze understood immanence as a minor tendency in philosophy, represented solely by figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Contrastively within What is Philosophy? immanence is conceptualised as something present in most philosophy, but which has been repeatedly been subordinated to transcendence on most occasions. Paolo Marrati (2008) contends that this new understanding of immanence derives in large part from the Cinema books' analysis of "forms of action and agency and their transformations" (x) within the time-image in particular; a point I will return to later once Deleuze's concepts around the cinema image have been elucidated.
The centrality of difference and becoming to Deleuze's thought marks him out as a post-structuralist philosopher. While Deleuze and other French post-structuralists, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, were not self-consciously a group, they do have certain characteristics in common. Each responded in his own way to two previous schools in French and Continental European thought, phenomenology and structuralism. Phenomenologists looked for a more secure foundation for knowledge in experience itself. Structuralists then questioned this foundation, arguing that experience was meaningless in itself. Consequently they looked to the systematic structures that made experience possible. For example, we can only understand man by reference to related terms such as animal, woman and child. Post-structuralists then questioned both these groundings for knowledge. For example, the term man can only be understood by reference to what it is not. But then it follows that animal, woman and child can in turn only be understood by reference to what they are not, namely man. There is nothing that exists outside the system which can be used to securely anchor the meanings of the structures within it. For Deleuze this was not something to be lamented, but rather celebrated. It gives us the chance to create and transform life.
Behind the post-structuralists' critique of phenomenology and structuralism, that no grounding could be found for knowledge, lay a challenge to the longer history of western thought. A key figure here was Hegel, and the particular interpretation of his thought within French thought in the 1940s and 50s through Kojeve. Hegel argued that Enlightenment philosophy represented the end-point of history, becoming and difference, where everything could be understood in relation to the "spirit".
Returning to What is Philosophy? and Deleuze and Guattari's formulations of philosophy, art and science, they suggest that the three "powers of thinking" can be understood as follows: Art is about the creation of percepts and affects. A percept is what we perceive, while an affect is what affects us. What art does is free affects and percepts from the particular individuals that experience them. For instance, within Argento's Deep Red, we experience fear, even though we are not in the position of the characters within its diegesis. As such, the power of art is its ability to make us experience things in a new way. Philosophy is about the creation of concepts, or ways of thinking about things in a new way. Science, finally, is about the creation of functions, or ways of thinking about things in a consistent way. As such, the three realms of thought cannot be placed in a hierarchy, subsume one another, or have their specific terms of reference used with regard to the others. That which is good for science, namely consistency or sameness, is bad for philosophy, and vice versa. I would argue that one issue here with regard to Deleuze's Cinema books and more generally is that science is marginalised: As a philosopher of difference, Deleuze is inevitably more interested in difference than sameness, or the inconsistent over the consistent. In the cinema books this manifests in various ways. First, his emphasis upon the differences between the movement-image and the time-image over their similarities. Second, his emphasis upon a small number of apparently distinctive filmmakers and films (the different) over the apparently larger numbers that are not so distinctive (the similar). Third, in his emphasis upon cinema as art and philosophy to the detriment of industry, or its functional role. Deleuze looks at film texts for their percepts, affects and concepts, but not at their functional values: Whether a film was efficiently produced, reached an audience, or was well received by this audience are not things he really considers. Rather, the history of cinema is a "martyrology" of film artists and philosophers against its scientists.
In relation to my filmmakers, I will argue that Leone and Argento are notable in being film-makers whose work (like that of Ford and Hitchcock) succeeds in each regard, albeit with their successes qualified by neither being 'respectable' European art cinema directors nor 'popular' US directors. Questi is someone whose successes in artistic and philosophical terms, that he went further than Leone or Argento, must be qualified by his relative failure in scientific terms, that his work did not reach their audiences. His films were too different from what audiences and critics, here assuming the two are incommensurable, had being primed to accept and acknowledge.
The first reason for this is that Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 present an encounter between the "industrial art" of cinema and philosophy, an encounter that leads Deleuze to develop a number of "concepts" around the cinematic "image". As such, we need to first see how Deleuze understands art and philosophy, along with what he means when he talks about a concept. The second reason is that while beginning by repeating Andre Bazin's question "What is Cinema?" Deleuze concludes the Cinema books, having provided his answers, by asking his own question: "What is Philosophy?" (2005b: 269). This would serve as the subject and title of his next work, co-authored with his frequent collaborator Felix Guattari. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari present their understanding of philosophy and how it differs from art and science, along with explaining the concept. The third reason is that, besides the likes of art, philosophy and the concept, the Cinema books are replete with references and allusions to Deleuze's earlier works, both his own and those co-authored with Guattari: For example, Dziga Vertov's films present the "molecular" woman and child (2005a: 41) thereby implying that other filmmakers must have presented their "molar" counterparts. Likewise, if "the infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane [plan] of immanence." and "The image exists in itself, on this plane" (2005a: 61) then we are talking about a distinction between the planes of "immanence", as explictly mentioned, and "consistency", as its implied other. On the same page and elsewhere (81) Deleuze also refers to the "machine assemblage" of movement-images, later further referring to the "always deterritorialised" quality of cinematic images (98) and thus their inherently "rhizomatic" quality of being able to be connected in "an infinite number of ways" (113). In the same volume Deleuze also refers to Kafka (102-104). Kafka is mentioned again in Cinema 2 in relation to the work of Third World and minority filmmakers as instances of a "minor cinema", comparable to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the German-Jewish-Czech author's position as a writer of a "minor literature" (2005b: 209-211). Not all of these concepts are relevant for the purposes of my discussion of Leone, Argento and Questi's films and their relationship to postmodernism. Deterritorialisation and the minor, for example, are more useful than the molecular.
The most important concepts in Deleuze's work, the ones which appear and and reconfigured time and again within it, are arguably difference and becoming/immanence. These are ideas which have been marginalised within the wider tradition of western thought, in favour of sameness, being, identity and transcendence. In earlier works such as Difference and Repetition (19??), Deleuze understood immanence as a minor tendency in philosophy, represented solely by figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Contrastively within What is Philosophy? immanence is conceptualised as something present in most philosophy, but which has been repeatedly been subordinated to transcendence on most occasions. Paolo Marrati (2008) contends that this new understanding of immanence derives in large part from the Cinema books' analysis of "forms of action and agency and their transformations" (x) within the time-image in particular; a point I will return to later once Deleuze's concepts around the cinema image have been elucidated.
