Aesthetics Ethics Cinema

Aesthetics
&
Ethics
of
Cinema
Hugo Santander Ferreira
Omnis mundo creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculum Alain de Lille For logic is, in the main, criticism of reasoning as good or bad Charles Peirce
Think slow, act fast Buster Keaton
Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander
Index
Index ..........................................................................................................................3 Introduction ...............................................................................................................4 Part 1. Aesthetics of Cinema ...............................................................................................7 1. Cinema and Perception..........................................................................................8 2. Screenplay ...........................................................................................................27 3. Acting ..................................................................................................................55 4. Direction ..............................................................................................................67 5. Ideology...............................................................................................................80 6. Film and semiotics...............................................................................................89 Part 2. Ethics of Cinema....................................................................................................98 7. Manichaean Cinema ............................................................................................99 8. Submissive Cinema ...........................................................................................124 9. Tragic cinema ....................................................................................................143 10. The ascendancy of poetry over theory ............................................................172 11. Resourceful Cinema ........................................................................................186 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................195
Introduction Rudolf Arnheim saw cinema as a construction on reality, more akin to painting than to photography. Though writers and filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague contravened Arnheim's writings, recent films adapted from comics in the era of digital technology appear to confirm his prescription. At the same time email, social networks and books of sand anticipated by Borges are transforming the civilized world. Civilization has reached Jrgen Habermas' utopia: a society of communicative action, with its advantages and disadvantages unfolding. We are shifting back to reality from the hyperrealism of photography--from Baudrillard's simulacra. Cinema, the latest universal jester, adapts to the tastes and technical expectations of each generation. But beneath the charming faade of light and sound, storytelling remains, since Mlis, the backbone of the art. Films follow an organic model first described by Aristotle in "Poetics." The structure of storytelling, however, is not the invention of a particular playwright in a particular era. The representation of conflicts that require an urgent answer, follows the logic of perception. The principle of causality operates as the only a-priori category of our understanding. On our first chapter we give credit to Mlis, the magician who while relying on the fallibility of perception imported to cinema the grammar of the dramatic arts. The chapters on aesthetics were written for my university students in the US, Portugal, England, Kirgizstan, Colombia and India. Even in prestigious universities outputs of creativity are often checked by budget and technical constraints. The chapter Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander 4
5 on resourceful cinema discusses the growing influence of the aesthetics of poor theatre into cinema. Low-budget cinema allows filmmakers to express their particular voices without the constraints of budget or film distribution. The methodology of this book is interdisciplinary. Raising questions from the field of film studies, I have incorporated concepts from semiotics, psychology, archaeology, history, sociology, theology and philosophy. My discussion on Ethics of Cinema is but a development of questions already addressed by my definition of Narration, published by Hodder Education in their Encyclopaedia on Ethics and Philosophy (2006.) In an era of universal communication, there is a tendency to understand and correct social misbehaviours. The main influences on this book are the works of Shakespeare, Sren Kierkegaard and Joseph Campbell. Shakespeare speaks of drama as the mirror where men see the true image of their vices and virtues. Films and theatre plays, indeed, as well as literature and poetry, are but mirrors to present and incoming generations. Aristotle had already prescribed that the ethics of the child are very much influenced by the behaviour of the adult. Imitation, then, has a didactic purpose. Poetry would certainly play an important role in the construction of the child's universe. The actions of daily life are persistently reflected on memories of actions performed by historical figures, actors and celebrities. Sren Kierkegaard revealed the ceaseless interaction between the representations of today and the ethics of tomorrow. In a time where filmmakers become the most influential poets since Saint Paul and Mahomet, the virtual substitutes of parents and professors, children are constraint to adopt the ethics performed by the heroes of the screen. All societies suffer inconsistencies, errors, vices,
6 criminals, disasters, revenge and death. What varies is the way they cope with it. They can choose to exterminate the previous ruling and wealthy class--as in the revolutions of France and Russia, or they can forgive and implement new policies, as in Nicaragua and South Africa. The writings of Joseph Campbell have underlined the mythical dimension of literature and cinema. Notwithstanding, the Bible, the Coram and the Ramayana remain the most influential texts. Modern writers--according to Campbell, have the purpose of representing very ancient myths in new settings. Movies could certainly be identified as representations of very old myths. Artistic films would be those able to revive the archetypes of the past. The myth of Cain and Abel will be remembered as long as humanity perpetrates fratricide, e.g., Coppola's The Godfather: Part II (1974) and the TV series The Borgia II (2012.)
Madras, August 15th 2012 SDG
Part 1. Aesthetics of Cinema
1. Cinema and Perception The unreliable relationship between cause and effect constitutes the cornerstone of human perception. I hear a voice calling me, and as I turn around I see a woman; two separate facts that my mind unifies in order to establish a third meaning: a woman has called me. "It is sufficient to observe, that there is no relation, which produces a stronger connection in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their objects1." I am entitled to ask myself, however, whether I am called by the woman I see or by someone elsea reasonable doubt confirmed or dissipated by further certainty. As perceptive entities we are subject to continuous error. Movement itself is an illusion grounded on causality: "For as that action or motion is nothing but the object itself, considered in a certain light, and as the object continues the same in all its different situations, 'tis easy to imagine how such an influence of objects upon one another may connect them in the imagination2." By the end of the 19th century the makers of cinema had exposed the mechanisms of movement. Each instant in time is, in fact, subdivided ad infinitum. Our senses, nonetheless, reject absolute perception (a process that would leave us in the universe of a given instant3) to select twenty-four frames or still instants, per
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, I, 1,4. Ibidem. 3 An instant can be divided ad infinitum. Still, we live a series of instants. See "Aquiles, la tortuga y la demostracin del infinito." in A Parte Rey, Electronic Journal of Philosophy, Universidad Complutense de Madrid-September 2001.
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9 second. Film, as our senses, selects pieces of eternity. Georges Mlis was not only the first great filmmaker, but also the president of the Chambre Syndicale des Artistes Illusionistes from 1895 to 1935. A Trip to the Moon (Voyage dans la lune, 1902) stages a sidereal journey through anthropomorphic planets and constellations, and an attack against its voyagers by an army of moon inhabitants. Mlis' reputation is indisputable: Louis Lumire and Ren Clair considered him the inventor of cinematic spectacle; Henri Langlois, the first auteur; Georges Sadoul, the father of the art film. Mlis' cinema exposedalbeit his own artistry, the flaws of perception. Scorsese's Hugo (2012) has the merit of rescuing Mlis contribution to art direction, but misses his main contribution to the craft, the representation of dramatic stories. Years later a filmmaker and professor of the First State Film School in Moscow, Lev Kuleshov, studied the possibilities and limitations of causality. The "Kuleshov effect" involves a long close-up of the expressionless face of the actor Ivan Mazouchin, undercut with shots of a bowl of steaming soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child playing with a toy bear. The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked at the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same4. Kuleshov proved that two shots projected in succession are not interpreted separately by the viewer; in the audience's mind, they are integrated into a whole. His effect can be expressed by the equation A + B = C, in which A and B are independent images.
4
Pudovkin, Film Direction (New York: Grove press, 1978) p. 74.
10 In 1924 Eisenstein ranked post-production first, above all the other stages of film production. Well aware of the flaws of perception, Eisenstein relied on the dialectics of editing. But by stretching the boundaries of perception, he unwillingly opened the gates to propaganda. The greatest rhetorical film of the twentieth century is not Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) but Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925.) Commissioned by the committee set up to coordinate celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, Eisenstein portrayed a State that mistreats soldiers and children. But the raise of the marble lionthe greatest achievement of communist propaganda, only occurs after the spectator has witnessed the shooting of a defenceless woman carrying her dead son, and the fall of an ownerless baby carriage bouncing down the Odessa steps. Riefenstahl, by contrast, glorifies technology, discipline and water games. Her images are not compelling, but imposing. The representation of Hitler as the leader of hygienic men was intended to suppress, rather than to seduce, dissent. Although the mise-en-scne of Berta Helene Amalia Riefenstahl became a symbol of Nazi Germany, indignation against the powerful proved to be more effective than sympathy towards the willing. Men and animals perceive, but only men recreate perception. The book is the only media that requires the active complicity of its reader. The written narration of the fall of Constantinople by Edward Gibbon is far more compelling than the invasion of Normandy by Steven Spielberg. Shakespeare's Macbeth preserves its hierarchy over the violent sequences of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, 1957.) With the end of silent cinema, mainstream filmmaking has impoverished not only our imagination, but also our power of reflection.
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11 As causality relies on two events logically independent, perception is articulated as a riddle. I hear a sound. I perceive. But such perception remains suspended until I question my mind about its meaning. Henri hears a noise. Wonder breaks through and Henri formulates a wordless riddle to his mind. It thunders, he concludes. A unit of perception is established. Will it rain? Any question triggers a second question, this one of a third one, and so on. What keeps the dynamics of this process is our sense of admiration, the , in an unpredictable world. As our mind longs for understanding, we are subjects to the why and to the what for. An epistemological conflict arises. Without an immediate answer we endure suspense; each question burns in our mind until it finds its answer: true or false. One of the characters of Eugne Ionesco claims in "Victimes du Devoir": "All the plays written by men, from antiquity until now, have been but detective stories. Theatre has been but a realistic stage of detective plots... There is an enigma that is revealed to us in the last scene.5" Ionesco praises or satirizes the writers who structure their work around a main conflict. As a playwright he clearly understood that the foundations of a dramatic play are laid on a given question. "Hamlet" might be considered a treatise on psychology and suicide, but anterior to these didactic interpretations, it is perceived as the story of a man who wants to murder his stepfather. Since Aristotle, action has been wrongly assumed to be the unity of narration. The fall of a watch, the swinging of a pendulum or the mere act of walking could be, under such perspective, the basic element of a given literary work. Aristotle was well aware of
"Toutes les pices qui ont t crites, depuis l'Antiquit jusqu' nos jours, n'ont jamais t que policires. Le thatre n'a jamais t que raliste et policier (...) Il y a une nigme, qui nous est rvle la dernire scne." Ionesco, Eugne, Victimes du Devoir.
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12 the vagueness of his conception, and specified that such action should be complete, understanding completeness as something that has beginning, middle and end. This conception was assimilated through the centuries in diverse cultures by diverse poets and scholars; from Horatios "Art of Poetry" to Lope de Vegas "The Art of Making Comedies;" from Longinos "On the Sublime" to Sydneys "A defense of Poesie." In recent times, the study of narration has shifted from the creation of literary texts to the creation of meaning. J. F. Lyotard's conception of metanarrative and the writings of Walter Fisher have pointed out the importance of narration in the production of meaning. The critique to their endeavours has been equally important; we will certainly demean discourse as soon as we give to reality the value of verisimilitude. On the other hand, the problems raised by Bertold Brecht on the predominance of, as he called it, an Aristotelian dramaturgy, are still being debated. Conflict is, in fact, the unit of narration. A drama is but a chain of conflictive actions. Aristotle presents these components in order of importance, expanding a little on the significance of each to the tragedy as a whole. Plot is the representation of a complete action. Such action should be of a limited length.
Length 1: Length 2:
HAPPINESS UNHAPPINESS
UNHAPPINESS HAPPINESS
Aristotle presents a twofold concept. We should not only limit a given conflict for more than about 5 minutes, and we should not structure a screenplay with more than one
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13 change of fortune. Many a film is spoiled by the contravention of this precept, e.g., John McNaughton's Wild Things (1998) is a film that changes fortune thrice, making unbelievablenot to say laughable. Each conflict articulates an event, a why and a what for. The most celebrated tragedies, dramas or novels rouse the curiosity of the viewer/reader from its onset. A conflict is presented, generating suspense and expectation. Oedipus Rex starts with an urban calamity: the pest spreads out in Thebes. Why? What for? This unsolved conflict is soon bypassed and replaced by Teresias' humiliation. Before staging Yocasta's suicide, Sophocles induces the audience to wonder about the fate of a blind seer. Conflicts triggers a tripartite epistemological element, drawn between an unknown motivation and an unexpected outcome, a trident that the screenwriter articulates as several possible causes and consequences. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups, 1958) portrays a youngster, Antoine Doinel, who lies to his mother, his stepfather and his tutor.
Diagram 1. The conflict A rouses several possible outcomes
Conflict A Antoine Doinel lies Possible outcome 1 He will confess his lies Possible outcome 2 He will get away with his lies Possible outcome 3 He'll be caught
Spectators try to solve the riddle articulated by this conflict. Its resolution happens Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander 13
14 almost immediately, when Antoine's mother discovers him on the street, but then it is replaced by a new conflict: the boy realizes that his mother has a lover.
Diagram 2. The conflict B rouses several possible outcomes
Conflict B Antoine Doinel surprises his mother kissing an unkown man on the street Possible outcome 1 He will blackmail her Possible outcome 2 He will denounce her to his stepfather Possible outcome 3 He will keep quiet
As the film rolls on we also understand the causes of each particular conflict. When Antoine lies to his mentors, he reacts against a history of lack of affection and misunderstanding. New conflicts arise, and new series of possible outcomes, all built up in the mind of the spectator as the film unfolds. When the school director chides him, the outcome seems to be his reclusion in the reformatory; when the mother embraces him, their reconciliation. His escape and his precipitated arrival to the beach become an unexpectedalbeit believable, aftermath. Although perception is common to all humanity, wonder is conditioned by education, ideology and will. Thunderstorms were a widespread cause of anxiety amongst women and men before Ben Franklin devised the lighting rod. Lumire's Arrive d'un train La Ciotat (1896) had Parisian audiences at the Grand Caf jumping back from the screen as the train moved forward. We also become more or less interested on a film according to our disposition. Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander 14
15 Boredom is a result of frustrated perception: a spectator finds the conflicts of a film either too easy or too difficult to follow. Without a question mark our senses get stifled. From a structural viewpoint, conflicts are close, cryptic or open. Close conflicts have a sequential beginning, middle and end. In the main conflict of De Sica's La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Sophia Loren and her daughter start their way back to their native village in wartime Italy; danger increases along their journey, until both mother and daughter are raped by marauding Moroccan troops. In Dreyer's Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943) Anne falls in love with her stepson. When her decrepit husband dies, her community accuses her of witchcraft. She confesses and is sentenced to death. In Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), a depressed Marlon Brando clings to the love of a young woman, who by rejecting him prompts unwillingly his self-destruction. Close conflicts are complaisant; they satisfy the imperatives of our understanding. A mystery is formulated, and as the plot evolves audiences experience a variety of emotions. A timely answer releases spectators from the burden of doubt. Aristotle, who rightly understood the hedonistic nature of conflict, reduced drama to the representation of a single close conflict: Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude6. But single staged conflicts without attached subconflicts lasts hardly ten minutes. The Greek philosopher longed for a unity that no tragedynot even Oedipus Rex, fulfils satisfactorily. Any theatre play is a warp of conflicts of greater or lesser importance. The playwright or screenwriter is compelled, therefore, to create new conflicts. The interweaving of such conflicts consolidates the structure of a theatre play or screenplay. Based on a short novel by Ernst Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock masterly wove two main
6
Aristotle, Poetics, tr. by S. H. Butcher, vii.
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16 close conflicts in Psycho (1960.)
