From Four Flies on Grey Velvet through to Suspiria there is a progressive shift in colour. In Four Flies colour is still something which tends to inhere in objects, things or images: This curtain is red; the lining of this (fetishistic) box containing a syringe is red; this liquid drawn up into the syringe is blue. In Deep Red colours begin to become independent: While the reds of the opera house still inhere in objects, the blues and oranges of the burning house of the screaming child, as they play on Gianna’s form, are independent. Finally, in Suspiria colours break free. They are in themselves, no longer subordinate to objects. One moment a scene is bathed in red, another blue or green, without commentary from those diegetically engulfed. Colour here, and in Inferno, is pure intensity.
(cf. The impulse image in Bava, in Sam Ishii-Gonzales's Deleuzean reading http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/bava.html)
Friday, 6 November 2009
Suspiria question
When Mater Suspiriorum sits down on the bed behind the curtain in Suspiria, is she shot in reverse motion? There seems something unnatural about her movements to me.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Random thoughts
Is it better to watch a film in a language we do not totally understand, without subtitles? As this draws us back to the silent, pre-linguistic (babelistic) way of viewing when, ideally, a story could (should) be told wordlessly through images (and maybe music) alone? Is the spawn of The Last Laugh, Once Upon a Time in the West and Suspiria?
Knives
The shot of the knife plunging into Giordani in Deep Red is like than into Daria in Four Flies, but does not 'mirror' his anguish.
Mirrors
Mirrors are also implicated in Giordani's re-cognition of Amanda's murderer in the mirror: first he sees this in the bathroom mirror, the steam, which then prompts him to look at what she (her body) was pointing at.
"A mirror is a negative space
With a frame and a place for your face
It reveals what the rest of us see
It conceals what you'd like it to be"
- Blue Oyster Cult, Mirrors
"A mirror is a negative space
With a frame and a place for your face
It reveals what the rest of us see
It conceals what you'd like it to be"
- Blue Oyster Cult, Mirrors
More on another image from Deep Red
Doubling is also an aspect of Deep Red’s soundtrack. Argento originally commissioned jazz composer Giorgio Gaslini, who had done the scores for Five Days of Milan (including a Kubrick/Carlos styled rendition of The Thieving Magpie on synthesiser) and Door into Darkness. In the event, however, Argento encouraged Goblin to reinterpret Gaslini’s work, with the result being a soundtrack which was more Goblin/Argento than Gaslini.
The dominant features of the soundtrack are its intensity and its indifference, or its anempathetic quality, particularly when compared to Morricone’s soundtracks for the Animal trilogy: The musical cues, whether the one which plays over the credits, or over Helga’s murder, or to Marc’s visits to the haunted house, do not reflect these characters’ consciousness, nor any consciousness we are invited to share. Rather, they are intense and exciting, in a distanced way: Aesthetised murder, be it of a man or a woman – gender is irrelevant in pure figural terms – is exciting, even if we may feel revulsion towards its real world, unaestheticised, counterpart. Murder as one of the fine arts is one thing, banal unartistic, real murder another.
[As I paste this, there is the image of Marc and Carlo doing a piano duet, sometimes doubling one another, sometimes departing;..]
The dominant features of the soundtrack are its intensity and its indifference, or its anempathetic quality, particularly when compared to Morricone’s soundtracks for the Animal trilogy: The musical cues, whether the one which plays over the credits, or over Helga’s murder, or to Marc’s visits to the haunted house, do not reflect these characters’ consciousness, nor any consciousness we are invited to share. Rather, they are intense and exciting, in a distanced way: Aesthetised murder, be it of a man or a woman – gender is irrelevant in pure figural terms – is exciting, even if we may feel revulsion towards its real world, unaestheticised, counterpart. Murder as one of the fine arts is one thing, banal unartistic, real murder another.
[As I paste this, there is the image of Marc and Carlo doing a piano duet, sometimes doubling one another, sometimes departing;..]
Some thoughts on two or three images from Deep Red
As Marcus’s gaze meets Helga, Argento does something unusual within his work: He uses the zoom lens, rather than the sequence of two or three jump cuts. Through this he draws us from Marcus to Helga in an instant, without any interruption.
Argento’s general avoidance of the zoom lens is something which distinguishes him from Bava, Fulci and many other Italian directors working within the giallo and horror filone. For them the zoom was a staple part of their repertoire: It was a device which still had meaning, beyond signifying the laziness and ineptitude assumed by more traditionally inclined critics, but one which was nevertheless equally predictable: It was an impulse image, a shock.
For Argento it is also a shock, but through its rarity or singularity a shock to thought: What does this image, from this filmmaker, mean in this context? The answer, I would argue is that it makes a connection, and a transference, from Helga to Marcus. Helga had earlier indicated at the parapsychology conference that she could only see things at the instance they happened, but not what was to happen. As such, she could not predict her murder. But what she may have done here, at the moment of death, was project the killer’s identity to Marcus via her gaze. Marcus, however, is likewise thereby unable to see things until the moment they have happened: As he races into Helga’s apartment, he cannot recognise what he sees as a movement-image, a sensory-motor schema that provides a guide to action, as it is before him (or to his side).