The centrality of difference and becoming to Deleuze's thought marks him out as a post-structuralist philosopher. While Deleuze and other French post-structuralists, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, were not self-consciously a group, they do have certain characteristics in common. Each responded in his own way to two previous schools in French and Continental European thought, phenomenology and structuralism. Phenomenologists looked for a more secure foundation for knowledge in experience itself. Structuralists then questioned this foundation, arguing that experience was meaningless in itself. Consequently they looked to the systematic structures that made experience possible. For example, we can only understand man by reference to related terms such as animal, woman and child. Post-structuralists then questioned both these groundings for knowledge. For example, the term man can only be understood by reference to what it is not. But then it follows that animal, woman and child can in turn only be understood by reference to what they are not, namely man. There is nothing that exists outside the system which can be used to securely anchor the meanings of the structures within it. For Deleuze this was not something to be lamented, but rather celebrated. It gives us the chance to create and transform life.
Behind the post-structuralists' critique of phenomenology and structuralism, that no grounding could be found for knowledge, lay a challenge to the longer history of western thought. A key figure here was Hegel, and the particular interpretation of his thought within French thought in the 1940s and 50s through Kojeve. Hegel argued that Enlightenment philosophy represented the end-point of history, becoming and difference, where everything could be understood in relation to the "spirit".
Returning to What is Philosophy? and Deleuze and Guattari's formulations of philosophy, art and science, they suggest that the three "powers of thinking" can be understood as follows: Art is about the creation of percepts and affects. A percept is what we perceive, while an affect is what affects us. What art does is free affects and percepts from the particular individuals that experience them. For instance, within Argento's Deep Red, we experience fear, even though we are not in the position of the characters within its diegesis. As such, the power of art is its ability to make us experience things in a new way. Philosophy is about the creation of concepts, or ways of thinking about things in a new way. Science, finally, is about the creation of functions, or ways of thinking about things in a consistent way. As such, the three realms of thought cannot be placed in a hierarchy, subsume one another, or have their specific terms of reference used with regard to the others. That which is good for science, namely consistency or sameness, is bad for philosophy, and vice versa. I would argue that one issue here with regard to Deleuze's Cinema books and more generally is that science is marginalised: As a philosopher of difference, Deleuze is inevitably more interested in difference than sameness, or the inconsistent over the consistent. In the cinema books this manifests in various ways. First, his emphasis upon the differences between the movement-image and the time-image over their similarities. Second, his emphasis upon a small number of apparently distinctive filmmakers and films (the different) over the apparently larger numbers that are not so distinctive (the similar). Third, in his emphasis upon cinema as art and philosophy to the detriment of industry, or its functional role. Deleuze looks at film texts for their percepts, affects and concepts, but not at their functional values: Whether a film was efficiently produced, reached an audience, or was well received by this audience are not things he really considers. Rather, the history of cinema is a "martyrology" of film artists and philosophers against its scientists.
In relation to my filmmakers, I will argue that Leone and Argento are notable in being film-makers whose work (like that of Ford and Hitchcock) succeeds in each regard, albeit with their successes qualified by neither being 'respectable' European art cinema directors nor 'popular' US directors. Questi is someone whose successes in artistic and philosophical terms, that he went further than Leone or Argento, must be qualified by his relative failure in scientific terms, that his work did not reach their audiences. His films were too different from what audiences and critics, here assuming the two are incommensurable, had being primed to accept and acknowledge.
Monday, 21 September 2009
Don Camillo / Keiner haut wie Don Camillo / The World of Don Camillo
Produced, directed by and starring Terence Hill, Don Camillo could so easily have been a classic example of an actor's overextending themselves with a hyphenate vanity project.
Happily, however, it proves nothing of the sort, with Hill acquitting himself well on all fronts.
He may be a relatively lightweight, non-serious actor who gets through everything with that same twinkle in his eyes, but you feel that is exactly what the role of the titular town priest needs, especially as he written for the screen by Hill's wife Lori.
Hill also proves a competent director who is not afraid to try out different techniques, with some effective angles and use of slow-motion, as well as some larger scale set-pieces that indicate an ample budget, and thus something of his skill and ambition as a producer.
But if the film was clearly intended for international distribution - the version I watched had German titles and had been dubbed into English - this is also where it suffers in certain regards.
The Don Camillo character was created by Giovanni Guareschi just after the Second World War, with a series of massively popular novels being released over the course of the 1950s, along with a number of film adaptations. Ins that the battle for hearts and minds between Don Camillo and Communist Party mayor Peppone lay at the core of these stories and films, they were very much a product of and commentary upon the situation in Italy in the mid-1940s to mid-1950s: While both Catholics and communists had made important contributions to the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi resistance, the Cold War resulted in communists being recast as the enemy within.
Permanently excluded from power at the national level and hostile to the - equally hostile - institutions of the Catholic church and the DC state, the PCI thus established its own organisations in an attempt to offer the workers an alternative to official life and culture.
Without this background, specific aspects of the film make less sense: Why is it that Don Camillo refuses to set foot in the PCI's casa dell popolo, or House of the People? Who is that young man in a portrait prominently displayed on one of the casa walls?
Nevertheless, at least these elements are there for those who know to look for them; the portrait is of Antonio Gramsci by the way.
What is more problematic is the way that the stories have been updated to the 1980s: With the Cold War having thawed considerably and the PCI having distanced itself from the old USSR-led Leninist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist orthodoxies along with seeking a "historic compromise" with the DC in the 1970s, there was less for Hill's Don Camillo and Colin Blakely's Peppone to be fighting over.
In part the Hills seem to implicitly recognise this. There are various incidents within the episodic narrative that see the priest and the mayor guilty of the same little transgressions, such as poaching for game on private land; using marked cards; or bringing in outside ringers for the supposedly locals only football match between their factions. Likewise, there's an emblematic scene where Don Camillo refuses to baptise Peppone's son with the first names Lenin Liberty, with the two men reaching a compromise that he can be called Liberty Lenin Camillo Peppone. (It's a bit like how Asia Argento's official first name is Aria, her full name being Aria Asia Maria Vittoria Rossa Argento.)
If these mutual encounters give the clear sense that both men genuinely want to do what they feel is right for the town and its people but simply disagree over parts of the details, there are nevertheless also some awkward spots. The football match, in which Don Camillo's team (in blue) is named The Angels and Peppone's (in red) The Devils, is an obvious example. Besides situating the PCI within a DC discourse as the villains, whilst simultaneously depoliticising them, the depiction of the match includes US-style cheerleaders. Given PCI hostility to US consumer culture as cultural imperialism along with Catholic hesitancy about the materialism and lack of morality in this culture, they seem misplaced.
If all this serious criticism is irrelevant to your way of watching films, the thing that has to be emphasised is that Don Camillo is also genuinely funny - not least when the priest is talking with his personal Jesus.
Happily, however, it proves nothing of the sort, with Hill acquitting himself well on all fronts.
He may be a relatively lightweight, non-serious actor who gets through everything with that same twinkle in his eyes, but you feel that is exactly what the role of the titular town priest needs, especially as he written for the screen by Hill's wife Lori.