Conflict I Marion Crane Cause
Conflict II Norman Bates protects her dominant
Marion steals $40,000 in Phoenix, Norman Arizona mother
Event Aftermath
She tries to escape to California She is murdered
His mother murders a woman Norman is caught
The chronological structure of the script heightens dramatic tension. Joseph Stefano turned the discontinuous narration of Robert Bloch into a relentless story of survival: When I first met with Hitchcock I pitched that whole opening sequence of the movie, the first 25 minutes or so. My idea was to base the film around the character of Marion Craneyou like her, you want her to get away from the highway patrol, you want her to steal the money, and then take it back7. Whereas the first chapter of the novel narrates the conflictive relationship between Norman Bates and his mother, Stefano opens with a hectic city landscape:
FADE IN EXT. PHOENIX, ARIZONA (DAY) HELICOPTER SHOT
Above Midtown section of the city. It is early afternoon, a hot mid-summer day. The city is sunblanched white and its drifted-up noises are muted in their own echoes. We fly low, heading in a downtown direction, passing over traffic-clogged streets,
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Stefan, Joseph, interview with Marc Savlov, in The Austin Chronicle, October 15, 1999.
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17 parking lots, white business buildings, neatly patterned residential districts. As we approach downtown section, the character of the city begins to change. It is darker and shabby with age and industry. We see railroad tracks, smokestacks, wholesale fruitand-vegetable markets, old municipal buildings, empty lots. The very geography seems to give us a climate of nefariousness, of back-doorness, dark and shadowy. And secret We fly lower and faster now, as if seeking out a specific location. A skinny, high old hotel comes into view We move forward with purposefulness towards a certain window8. Anticipating Norman Bates' voyeuristic tendencies, the viewer is introduced into a small hotel room, where Mary Crane and Sam Lewis discuss their future. Pressed by economic hardship, she succumbs to the temptation of forty thousand dollars entrusted to her boss by a client. For about forty minutes we accompany Mary in her desperate escape to California. After a series of paranoid encounters with a police officer, she stops for the night at an isolated motel ran by Norman Bates, a nervous young man dominated by her decrepit mother. Minutes later she is stabbed to death with a knife. Robert Bloch introduces Marion Crane on the second chapter of his novel: The rain had been falling steadily for several minutes before Mary notices it and switched on the windshield wiper The worst part had come yesterday afternoon, when she stole the money9. Whereas the reader reconstructs the story through flashbacks and coincidences and memory recollections, Hitchcock's viewer is forced to experience chronologically her agony and death. As the identity of Marion's murderer is only revealed at the end of the film, Psycho was released with strict instructions that no one be allowed into the theatre
8 9
Stephano, Joseph, Psycho. Based on the novel by Robert Bloch, p. 2. Bloch, Robert, Psycho, p. 13 - 14.
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18 after the show had started. The elaborated close-conflict narrative of Psycho, prompted Hitchcock himself to described his masterpiece as 'using pure cinema to cause the audience to emote.' A close conflict presented in a non-linear sequence is a cryptic conflict. As ordinary perception is challenged, the spectator picks up scattered pieces of information, which he/she reorganizes in his mind according to a chronological principle of beginning, middle and end. Bertolucci make use of a cryptic conflict in 1900 (1976), in order to question the moral and cultural sympathies of the viewer. The film opens with the slaughter of a couple by a host of peasants. What appears to be an act of injustice is slowly turned into an act of revengeculturally justified by the abuses perpetrated by the man incarnated by Donald Sutherland. The most celebrated cryptic conflict in the history of cinema has been contrived by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941.) A tycoon dies muttering the word "rosebud." A chronological newsreel on his life is screened in a small room. The newsreel director, visibly unsatisfied with his work, orders to one of his reporters to find out the relationship between "rosebud" and Kane. He believes that by solving this puzzle the identity of Kane will come out to the light. As the rest of the film rolls, the audience reconstructs the life of Kane based on the recollections of five people who knew Kane closely. Although the reporter confesses his failure by the end of the film, a panning camera reveals the answer to the audience. As we watch the destruction of Kane's old furniture, we recognize the sled he had used as a boy. The sled is thrown into the furnace and the camera catches for a couple of seconds a word painted on its side: "Rosebud." The film concludes with the
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19 sign we saw at the beginning of the film: "No Trespassing." Although Citizen Kane emulates the theme, lighting and structure of William K. Howard's The Power and the Glory (1933,) Welles' Opera Prima is far more complex than its predecessor. As in The Trial (1962), Welles turns the structure of the film into a maze. As J.L. Borges rightly understood, the mystery of "Rosebud" becomes a secondary conflict: Kane's sled is burnt as rubbish. Although the reporter confesses his failure to his director, heas any spectator, becomes aware of the complexity of a man. Kane's betrayed childhood, his optimistic youth and his bereaved adulthood linger in the mind as traces of a more mysterious character. The fact that Kane is a selfish, a manipulating and a revengeful man, makes him even more interesting. By approaching life as a metaphysical subject, Wellesas Homer, as Cervantes, as Shakespeare, portrays a character out of his eternity. The complexity of Citizen Kane contrasts with the structural approach of contemporary cinema. Films such as Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997,) Ritchie's Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Francois Girard's The Red Violin (1999) can be edited chronologically without losing their dramatic impact. A prominent student of Kuleshov and Meyerhold, Serguei Eisenstein, formulated his own editing principles in 1924. The "Montage of Attractions" juxtaposes nonchronological images in order to produce a psychological impact. Anticipating the open manifestations of cinema, Eisenstein replaces the rigid laws of visual continuity for the almost unexplored principle of associate imagery. A celebrated sequence of Oktiabr (October, 1928) juxtaposes the images of Aleksandr Kerensky and a mechanical peacock.
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20 The head and open tail of the automata, interposed to Kerensky's wagging in the Winter Palace, produces one of the most fortunate cinematographic metaphors of bureaucracy. In spite of its originality, Oktiabr was coldly received by the Soviet intelligentsia. By directing a subjective, abstract and intellectual film, Eisenstein unfolded the subversive dialectics of Bronenosets Potemkin (1925.) Eisenstein's cinema is however a moderate example of his theory. The juxtaposition of a bird and a man in uniform is not didactic, but rather metaphorical. True, by dissociating perception from understanding, viewers are compelled to reflect on the political conditions of pre-communists Russian, but their reflection is predetermined by parodyby the exaggerated struts of Kerensky. Working under the stern creed of communism, Eisenstein was barely able to caricaturize the main characters of his films. In Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" Vladimir and Estragon long for Godot to show up to his appointment. By the end of the first act, when it has become clear that Godot won't come, they question Godot's intentions and their own existence. Unresolved riddles are open conflicts, for they are open to diverse and often opposite interpretations: I think a good film is one that has a lasting power. That you start to reconstruct of deconstruct in your head when you leave the cinema10." The screenwriter deliberately hides or blurs the main event of a given conflict, or its causes and/or effects. Buuel's Le Chien Andaloux (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) renders divergent interpretations. The shot of a man hauling a piano, two decaying donkeys and a couple of priests with a rope has been understood as a metaphor of the burden of morality, but also as a parable of the ennui generated by an absent morality. The main characters of Alan Resnais' LAnne Dernire Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) arelike the comic characters of
10
In Iranian Cinema. English broadcast by ITV, 06/30/02. Produced and directed by Susan Shaw.
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21 Ionesco's theatre play "La cantatrice chauve," unable to recognize themselves. Alain Robbe-Grillet, deliberately undermined the comprehensibility of his screenplay in order to emphasize uncertainty: The spectator that looks to build a 'Cartesian' scheme, the more linear, the more rational; this spectator will find this film difficult But if you allow yourself to be taken away by the extraordinary images he sees, by the voice of the actors, by the noises, by the music, by the rhythm of montage he will find the story the more faithful to reality11. Gilles Deleuze formulated a cinema of time, opposed to a cinema of movement. His persuasive categorization covers most of the history of cinema. But, as Aristotle, Deleuze saw each dramatic construction as the representation of a single action. He failed to recognize each dramatic work as a blend of conflicts, of many actions. As long as screenwriters wave open, cryptic and/or close conflicts in a screenplay, any absolute categorization of cinema will simply prove to be deficient. From an epistemological viewpoint, conflicts are active or passive. All cryptic and open conflicts are passive. Close conflicts can be passive or active. Passive conflicts are indexical or symbolic systems12, and as such they appeal primarily to our intellect. They rely heavily on the word, as in most adaptations of theatre plays. Passive conflicts require of the active participation of the spectator. They often require from viewers a fair knowledge of the symbolic systems of cinema, though references to works of art and literature are not uncommon. Icons may also fall into this category, e.g., the postcard sequence in Buuel's Le Fantme de la libert (Phantom of Liberty, 1974), or the retelling of the crime in Kurosawa's Rashamon (1950.)
11 12
Alain Robbe-Grillet, L'anne Dernire Marienband (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1961), p. 17. See chapter 6 on semiotics.
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22 Active conflicts are iconic, and as such appeal primarily to our sensesas in the rape sequence of Buuel's Viridiana (1961), or as in the final battle in Kurosawa's Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954.) The popularity of directors such as Buuel and Kurosawa relies on their craft to contrive passive and active conflicts within a film. Mainstream filmmaking recreates active conflicts. Its main themes are money, violence and sex. Rape, revenge and gain are confronted with rejection, death and defeat. Their variations are predictable: a man or a family must punish his/their enemy, a youngster must win a sport contest, a hygienic model must seduce a bony girl. They are popularly recognized as happy or sad: happy when they conform to their predictability, that is, when the hero or the family succeeds; sad when they do not. Commercial cinema is pointlessly entertaining. Our senses are enticed by the powers of the hero, the restless chases of monsters and paladins, and family misunderstandings. Spectators are enraptured by acts of survival that justify the selfishness and violence of the main characters. Our first concern is not the
verisimilitude or the ideology of the film, but the salvation of the hero. We become hostages as the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has pointed out: "There are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelmed you to the point that you forget about everything. Then you feel cheated13." Bertold Brecht longed for theatre audiences able to dissociate his ideas from the pleasant illusions of his play. The average spectator is, as a matter of fact, a victim of repetition. His/her senses are numbed by mainstream filmmaking and TV reality shows on a daily basis. "Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use
13
In Iranian Cinema. English broadcast by ITV, 06/30/02. Produced and directed by Susan Shaw.
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23 time no spent at the production line just to keep going14." A film is a presentation of dramatic conflicts. But films are not series of conflicts as independent units, shown one after the other. A film is a carefully interwoven presentation of conflicts. The arrangement of such conflicts determines the structure of the film: the scaffolding of an imaginary building: the skeleton of a recently conceived creature. From a structural viewpoint, films can be organic, reiterative, episodic or disjunctive. A film is organic when all the subconflicts contribute to the resolution of the main conflict. Chespirito, the most famous Hispano-American screenwriter, whose name translates Little Shakespeare, was an engineer who used to arrange conflicts as parts of a car engine. The pinnacle of 1940s noir cinema, John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) opens with the plain description of a legendary gem-incrusted golden bird. A new riddle comes out when a fragile woman hires Sam Spade, a private detective, to resolve a family dispute. Spade's partner assumes the case; he is murdered soon after. The rough consummation of this mystery prompts the main conflict of the film: Sam Spade attempts to elucidate the death of his colleague. Subconflicts are outlined as new roles intervened. In the final sequence of The Maltese Falcon the solution to the mysteries of the metallic bird and the dead detective are related to the amorous deception of the main characters of the film. Amongst all the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, Miller might be remembered as the most emotional writer of an unemotional milieu. His organic plays flow within a framework that in the hands of skilful actors move spectators to tears. The
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), tr. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1973) p. 135.
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24 loss of a hand is not less hurtful to the body than is the lost of a family member to a middle-class family. Jimmy's complaints on the absurdity of money in All my sons are not only the words of a doctor, but also the chorus of an entity unable to change the fate the incoming tragedy. Albeit his repetitive discourse on inhuman capitalism, his stubborn or one-dimensional characters and his uninventive dialogues, we applaud Miller by the emotional outpouring of his conflictive characters, unfit women and men shaped and destroyed by institutional forces: father and son, wife and husband, boss and employee, brother and sister. Horror films, science-fiction, melodramas and epic films are genres which cinema imported from 19th-century literatureas Eisenstein pointed out. While every summer cinema presents blockbusters of special effects, noise and music to paroxysm, screenplays are still being cast in the blueprints of organic story telling. A film is reiterative when its conflicts are but variations of a single conflict, as in Buuel's Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972), where upper-class characters present the variations of a meal: "[This film] shows lest a cycle of failed meals than the diverse versions of a the same meal under the influence of fashion and within irreducible worlds15." Reiterative films adopted the narrative structure of the circus, where one act is presented once and again with endless variations. Fellini is on this account the most celebrated filmmaker of reiterative cinema. The initial seductions of Casanova become more daring and fantastic as they are re-enacted in new cities. Most sport films, road movies, adventure and action films are reiterative. The hero must cope with a series of obstacles, each one most challenging that previously. D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) failed to capture the interest of the crowds.
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Deleuze, Gilles, L'Image-Temps, Cinema 2, p. 134 -135.
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25 His second epic film, bold in many aspects, proved the unpopularity of episodic films. Intolerance attaches assorted dramas from Babylon, Paris, Jerusalem and America to the image of a woman rocking a cradle. While the cradles works as an unclear threadwhich nonetheless guides us through the film, the four main plots are unrelated in terms of dramatic construction. Intolerance is an episodic film presented within the frame of an external referent16. As early as 2500 years ago, Aristotle complained about the poor quality of dramatic constructions by dilettantes in the craft of playwriting: "Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot 'episodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity17." Aristotle's remark makes justice to the spectator, always eager to grasp a clear map at the beginning of the play. There are episodic films, however, that make an effective use of internal maps or referents. Thus conflicts indirectly related to the main conflict of the movie are welcome as incidental, explanatory or circumstantial addendums. Ingmar Bergman's Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1956) plotted a series of independent conflicts (the survival of the jester's son, the infidelity of the peasant's wife and the cruelty of the friar,) to the Knight's wager with Death. In the same vein, Fellini's Satyricon (1969) juxtaposes a series of rugged conflicts, such as the chop of the comedian's hands before an audience, or the agony of an albino seer in the desert, to the hero's pangs of love. Anderson's Magnolia (1999) is a film that blends a series of urban legends, all of them interrelated by
16 17
For a definition of referent see chapter 3. Poetics, IX.
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26 the incidental presence in a given conflict of characters from external conflicts. "The Bible" and "The Arabian Nights" are classics that present a disjointed structure, where unrelated conflicts are attached to an independent external conflict. The fate of the Princess condemned to death is as intriguing as the unfolding word of God. Disjointed films juxtapose conflicts unrelated to one another, as in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rubliov (1966), in which the story of a man who flies in a globe over a belfry is strange to Andrei Rubliov's pilgrimage, and to the efforts of a beardless man who casts a humongous bell. Love for painting, and the story telling technique of murals are the keys to grasp continuity and, eventually, unity. Disjointed films may be arranged by the use of a map18, as in Errol Morris' The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003,) where we infer from the start the short length of eleven lessons on international affairs.
18
On the concept of Map see chapter 2.