This is also perhaps due to the sheer complexity of this image. Besides its marginalisation with the frame, that it is a central piece of data in a peripheral position, it neatly combines the three pre-Deleuzean conceptions of the frame. As a realist image it is a window on the world: Here is Martha’s face. As a formalist image it is a frame on the world: Here is Martha, seemingly as part of a painting. As a psychoanalytic image it presents a distorting mirror: Martha, reflected in the mirror, appears as part of the painting.
But, as we saw earlier, Deleuze’s notion of the frame (or the frame within the frame?) as encompassing a set of data potentially incorporates and thus supercedes each of these previous images. It presents the frame, or the frame within the frame, as containing a data set to be read.
Yet, this notion also indicates one of the problems here: an information system, of a computer type, and human perception do not accord. This is at least implicit in Deleuze’s discussions of conventional organic human or animal perception, as attending to those things which are habitually of the most important, and of those things through habitual patterns. But it is questionable if machine perception works in the same way. Rather than arriving in a massively parallel fashion, computer data arrives in series. An image is not perceived all at once, with the point(s) of interest then being focused upon. For humans, however, visual images are still processed in a linear fashion, starting at the top left and continuing along and down to the bottom right. (While there are bidirectional code libraries for text display, to reflect the habituated reading patterns of Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and other written languages, these are not yet reflected in conventional image processing libraries. In addition computer display co-ordinates are not Cartesian: an X, Y graph of pixel coordinates is different from an X,Y graph of Cartesian coordinates.)
As such, whereas we might happen – especially on a repeat viewing – to acknowledge the figure or information in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, a Deleuzean, more linear reading of this data, line by line, would perhaps fall short.
Alternatively, this again points to the difference between using these ideas metaphorically, as philosophical concepts, and literally, as scientific functions...
Argento’s general avoidance of the zoom lens is something which distinguishes him from Bava, Fulci and many other Italian directors working within the giallo and horror filone. For them the zoom was a staple part of their repertoire: It was a device which still had meaning, beyond signifying the laziness and ineptitude assumed by more traditionally inclined critics, but one which was nevertheless equally predictable: It was an impulse image, a shock.
For Argento it is also a shock, but through its rarity or singularity a shock to thought: What does this image, from this filmmaker, mean in this context? The answer, I would argue is that it makes a connection, and a transference, from Helga to Marcus. Helga had earlier indicated at the parapsychology conference that she could only see things at the instance they happened, but not what was to happen. As such, she could not predict her murder. But what she may have done here, at the moment of death, was project the killer’s identity to Marcus via her gaze. Marcus, however, is likewise thereby unable to see things until the moment they have happened: As he races into Helga’s apartment, he cannot recognise what he sees as a movement-image, a sensory-motor schema that provides a guide to action, as it is before him (or to his side).
This is also perhaps due to the sheer complexity of this image. Besides its marginalisation with the frame, that it is a central piece of data in a peripheral position, it neatly combines the three pre-Deleuzean conceptions of the frame. As a realist image it is a window on the world: Here is Martha’s face. As a formalist image it is a frame on the world: Here is Martha, seemingly as part of a painting. As a psychoanalytic image it presents a distorting mirror: Martha, reflected in the mirror, appears as part of the painting.
But, as we saw earlier, Deleuze’s notion of the frame (or the frame within the frame?) as encompassing a set of data potentially incorporates and thus supercedes each of these previous images. It presents the frame, or the frame within the frame, as containing a data set to be read.
Yet, this notion also indicates one of the problems here: an information system, of a computer type, and human perception do not accord. This is at least implicit in Deleuze’s discussions of conventional organic human or animal perception, as attending to those things which are habitually of the most important, and of those things through habitual patterns. But it is questionable if machine perception works in the same way. Rather than arriving in a massively parallel fashion, computer data arrives in series. An image is not perceived all at once, with the point(s) of interest then being focused upon. For humans, however, visual images are still processed in a linear fashion, starting at the top left and continuing along and down to the bottom right. (While there are bidirectional code libraries for text display, to reflect the habituated reading patterns of Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and other written languages, these are not yet reflected in conventional image processing libraries. In addition computer display co-ordinates are not Cartesian: an X, Y graph of pixel coordinates is different from an X,Y graph of Cartesian coordinates.)
As such, whereas we might happen – especially on a repeat viewing – to acknowledge the figure or information in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, a Deleuzean, more linear reading of this data, line by line, would perhaps fall short.
Alternatively, this again points to the difference between using these ideas metaphorically, as philosophical concepts, and literally, as scientific functions...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)