Hill also proves a competent director who is not afraid to try out different techniques, with some effective angles and use of slow-motion, as well as some larger scale set-pieces that indicate an ample budget, and thus something of his skill and ambition as a producer.
But if the film was clearly intended for international distribution - the version I watched had German titles and had been dubbed into English - this is also where it suffers in certain regards.
The Don Camillo character was created by Giovanni Guareschi just after the Second World War, with a series of massively popular novels being released over the course of the 1950s, along with a number of film adaptations. Ins that the battle for hearts and minds between Don Camillo and Communist Party mayor Peppone lay at the core of these stories and films, they were very much a product of and commentary upon the situation in Italy in the mid-1940s to mid-1950s: While both Catholics and communists had made important contributions to the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi resistance, the Cold War resulted in communists being recast as the enemy within.
Permanently excluded from power at the national level and hostile to the - equally hostile - institutions of the Catholic church and the DC state, the PCI thus established its own organisations in an attempt to offer the workers an alternative to official life and culture.
Without this background, specific aspects of the film make less sense: Why is it that Don Camillo refuses to set foot in the PCI's casa dell popolo, or House of the People? Who is that young man in a portrait prominently displayed on one of the casa walls?
Nevertheless, at least these elements are there for those who know to look for them; the portrait is of Antonio Gramsci by the way.
What is more problematic is the way that the stories have been updated to the 1980s: With the Cold War having thawed considerably and the PCI having distanced itself from the old USSR-led Leninist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist orthodoxies along with seeking a "historic compromise" with the DC in the 1970s, there was less for Hill's Don Camillo and Colin Blakely's Peppone to be fighting over.
In part the Hills seem to implicitly recognise this. There are various incidents within the episodic narrative that see the priest and the mayor guilty of the same little transgressions, such as poaching for game on private land; using marked cards; or bringing in outside ringers for the supposedly locals only football match between their factions. Likewise, there's an emblematic scene where Don Camillo refuses to baptise Peppone's son with the first names Lenin Liberty, with the two men reaching a compromise that he can be called Liberty Lenin Camillo Peppone. (It's a bit like how Asia Argento's official first name is Aria, her full name being Aria Asia Maria Vittoria Rossa Argento.)
If these mutual encounters give the clear sense that both men genuinely want to do what they feel is right for the town and its people but simply disagree over parts of the details, there are nevertheless also some awkward spots. The football match, in which Don Camillo's team (in blue) is named The Angels and Peppone's (in red) The Devils, is an obvious example. Besides situating the PCI within a DC discourse as the villains, whilst simultaneously depoliticising them, the depiction of the match includes US-style cheerleaders. Given PCI hostility to US consumer culture as cultural imperialism along with Catholic hesitancy about the materialism and lack of morality in this culture, they seem misplaced.
If all this serious criticism is irrelevant to your way of watching films, the thing that has to be emphasised is that Don Camillo is also genuinely funny - not least when the priest is talking with his personal Jesus.
Sunday, 20 September 2009
The Psychopath
Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s Freddie Francis directed a number of horror and thriller films. Unfortunately it was often often a case of quantity over quality as he took on unpromising assignments from Hammer, Amicus and whoever else was offering steady work. Yet if The Deadly Bees and Trog are notorious examples of bad cinema, Francis also directed some intriguing films such as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly and The Vampire Happening.
The Psychopath, made under the auspices of Amicus, is also one of Francis's better efforts, clearly gaining from his experiences in helming a number of Hammer's mini-Hitchcocks and the curious British-German krimi co-production Traitor's Gate.
Images from the title and credits sequence; thanks to the guys at Cinemageddon who put together this German version with the English audio track.
Indeed, the story here comes across as something that Edgar Wallace could easily have penned in the 1920s, given a 1960s update in the manner of the Rialto films from West Germany.
Almost everyone except the investigating Inspector Holloway is a suspect, be it the group of old war colleagues initially targeted by the killer; the young medical student who is dating one of their daughters, or the widowed old woman confined to a wheelchair through a psychosomatic rather than physical condition who lives with her Milquetoast son in a house full of dolls.
"No love lost in the House of Dolls" - a relevant Joy Division quote, given the war crimes that have something to do with the case.
Dolls also figure in the killer's modus operandi, as a doll bearing the features of each victim is left with their body. Besides being a nice Wallace-esque quirk courtesy of screenwriter Robert Bloch, the use of the doll / mannequin trope also helps position The Psychopath as another point of connection between various 1960s and 70s thrillers:
One of the dolls that signal death
Bloch had also, of course, written Psycho, whose mother-son relationship is vaguely echoed by that between Mrs Von Sturm and her son. Psycho's shower scene murder provided a major source inspiration for the likes of Freda and Bava, who upped the stakes in films like The Ghost and Blood and Blood and Black Lace respectively: What Hitchcock suggested a blade could do to human flesh, Freda showed. Where Hitchcock gave audiences two murder set pieces, Bava gave them six.
Bava's film, of course, also featured mannequins and people as mannequins in those body in pieces and Hans Bellmer kind of ways. ("Mannequin comes from the French word mannequin, which had acquired the meaning "an artist's jointed model", which in turn came from the Middle Dutch word mannekijn, meaning little man, figurine.")
This theme would be taken up would later gialli like Torso ("They were only dolls - stupid dolls, made out of flesh and blood!") and Deep Red, along with the Spanish Pieces ("It's exactly what you think it is.")
Nevertheless, there are also differences between Francis's film and its intertexts. While The Psychopath features a number of stylish compositions and makes conscious use of a limited colour palette primarily consisting of reds, greens and the black-white scale, it's far less imaginative and excessive than Bava's work.
Insofar as the two men were great cinematographers and technicians, I would ascribe this to a general film cultural thing. Take an English Gothic by Fisher or Francis, and an Italian Gothic, even one nominally made in an English style, by Robert Hampton or John M. Old (Bava's reading of his distributors request to make up "an old English name" under which he could be credited) and you immediately get the difference.
A US poster for the film; did Glenn Danzig see it on a double bill with Fanatic? Unlikely, since Fanatic was a Hammer production, but a nice thought....
Francis's Taste the Blood of Dracula is perhaps exemplary in this regard, insofar as he apparently only gave the film's cinematographer Arthur Grant colour filters he had previously used himself somewhat reluctantly. Had the film been directed by Bava you suspect he would either have functioned as his own cinematographer or encouraged whoever was his cinematographer to use more stylised lighting from the get-go.
Returning to the krimi, there are also some distinctive omissions: First, no attempt is made to signify that the film is indeed taking place in London, England. Instead, this is just taken for granted. Second, the usual developing romantic attachment between the woman in peril and the Scotland Yard man aspect is missing, perhaps because Patrick Wymark is not a dashing and dynamic lead in the Joachim Fuchsberger or Heinz Drache mould.