26
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2. Screenplay "Here the word came in," writes the chronicler of the Popul-Vuh to present the creation of the world. And then, after the creation of the animals, the Mayan gods reward them with sound, by which they can communicate with other members of their species. For words anticipate action, as Eric Bentley reminds us, quoting Freud. They may constraint our movements, but such stillness is the key to the boundless universes of imagination and fantasy. Writing is creation in its purest manifestation. Not surprisingly, the ancient writers were also holy men. The Spanish film director Luis Buuel, once asked why he didn't make surrealist films while working in Mxico remarked that cinema was also a source of employment for many. This said, there are no written rules on filmmaking, just a series of recommendations supported by tradition or experience. As the main conflict of a screenplay can be formulated according to syllogisms, screenplays can be inductive, deductive or abductive. Inductive screenplays works with very clear-cut psychological profiles. As inductive deductions move from the particular to the general, inductive screenplays are often based on personal experiences. They rely on strong characters or warriors, who by virtue of their exceptional personalities appear to be in control of their own fate. Most biopic films fall into this category, e.g. Ghandi (Attenborough, 1982) Malcom X (Lee, 1992,) The Passion of the Christ (Gibson, 2003.) We'll refer again to inductive
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28 screenplays in our Ethics. Abductive screenplays are compilations of facts without explanation. The principle of causality is overwritten by those of creativity and metaphor. We should first expand on the concept of abduction. In a page of a novel by Isaac Asimov, two characters ponder on the boundaries of artificial intelligence. The advocate of the robots argues that no computer would be able to generate ideas, for machines can only follow the laws of a particular logic. The creative impulses of reason appear to be the privilege of men. For many years I have ruminated on this page. The ascendancy of reason above logic may invalidate sciencefiction TV series about thinking robots, as it may throw light on the essence of western though. Since Kant, we represent ourselves in a universe ruled by the logic of geometry and mathematics. Such reduction has become the cornerstone of modern education, and reason is prescribed as the dam that contains the waters of the imagination. But the efforts of the academy have been unable to deter the impulses of the majority. Reason is still understood in its primal meaning, the regulatory entity, the commander of diverse logics and impulses such as imagination and sensuality. Let's take, for instance two verses of Shakespeare:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turnd to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall t expel the winters flaw!
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29 A textual reading will spoil the fragrance of the verses. Julius Caesar may become clay, but we are not allowed to inquire on the probability of his remains as the brick and layer of a construction site. We may rather consider Shakespeare as a poet of violent metaphors that became reality. Julius Caesar or his dust lives in one of the carotids of a theatre: a figure built alongside Shakespeare's immortal characters. Certain day I read some verses to a lady specialized in engineering. I quoted a poet that compared our lives to walkers on a predetermined road. In spite of my efforts, my friend wasn't able to draw a parallel between the metaphor and her personal experience. Her reason was an output of geometry and mathematics. She had already drawn conclusions from a factual premise: "There is no significant probability that the dust of Julius Caesar ended in a dam." The American philosopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce wrote on abduction on several occasions. If the process of making conclusions from general judgements is deductive, and if the process of making conclusions from particular judgements is inductive, the process of drawing particular and general judgements from conclusions should be called abduction. During his life Peirce insisted on the importance of abductive judgements, the creative source of all serious research. He traces the history of the concept to Aristotle's Anterior Analytics: There are in science three fundamentally different kinds of reasoning, Deduction (called by Aristotle {synagg} or {anagg},) Induction (Aristotle's and Plato's {epagg}) and Retroduction (Aristotle's {apagg}, but misunderstood because of corrupt text, and as misunderstood usually translated abduction19. Peirce played with the terms for a while, until abduction became a recurrent topic: Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but
19
Peirce, I, 65.
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30 determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis. Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative". ; Abduction merely suggests that something may be...20 Peirce underlines the pragmatic value of abduction, the proto original judgement that makes possible great enterprises in the fields of knowledge: "For example, at a certain stage of Kepler's eternal exemplar of scientific reasoning, he found that the observed longitudes of Mars, which he had long tried in vain to get fitted with an orbit, were (within the possible limits of error of the observations) such as they would be if Mars moved in an ellipse. The facts were thus, in so far, a likeness of those of motion in an elliptic orbit. Kepler did not conclude from this that the orbit really was an ellipse; but it did incline him to that idea so much as to decide him to undertake to ascertain whether virtual predictions about the latitudes and parallaxes based on this hypothesis would be verified or not. This probational adoption of the hypothesis was an Abduction. An Abduction is Originary in respect to being the only kind of argument which starts a new idea21." Abductive judgements are products of the imagination, conclusions drawn from ideas that the mind summons at will. Most discoveries and inventions are done by abduction22. Peirce refutes the positivist presumption that valid hypothesis must be sensorial23. An abduction is an ethereal idea, drawn from perceived emotions and ideas. The immaterial original question that moves all philosophies is also an abductive judgement: There can be no doubt of the importance of this problem. According to Kant,
20 21
Peirce, V, 171. See also V, 145. Peirce, I, 96. 22 Peirce, V, 171. 23 Cfr. Peirce, V, 197.
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31 the central question of philosophy is "How are synthetical judgments a priori possible?" But antecedently to this comes the question how synthetical judgments in general, and still more generally, how synthetical reasoning is possible at all. When the answer to the general problem has been obtained, the particular one will be comparatively simple. This is the lock upon the door of philosophy24." Since originality appears to be a burden for a conservative society, political elites display a growing distrust towards creativity, intuition or abduction. Far from such fear or misconception, Peirce considers abduction an instinctive reflex common to all men: It appears to me that the clearest statement we can make of the logical situation the freest from all questionable admixture is to say that man has a certain Insight, not strong enough to be oftener right than wrong, but strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often wrong than right, into the Thirdnesses, the general elements, of Nature. An Insight, I call it, because it is to be referred to the same general class of operations to which Perceptive Judgments belong. This Faculty is at the same time of the general nature of Instinct, resembling the instincts of the animals in its so far surpassing the general powers of our reason and for its directing us as if we were in possession of facts that are entirely beyond the reach of our senses. It resembles instinct too in its small liability to error; for though it goes wrong oftener than right, yet the relative frequency with which it is right is on the whole the most wonderful thing in our constitution25. We often find abductive ideas within deductive frames and inductive arguments. Abductive judgements cast understanding on the subject of poetical inspiration Alan Resnais' LAnne Dernire Marienbad (1961) and Welles' The Trial (1962) as
24 25
Peirce, II, 348. Peirce, V, 174.
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32 examples of abductive films. They are triggered by an image, by a sudden impulse or by a nightmare. Deductive screenplays are the most widespread, widely commented by the American gurus of screenwriting. A deductive screenplay distribute actions according to pre-determined classifications, paradigms and actantial models. A compelling screenplay is a representation of about 20 to 40 conflicts, interwoven along a single main conflict. There are exceptions, such as Lewis Teague's Cujo (1981,) after a novel by Sthephen King. Even so, if we dissect Cujo's screenplay, isolating every single conflict, we'll find out that most of them are but variations of a single conflict, e.g., Cujo attacking the woman and the child. Cinema has relied in the conventions of story telling from its very onset. The great merit of Georges Mlis was not only the representation of fees, humanoid moons and talking oysters. Mlis was a storyteller, a creative sensitive mind, able to perceive the causes and consequences of conflicts in the realms of the imagination. He knew that magic was but a naked trick if divested of the charm and tension of storytelling. Mlis imagination turned makers of myths into filmmakers. In 1928 Vladimir Propp compiled, dissected and compared hundreds of narrative structures form folktales. Propp's research has still the power to persuade readers of the direct relationship between cinema and storytelling. Propp presented seven "act spheres" as components of the folktale: Aggressor, Donor, Auxiliary, Princess & the Father, Committer, Fake Hero and Hero. Propp's contributions were further developed on the areas of linguistics and semiotics. In 1966 Greimas expounded an actantial model with one vertical and two horizontal axes of action, with 9 "actants" or plot roles.
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33
Figure 1. Greimas' Actantial Model
Sender
>
Object
->
Receiver
Helper
->
Subject
<
Opponent
Greimas' actantial model has the virtue of conciseness. It can be use as a pocketcompass by playwrights and screenwriters.
Figure 2. Greimas' Actantial Model applied to Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
Lord Vader kills > Luke's parents
To avenge -> his parents
Luke defeats Lord Vader
Princes Lia Han Solo
->
Luke
<
Darth Vader The Empire
In Star Wars we follow the adventures of Luke Skywalker, a farmer who by rescuing a Princess and by helping an attack against the Empire with the help of a monk, a mercenary and an alien, takes revenge on the intellectual murderer of his adoptive parents.
Figure 3. Greimas' Actantial Model 1 applied to Kramer vs Kramer (Brenton, 1979)
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34 Joanna and Billy left Ted > Billy Kramer -> Ted Kramer
Margaret Joanna
->
Ted Kramer
<
Joanna Law
In Kramer Vs Kramer a father struggles to get the custody of his only child. As the drama evolves in the interior world of the main characters become the actants of the main plot. Spectators follow the story according to the emotions of the players. The melodramatic conventions dissolve before the weight of a second actantial model:
Figure 4. Greimas' Actantial Model 2 applied to Kramer vs Kramer (Brenton, 1979)
Joanna and Billy
left
Ted >
Billy Kramer
->
Ted Kramer
Margaret Ted
->
Joanna Kramer
<
Law
In 1969 Julia Kristeva understood that the subject and the object often switch positions. The Helper and the Opponet also switch positions accordingly
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35
Figure 5. Greimas' Actantial Model applied to Amadeus (Forman, 1984)
Mozart
seduced >
To destroy -> Mozart
Salieri kills Mozart
Salieri's darling
Emperor Mozart
->
Salieri
<
Constanze
Gozzi reduced the combinations of playwriting to 36 dramatic situations. Goethe and Schiller approved the remark and in 1916 Georges Polti published in Paris Les 36 situations dramatiques. In this book Polti organizes all the main events of literature and history into 36 main recurrent conflicts. The variations are many, and it would be unwise to overlook Polti's remarks. The 36 situations offer a range of possibilities or menu to the resourceful screenwriters; these are but narrative structures tried by playwrights and audiences from diverse civilizations; they all can be effortlessly identified in 20th-century cinema.
Figure 6. Polti's 36 dramatic situations
1 2 3
Supplication Deliverance Crime pursued by vengeance
The Mission (Joff, 1986) Quo Vadis (LeRoy, 1951) The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960)
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36 4 5 6 7 8 9 Vengeance taken for kin upon kin Pursuit Disaster Falling prey to cruelty or misfortune Revolt Daring enterprise The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) Les Misrables (Lelouch, 1995) The Exterminating Angel (Buuel, 1962) Sophie's Choice (Pakula, 1982) The Edukators (Weingartner, 2004) Rififi (Dassin, 1955) Ransom (Howard, 1997) Citizen Kane (Welles, 1942) Rocky (Avildsen, 1976) Les Diaboliques (Cluzot, 1955) Wuthering Heights (Wyler, 1939) Ossessione (Visconti, 1943) Misery (Reiner, 1990) Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) Breathless (Godard, 1959) Oedipus (Passolini, 1968) The Passion of the Christ (Gibson, 2004) Brave Heart (Gibson, 1995)
10 Abduction 11 The enigma 12 Obtaining 13 Enmity of kin 14 Rivalry of kin 15 Murderous adultery 16 Madness 17 Fatal imprudence 18 Involuntary crimes of love 19 Slaying of kin unrecognized 20 Self-sacrifice for an ideal 21 Self-sacrifice for kin
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37 22 All sacrificed for passion 23 Necessity of sacrificing loved ones 24 Rivalry of superior vs. inferior 25 Adultery 26 Crimes of love Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet, 1975) Sweeney Todd (Burton, 2007) Gladiator (Scott, 2000) Madam Bovary (Minelli, 1949) The Crime of Father Amaro (Carrera, 2002)
27 Discovery of the dishonour of a Father (Power, 1990) loved one 28 Obstacles to love 29 An enemy loved 30 Ambition 31 Conflict with a God 32 Mistaken jealousy 33 Erroneous judgment 34 Remorse 35 Recovery of lost one 36 Loss of loved ones Great Expectations (Cuarn, 1998) Return of the Jedi (Lucas, 1985) The Treasure of Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948) The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) Othello (Burge, 1965) The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959) Amadeus (Forman, 1984) Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) Titanic (Cameron, 1997)
Today scholars praise the dramatic genius of Aeschylus, Caldern and Shakespeare. Their plays, notwithstanding, are hardly original. The greatest playwrights
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38 used to barrow themes and structures from previous myths, legends, and even from recent tragedies. Emerson recognizes the paradox and praises Shakespeare on account of his ability to used the dramatic material of his age26." Life is drama, the source of drama, and very much influenced by drama. Buuel used to quote the Spanish philosopher Eugenio D'Ors, who dismissed writing from unknown sources as plagiarism. Literary critics find their raison d'tre tracking the origins and influences of novelists and poets. Our lives as the lives of others, literature, newspaper chronicles, film, history, poetry and theatre: everything perceivable is a valid source of inspiration. Reality is filtered by the imagination of the artist in order to produce stories. Only those able to translate their knowledge and experience into dramatic material are able to produce innovative, compelling films. Since ancient times the division between comedy and tragedy have divided the stage. Today we accept a greater number of genres. There is not a single pattern that organizes genre. The porous line between fiction and documentary classifies film a grosso modo. But whereas we are obliged to use the term "documentary" for certain type of films, we rarely spoke of fictional films as "fictional". Instead we use a typology forged by tradition. The most popular genres follow conventions set up by literature. Some of the most recurrent genres are: Action, Science Fiction, War, Musical, Drama, Historical, Horror, Western, Noir, Heist, Comedy, Western and Thriller. Comedy has been a favouritefavorite theme of inquiry since Aristotle. In order to understand it we should consider first the concept of incongruity. According to Schopenhauer humourhumor arises from the failure of a concept to account for an object
"Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind" Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Shakespeare; Or, The Poet, 2.
26
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39 of thought. What does smiling and laughing have in common? They both are manifestations of two kinds of pleasure: a smile is an expression of joy, as a grin is an expression of mockery. Such experiences are triggered by external events. Let's imagine a society that wants to measure the sensibility of their citizens. They ask participants to come to see a gag performed by an old lady in a close room. During the representation of the show the lady falls into the ground. The participant can then either come to assist the falling lady, do nothing, or laugh at the event. According to their reaction participants are graded.
Fig 7. From compassion to mockery
Compassion 1 to 10
Indolence 1 to10
Mockery 1 to 10
Laugh has been always related to disrespect towards the establishment, as the villain of The Name of the Rose reflects. The baser actors are, the louder spectators laugh. But what also distinguishes comedy from most serious genres is its recurrence to gags. A gag was a visual joke in silent cinema. Today it is, by extension, any laughable dramatic happening, the representation of a joke or a funny situation. An apocryphal Aristotle was right to point out that the climax of comedy is not in the story line, but in the microcosms of every joke. Lope de Vega wrote that the main virtue of the new Spanish theatre was the use of comic gags in tragedies. The seed of any film is the idea. The first impression in the artist's mind should be expressed as conflict, as an image or as a dialogue. Lajos Egri saw in every play or film Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander 39
40 the demonstration of a premise. Without reducing art to forensics, we may profit from Egri's dialectical approach to creativity. We may formulate the main conflict of a film, for instance, by presenting the thesis and the antithesis of a popular proverb. As all proverbs are consolidated by experience, we can pronounce it as the synthesis of a dialectical process. Let's take a popular maxim:
Curiosity killed the cat
Most proverbs work at the symbolic level; a curious mind should translate such abstraction into concrete facts. The general concept should be presented on a more particular level:
Too many questions may get you into trouble
Now we are required to produce a thesis and an antithesis at both abstract and concrete levels.
Figure 8. Dialectics of the idea
Thesis
Anthitesis
Synthesis level)
(Abstract level) The cat was (Abstract level) The Ogre (Abstract curious about the ham in the kills Ogre's kitchen. any animal
who Curiosity killed the cat.
approaches his ham.
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41 (Concrete level) Asked (Concrete level) I can profit (Concrete level) Your
someone too many questions from information on other's questions get you into and you get into trouble. affairs trouble
The concrete dialectical triad coincides with the main plot of Chinatown (Polanski, 1974.) Note that the three concepts are embodied into particular characters.
Figure 9. Dialectics of Chinatown (Polanski, 1974.)
(Abstract level) The cat
(Abstract Ogre
level)
The (Abstract level) The dead cat
(Concrete level) Cross
(Concrete level) Gittes
(Concrete humiliated friends
level) before
Gittes his
Once we have the idea, we can establish the theme. A theme is a single word or general concept that comprises the actions of the film. Thus, we can say that the theme of Romeo and Juliet (Zefirelly, 1968) is Love is more powerful than death, and the theme of All Presidents Men (Lumen, 1976) is Deceit is everywhere. The "Poetics" of Aristotle prescribed that drama was the representation of a single complete action. But, as we already mentioned, conflict--rather than action, is the unit of dramatic representation. Short stories are single narrations told in very few conflicts. A Novel, by contrast, Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander 41
42 is a writing of considerable length that waves several conflicts into a single narrative. Most theatre plays, TV soap operas and films are structured around a main conflict, able to capture the spectators attention from beginning to end. A Woman of Paris (Chaplin, 1922) is a film that represents 11 conflicts carefully interwoven. Each conflict triggers confrontation between a character (hero) and an external force (opponent.)
Fig. 10. Conflicts of A Woman of Paris (Chaplin, 1923)
Conflict 1
Hero
Opponent Fate (misunderstandings) Marie's Stepfather
Marie St. Clair loves Jean Marie Millet.
Marie's stepfather throws Marie Marie out her house.
3 4
Jean's father dies Marie courtesan becomes
Jean's father Pierre's Pierre
Fate (sudden death) Morality
Marie goes to a party and ends Marie up in Jean's apartment
Fate (she gets lost)
Marie and Jean are separated at Marie and Jane the train station
Fate
(interrupted
conversation) Jean Fate (Jean's apparent rejection of Mary,) Pierre
Jean proposes to Marie
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43 8 Jean rejects Marie just to Jean appease his mother 9 Jean clears his name Jean Pierre's mother, Fate (door ajar,) Marie Fate (Marie doesn't believe him) 10 Jean's mother wants to avenge Jean's mother his son's death Marie, Fate (The
image of Marie crying before Jean)
11
Marie and Jean's mother open Marie and Jean's Pierre an orphanage mother
The selection of the main conflict is one of the decisive steps in the construction of the screenplay. It also predetermines the literary viewpoint. Each conflict is subdivided in to two or more segments. The juxtaposition of such segments renders the structure of the film. Conflict number 1 also happens to be the main conflict of the film: Marie St. Clair loves Jean Millet. This conflict comprises a series of actions that divided in several segments and intercut with the remaining conflicts guide spectators along the film. Main conflicts are the narrative threat, the backbone of films. As such, they should be presented at the beginning of the story. Aristotle alludes to the main conflict of the play while prescribing the ideal duration of a tragedy. The action of the play should represent either the transition from happiness to unhappiness or from happiness to happiness. The playwright should use a single dominant conflict as backbone of the film. It is not advisable to overwrite it with more than one change of fortune. Many a film is spoiled by the contravention of this
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44 precept, e.g., "Wild Things" (John McNaughton, 1998) is a film that changes fortune thrice, making it unbelievable, if not laughable. Once we have determined which is the main conflict of the film, we can formulate the plot or story line of the script. The plot describes a main conflict in one paragraph of three sentences: one for the beginning, a second for the middle, and a third one for the end. Each sentence should be expressed in terms of conflict. Let's take for instance the plot of Star Wars (Lucas, 1977):
"In a far away galaxy enslaved Princess Lia asks help from hermit Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ben, with the help of young Skywalkera farmer, and Han Soloa mercenary, two robots and a human-like pet, launches an attack to save Princess Lia. Ben sacrifices his life, Princess Lia is set free and young Skywalker becomes Ben's heir."
We find an ascending and descending point: a) Princess Lia asks for help; b) She recovers her liberty. Spectators of Star Wars witness thus a film that represents the main characters transition from unhappiness to happiness. Screenwriters are advised to prepare their logline or a one-line sentence of the script. The logline presents the core of the film to the spectators of the pitch. A pitch is the presentation of a screenplay or film project before a jury of producers. According to Aristotle a pathos () is an unexpected violent event. As such, it can happen at any moment in the story. Car accidents, sudden catastrophes and diseases are events that trigger fear in the public's mind. Pathos are not necessarily the turning point of the story. Still they invigorate a film with small rapid conflicts. Get Shorty
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45 (Sonnenfeld, 1995,) for instance, starts with a nose violently broken, a head cut by a bullet and the sudden death of a Mafioso. Raymond Chandler famously advised to writers the implementation of a pathos when he said: When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. A recognition () is often the turning point in a film. Recognitions indicate the action by which the hero's mind sees an until-then hidden truth. Startling recognitions are pleasant, for they satisfy the intellect. It is true, as Aristotle prescribed, that a play is not mainly shaped by the psychology of the characters, but rather by the emotional outpouring of dramatic actions in a particular sociological context. Modern spectators of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1926,) are unable to understand the main character's decisions without a minimum knowledge of medieval history. Greatest characters are abnormal and rebellious: the villain, the unfit, the victim and the prophet: Aedipus, Jesus, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Saint Joan. All the above mentioned characters are driven by decisions. Decisions are the concrete manifestations of a character's will, for they are choices that pave their way for further action: Aedipus decides to find out the murderer of the King, cause of the plague that bleeds Thebes according to the oracle of Delphos; Jesus decides to return to Jerusalem, where his enemies receive the tributes of the Temple; Hamlet decides to avenge his father without consideration for his beloved ones; Don Quixote decides to end all the evilness of the world by virtue of his imagination; Saint Joan decides to free France from the yoke of the British crown. All of them achieve their goals without fear of death.
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46 Polti wrote a book on characters borrowed from medieval typologies. It is also said that Cortazar and Calvino use to write short stories after combinations of tarot cards. Psychology and astrology can certainly furnish the imagination of the playwright, not indifferent to the challenge of composing a comedy between a mystical Aquarius woman and her schizophrenic husband. The conception of twelve diverse characters according to the Chinese horoscope can also be as entertaining as conceiving the characters 's fate by I-Ching hexagrams. Patrice Pavis prescribes for theatre eleven types of character representation, arrayed from the general to the particular:
Fig. 11. Degrees of complexity of the characters[1].
Particular Individual Caractre Humour Actor Role Type Condition Stereotype Allegory Archetype Hamlet The misanthropist Othello The President A lawyer The soldier The merchant The knavish valet Death The pleasure principle
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47 Actant General The search for profit
In the context of a screenplay the primal general characters are the allegories. In The Seventh Seal Bergman was challenged to represent an allegory of Death. According to his memoirs, he doubted whether his allegory could work. In the long run the image of a bald man in black cloth became one of the most enduring symbols of cinema. The stereotype is the derisive cartoonish representation of a group. They are the favourite subject of clowns and jesters, and they can be heard in the voices of many a cartoon. Scola's Ugly, dirty and bad (Scola, 1976) is a sarcastic take on Italian neorealism enacted by actors that incarnate stereotypes of criminals, prostitutes and matrons. A condition and a type are more elaborated characters, for they respond to particular traits of groups more or less accepted by society, e.g., the type of the American producer performed by Jack Palance in Godard's Contempt (1963.) A role is the representation of the member of a trade or profession, e.g., a student, a watchman or a doctor. An actor is a role with unique special responsibility, such as King Henry VIII in A man of all Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966.) The complexity of the character is greater in the humour, the caractre and the individual. The humour is a character that responds to a very particular temperament,
such as Welles' Othello (1952.) The humour of a psychopathic murderer was masterly enacted by Heath Ledger in Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008.) The caractre corresponds to a character that acts according to a very particular belief, such as Patton in Schaffner's Patton (1970.) The individual has a world of his own, as Charles Foster Kane.
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48 Each story demands particular types of characters. Such election determines the mood and style of the film. The characters of cinema may vary from the stereotypes of the Kusta Rica's clowns to the complex individuals of Forman's Amadeus (1985.) The construction of the character has become a prolific subject of inquiry amongst modern scholars. Characters are made of wants (what does s/he want?) and lacks (what does s/he lack?) A character, indeed, should have a clear intention in mind. There are not aimless characters, for even a tram will have a goal, e.g., the desire of Malone, the hero of a Beckett's eponymous novel, who just wants to be let alone. Some actors demand biographies of the characters with the script. In order to
understand the complexity of the character we can make use of the Johari window, created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955, a model that reveals the internal and external manifestations of the characters.
Fig. 12. Johari window.
1. Open/free area 3. Hidden area
2. Blind area 4. Unknown area
The window represents four rooms. Room 1 is the part of ourselves that we see and others also see. Room 2 is the aspects that others see but we are not aware of. Room 3 is the most mysterious room, where the soul remains invisible to us and to the world. Room 4 is our private space. Let's apply such concept to the character of Salieri, interpreted by Abraham Murray in Amadeus:
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Fig. 12. Salieri's personality according to the Johari window.
1. Open/free area: Friendly, calm, prudent 3. Hidden area: Wrathful, murderous, mad
2. Blind area: Flatterer, boring, egocentric 4. Unknown area: Jealous, deceitful, revengeful
The most commented screenwriting paradigm has been formulated by Syd Field.
Figure 13. The Syd Field Paradigm.
ACT I Minute 1 SETUP
Plot point 1
ACT II
Plot point 2 Minute 90-95
ACT III
Minute 24 -30 Minute 30 CONFRONTATION
RESOLUTION
Syd Field's paradigm is but a variation of Gustav Freytag's triangle, formulated in 1863 after Aristotle's "Poetics." Syd Field effectively sorted out the imperfections of Freytag's model. The Climax, for instances, should be shifted to the very end of the tragedy.
Figure 14. Freytag's Diagram
Raising action Inciting incident EXPOSITION
CLIMAX
Falling Action Dnoument RESOLUTION
Freytag's diagram was also very much influenced by Newton's third law of
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50 motion: "Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it." It takes two external forces to present the plot points or turning points of the dramatic story. Aristotle called them peripeteia (,) which in ancient Greek translates reversal of fortune. In any undisturbed story there is a disturbance, a force that deviates the plot from the normal course of action. Forces are unleashed either by the will of a character or by fate. Hamlet, Hedda Gabler and Caligula are characters that unleash the forces of their own tragedies, in contrast with figures who had to stand the strokes of fate, e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Pearl S. Buck's The Mother, Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (fig. 7.) The skill of a screenwriter can be measured by his/her ability to create conflict within a conflict; descriptions of scenarios and props, actions and dialogues are presented as elements of conflict. Tension, the barometer of conflict, requires of suspense. I call suspense the feeling of impotence shared by the viewers of a film. For the suspense writer or filmmaker a plain story is never good enough. He secretly believes that people are delighted to be scared while watching a horror film, and with nightmarish representations drive spectators into fear. Such screenwriters must be tormenting and tantalizing. Eternal thirst is the punishment for those who drink from the waters of the future, for water recedes. We may know that the inspector of Psycho is going to the murdered by a member of the Bates Family, but there is nothing we can do. We are merely spectators. But such feeling of impotence could have been overshadowed in intensity by the sense of guilt shared by the first spectators of Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946,) who were forced to believe that the glass of milk that the heroine was about to drink was poisoned.
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51 There are three possible narrative points of view: first-person view, when a single narrator relates the story; second-person view, when the narrator addresses the reader; third-person view, when an unknown voice, often associated to the author of the narration, chronicles the conflicts of the story. A combination of two or three POV is also possible. Screenwriters are often constrained to the third-person view by the very dynamics of filmmaking. Hollywood has socialized such practice. Less constrained than literature, cinema possesses a ubiquitous point of view by virtue of its iconic nature. Let's take for instance Dracula (Tim Browning, 1930,) a film that echoes the ubiquitous POV of the original novel by Bram Stoker. The camera follows first events from the eye of Jonathan Harker. Then we see events from the eye of Nina Harker. The final scenes of the film follow closely the life of Doctor Van Helsing. Scenes shot from the viewpoint of Count Dracula are scant. After the theme, the idea and the plot of the film, a screenwriter writes the outline or synopsis of the screenplay: a summary with beginning, middle and end that in simple present tense chronicles the events of the incoming film. Though most producers are happy to get a one-page synopsis or outline, there are production companies that require a more detailed synopsis. In such event screenwriters write a treatment or four pages or more. Mario Puzo wrote first Coppola's The Godfather (1964) as a treatment for a film. Deductive screenwriters write then the Scene Cards or scaletta (the Italian word for ladder.) They both conform the presentation of the entire screenplay into scenes, each of them briefly described. Such summary should include the time, the space, the main characters and the action of the scene. The Scene Cards are written in small card-board post-cards. They have an advantage: screenwriters can play with them at will, in order to
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52 reorganize the structure of the script before the writing of the first draft. If structure is the skeleton that supports action and narration, dialogue is the blood of drama. Conversation shouldn't be informative, but provoking. A screenwriter should agree with Guilles Deleuze prescription: all dialogues are schizophrenic. An informative dialogue such as as:
BLANCHE.- Hello. My name is Blanche. STANLEY.- Hello. I'm Stanley.
Is represented with greater tension by Kazan in A Streetcar named Desire (1949) as:
BLANCHE.- You must be Stanley. I'm Blanche. STANLEY.- Oh, you're Stella's sister.
These are some tips compiled from different sources on the craft of screenwriting: 1. Visualize a scene in terms of images and physical movements; then write it. 2. Describe the actions in short sentences, written in simple present tense of the indicative mood. 3. Write in concrete terms. Avoid abstractions that don't belong to the visual representation of the screenplay. 4. Don't create isolated characters. Each actor should be included in at least two scenes of the film.
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53 5. Reduce the number of characters; many actions executed by extras can be executed by secondary characters. 6. Props and gadgets that play a decisive role in the story should be presented at the beginning of the play. 7. Conceive dialogues that haven't been heard before. 8. As for the extension of the dialogues: a page should be abridged in a paragraph; a paragraph in a sentence; a sentence in a word. 9. Start the screenplay with a scene of expectation that won't be answered before the middle of the film. 10. Don't procrastinate conflicts for more than 5 minutes. If necessary, create new sub-conflicts. 11. Write wordless scenes every four minutes. 12. Use software for screenwriting and film production such as celtx. Screenwriting software provides the margins, conventions and fonts for creative dramatic writing, as inherited from the silent film era. They are automatically set up for each new document, be it for theatre, film or TV. The frame is a scene that at the beginning of the film presents an outline of the scenes to be screened. As such it anticipates conflicts to come. Frames are organic, and should be distinguished from the map, which is an artificial outline of the film. A map is an external guide that categorizes conflicts according to particular topics. The frame is presented within the film, a single scene or sequence that tells audiences what can they expect from the film, e.g., the film projection before the father and his mistress in Murnau's Tartuffe (1925) The most celebrated frame in cinema is the newsreel sequence
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54 at the beginning of Citizen Kane. Narrated in voice over, Welles presents in News on the March a synthesis of the life of Charles Foster Kane. Then and only then we are introduced to the main conflict of the film: What does Rosebud mean? At the beginning of Bertolucci's Novecento (1976,) we see a couple slaughtered by peasants. The entire film is an effort to understand the circumstances of such killing, an echo of the killings of Mussolini and his lover during the Second World War. Frames can also appear as the end of a previous conflict, as in For your Eyes Only (1981,) they can be a footnote in history, as in Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941.) In the detective genre, frames are often triggered by the sight of what appears to be a cadaver, e.g., the girl lying on the grass at the beginning of Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989;) the finger besides the cadaver of the father in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986.) Maps can be featured in the title of the film, as in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003.) Maps are an effective tool to counterweight the dramatic deficiencies of disjointed films. Frames and maps are often presented in the first five minutes of the film. They produce a sense of expectation comparable to that felt after watching a film trailer.