As far as placing the film temporally the treatment of Mark Von Sturm is noteworthy. Had the film been made a few years later, I got the feeling that he would have been made into an explicitly homosexual figure rather than being given artistic inclinations. As it is these inclinations still lead into fairly coy Peeping Tom-type artists and models territory as far as nudity and sleaze are concerned compared to five years later.
Two final aspects of the film that must be commented upon are the effective score by twelve-toner Elizabeth Luytens, one of those serious composers who benefited from the opportunity to do the kind of high-culture music she wanted within the low-culture format of the horror film, and the titles, with their use of an eerie eyeless doll's head vaguely recalling Halloween's pumpkin head.
The Psychopath, made under the auspices of Amicus, is also one of Francis's better efforts, clearly gaining from his experiences in helming a number of Hammer's mini-Hitchcocks and the curious British-German krimi co-production Traitor's Gate.
Images from the title and credits sequence; thanks to the guys at Cinemageddon who put together this German version with the English audio track.
Indeed, the story here comes across as something that Edgar Wallace could easily have penned in the 1920s, given a 1960s update in the manner of the Rialto films from West Germany.
Almost everyone except the investigating Inspector Holloway is a suspect, be it the group of old war colleagues initially targeted by the killer; the young medical student who is dating one of their daughters, or the widowed old woman confined to a wheelchair through a psychosomatic rather than physical condition who lives with her Milquetoast son in a house full of dolls.
"No love lost in the House of Dolls" - a relevant Joy Division quote, given the war crimes that have something to do with the case.
Dolls also figure in the killer's modus operandi, as a doll bearing the features of each victim is left with their body. Besides being a nice Wallace-esque quirk courtesy of screenwriter Robert Bloch, the use of the doll / mannequin trope also helps position The Psychopath as another point of connection between various 1960s and 70s thrillers:
One of the dolls that signal death
Bloch had also, of course, written Psycho, whose mother-son relationship is vaguely echoed by that between Mrs Von Sturm and her son. Psycho's shower scene murder provided a major source inspiration for the likes of Freda and Bava, who upped the stakes in films like The Ghost and Blood and Blood and Black Lace respectively: What Hitchcock suggested a blade could do to human flesh, Freda showed. Where Hitchcock gave audiences two murder set pieces, Bava gave them six.
Bava's film, of course, also featured mannequins and people as mannequins in those body in pieces and Hans Bellmer kind of ways. ("Mannequin comes from the French word mannequin, which had acquired the meaning "an artist's jointed model", which in turn came from the Middle Dutch word mannekijn, meaning little man, figurine.")
This theme would be taken up would later gialli like Torso ("They were only dolls - stupid dolls, made out of flesh and blood!") and Deep Red, along with the Spanish Pieces ("It's exactly what you think it is.")
Nevertheless, there are also differences between Francis's film and its intertexts. While The Psychopath features a number of stylish compositions and makes conscious use of a limited colour palette primarily consisting of reds, greens and the black-white scale, it's far less imaginative and excessive than Bava's work.
Insofar as the two men were great cinematographers and technicians, I would ascribe this to a general film cultural thing. Take an English Gothic by Fisher or Francis, and an Italian Gothic, even one nominally made in an English style, by Robert Hampton or John M. Old (Bava's reading of his distributors request to make up "an old English name" under which he could be credited) and you immediately get the difference.
A US poster for the film; did Glenn Danzig see it on a double bill with Fanatic? Unlikely, since Fanatic was a Hammer production, but a nice thought....
Francis's Taste the Blood of Dracula is perhaps exemplary in this regard, insofar as he apparently only gave the film's cinematographer Arthur Grant colour filters he had previously used himself somewhat reluctantly. Had the film been directed by Bava you suspect he would either have functioned as his own cinematographer or encouraged whoever was his cinematographer to use more stylised lighting from the get-go.
Returning to the krimi, there are also some distinctive omissions: First, no attempt is made to signify that the film is indeed taking place in London, England. Instead, this is just taken for granted. Second, the usual developing romantic attachment between the woman in peril and the Scotland Yard man aspect is missing, perhaps because Patrick Wymark is not a dashing and dynamic lead in the Joachim Fuchsberger or Heinz Drache mould.
As far as placing the film temporally the treatment of Mark Von Sturm is noteworthy. Had the film been made a few years later, I got the feeling that he would have been made into an explicitly homosexual figure rather than being given artistic inclinations. As it is these inclinations still lead into fairly coy Peeping Tom-type artists and models territory as far as nudity and sleaze are concerned compared to five years later.
Two final aspects of the film that must be commented upon are the effective score by twelve-toner Elizabeth Luytens, one of those serious composers who benefited from the opportunity to do the kind of high-culture music she wanted within the low-culture format of the horror film, and the titles, with their use of an eerie eyeless doll's head vaguely recalling Halloween's pumpkin head.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Thesis Work #3
The Electronic-image and the new "cinema of attractions" and sensations
At the point of Leone's death he was involved in preparatory work for his next project, a film about the Siege of Stalingrad. Given the intended scale of the film it would quite possibly have been the most expensive film ever made to that point, with some sources estimating its budget at $100 million. Coupled with the idea of a train whose cargo of cars morphed from 1960s to 1930s models before our eyes in Once Upon a Time in America, or the similar plunge into the depths through layers of the past with which Leone had at one time imagined opening the film, Leone thus might be positioned as an artist who would love to have worked with digital technologies. Had he lived a few years longer, he would perhaps have been the first Italian film-maker to use CGI effects, not Argento.
Had he used the new electronic image, Leone could again be positioned as a film-maker who partook of both movement-image and time-image in a distinctive way. While Deleuze is critical of television and other electronic images within Cinema 2, it has to be borne in mind that he was writing at a time when computer technologies were still in their relative infancy. Pixar, for instance, was not established until 1979, as the Graphics Group. Drawing a parallel with Deleuze's analysis of Bergson's dismissal of cinema, as one occuring at a point when it presented movement but not movement-image, we might say the electronic image's "strength" and "essence" were not established by the early 1980s. Just as the early "cinema of attractions" had not yet developed any sense of moving the camera or from one shot to another, primitive CGI were as yet capable of doing little but functioning as an attraction, a sign of future potentiality. Nor was the much-maligned MTV or music video type aesthetic, with its eclectic combination of contemporary (and initially principally analogue) image manipulation technologies and Soviet-inspired montage particularly influential at the time Deleuze was writing: MTV did not begin broadcasting until 1981. Here it is also worth noting that Argento has used the closely related television commercial form as an opportunity to experiment with new technologies and techniques which he has subsequently incorporated into his films; Leone also made commercials in the 1970s during the period when Once Upon a Time in America was in its extended pre-production.