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3. Acting In 1965, Grotowski recognized theatre had lost ground before film and TV: "No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to TV and film27... the theatre must recognize its own limitations. If it cannot be richer than the cinema, then let it be poor. If it cannot be a technical attraction, let it renounce all outward technique.28" Cogitating on such limitations, Grotowski unfold a new approach to theatrical representation. The increasing demands of naturalism were surrendered to the film industry, and not without a hint of irony, the aesthetics of Poor Theatre were applauded by the press. As Aeschylus, as Shakespeare and Moliere, Grotowski gave the utmost importance to the actor. There is no theatre without acting, for there is acting and only acting that makes the world a stage: can the theatre exist without costumes and sets? Yes, it can. Can it exist without music to accompany the plot? Yes. Can it exist without lighting effects? Of course. And without text? Yes But can the theatre exist without actors? I know of no example of this. Dramatic art is: what takes place between spectator and actor29. Grotowskis remark is also a definition of 20th-century cinema, where celebrities and stars are dearer to the mass public than the plots of the films they watch. Aristotle sensed dramatic art was properly born the day Aeschylus introduced the
27 28
Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre, p. 19. Ibid., p.41. 29 Ibid., p.32.
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56 second actor on the stage. The legacies of the great Greek as both playwright and theatre director were, as Borges beautifully pointed out, not only the whispers of Electra, but also the protests of Pedro Crespo, the roars of King Lear and the tears of Uncle Vania. A naturalistic representation of dramatic relationships, cinema is no less indebted to Aeschylus. The tears of Charlotte and the desolation of Charles Foster Kane owe as much to the mastery of the close-up and the depth of field, as to the ancient craft of acting. Film relies on actors. Abstract films and video-art are not exceptions to the rule; their directors are the new puppeteers of images and sounds. We experience the omnipresence of actors in abstract forms, as we experience the omnipresence of artists in object trouvs. Some spectators may discover players in the textures and shapes of Viking Eggeling's Symphonie Diagonale (1924); most of them, though, will struggle to make sense of the film, turning the director's sensitivity into the main actor of the film. The widespread use of the Voice of God in mainstream documentaries also corroborate the ascendancy of the actor. Certainly, cinema is not only about acting. All possible images are an integral part of its universe. But even a landscape or a desert must be imagined or seen by somebody. In ontological terms any man is an observer of our lives, or as Berkeley put it esse est percipi (To be is to be perceived.) Samuel Beckett's Film (1965) expresses best this precondition; along ten minutes Buster Keaton desires a state of non-existence, hiding himself from the world. Having confronted animated and unanimated objects, as well as the photographic symbols of his past, he confronts in awe the presence of the universal observer, an entity incarnated, alas, by Buster Keaton! Actors are hired spokesmen of the thoughts and feelings of a poet. A persona--
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57 following the Latin etymology, is designed to project the voice of its original speaker: per-sonare (to sound through.) Cinema, the Parnassus of modernity, places the actor on the spotlight, embellishing her with patterns of light and shadow, rich scenarios, costumes, decors and the melodious voice of music. Film scores acquired growing importance during the fall of the silent era. The advent of sound prompted an arduous romance between music and filmmaking, and silver screens were flooded with singers, players and dancers. Unfortunately dialogue took ascendancy over music. Film, still a bachelor, married the Word with the connivance of audiences and producers. With the uninterrupted exception of India, musical scores lost ground in the 1960s, and singers and dancers were discreetly dismissed. Composers never gave up, though. With the dignity of a dethroned Queen, music was appointed as the ideal spectator, the rightful incarnation of the Ancient Greek Chorus. We long, indeed, to see all the events in the universe represented on a screen. Shakespeare and Calderon found the purpose of our world in representation. Centuries later, from an academic perspective, John Huizinga presented to a world on the brink of destruction, compelling proofs of the playful nature of war. Life is a play, and the role played by the actors that nourish our dreams can't be underestimated. They are what we are and what we are not. As Johnny Deep and Scarlet Meryl Strip speak, we talk to them in our minds. The intensity of their emotions make them no only spiritual, but also beautiful and loyal. We really share the anger of Richard Harris, the evilness of Anthony Hopkins, the anguish of Peter Sellers and the madness of Heath Ledger. It is true that we feel as we live, but only actors can teach us the color and the
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58 intensity of our feelings. As we may expect from a true friend, actors never hide their secrets. We can see them crying, making love and even talking to themselves. Brook, whose writings were greatly influenced by Grotowskis work, judges a theatre director by his actors' performance. But The Empty Space is more than an admirable attempt to understand the clichs in the creative process of an actor. Brook's essay is also a manifest against the realistic atmosphere imposed by Stanislavski. Actors are also playmates. We may see them rising up to power, conquering nations, murdering enemies, but we also see them with a broken heart. They may kill us, and so we also kill them, but at the end all we know that such killings are not real. They are merely a play. Actors are the real priests of the world. As such they suffered so much poverty and humiliation before the discovery of cinema. And their moment came, and they became the idols of the crowd. Our admiration is based in the love we personally profess them, for by sharing their sufferings and joys with us, their public, we are allowed to feel each representation. What is acting? In the third book of "Republic", Plato distinguishes acting (: mimesis,) from narrative (: diegesis.) Mimesis can be translated first as imitation, and second as creation; that's to say, mimesis is never a copy of reality, but an interpretation. Aristotles prescribes in "Poetics" that the aim of art is the cleansing of the passions (.) In order to achieve it, the actor should imitate reality to the point that audiences identify his/her passions as their own. In "Hamlet" Shakespeare defines acting as a "dream of passion". I call acting the representation of emotions according to the expectations of a film
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59 director. Adoor Gopalakrishnan is emphatic on this issue: "[i]n movies, the actor is not performing to the audience like the stage actor. Here they are acting for me. I am the audience and I will decide whether it is correct or not, enough or not." It's true, as Gordon Craig wrote, that the art of an actor can't be compared to that of a painter or a poet. Actors are mostly instruments of ambitious writers or directors. George C Scott delivers in Patton (1970) one of the finest performances in the history of acting. The screenplay is as instrumental to his aims as it is the war in Europe and the personality of the general who defeated the Germans in 1945. What does the acting of George C Scott so remarkable? Most critics attribute his versatility to the virtuosity of his voice. But a grave voice is not enough to convey the array of emotions delivered by George C Scott. We see Patton as a man with a variety of feelings: his happiness in front on the ruins of Cartage and his fury while slapping a terrified soldier find no other equivalent in the film. We may see him again happy and angry, but he is able to produce different hues of these emotions. He displays a controlled rage while begging to command an army in Europe, and his happiness when the good weather improves after his prayers should rather be defined as satisfaction. Schopenhauer believed there was one of two main feelings to be articulated in a given relationship: pity or envy. He advise his readers to pity the others: "I should be inclined to lay down the following rule: When you come into contact with a man, no matter whom, do not attempt an objective appreciation of him according to his worth and dignity. Do not consider his bad will, or his narrow understanding and perverse ideas; as the former may easily lead you to hate and the latter to despise him; but fix your attention only upon his sufferings, his needs, his anxieties, his pains. Then you will always feel
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60 your kinship with him; you will sympathise with him; and instead of hatred or contempt you will experience the commiseration that alone is the peace to which the Gospel calls us. The way to keep down hatred and contempt is certainly not to look for a mans alleged dignity, but, on the contrary, to regard him as an object of pity. The Buddhists, as the result of the more profound views which they entertain on ethical and metaphysical subjects, start from the cardinal vices and not the cardinal virtues" Schopenhauer, Arthur, Human Nature. According to Schopenhauer observation opposite poles: all emotions oscillate between two
A___________________________________________________Z
Where A and Z are the black and white of the colour spectrum of emotions. The task of an actor is that of revealing as more colours or feelings as possible between A and Z. There are as many emotions in the souls as colours in the spectrum, even if most actors and spectators assume them to be five or six. Language also proves the point. Whereas a linguist may define wrath, ire, anger, choler and fury as synonyms, an actor should struggle to find their nuances. Actors are overall consummated observers. Out of such observations they adapt their minds and bodies to lives of their own invention. "[Helen Mirren] was on a panel with him [Depardieu] once at the Sundance festival, and he said something which changed the way she felt about acting. Asked how he approaches a role, Depardieu replied: "I look at the page. If it says 'gangster', I play a gangster. If it says 'shopkeeper', I
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61 play a shopkeeper." Mirren claps her hands. "A light bulb went on in my brain. I thought, 'That's it! Just play what's on the page.' I've followed that ever since. If it says, 'Over-thehill, angry woman with no makeup gets out of bed,' that's what I'll play. I don't mess it up with, 'What's her back story?'" Interview to The Guardian, March 3, 2011. On the previous chapter we discussed the 11 degrees of reality of a given character according to Patrick Pavis. Actors can also benefit from the knowledge of Pavi's categorization. We can see the most superficial performances in the types of Fellini, Scorcese or Scola, and the most complex characters in individuals such as Salieri from Amadeus (Forman, 1985) or Schlinder from Schlinder's List (Spielberg, 1993.) Each film demands particular interpretations from actors. The mood of a film is determined by them. In an era of convivial diversity, we can no longer consider individuals superior to types. Critically acclaimed films such as Amarcord (Fellini, 1973) and Ugly, dirty and bad (Scola, 1976) are performed by actors that play criminal types. The intensity of the clowns and types of these films may even surpass the subtle individualities of Rope (Hitchcock, 1948.) A film with diverse levels of characterization might be discontinuous and incongruous. Melodramas and soap-operas follow this trend when they combine Method actors with types and clowns.
Uta Hagen there has expounded two predominant acting styles: formalistic acting, based on predetermined gestures and clichs, and realistic acting, triggered by intimate emotions of the actor. The archetype, the stereotype and the type would require of a formalistic approach to acting, whereas the role, the actor, the humour, the caractre and
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62 the individual would rely more on the emotions of the player. Actors feel inside their minds and bodies. After the decline of the liberal arts, that's to say, of rhetoric and theology, the dichotomy between body and soul was revamped and incorporated into the history of acting by Constantine Stanislavski (1863 1938.) Through his writings Stanislavski refers to an internal and an external rhythm. Internal rhythm can be defined as the emotional rhythm a man has on a determined moment: the soul. External rhythm would be the visual manifestation of that rhythm: face and body. As rhythms are measured by conflict, audiences prefer extreme situations of survival, where we can appreciate in the greatest conflicts the most contrasted representations of rhythm. A minister accused of high treason should be reasonably upset in a trial at an interior level, whereas externally he should display a controlled countenance. Inversely, a murderer with an alibi in a trial may be internally without conflict, while breathing loudly and screaming externally in an effort to appear distressed to his judges. Good acting in terms of emotional intensity corresponds to the equation: I+c
_______________
E-c Where I = internal rhythm, E = external rhythm and c = conflict. Horace wrote in "Poetics": "Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi." "If you wish me to weep, you yourself must first feel grief." Such statement should be taken with a pinch of salt, for feelings that come into the body without internal conflict are often unbelievable. In The Field (Sheridan, 1990,) Richard Harris plays a patriarchal figure who at
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63 some point curst into tears. His performance is quite compelling, for we don't see as much his tears as his struggle to have a grip of himself. Players should never forget they are but competitors of a game. They are the selfappointed victims of a ritual that celebrates both victory and defeat. Arts differ from sports in that it has no winners. Actors, however, play the game with visible excitement. There is a sense of celebration in every movie, even in the darkest flicks. The enjoyment of a play is not in the score, but in its performance. Actors bring imaginary worlds into being. Players struggle to achieve the tension reserved to the players of the Maya ball game in which losers were sacrificed. Their imagination inspires fear or joy in their minds and bodies. The feelings of an actor are displayed in conflict with the desires of the audience, which longs for peace, love and prosperity. Huizinga was the first writer who emphasized our eagerness to win all challenges in life. Acting is also about wining. Homo Ludens watches plays and cinema, a source of inspiration for the performing of the play of his own life, where winning is a need. Stanislavski remains the most influential figure of acting theory. His style is anecdotic. He avoids clear-cut formulas, a fact that explains why his work has been reinterpreted by so many acting directors and academy professors. Overall he demands from the actor the feeling of sincere emotions while delivering his lines. A supple body, clear voice and demeanour are all important for the actor, but they are subordinated to emotions and imagination. By the end of his life, Stanislavski developed the method of Physical Actions, by which the actors' emotional intensity is triggered by the use of simple physical actions.
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64 As Proust, Stanislavski understood that memories were attached to emotions. He recommended actors to discover the variety of small physical actions and objects able to trigger memories powerful enough to stir the emotions of the player. Lee Strasberg (1901 - 1982) has become the most known of Stanislavski's interpreters, due to the celebrity of many of his students, e.g., James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman. Strasberg was for nearly 30 years the director of the Actor's Studio, an acting school set in New York, which is currently associated to the MFA program in Acting at Pace University. Strasberg developed The Method, a series of exercises based on Stanislavskys writings. The most important of them is the Emotional Memory, a technique designed to revive the traumatic moments in an actor's life, in order to sharpen his sensibility for incoming performances. Though the use of the Emotional Memory has been put under discussion, very few doubt the value of Strasberg's Method. As Tenessee Williams put it: "They [Strasberg's actors] act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life." Exercises of Emotional Memory should be understood in the context of a play. For actors imagine themselves in a sort of group psychological therapy. There is a guide who asks questions to a given patient in order to bring to his mind the emotional state of past events. Strasberg believes his technique can be extended to any artistic manifestation, and quotes Proust's " la recherche du temps perdu" (1913 - 1927.) Stanislavski developed then a double approach to acting in his writings: from the psyche and from the body. The first one, with further developments in America and the Method school of acting, was based on an internal generation of emotions. The second, dear to Meyerhold (1874 1940) and Gordon Craig (1872 1966,) prescribes that acting
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65 is very much determined by the body movements and gestures. The acting technique of Meyerhold blends psychological and physiological processes in order to apply learned gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion outwardly. Mesmer, another influential acting professor of Hollywood, prescribes, as Meyerhold, that emotions are also a product of the alterations of the body. Though contemporary cinema is more inclined to internal acting, we can see actors such as Jim Carrey who successfully employ outward acting in their performances. Comedy indeed is the best ground for external acting, and it's not mere coincidence that one of Meyerhold's aim was that of bringing the techniques of the Commedia dell'arte to modern representation. Craig's thoughts on acting may have influenced Strasberg's austerity. As Kuleshov, Craig believes actors are accessory to the action and the text of a play. Craig advocates the use of expressionless actors, akin to the puppets or the statues of ancient Egypt. And indeed to watch the pauses of acting in cinema is an experience quite similar to that of contemplating a portrait in photography. Actors become passive figures fulfilled in feelings and intentions by the imagination of their viewers, vey much under the influence of editing and music. Many actors maintain a psychologically dependent relationship with their couching directors. The French director Henri George Cluzot used to say that there were not bad actors, only bad directors, and on several occasions boasted he could make anyone a film actor. Cluzot's dictatorial methods paid almost dearly. Brigitte Bardot, one of her actresses, and eventually a cinema legend, became so entrapped in her character as she nearly emulated the storyline of La Vrit (1960.) As the character she had just
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66 performed, Bardot attempted to commit suicide.
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4. Direction
There is a freshness to Las Amigas (Le Amiche, 1955) that will always surprise new generations of moviegoers. An early feature by Michelangelo Antonioni, it introduces us to many of the key elements and themes explored in the directors later, more prestigious works. The search for Anna in Lavventura (1960) is a cinematic scheme to present the emptiness of her searchers, all of them unaware of the real nature of this character who is tortured by the dilemma of being or not being. Anticipating such a barren display of the soul, we witness, in Le Amiche, the traps of the maze of love, a motif tenderly exteriorised in the walk that Clelia and Tony take around the furniture shops of Torino. As in the novels of Stendahl, class and economics condition love. Antonionis mastery in Le Amiche is embodied by the harrowing performances of Madeleine Fischer (Rosetta) and Valentina Cortese (Nene.) Brought up on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Rosetta is a woman tortured by false conceptions of happiness, a figure who is very much unable to cope with solitude and disdain. In contrast, Nene is a practical girl who accepts that other women are more beautiful than her, with patience and suffering being her only obvious charms. There is also a poignant note on friendship contained in the brief snippets of dialogue sustained by the pair: for example, one of them declares Ill help you by leaving him. Ill be strong. But Antonionis genius is more evident in his elaborated and yet casual mise en scne. This is demonstrated in the
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68 sequence where Clelia recriminates the vanity of the richest woman in the group while various characters enter and leave the frame. The smoothness of Antonionis camera works imperceptibly. He plays with the spectators gaze until he is able to carve the right memorable image, such as when Clelia and Tony walk away from one another, leaving us in an open space with several blocks of derelict houses as depth-of-field. Antonioni was a passionate reader of Csare Pavese, the writer of "Tra donne sole" a short novel from which the director and his co-writers adapted their screenplay. Pointedly, Pavese, a poet who committed suicide, concluded his last diary entry with: No more words, only a gesture. In Le Amiche we sit before a film that is not merely a rhapsody of words, but an overall aesthetic gesture written in the form of a three-act suicide note. The opening shot of Torino introduces us to the life of a group of characters where love has no place. Clelia bluntly declares the films core premise in the seemingly idyllic scene on the train: Very few people can really be self-sufficient. We cant do without others. Its no use thinking you can. But such words only apply to the weak, as Lorenzo tragically points out in his excluding, yet very cruel: I dont need anyone. The dialogue is concise and spontaneous throughout Le Amiche. There are also lines that define characters in terms of an unbearable lightness; when Nene asks Mariella (Anna Maria Pancani) and what talents do you have? she answers, Me? Ask the guys. There are other lines in the film that seem to contain an entire relationship: I fell in love with you while you painted my portrait. You painted my face and it felt like you were caressing me. Lorenzo, indeed, has fallen in love with Rosettas image, whereas she is instead focused on the finest fibre of his nature, that region reserved for anger and inspiration.
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69 As in Lavventura and Leclisse (1962,) Antonionis scepticism about love is outlined in four stages: flirting, lovemaking, doubt and jealousy. But we dont know whether Rosetta intends to commit suicide because of the failure of love or blunt loneliness. Being itself is, in fact, the real sickness that afflicts all of Antonionis main characters. They are never connected to their lovers. They are aboard themselves, as Colombian novelist Eduardo Zalamea Borda put it in another context30. Le Amiches Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti) is a mediocre artist who finds a lover to support him; Mariella, a shallow girl who seeks many men, longing for the attention of both those who are immediately present and those just beyond her reach, stating, for example, tell me if there is a woman prettier than me in the next room?. But the most intriguing character in this exceptional film is Momina (Yvonne Furneaux,) a beautiful woman separated from her rich husband. A pre-incarnation of the most cynical of characters in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1960,) she is cleverly summed up by Clelia towards the end of the film: You play with the emotions of the others as if they were of your kind. You, who dont even know the nature of emotions. Directors must understand overall the psychology of the actor. They are in fact, father figures and tutors of those willing to expose their feelings to the crowd. Erich Fromm sharply distinguishes the love of the father from that of the mother: "The relationship to father is quite different. Mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean; father does not represent any such natural home. He has little connection with the child in the first years of its life, and his importance for the child in this early period cannot be compared with that of mother. But while father does not represent the natural world, he represents the other pole of human existence; the world of thought, of
30
Zalamea Borda, Eduardo, 4 aos a bordo de m mismo (Medelln, Bedout, 1982.
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70 man-made things, of law and order, of discipline, of travel and adventure. Father is the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into the world... Closely related to this function is one which is connected with socio-economic development. When private property came into existence, and when private property could be inherited by one of the sons, father began to look for that son to whom he could leave his property. Naturally, that was the one whom father thought best fitted to become his successor, the son who was most like him, and consequently whom he like the most. Fatherly love is conditional love. Its principle is "I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me." In conditional fatherly love we find, as with unconditional motherly love, a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect is the very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be lost if one does not do what is expected. In the nature of fatherly love lies the fact that obedience becomes the main virtue, that disobedience is the main sin - and its punishment the withdrawal of fatherly love. The positive side is equally important. Since his love is conditioned, I can do something to acquire it, I can work for it; his love is not out side of my control as motherly love is31." Their paternalistic gifs give them an aura of leadership. Hours before dying, Orson Welles confessed a bewildered audience that a film director was a fellow able to perform many other tasks in life. Someone with exceptional qualities, a maker of dreams or nightmares in the fields of imagination, but also, on this account, an enfant terrible, a rebel against injustice in a society reluctant to excesses of creativity. Most film directors are imperfect copies of the prototype of the absolute leader of the play. Applying Plato's simile, they are the captains of the ships. In the same way a
31
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 34.
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71 captain is responsible for taking a cargo from one port to another, avoiding internal and external dangers such as storms, seditions and shipwreck, thus a film director is responsible to direct and bring a screenplay to conclusion, avoiding internal and external dangers such as delays, lacks of funds and failure. As Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective of Edgar Allan Poe, a film director should be both a mathematician and a poet. He must display technical knowledge and lyrical inspiration, a man or woman able to execute images and sounds with a preconceived vision of the film. S/he should also be an expert administrator and coordinator, a manager able to cope with many people at the same time under considerable strain.
From an ideological standpoint a drama can be dialectic or rhetorical. Dialectical when it exposes the flaws of a political system, rhetorical when it conceals them or ignores them. This distinction, formulated by Aristotle, bears the double-edge sword of ideology. In his early study on the birth of tragedy, Nietzsche, very much under the ideology of the French Revolution, placed the patriarchal warlike arguments of Aeschylus' characters over the pacifist discourses of Euripides'. Having elucidated the archaeology of modern scholarship, Michael Foucault confessed in an interview to be a possible victim of the main prejudices of his own age. Ideology appears as a hydra, with unexpected consequences. As mainstream filmmaking is presented as an industry, most films are but displays of rhetorical figures. As early as 1947 the school of Frankfurt dismissed cinema as mere entertainment, free of economical and political connotations: value judgements are taken either as
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72 advertising or as empty talk. Accordingly ideology has been made vague and noncommittal, and thus neither clearer nor weaker. Its very vagueness, its almost scientific aversion from committing itself to anything which cannot be verified, acts as an instrument of domination32. George Bernard Shaw went as far as to denounce the idiocy of any artist unable to discuss the politics of his/her work. Venturing into modern linguistics, Shaw related his invective to the Greek prefix i = non, and the verb dioto = concern with domestic issues. For most of the 20th century the worldwide influence of the American producers shaped ideology and morals. A compromise was made with the intelligentsia, and the cinema of Welles, Chaplin or Huston came to light. Such deed would have not been feasible without the efficiency of the Hollywood studio system33. As artists unveil ideology, they pave the way for a different world. Henryk Ibsen endured fierce criticism after "A Doll's House," his play in prose, opened with an avantgarde ending. After experiencing her husband selfishness and conceit, Norma Helmer forsakes her family. Rhetorical films share the variations of the Manichaean and submissive ethical structures of narration. All tragic films are dialectical by virtue of their solemnity34. As in theatre, dialectical films are often the cause of controversy and violence. On the day after Buuel's L'Age d'or was released, two right-wing vigilante groups, the Patriot's League and the Anti-Jewish League stormed the theatre, hurling ink and rotten eggs at the movie screen, setting off teargas and stink bombs. The surrealist published a manifesto condemning the incident, while the leftist press came to Buuel's defense. Le Figaro,
32 33
Adorno and Horkheimer, Op. cit., p. 147. See Carrington, Robert, The Making of Citizen Kane (UCP, 1996) 34 See chapter 9.
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73 meanwhile, dismissed the film as an exercise of Bolshevism. Dialectical directors are often martyrs of their craft: Eisenstein, Keaton, Chaplin, Welles, Fassbinder, Passolini. Welles' Citizen Kane received nine nominations for the 1941 Academy Awards; as William Randolph Hearstthe American tycoon whose life resembled Kane's, ordered the editors of his newspapers and magazines to hamper the distribution of the film, the actors, producers and crews of Hollywood closed ranks against Welles. He lost for best picture, best actor and best director before an audience that booed his work. Citizen Kane received a single Oscar for best screenplay and was discreetly shelved in the RKO vaults. The protectors of the status quo may also understand that complaisance deadens dissent. Wenders' Alice in den Stdten (Alice in the Cities, 1973) was promoted by the very media that one of Wenders' characters calls "inhuman." By that time Mark Robson had already denounced boxing as a pernicious sport in The Harder They Fall (1956.) But, as in Hamlet, we are before spectators who no longer expect lectures on morality from a play. The denunciation of Nazism, which Chaplin represented with sarcasm in The Great Dictator (1940) is laughing matter before the faade of political conformity. Today very few would discuss the duties of a film director. We see them on TV organizing crew members and asking actors to perform in front of heavy lighting equipment. A philosopher of cinema, though, must reflect on the principles that define the profession. Film directors are not obliged to write their own plays, as it used to be in Ancient Greece and 17th-century France. Omitting, therefore, screenwriting, we find five particular tasks assumed by film directors:
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74 1. Hiring his crew. 2. Mise-en-scne: directing actors' movements and performances. 3. Supervising art direction. 4. Mise-en-scne: Directing crew members. 5. Supervising the editing of the film. Directors with lack of experience often delegate up to three of these tasks to fellow directors or crewmembers. Eisenstein, for instance, came to conclude that the aim of film was determined by montage. Carl Dreyer of Elia Kazan would dissent; for them cinema relied on the actors' performance. George Lucas, by contrast, proved the ascendancy of art direction. The mise-en-scne is divided in two simultaneous moments: 1. The factual mise-en-scne: where actors move and act in a real space according to the directions of the director. 2. The virtual mise-en-scne: where cameramen capture excerpts of the factual mise-en-scne in a two-dimensional square space. The factual mise-en-scne relies on the intellectual and emotional rapport between actors and film directors. Ideas and feelings are put into action before a lens. In an interview at the Actors Studio Johnny Deep expressed his lack of interests on his films. For Deep acting is an art reduced to the factual mise-en-scne. What directors do with his image in the virtual mise-en-scne appeared not to be his main concern. Indeed Most
actors affirm that acting for theatre is more rewarding that performing in a film. After a play has premiered, the stage player performs his character in chronological real time. The film star, by contrast, is obliged to cut his/her inspiration according to the will of a
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75 director. We can discern eight steps in the preparation of a factual mise-en-scne: 1.1. Casting: The playwright George Bernard Shaw was right when he
recommended that casting should not be based only on physical appearances, but also on the relationships of voice tonality. e.g., casting a baritone, a tenor and a bass as the main characters of "Othello". 1.2. Reading and analysis: where actors and directors understand the basic meaning of each word and sentence while discussing the interpretation of the text. This step sets up the mood of the film. Radford's The Merchant of Venice (2004) with Al Pacino presents a Shylock very different from the previous cinema versions of the play. Until then the Jew had been interpreted by tradition as a wicked miser, Pacino's Shylock is a sympathetic character, and we can understand his actions as motivated by the segregation of his contemporaries. The director is advised to study in detail the screenplay with his/her actors. They should understand in detail the nuances of meaning of their character's words. Understanding the screenplay is not enough, though. They also should provide a sociological context to their characters. 1.3. Games: Huysimas's most widely read work "Homo Ludus" was published during the triumphant years of cinema. Games are present in all institutions and events, making the world a playing ground. Imagination is the key to artistic creativity. Games are also the primal expression of a newly shaped society. Shared comradeship creates a lasting impression amongst artists. After two or three games most actors open up. 1.4. Improvisations: Spontaneous variations on the written plot, improvisations
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76 are pivotal in the process of interpreting the text. Directors encourage actors to repeat, diversify and multiply their emotions. Colourful representation of emotions pave the way for acceptable performances. 1.5. Movement directions: A line of action is an imaginary axis drawn before an actor for the movement of his sight, his face or his body during the shooting of a scene. Movement directions should be imparted by social and psychological observation. They are, as Stanislavsky understood, physical actions, and by affecting the nervous system they influence considerably an actor's performance. We define a plane as a surface with infinite lines. Cinema is screened over a plane. A film director works then over infinite lines. A director owns an infinity of lines of action in a single space. The master piece of Albrecht Aldorfer "The Battle of Issus" explores the endless possibilities of the aesthetics of a single shot. Troops from all the corners of the world are seen marching in a tableaux. Armies, cities, mountains, oceans, lakes, winds, skies and a majestic sun find a proper place into a colourful composition in which the universe appears to contemplate itself, as in a mirror. By enriching the depth of field, filmmakers brought into cinema the universe of painting. But whereas painting is obliged to fix a still movement for eternity, a factual mise-en-scne organizes simultaneous movements in a limited space. The movements refer to the physical actions of the actors in the set. These movements are never chaotic, but choreographed or orchestrated. An actor, indeed, is akin to a musical instrument. 1.6. Text interpretation: once the movement directions are set up, directors should
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77 concentrate into achieving an interpretation in agreement with the concepts and feelings established during the analysis of the text. 1.7. Rhythm variations: Each actor should display an internal and external rhythm according to his/her particular interpretation of his character. Plays where all main
characters act with the same rhythm become tedious. If a capable actor should be able to alter the rhythm of his own performance, a capable director should be able to diversify the rhythms of actors interacting with one another. The only flaw of a flawless film such as Gosdford Park (2001) may be the actors' performance as a whole, with very light variations of rhythm. 1.8. Relationships: In the arena of theatre, Stanislavski gives importance to the concept of "communion", which refers to communication amongst actors. In the same way a writer is trying to capture the attention of his reader by illustrating his concepts with examples, thus an actor should make all possible efforts to capture the real attention of the characters he is addressing in drama. There are actors who are just happy to deliver their lines, without making any effort to check whether their words are being heard or not by their interlocutors. Whereas in real life we might find people who are indolent to the emotions of the other, we look for actors able to perceive as many emotions as possible in a drama. Emotional nuances determine the impact of a film. The virtual mise-en-scne has four stages: 2.1. Storyboard: The storyboard depicts the movements between characters and objects in particular scenarios. Jean Mitry was right to point out that the montage was not done, as Eisenstein prescribed, in postproduction, but in preproduction. Many directors in the Indian industry, for instance, prefer to ignore this step, as they shoot without
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78 storyboard. This procedure is certainly viable by following the rules of TV studio productions, such as the respect for the 180 axis. Nonetheless, such decision often impoverishes the cinematography of the film. The German expressionist used the term angles for innovative shots. Orson Welles, coined the last greatest expressionist of cinema, is a director that still surprises new generations of viewers by his bold use of angles. 2.2. Scouting locations: Most settings please the eyes rather than the intellect. Every director of photography understands that his choice of frame is also an output of culture and technology. But we no longer believe in the permanence of culture and technology. The language of the voyeur, the paparazzi and the TV news reporter have been incorporated into cinema via documentary. What counts is not the composition of the space, but the choreography of objects that coexist within the frame. 2.3. Shooting: When the storyboard is carefully followed, the technicalities of shooting are just a matter of execution. The final performance of the actors, however, requires all the attention from the director and the script assistant. The director asks actors to perform their takes once and again until their performance achieves an outstanding level. The script assistant in charge of continuity. We are all watchers of movies, and as such we expect movement within a film. But movement is not a privilege of the observer, that's to say, of the lens. The films by Ozu are static frames in which actors perform elaborated choreographies and movements. Directors of photography face already a world that has been put in motion by the inspiration of the director of the factual mis-en-scene. A torn shot may appear as a postcard to new viewers. It occurs when a subject
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79 crosses the frame from side to side within a static shot. Slow movement become the subject within these frames, e.g., the clouds crossing the moon and the screen in Un Chien Andalou. 2.4. Editing; where the mise-en-scne can be altered, cut, dubbed or replaced in the editing bench. Not only bad takes can be corrected in the postproduction stage. A weak delivery or a chilling voice can be corrected or replaced by ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement.)