While Ronald Bogue characterises the "television image" as "fundamentally a type of time-image" (2003: 195) it also needs to be acknowledged that contemporary digital technologies have given rise to new varieties of something closer to the movement-image: Contemporary special effects driven blockbusters could be construed as present a new version of the action-image. Kristin Thomson's (1999) criticisms of films such as Speed (Dir: Jan De Bont, 1994) and Armageddon (Dir: Michael Bay, 1996) and the response of Angela Ndalianis (2004) are exemplary here:
The focus on action and special effects [in Armageddon] result in a lack of depth with regard to character development and their motivation of "causal action" (14). [...] Thompson herself may see the film as a "failed" or "incorrect" attempt at classical form, but audiences recorded their belief in the film's "correctness" through their contribution to box office returns. Likewise, Speed "suffers," according to Thompson, because it "uses up too much narrative energy in the bus episode without leaving any dangling cause at the end" (26). The end of the film (in the train) is viewed as an isolated episode that lacks concrete connection (in a classical sense) with the cause-and-effect patterns of the rest of the film. In other words, the film ignores the pattern of classical storytelling that Thompson identifies and instead succumbs to spectacle and action that ride on minimal story causation. (http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html)
Recasting Thompson's neo-formalist analysis and Ndalianis "neo-baroque" response in Deleuzean terms, what we see here is a distinction between classical and modern action cinemas: Classical action cinemas, like the western, were based around the SAS' form. Clear situations provoked clear sensory motor responses, propelling the narrative along. Today's action cinemas, perhaps particularly within the science-fiction and fantasy genres, present spectacular images that characters do not know how to respond to. The issue is what to make of this inability to act. Comparing Bay's images to those of Rossellini, for instance, they would clearly appear to be lacking: The Hollywood director's protagonists and audience are not confronted by a same kind of "shock to thought". But if we consider these images as a contemporary version of the "cinema of attractions" we might view them more positively. The difficulty here is that Deleuze does not really address the cinema of attractions in Cinema 1 and 2. Instead he identifies only a "primitive" state of the cinema which featured movement only within the frame via the figures present within it, "where the image is in movement rather than being movement-image" (2005b: 26). When discussing the "montage of attractions" in Eisenstein he is also uncharacteristically hesitant, saying that "In our view the 'attractions' consist sometimes in theatrical or circus representations" (2005a: 37). As Deleuze was keen to identify the essential aspects of cinema that distinguish it from other artistic forms, we might assume a degree of wariness as far as such "attractions" are concerned. Today's attractions cannot completely be equated with their turn of the 20th century predecessors. As Tom Gunning contended (19??: ??), the likes of Star Wars (Dir: George Lucas, 1977) were about "tamed" "effects". Nevertheless, it is also notable how contemporary directors, such as John Carpenter, refer to a "rollercoaster" metaphor in explaining the dynamics of their films.i Likewise the spectacular special effects and stunts are there to be seen and to astonish the viewer. As such, they follow the exhibitionist logic of the cinema of attractions rather than the voyeuristic logic of the classical "cinema of narrative integration" or Deleuze's own movement-image. Precisely by being there to astonish, however, such effects may be unsatisfactory from a Deleuzean perspective. They would seem to determine the typical viewer's response more than genuinely provoking thought through the reverberations of the image itself:
Everyone knows that if an art necessarily imposed the shock or vibration, the world would have changed long ago, and men would have been thinking for a long time. So this pretension of the cinema, at last among the greatest pioneers, raises a smile today. They believed that cinema was capable of imposing a shock, and imposing it on the masses, the people [...] However they foresaw that cinema would encounter and was already encountering all the ambiguities of the other arts; that it would be overlaid with experimental abstractions, 'formalist antics' and commercial configurations of sex and blood. The shock would be confused, in bad cinema, with the figurative violence of represented instead of achieving that other violence of a movement-image developing its vibrations in a moving sequence which embeds itself within us." (2005b: 152)
Whereathe a good movement-image cinema presents a clear chain of action-images or sensory-motor situations, and the time-image the thought-provoking breakdown of this chain, the bad movement-image cinema breaks the chain without provoking thought. Moments of spectacle in themselves, as interruptions to the narrative, are largely unsatisfactory to Deleuze. He does however allow for an exception in the likes of Vincente Minnelli's musicals with their creation of "dream worlds" (2005b: 60). This is significant not only because of the (admittedly vague) comparisons that have been made between Minnelli's set pieces and those of Argento, "The Vincent Minnelli of Ultraviolence" as critic Kim Newman has termed him (1988: ??), but also for the Pasolinian reading that may then be drawn out. Pasolini, as we saw earlier, distinguished between a classical "cinema of prose" and a modern "cinema of poetry". While he recognised that there were poetic interruptions in the classical cinema, where the 'real' film and its possibilities broke through, he was also wary of their very separation from the rest of the film. Narrative and spectacle remained separate and distinct. In the modern cinema of poetry by contrast they are clearly intertwined: The camera consciousness of Bertolucci or Antonioni said something in itself, something that related to what they were saying about the contemporary world. Relating back to my discussions of Koven's analysis of the giallo and Martin-Smith's analysis of the western all'italiana, the point here is the distinction Argento, Leone and Questi's work within these filone compared to that of the majority of their contemporaries. Whereas Koven sees most giallo filmmakers as only attaining a (vernacular) cinema of poetry within their films' set-pieces, I am arguing that Argento and Questi's films are poetic in the more thoroughgoing sense identified by Pasolini himself. Whereas Martin-Smith sees spaghetti westerns like Corbucci's Django as presenting a succession of spectacular set-pieces as a SSS rather than a SAS' narrative, I am arguing that Leone's later westerns successfully integrate narrative and spectacle in a poetic manner. In each case, this poeticism is both what redeems their films in Deleuzean terms. It is also, by virtue of being a time-image trait occurring within generic movement-image forms, the thing that takes these directors work beyond Deleuze's movement-image / time-image binary in a pioneering way.
At the point of Leone's death he was involved in preparatory work for his next project, a film about the Siege of Stalingrad. Given the intended scale of the film it would quite possibly have been the most expensive film ever made to that point, with some sources estimating its budget at $100 million. Coupled with the idea of a train whose cargo of cars morphed from 1960s to 1930s models before our eyes in Once Upon a Time in America, or the similar plunge into the depths through layers of the past with which Leone had at one time imagined opening the film, Leone thus might be positioned as an artist who would love to have worked with digital technologies. Had he lived a few years longer, he would perhaps have been the first Italian film-maker to use CGI effects, not Argento.