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5. Ideology A clear distinction between tragedy and comedy dominated the stage of the ancient world. The biblical adaptations of the medieval times, represented during the holidays in front of the churches, combined tragedy and comedy, giving birth to modern dramaturgy:
The mixture of tragedy with comedy Will make an earnest part, another funny; A variety that most people like 36.
Originally conceived as an analysis of tragedy, the technical descriptions of "Poetics" suited both the dramatic sensitivity of the Elizabethan theatre and the technical challenges of the golden-age of Spanish literature theatre. D. W. Lucas writes on this issue: ... as the subject of a book it would recall the , the Handbook of Rhetoric; the purpose of this books, which had been in existence for a century or more..., was to teach the art of speaking, but [Poetics' object] is mainly to define the nature and function of poetry, though instructions for the poet are included37. Aristotle realized that originality of poetry could be traced in
Lo trgico y lo cmico mezclado () harn grave una parte, otra ridcula, que aquesta variedad deleita mucho. Vega, Lope de, El Nuevo Arte de Hacer Comedias, 174 - 178. 37 D.W Lucas, appendix to Aristotle's Poetics, p. 53.
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81 the structure of the play, rather than in the beauty of the verses: It clearly follows that the poet or 'maker' should be the maker of plots rather than of verses (Poet., 9)38. Based on his own experience as spectator of Greek poetry, epic and drama, Aristotle deduced a series of narrative principles, widely spread in the academic circles of Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Cordoba, Istanbul, Paris and Beverly Hills. The reputation of Poetics can be attributed to its sharp description of the elements of drama, but also to its apparent lack of interest on an ethics of narration. Although Aristotle distinguishes the dialectics of the older poets from the rhetoric of the contemporary (Poet., 6,) he abstains from any further analysis on the subject and refers the reader to his treatise on "Rhetoric39," in which he defines rhetoric as a halfdialectic, half-deceiving reasoning referred to ethics and politics (Rhet., 1, 2)40. Contrary to Plato, Aristotle did not write about the effects of poetry on children's education. "Poetics" mainly describes the internal mechanisms of dramaturgy, giving special attention to the emotions aroused by the spectacle. As a result Aristotelian aesthetics, divested from ethics, deteriorated the social role of creativity during the centuries to come. When at the beginning of the 19th-century Benjamin Constant advocated an art for art's sakeL'art pour l'art, he was merely formalizing the ideology of "Poetics41." Cinema, a sub-product of the industrial revolution, evolved as an art for the mass, but only exceptionally as an art about the mass. Without interest to debate the effects of mechanized art upon society, the early producers and directors of commercial cinema
Aristotle, Poetics, tran. S. H. Butcher. "Concerning Thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs" (Poet., 19) 40 Aristotle, Rhetoric. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "partly like dialectic, partly like sophistical reasoning" (Rhet., 1,4) 41 Oscar Wilde popularized this expression The Critic as Artist, pp. 948-998.
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38
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82 quickly embraced the formalistic precepts of "Poetics." Television distinguishes from other media not only by its global coverage, but also by its visual continuity: a legacy of the Hollywood studio production system. News-reports, soap operas, TV commercials, travel documentaries and music video-clips are all visual stories with a beginning, middle and end. In spite of his manifest animadversion towards spectacle42, Aristotle refers to frenetic music and special effects as means able to arouse through pity and fear the catharsis () (Poet., 14,) that is, the pleasure of the play. The lines assigned to the chorus in a tragedy are usually conveyed in song accompanied by rhythmical movement. Music is described as an embellishment of language. Aristotle lists spectacle last in order of importance, pointing out that the power of tragedy is not fully dependent upon its performance (we can read a tragedy and still appreciate its message,) and that the art of the spectacle really belongs to the set designer and not to the poet. It would be prolix to establish how many mainstream screenwriters conceive their plots according to the precepts of "Poetics." Aristotle's analysis on tragedy is deductive; his observations are still valid for the playwrights and spectators of today. Any spectacle, any entertainment, encourages creativity. Contrary to Plato, Aristotle pays little attention to poetic inspiration. As the scholastics rightly understood, Aristotle's pretended vindication of poetry is rather a satire against Plato. Plato didn't intend to exclude the poets from the Republic, but rather to establish a rigorous censorship on poetry in conformity with a warlike educational policy. Aristotle becomes more rigid than his tutor does when he reduces the function of the poet and the historian to that of making of plots. Susan Sontag
42 "The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry... Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet" (Poet., 6)
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83 grasps the ideology of Poetics when she writes: When Aristotle said that poetry was more philosophical than history, he was justified insofar as he wanted to rescue poetry, that is, the arts, from being conceived as a type of factual, particular, descriptive statement. But what he said was misleading insofar as it suggests that art supplies something like what philosophy gives us: an argument43." We may add that by calling poetry philosophical44, and by stating that it bends towards the universal, Aristotle achieves what Plato was unable to achieve through his arguments: to establish the superiority of philosophy over poetry. The poet is thus condemned to the arena of divertimento. The arduous debates in the universities of Italy, Spain, England and France about the unity of tragedy, its duration and its purpose, were a direct aftermath of the Aristotelian subordination of drama to dialectics. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century Novalis was able to re-establish the harmony between philosophy and poetry. Aristotle underrates the poets who value versification over plot-making, praise those who attempt to emulate the philosophers and ends up calling all of them gifted or insane. His praise or satire alludes to the ability of the poet for writing discourses incompatible with each other within a single play, that is, of severing truth in a random number of certainties. Reluctant to analyze a discourse that rejects universal laws, Aristotle centres his analysis in the emotions: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation (,) of these emotions (Poet.,6.) Based on passage of "Politics," in which Aristotle mentions catharsis once again, the interpreters of the renaissance understood drama either as a therapeutic process or as an ethical action, which, as happens with music, would strengthen the citizen's disposition towards terror
43 44
Sontag, Susan, On Style, in Against Interpretation, p. 15. (Poet., 9)
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84 and compassion45. But refers primarily to the climax, that is, to the resolution of the tragedy's main conflict. Aristotle describes drama as a pleasant experience, far more intense than reading and declamation: And superior it [tragedy] is, because it has an the epic elements- it may even use the epic meter- with the music and spectacular effects as important accessories; and these produce the most vivid of pleasures (poet., 26). The hedonic aspect of drama was also vindicated by Bertold Brecht: Thus, what the ancients, following Aristotle, demanded of tragedy is nothing higher or lower than that it should entertain people... [] is performed not only in a pleasurable way, but precisely for the purpose of pleasure46. The assumption that or the cleansing of the passions, happens during the climax of the drama, contrasts with the ubiquitous definition of included in the 'Tractatus Coisliniamus'a text arguable attributed to Aristotle, in which occurs after each laugh: Comedy catharsis of such emotions47. 'Poetics' constitutes a reformulation of poetry. Aristotle insists in the etymology of the word ( from : to make to fabricate,) in order to define poets as makers of plots. Once he has established the ideal length of a play, Aristotle places Homer, the official poet of Athens, in a rank inferior to Aeschylus and Sophocles. The art () of composing versesstill present in the definition of tragedy, is excluded from the list of constitutive elements of drama: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious in language embellished [which] must have six parts Plot, Character, Diction, Thought,
Torquato Tasso, nonetheless, judges the originality of a poem by its main conflict and resolution: La novit del poema... consiste ne la novit del nodo e de lo scioglimento de la favola, Tasso, Torquato, Discorsi dell'arte poetica ed in particolare sopra il poema eroico, I. 46 Bertold Brecht, Journal Notes, p. 157. 47 Tractatus Coislinianus, trans. by Richard Janko (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 45.
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[accomplishes] by means of pleasure and laughter the
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85 Spectacle, Song (Poet., 6.) Poetic inspiration should be surveyed according to the plotmaking inventiveness of the poet. Weavers of incidents and conflicts, the poets will gradually sacrifice versification in order to become playwrights. Centuries before the establishment of naturalistic cinema, Aristotle hinted that the elaborated verses of Greek drama would be replaced by colloquial speech: Aeschylus first introduced a second actor Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse (Poet., 4.) The unflavored dialogues of commercial cinema are the most recent manifestation of poetic drama. The survival of versified poetry had been already at the stake during Aristotle's lifetime: Ariphrades ridiculed the tragedians for using phrases which no one would employ in ordinary speech (Poet., 22.) Due to its formalist analysis, Poetics has been traditionally interpreted as an apolitical treatise. But the dramatic preferences of Aristotle reveal his own ideology. Poetics omits the most controversial Greek tragedies, e.g., "Prometheus Bound," "Antigone" and "Women of Troy," in order to elaborate its discourse on an illustrative play of the Status Quo: "Oedipus King." Sophocles' masterpiece represents the life of a ruler willing to sacrifice his life for his vassals. Aristotle admires Oedipus King on account of its structurein which sentences and sub-conflicts are directly related to the main conflict of the play: The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, in the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles (Poet., 18.) He also questions the use of the chorus as a singer of interludesthat is, of prayers or laments dissociated from
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86 the main action of the play: their choral songs pertain as little to the subject of the piece as to that of any other tragedy (Poet., 18.) Aristotle does not question the originality of these songs, but rather their flimsy articulation to the main conflict of the play. Thematic repetition is encouraged, as well as the representation of the fate of a small number of ruling families: the best tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses- on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus (Poet., 13.)" Aristotle recommends the representation of active rather than passive conflicts, for the former are more prompt to evoke fear and compassion. As most of the commercial producers of our time, the philosopher rejects episodic or disjunctive tragedies. Several dramas lost or destroyed during the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization had been already condemned by Poetics: Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot 'episodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players (Poet., 9.) His statement applies to summer blockbusters such as Jurassic Park, in which all the scenes are chronologically edited one after each other. The scene in which two reptiles of supernatural appetite are about to swallow the heroes of the film, must be placed, according to the Deus ex Machina convention, towards the end of the film. This narrative structure is repeated in Saving Private Ryan, in which a troupe of German soldiers is about to slaughter the heroes of the film. In both cases the antagonists are timely annihilated by a celestial mechanism. The reduction of art to entertainment drove Bertold Brecht to formulate an Epic Dramaturgyin opposition to an Aristotelian Dramaturgy. As a playwright, Brecht
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87 distinguished art from science48 in order to recover for art the space it had lost before philosophy and science: It is customary to see a rather unnatural knowledge in exceptional poets. They perceive with clear divine assertiveness what most men can only achieve through great industry and effort. It is clearly unpleasant let's confess it, to realize that we hardly listen to the inspiration of the poets49. In the same vein, the aesthetics of disjunctive or reiterative films such as Un Chien Andalou, LAnne Dernire Marienbad o Citizen Kane prompted professor Jean Mitry to psychoanalyse cinema. Poetics defines plot as the soul of drama, a statement that suits the commercial demands of mainstream filmmaking today. And though drama could exist with plot alone, no film is eventually done without paying due homage to celebrities, songs and music. Aristotle understands plot as a complete action (): for Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality (Poet., 6.) The poet is a contriver of actions, in conformity with Aristotle's theories on physics (197b4,) politics (1325a32,) and ethics (1098a16, b21.) Happiness and unhappiness happened in actions regulated by opposed forces: true and secrecy, life and death, revenge or forgiveness. Gilles Deleuze echoes Aristotle while describing American Cinema: Action is by itself a strife of forces, a series of strives: strife against the system (milieu,) against the others, against itself [The movement action
Kunst und Wissenschaft wirken in sehr verschiedener Weise, abgemacht 'Das epische Theater', in Schriften zum Theater 3: ber eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1963), p. 58. And later on, towards the end of his life: Die materialistisch-dialektische Betrachtungsweise mu, da wir uns im Bereich der Kunst aufhalten, zu Bewubtsein gebracht und zu einem Vergngen gemacht werden Brecht, Bertold, Eigenarten des Berliner Ensembles, in Brechts Theaterarbeit: seine Inszenierung des 'Kaukasischen Kreidekreises' (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1954), p. 15. 49 Sie sind es gewohnt, in Dichtern einzigartige, ziemlich unnatrlich Wesen zu sehen, die mit wahrhaft gttlicher Sicherheit Dinge erkennen, welche andere nur mit groer Mhe und viel Flei erkennen knnen. Es ist natrlich unangenehm, zugeben zu mssen, da man nicht zu diesen Begnadeten gehrt Brecht, Op. cit., 1963, p. 58.
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88 (l'image-action) stretches out before the system and shrinks in before the action50. Mainstream cinema represents characters that can only live and feel through violent actions, e.g. in The Godfather (1972,) the main character achieves power by slaying his opponents, in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) a cow-boy expresses his friendship by shooting a trouble-maker on his back. Actions become physical actions. Violence, rarely represented during the decline of the Greek tragedy, becomes the norm of commercial cinema. Models and actors perform acrobatic chases and escapes in order to satisfy their psychological needs. The morbidity of film producers, rather than the aesthetic demands of the spectators, regulates filmmaking today. Poetics describes the dramatic elements of contemporary cinema. In his last chapters, Aristotle analyses the role of sub-plots, changes of fortune, music, make-up and special effects. But by emphasizing entertainment, Aristotle sanctioned poetry in
conformity with the economic and political imperatives of his age.
50
Deleuze, Gilles, LImage-Mouvement, Cinema 1, p. 197.