Had he used the new electronic image, Leone could again be positioned as a film-maker who partook of both movement-image and time-image in a distinctive way. While Deleuze is critical of television and other electronic images within Cinema 2, it has to be borne in mind that he was writing at a time when computer technologies were still in their relative infancy. Pixar, for instance, was not established until 1979, as the Graphics Group. Drawing a parallel with Deleuze's analysis of Bergson's dismissal of cinema, as one occuring at a point when it presented movement but not movement-image, we might say the electronic image's "strength" and "essence" were not established by the early 1980s. Just as the early "cinema of attractions" had not yet developed any sense of moving the camera or from one shot to another, primitive CGI were as yet capable of doing little but functioning as an attraction, a sign of future potentiality. Nor was the much-maligned MTV or music video type aesthetic, with its eclectic combination of contemporary (and initially principally analogue) image manipulation technologies and Soviet-inspired montage particularly influential at the time Deleuze was writing: MTV did not begin broadcasting until 1981. Here it is also worth noting that Argento has used the closely related television commercial form as an opportunity to experiment with new technologies and techniques which he has subsequently incorporated into his films; Leone also made commercials in the 1970s during the period when Once Upon a Time in America was in its extended pre-production.
While Ronald Bogue characterises the "television image" as "fundamentally a type of time-image" (2003: 195) it also needs to be acknowledged that contemporary digital technologies have given rise to new varieties of something closer to the movement-image: Contemporary special effects driven blockbusters could be construed as present a new version of the action-image. Kristin Thomson's (1999) criticisms of films such as Speed (Dir: Jan De Bont, 1994) and Armageddon (Dir: Michael Bay, 1996) and the response of Angela Ndalianis (2004) are exemplary here:
The focus on action and special effects [in Armageddon] result in a lack of depth with regard to character development and their motivation of "causal action" (14). [...] Thompson herself may see the film as a "failed" or "incorrect" attempt at classical form, but audiences recorded their belief in the film's "correctness" through their contribution to box office returns. Likewise, Speed "suffers," according to Thompson, because it "uses up too much narrative energy in the bus episode without leaving any dangling cause at the end" (26). The end of the film (in the train) is viewed as an isolated episode that lacks concrete connection (in a classical sense) with the cause-and-effect patterns of the rest of the film. In other words, the film ignores the pattern of classical storytelling that Thompson identifies and instead succumbs to spectacle and action that ride on minimal story causation. (http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html)
Recasting Thompson's neo-formalist analysis and Ndalianis "neo-baroque" response in Deleuzean terms, what we see here is a distinction between classical and modern action cinemas: Classical action cinemas, like the western, were based around the SAS' form. Clear situations provoked clear sensory motor responses, propelling the narrative along. Today's action cinemas, perhaps particularly within the science-fiction and fantasy genres, present spectacular images that characters do not know how to respond to. The issue is what to make of this inability to act. Comparing Bay's images to those of Rossellini, for instance, they would clearly appear to be lacking: The Hollywood director's protagonists and audience are not confronted by a same kind of "shock to thought". But if we consider these images as a contemporary version of the "cinema of attractions" we might view them more positively. The difficulty here is that Deleuze does not really address the cinema of attractions in Cinema 1 and 2. Instead he identifies only a "primitive" state of the cinema which featured movement only within the frame via the figures present within it, "where the image is in movement rather than being movement-image" (2005b: 26). When discussing the "montage of attractions" in Eisenstein he is also uncharacteristically hesitant, saying that "In our view the 'attractions' consist sometimes in theatrical or circus representations" (2005a: 37). As Deleuze was keen to identify the essential aspects of cinema that distinguish it from other artistic forms, we might assume a degree of wariness as far as such "attractions" are concerned. Today's attractions cannot completely be equated with their turn of the 20th century predecessors. As Tom Gunning contended (19??: ??), the likes of Star Wars (Dir: George Lucas, 1977) were about "tamed" "effects". Nevertheless, it is also notable how contemporary directors, such as John Carpenter, refer to a "rollercoaster" metaphor in explaining the dynamics of their films.i Likewise the spectacular special effects and stunts are there to be seen and to astonish the viewer. As such, they follow the exhibitionist logic of the cinema of attractions rather than the voyeuristic logic of the classical "cinema of narrative integration" or Deleuze's own movement-image. Precisely by being there to astonish, however, such effects may be unsatisfactory from a Deleuzean perspective. They would seem to determine the typical viewer's response more than genuinely provoking thought through the reverberations of the image itself:
Everyone knows that if an art necessarily imposed the shock or vibration, the world would have changed long ago, and men would have been thinking for a long time. So this pretension of the cinema, at last among the greatest pioneers, raises a smile today. They believed that cinema was capable of imposing a shock, and imposing it on the masses, the people [...] However they foresaw that cinema would encounter and was already encountering all the ambiguities of the other arts; that it would be overlaid with experimental abstractions, 'formalist antics' and commercial configurations of sex and blood. The shock would be confused, in bad cinema, with the figurative violence of represented instead of achieving that other violence of a movement-image developing its vibrations in a moving sequence which embeds itself within us." (2005b: 152)
Whereathe a good movement-image cinema presents a clear chain of action-images or sensory-motor situations, and the time-image the thought-provoking breakdown of this chain, the bad movement-image cinema breaks the chain without provoking thought. Moments of spectacle in themselves, as interruptions to the narrative, are largely unsatisfactory to Deleuze. He does however allow for an exception in the likes of Vincente Minnelli's musicals with their creation of "dream worlds" (2005b: 60). This is significant not only because of the (admittedly vague) comparisons that have been made between Minnelli's set pieces and those of Argento, "The Vincent Minnelli of Ultraviolence" as critic Kim Newman has termed him (1988: ??), but also for the Pasolinian reading that may then be drawn out. Pasolini, as we saw earlier, distinguished between a classical "cinema of prose" and a modern "cinema of poetry". While he recognised that there were poetic interruptions in the classical cinema, where the 'real' film and its possibilities broke through, he was also wary of their very separation from the rest of the film. Narrative and spectacle remained separate and distinct. In the modern cinema of poetry by contrast they are clearly intertwined: The camera consciousness of Bertolucci or Antonioni said something in itself, something that related to what they were saying about the contemporary world. Relating back to my discussions of Koven's analysis of the giallo and Martin-Smith's analysis of the western all'italiana, the point here is the distinction Argento, Leone and Questi's work within these filone compared to that of the majority of their contemporaries. Whereas Koven sees most giallo filmmakers as only attaining a (vernacular) cinema of poetry within their films' set-pieces, I am arguing that Argento and Questi's films are poetic in the more thoroughgoing sense identified by Pasolini himself. Whereas Martin-Smith sees spaghetti westerns like Corbucci's Django as presenting a succession of spectacular set-pieces as a SSS rather than a SAS' narrative, I am arguing that Leone's later westerns successfully integrate narrative and spectacle in a poetic manner. In each case, this poeticism is both what redeems their films in Deleuzean terms. It is also, by virtue of being a time-image trait occurring within generic movement-image forms, the thing that takes these directors work beyond Deleuze's movement-image / time-image binary in a pioneering way.
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Thesis Work 2
Neil Campbell - The Rhiziomatic West (2008)
The Rhizomatic West (2008) examines the American West through a perspective derived from Deleuze and Guattari's co-authored work, emphasising their concept of the rhizome. Author Neil Campbell interprets the rhizome as both "root" and "route", to engage with ideas of the west and 'westness' as they have manifested in a number of media including film, literature, photography, architecture and music. In terms of film specifically, he discusses Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. Besides the "cultural roots" controversy identified by Frayling(1998), Campbell suggests that they might be considered a "critical" or "minoritarian" cinema of the sort introduced by Deleuze towards the end of Cinema 2 in relation to Third World and Quebecois cinemas. The idea of a minor cinema, comparable to that of a minor literature, comes from Delueze and Guattari's reading of Kafka. Significantly Deleuze interprets minor cinemas as going beyond the movement-image and time-image alike in certain ways: The overtly political cinema of the Soviet filmmakers and of populist Hollywood directors such as Frank Capra was based upon the premise that "the people" already exist and merely needed to be mobilised. "In American and in Soviet cinema the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract." (Delueze, 2005: 208) While Hitler, Stalin and the failures of the "American dream" each challenged this belief, the majority of filmmakers in the West continued to endorse it, even within the time-image:
"[I]f there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet... the people are missing.
No doubt this truth also applied to the west, but very few authors discovered it, because it was hidden by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority. On the other hand, it was absolutely clear in the third world, where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis. Third world and minorities gave rise to authors who would be in a position to say, in relation to their nation, and their personal situation in that nation to say: the people are what is missing. Kafka and Klee had been the first to state this explicitly. (208-209)
Although there are obviously differences between the position of my Italian directors and the likes of the Brazilian Lino Brocka and the Quebecois Pierre Perrault, there are a number of reasons for considering the films of Leone, Argento and Questi in relation to such Third World and minoritarian filmmakers beyond those identified by Campbell.
The spaghetti western and giallo filone might be understood as differently accented takes upon the dominant Hollywood western and thriller genres which, in the hands of Leone, Argento and Questi, cannot be aligned completely with either the classical Hollywood movement-image cinema nor the modernist European time-image cinema. In this regard it is significant that while Deleuze himself never mentions Leone in the Cinema books, he does suggest that "it was the neo-western that first demonstrated [the] break-up" of the "American people" (208). The point is that the likes of Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) would probably not have been possible without the Italian westerns of Leone and others. While Penn and Peckinpah had both made westerns before Leone, Campbell significantly positions Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) as a US reworking of Once Upon a Time in the West, noting their common themes and motifs, such as capitalism, prostitute protagonists and epic scale.
It is also notable that the spaghetti western was popular with Third World audiences, as demonstrated by the way Sergio Corbucci's Django is positioned within Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1973) as an inspiration for reggae singer Jimmy Cliff's "ragamuffin" anti-hero. More generally, the more overt "political spaghettis" of Corbucci and others, which Leone later critiqued with Duck You Sucker, were popular with Third World audiences. They appreciated their anti-imperialist and colonialist sentiments, problematic though these undoubtedly were from the perspective of western film theorists such as the Cahiers du cinema collective and the Screen group. Another point of connection here is Glauber Rocha. His Black God, White Devil (1964) has been cited as an inspiration for Once Upon a Time in the West, with both films exploring the relationship between myth and history and featuring duster coat clad gunmen. In addition Rocha also appeared as an actor in Godard/The Dziga Vertov Group's Wind from the East (1970) alongside Gian-Maria Volonte, with the film itself being Godard/The Group's reinterpretation-cum-deconstruction of an Italian western. Within it Rocha actually comments on the relationship between different cinemas, outlining the distinctions between Godard's political cinema and his own, as a Third World/Third Cinema filmmaker.
Relating the Italian western back to its domestic context, meanwhile, the important point is that the films often played to a terza visione audience which was disproportionately southern Italian, rural, male, working class and less educated. Else, as with Leone's films, they had a crossover appeal and played to the terza visione alongside their prima visione counterparts, disproportionately northern Italian, urban, middle class and more educated. This ability to reach the terza visione audience was what made Italian intellectuals, themselves disproportionately northern, alternately despair about and engage with filone cinema. On the one hand, for example, the Bologna-born Pasolini described Rome's Cinecitta studios as [belching stomach quote]. On the other hand, he appeared in neo-realist theorist, historian and director Carlo Lizzani's western Requiescant (1967), as a revolutionary priest. The terza visione audience can thereby be understood as having affinities with the Third World and Quebecois audiences: They too were a Deleuzean minority, in terms of power if not numbers. Likewise, if the films of Leone and Argento, two Romans with southern parents, were successful at the Italian box office, this was down to their cross-visione appeal more than the approval of hegemonic northern Italian critics. Here the contrast between Argento and Bertolucci regarding to Leone is telling: The two younger men were hired by Leone for Once Upon a Time in the West as the "young intellectuals" who could assist in taking his filmmaking to a new level. Subsequently the Parma-born Bertolucci, whose father Attilio was a poet and critic, proved more critical of the limitations of Leone's films than the Rome-born Argento, whose father was a film producer. As John Fawell (2005) says in his discussion of their collaboration, Argento was a "true believer" in the filone cinema in a way Bertolucci was not. If we think about Questi, meanwhile, the issue is again that he made films which were too filone or movement-image for the majoritarian Northern Italian critics, but too arthouse or time-image for the minoritarian Southern Italian audience.
Crucially, these are all aspects of Leone's work and its relation to Deleuze which Campbell does not address. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, does he discuss Deleuze's anti-Bazinian analysis of the Hollywood western as a genre which was as much rhiziomatic as arborescent:
[I]t would be dangerous to reserve an epic genius for Ince and Ford, attributing to other more recent directors the invention of of a tragic or even romantic western. The application of Hegel and Lukacs' formula of the succession of these genres works badly for the Western: as Mitry has shown, from the outset the Western explores all these directions - epic, tragic, romantic - with cowboys who are already nostalgic, solitary, ageing, or even born losers, or rehabilitated Indians. (151)
The issue here is one of squaring Deleuze's impressionistic analysis with Will Wright's more empirical work: Whatever its limitations, especially with regard to the Italian western, as Frayling (1998) argues, Wright's Sixguns and Society (1975) also has the virtue of charting the rise and fall of different western narrative forms in relation to their box-office popularity. If there were already westerns which departed from the dominant formula in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), then their commercial success or otherwise (to the extent that such factors as star presence can be factored out) provides us with an indication of which trajectories or "lines of flight" for the western, whether arborescent or rhiziomatic, worked best with the majority audience.
The Rhizomatic West (2008) examines the American West through a perspective derived from Deleuze and Guattari's co-authored work, emphasising their concept of the rhizome. Author Neil Campbell interprets the rhizome as both "root" and "route", to engage with ideas of the west and 'westness' as they have manifested in a number of media including film, literature, photography, architecture and music. In terms of film specifically, he discusses Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. Besides the "cultural roots" controversy identified by Frayling(1998), Campbell suggests that they might be considered a "critical" or "minoritarian" cinema of the sort introduced by Deleuze towards the end of Cinema 2 in relation to Third World and Quebecois cinemas. The idea of a minor cinema, comparable to that of a minor literature, comes from Delueze and Guattari's reading of Kafka. Significantly Deleuze interprets minor cinemas as going beyond the movement-image and time-image alike in certain ways: The overtly political cinema of the Soviet filmmakers and of populist Hollywood directors such as Frank Capra was based upon the premise that "the people" already exist and merely needed to be mobilised. "In American and in Soviet cinema the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract." (Delueze, 2005: 208) While Hitler, Stalin and the failures of the "American dream" each challenged this belief, the majority of filmmakers in the West continued to endorse it, even within the time-image:
"[I]f there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet... the people are missing.
No doubt this truth also applied to the west, but very few authors discovered it, because it was hidden by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority. On the other hand, it was absolutely clear in the third world, where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis. Third world and minorities gave rise to authors who would be in a position to say, in relation to their nation, and their personal situation in that nation to say: the people are what is missing. Kafka and Klee had been the first to state this explicitly. (208-209)
Although there are obviously differences between the position of my Italian directors and the likes of the Brazilian Lino Brocka and the Quebecois Pierre Perrault, there are a number of reasons for considering the films of Leone, Argento and Questi in relation to such Third World and minoritarian filmmakers beyond those identified by Campbell.
The spaghetti western and giallo filone might be understood as differently accented takes upon the dominant Hollywood western and thriller genres which, in the hands of Leone, Argento and Questi, cannot be aligned completely with either the classical Hollywood movement-image cinema nor the modernist European time-image cinema. In this regard it is significant that while Deleuze himself never mentions Leone in the Cinema books, he does suggest that "it was the neo-western that first demonstrated [the] break-up" of the "American people" (208). The point is that the likes of Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) would probably not have been possible without the Italian westerns of Leone and others. While Penn and Peckinpah had both made westerns before Leone, Campbell significantly positions Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) as a US reworking of Once Upon a Time in the West, noting their common themes and motifs, such as capitalism, prostitute protagonists and epic scale.
It is also notable that the spaghetti western was popular with Third World audiences, as demonstrated by the way Sergio Corbucci's Django is positioned within Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1973) as an inspiration for reggae singer Jimmy Cliff's "ragamuffin" anti-hero. More generally, the more overt "political spaghettis" of Corbucci and others, which Leone later critiqued with Duck You Sucker, were popular with Third World audiences. They appreciated their anti-imperialist and colonialist sentiments, problematic though these undoubtedly were from the perspective of western film theorists such as the Cahiers du cinema collective and the Screen group. Another point of connection here is Glauber Rocha. His Black God, White Devil (1964) has been cited as an inspiration for Once Upon a Time in the West, with both films exploring the relationship between myth and history and featuring duster coat clad gunmen. In addition Rocha also appeared as an actor in Godard/The Dziga Vertov Group's Wind from the East (1970) alongside Gian-Maria Volonte, with the film itself being Godard/The Group's reinterpretation-cum-deconstruction of an Italian western. Within it Rocha actually comments on the relationship between different cinemas, outlining the distinctions between Godard's political cinema and his own, as a Third World/Third Cinema filmmaker.
Relating the Italian western back to its domestic context, meanwhile, the important point is that the films often played to a terza visione audience which was disproportionately southern Italian, rural, male, working class and less educated. Else, as with Leone's films, they had a crossover appeal and played to the terza visione alongside their prima visione counterparts, disproportionately northern Italian, urban, middle class and more educated. This ability to reach the terza visione audience was what made Italian intellectuals, themselves disproportionately northern, alternately despair about and engage with filone cinema. On the one hand, for example, the Bologna-born Pasolini described Rome's Cinecitta studios as [belching stomach quote]. On the other hand, he appeared in neo-realist theorist, historian and director Carlo Lizzani's western Requiescant (1967), as a revolutionary priest. The terza visione audience can thereby be understood as having affinities with the Third World and Quebecois audiences: They too were a Deleuzean minority, in terms of power if not numbers. Likewise, if the films of Leone and Argento, two Romans with southern parents, were successful at the Italian box office, this was down to their cross-visione appeal more than the approval of hegemonic northern Italian critics. Here the contrast between Argento and Bertolucci regarding to Leone is telling: The two younger men were hired by Leone for Once Upon a Time in the West as the "young intellectuals" who could assist in taking his filmmaking to a new level. Subsequently the Parma-born Bertolucci, whose father Attilio was a poet and critic, proved more critical of the limitations of Leone's films than the Rome-born Argento, whose father was a film producer. As John Fawell (2005) says in his discussion of their collaboration, Argento was a "true believer" in the filone cinema in a way Bertolucci was not. If we think about Questi, meanwhile, the issue is again that he made films which were too filone or movement-image for the majoritarian Northern Italian critics, but too arthouse or time-image for the minoritarian Southern Italian audience.
Crucially, these are all aspects of Leone's work and its relation to Deleuze which Campbell does not address. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, does he discuss Deleuze's anti-Bazinian analysis of the Hollywood western as a genre which was as much rhiziomatic as arborescent:
[I]t would be dangerous to reserve an epic genius for Ince and Ford, attributing to other more recent directors the invention of of a tragic or even romantic western. The application of Hegel and Lukacs' formula of the succession of these genres works badly for the Western: as Mitry has shown, from the outset the Western explores all these directions - epic, tragic, romantic - with cowboys who are already nostalgic, solitary, ageing, or even born losers, or rehabilitated Indians. (151)
The issue here is one of squaring Deleuze's impressionistic analysis with Will Wright's more empirical work: Whatever its limitations, especially with regard to the Italian western, as Frayling (1998) argues, Wright's Sixguns and Society (1975) also has the virtue of charting the rise and fall of different western narrative forms in relation to their box-office popularity. If there were already westerns which departed from the dominant formula in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), then their commercial success or otherwise (to the extent that such factors as star presence can be factored out) provides us with an indication of which trajectories or "lines of flight" for the western, whether arborescent or rhiziomatic, worked best with the majority audience.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Music
What is the most fucked up transcendental/or immanent music you can think of? Whitehouse, Albert Ayler, Brutal Truth, Tuvan Throat Singing, Gamelan, The Germs?
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