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6. Film and semiotics Sounds, shadows and words are cheaper than buildings, choppers and explosions. They can also be more original. Out of the many signs formulated by C. Peirce, there are three that have raised great interest amongst linguistics and semiotics: the icon, the index and the symbol. All signs, in fact, can be understood as a variation or combination of them. Though most scholars have displayed an admirable understanding of the triad, I haven't found a clearcut definition of these terms in the field of cinema. The purpose in this paper is not to contend against previous semiotic categorizations, but of analyzing the uses of semiotics for filmmaking in order to contribute effectively to the arts of screenwriting and film direction. The icon is the image. It triggers its immediate interpretation in a given space. The importance that Aristotle gives to the eye in his Metaphysics corresponds to the prevailing nature of the icon. Healthy men see the world and understand reality through icons. The popularity of filmmaking, and in particular, of Hollywood filmmaking, is an aftermath of its iconic nature. Spectators see what they see, without need of further interpretation. The language of the icons is the language of the eye. The primal, onedimensional nature of the icon is also accountable of its universality. An icon comes into existence as soon as any human being perceives it. Thus, the icon of a knife recreates the
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90 icon of a knife, and the icon of a smiling woman is interpreted as a smiling woman. The icon is a denotation. It refers to its primal meaning. Additional interpretations will bypass the iconic nature of the sign, for any connotation, that's to say, any late interpretation, bears the output of a symbol. The icon of an object that a man has never seen before is immediately understood as the icon of a never-seen-before object. I must point out that icons are not always the product of cultural convention; the icon of Marilyn Monroe smiling might be merely the icon of a woman smiling, as it happens in the mind of three Cuban singers of Wender's Buena Vista Social Club (1999.) Indexes and symbols, on the other hand, are mediated by culture, arts and science. An index is a non-iconic sign. Though they most indexes are sounds, some visual effects and shadows should be included in this category. Smells and tactile sensations are also indexes. Though cinema has very rarely made use of sensations and smells, I can see them at the light of growing popularity of 3D theatres as part of the cinematic experience in a near future. A thunder is the index of a storm; a fever is an index of infection; a smoke the index of a fire. Our mind grasps and reads indexes at once as a result of our innate ability to correlate cause to effect. They don't have a virtual existence in the mind of the interpreter, as Plato would argue. They are understood as elements of their own category, that's to say, as non-iconic signs. The reading of indexes relies on the particular knowledge and/or experience of the interpreter. Animals and small children, for instance, are unable to correlate a thunder with the sound of a subsequent rain. Since it is the principle of causality which determines our daily perceptions, indexes are subject to erroneous interpretations. Behaviourist experiments rely on the erratic nature of the
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91 index. When a dog learns to associate the sound of a tingling bell with food, it has learnt that the index of a tingling bell corresponds to the appearance of its food. Whereas the eye is the only organ through which icons are perceived, indexes are mainly taken in by the senses of hearing, tact and smell. Blind men recreate the world through indexes. They can, for instance, note the presence of an upset fellow by the sound of his speech, or the existence of debris by a smell. They can also identify a metallic object by its temperature and texture. A symbol is a sign that triggers a cultural interpretation. All words, for instant, are symbols, for they sprung from a given culture and are expected to be understood for interpreters that are acquainted with such culture. As indexes, symbols are opened to misinterpretation, for the value that a symbol acquires in a given culture is arbitrary and it is constantly subject to change. Moreover, a symbol may trigger several meanings: the word bitch, for instance, refers to a female dog, but also to a capricious woman. At this point we can understand the main difference between semiotics and semiology. Whereas semiotics refers to signs in general, sociology studies the most artificial of all signs: the symbol. Saussure, who sharply understood the complexity of symbols, anticipated in his Cours de linguistique gnrale the existence of semiotics. Saussure also established the dual nature of the symbol, and understood it as a sign with a signifier and a signified. Thus the word chien is a signifier, an arbitrary combination of letters whose signified becomes accessible to French speakers alone (dog.) Saussure strongly believed that a signifier was inseparable of its signified. Although such contention remains practically undisputable, it is obvious that a symbol is compounded of a single signifier and one or several signified. Many linguistics and
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92 semiologists have elaborated intricate theories in order to conciliate this obvious fact with Saussures writings. Bitch can bear the two signified already mentioned, but it can also be interpreted as an insult. The richness or poorness of the symbol, thats to say, the potentiality of its signified, will depend on the knowledge, culture and experience of the interpreter. The word simple can be exclusively understood today by a youngster as a symbol for decay. By contrast a reader better acquainted with Elizabethan literature, will read it as a symbol of strength. In one of his prison notebooks Gramsci left a striking example of the exclusive nature of a symbol. An aunt of her used to praise a woman called Bisodia. She told Gramsci she was so important that she was always mentioned at mass. As it turned out her aunt was misinterpreting the Latin sentence dona nobis hodie. Communication is a delicate process, often hindered by the fragile nature of the symbols. The film industry has struggled to produce films within accessible symbolic systems. Dubbing and subtitling are just necessary in order to convey the meaning and expression of local films to worldwide audiences. Overall, film is made of images. The era of the silent screen was also the golden age of iconography. Filmmakers and actors were unable to use their voice. Thinking became an activity of the eye. Editing was a puzzle solved by gestures and bodily movements. The use of symbols, that's to say, of printed words and intertitles, was scant. Writers and filmmakers were judged by their conciseness. "Show, don't tell", became the indisputable rule, and the most renown filmmaker from Germany achieved the perfect film of the epoch in a 20th-century free adaptation of the book of Job: Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924,) the drama of an old man who is fired without benefits, losing his social status. Murnau's film will be remembered as the first silent long-feature film edited
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93 without inter-titles. Actors became mute starts, bringing the universal language of the deaf to all humanity. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks became the symbols of an era, soon to be forgotten. Only Chaplin and Keaton have survived the test of time. An industrious study of fin-de-sicle semiotics may establish the tremendous contribution of the silent films' starts to modern communication. Almost simultaneous to the rise of film was the popularity of radio, the paramount medium of acoustic signs. When Borges listens to the radio, his mind recreates new worlds with words, music and acoustic effects. In 1928 sound was synchronized to the filmstrip at 24 frames per second, and the semiotics of radio were quickly incorporated to the grammar of cinema. Talkies took over the theatres and the silent industry endured a sudden death. All acoustic effects are indexes, for they refer us to a non-visible world. We hear drops of rain, and without seeing it we feel the proximity of the rain. We hear an offscreen voice that turns out to be recorded, as in Lang's Doctor Mabuse (1933,) or we may represent a car explosion in our mind without effectively seeing it, as in Welles' Touch of Evil (1958.) Sometimes the index is merely visual. The icon is perceived not as image, but as a movement that refers to another physical space. Visual indexes are moving images, such as shadows or glittering lights. Gilles Deleuze is right to point out the indexical nature of the famous train scene of Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (1923.) The fact that the scene was devised as a solution to production constraints, stresses the lowbudget nature of the filmic index. Chaplin's cameraman Rollie Totheroh has the credit of devising a spotlight before a rolling perforated cardboard in order to indicate the existence of an off-screen departing train.
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94 A symbol is an artificial construction, and as such it has a value in the market of meaning. Languages are but systems of symbols. Once of the great achievements of French semiology has been the discovery of symbolic systems in our daily activities. Symbols, indeed, are not only reduced to words. You can read them in a street sign (No parking,) in a logo (US flag,) in a colours or a picture (Green-clothed beer drinkers at Saint Patrick's day.) To give another example let's imagine the icon of a blonde woman clothed in a white dress. She walks along the street until her dress is lifted by a subway draft. The reader may have by now identified a Marylyn Monroe, one of the most valuable symbols in the civilized world. The reasons why symbols acquire or loss value are complex, and deserve and separate study. Symbols function as archetypes, but they are not immune to decay and extinction. The ceaseless transformation of language is the most striking proof of the volatility of symbols. The most common symbols in cinema are dialogues and written words. Decades before the industrialization of cinema, theatre and playwriting had already shaped naturalistic drama, the most suitable style to the art of filmmaking. The rise of naturalism, nonetheless, was quite slow, for it had to bear decades of humiliating defeat. The reign of pantomime was eventually overthrown by the synchronization of dialogues at 24 frames per second. Since then year after year many theatre plays are successfully adapted to the screen. Symbols and indexes are the resources of a Resourceful Cinema. Filmmakers who rely on symbols face a twofold challenge. On the one hand they rely in their actor's talent. The delivery of meaning is commended to their particular interpretations. The expression
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95 of clear ideas (rhetoric) becomes as important as the texture of their voices (diction) and the versatility and transparency of their looks, gestures and demeanours (versatility.) As action is the element of drama, their speeches should be rich in what Pirandello calls Spoken Action (L'azione parlata:) "the living word that moves, the immediate expression, natural to the action, the only sentence that can not be but that one attributed to a given character in the given situation. Words, phrases and sentences that are not invented, but which arise when an author has truly associated them to his creation... 51." Words are the unavoidable intermediary between thought and action, all three manifestations of the will according to Indian Shivaism. On the other hand, filmmakers who made use of symbols are inclined by the naturalistic stylization of cinema to enrich the stage with valuable objects of art. Brooks' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958,) Forman's Amadeus (1984) and Shanley's Doubt (2008) are examples of symbolic cinema. Most of the films by Fassbinder, Dreyer, Bertolucci and Bergman belong to this category. The desolated monologue of Marlon Brando in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972,) the sharp remarks of the neighbours in Fassbinder's Ali: Fears eats the soul (1974,) and the cinematographic confessions of Bibi Anderson in Bergman's Persona (1966) are valuable examples of the ascendency of the symbol over the icon.
Figure 1. Triad of signs with their correspondent filmic material
Icons Signs Indexes Symbols
Images Sounds, lighting and shadows Words
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Pirandello, Luigi, L'azione parlata, in Dal Marzocco, 7 maggio 1899.
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It is true that theatre is constrained by its very nature to the extensive use of symbols and indexes . But it is also true that words are the most effective medium of communication. We learn in words, we think in words and we act in words. Film is a ductile medium of art expression, that's to say, of communication. No filmmaker is obliged to make an extensive use of icons in a film, though audiences and film crews bear expectations consolidate by habit. Kiarostami tells in one of his interviews how he succumbed to the demands of his crew, who insisted in setting up a exterior scene with a travelling. The symbol is the most powerful of the triad of signs, for words are the final judges of meaning. Icons are equally important, though they don't enjoy as much trust as symbols do. Indexes, by contrast, are the most volatile of signs, though they are often the most ingenuous, as we can see in Chaplin's A Woman of Paris. This hierarchy indicates that most particular meanings can be conveyed by icons, indexes or symbols. As we have already seen, silent films is the exclusive filed of the icon, as radio is the exclusive field of the symbol. The index have also shared brief solo moments in the history of cinema. First in the avant-garde 1920's films of textures, paintings and acoustic effects. Then in the 1960s and 1970s with Videoart. Semiotic adaptation is the process of shifting particular expressions of meaning from one type of sign to another. Let's think as an example on the landing of chopper over a tower. The immediate compulsion of most filmmaker is that of hiring a chopper and filming it landing over the tower of a building. An intelligent film director with budget constraints may chose to reflect such image in the countenance of an actor whose
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97 hair and clothes are fluttered by a revolving air. Then, on the editing bench, he can add the portentous sound of a chopper landing. He may also decide to suppress the icon and the index altogether and to rely solely on the symbol, asking one of his actors to describe in words the landing of the chopper over the top of the twin towers. The mere enunciation of the last two words articulates a symbol as powerful as the aborted icon and the ingenious index. The montage of attractions formulated by Eisenstein is an admirable effort to incorporate metaphors, that's to say, the richness of visual indexes, into film. But the almost one-dimensional nature of the icon makes this process quite difficult. The problem lies is not in the emission of the message, but in its reception by a public conditioned by a cinema that nails them to their seats. I relied heavily on symbols in the making of Kenedy's Crimes. As a professor of cinema I have encounter many students frustrated by the cost of production of their scripts. "Use indexes or symbols instead of icons", is my main advice.
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Part 2. Ethics of Cinema
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7. Manichaean Cinema Narrative is the juxtaposition of real or imaginary conflicts according to the principle of causality. That we conceive a narrative in terms of causes and consequences, recreating non-uttered conflicts and identifying with the characters of each conflict, is evident by our interest to know the resolution of a puzzle, a sport contest or a nightmare. In "On the Sublime," Longinus underlined the dialectical value of narrative and corrected Aristotle by ranking thought and emotion over plot-making and diction. Going even further, the young poet and courtier Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586) claimed the ascendancy of poetry over philosophy, for the later "replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy.". The categories of Aesthetics represent abstractions with sensual references. Spectators perceive beauty through their senses. The categories of Aesthetics, by contrast, appeal to the intellect. They are general abstractions, and as such they can't be defined within the limits of a particular logic. "There are no facts, only interpretations," wrote Nietzsche to a universe enticed by the exactness of natural sciences. All research on ethics should contemplate the application of general concepts to particular circumstances. The level of synthesis should be place beyond the creative scope of creativity, to the point that two films based on the same book can articulate opposite ethical readings, e.g.,
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100 Ossessione (1943) and The Postman rings Twice (1946.) One hundred years of cinema cannot be studied without taking into consideration classical literature. Cinema brought me to theatre, novel and poetry. The narrations of the past furnish the imagination of today. For decades I have studied languages in order to contemplate the mountains and cathedrals of literature, flanked by the lofty fortresses of philosophy and history. I have identified three prominent ethical discourses in cinema: Manichaean, Submissive and Tragic. As ethics is an abstract manifestation of the inner world of a given subject, we can represent the structure of each narrative discourse in the object axis of the Greima's actantial model.
The Vindictive or Manichaean Discourse represents the irreconcilable confrontation of two forces, in which the heroan incarnation of the prevailing conception of "good" is offended by the antagonist, a beast or inhuman character that performs "evil"; horror pictures, thrillers, summer blockbusters, Disney animated films, computer games and even sport competitions enact the narrative of the puritan hero that must eliminate his perverse antagonists in order to save his honour or his life. Such vindictiveness dates back to Babylon, where the most intolerant passages of the Pentateuch were written under the influence of Zoroastrianism, a religion that divided the world into two distinct and independent reigns; the reign of light and good, and the realm of dark and evil.
Figure 1. Manichaean Actantial Model
Sender
>
Object
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101 OFFENSE REVENGE Subject HERO GLORY
In a Manichean discourse the spectator identifies him/herself with a character that develops feeling of revenge and destruction against his/her antagonist, as in Star Wars I and The Lion King. Manichaeism is the most widespread ethical structure of screenwriting. It opposes the spectator to a foreign reality. As in the oldest written epic, the Poem of Gilgamesh, where the antagonist is a murderer that should be eliminated by the hero. The actions of the good character are invariably motivated by an original offence that should be avenged. Evil is the active voice of a being that must be placed out of society, a force that justifies the institutional deployment of revenge in lethal-injection rooms.
A brief history of Manichaeism Manichaeism dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, where the Sumerians entrusted their cities to particular deities. The first religious representations of the Sumerians were the inscrutable forces of fate. The Sun was worshipped as father of food and prosperity. Earthquakes, common in the region, encourage them to conceive evil deities, the invisible agents of their mishaps. Thus Pazuzu was confronted to Lamashtu, predatory goddess of fetuses. Marduk, protector of Babylon, was confronted to Tiamat, mother of demons. Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander 101
102 With the rise of the Assyrian empire the Medes collectivized and exteriorized the conflicts in their daily life. The battle for survival became the battle of the community. War was the cure to their individual weaknesses. By building an empire the Medes became demigods: "The glorious individual introduces, through the primal denial of his individuality, the divine order in the category of the individual52". Victory cannot be attributed to the courage and strength of men alone. After the fall of Babylon in 539 BC at the hands of the army of Cyrus, the Persians assimilated the Babylonian religion, in particular the rites of veneration to the light and their disdain for darkness. They established the worship of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Inspired by the cult of the Persian Mazda, they attributed to Ormuzd the creation of light. Ahriman was conceived as his antagonist, the prince of darkness. Day was identified with the good and night with evil. As the Persian Empire was being consolidated with the campaigns of Darius and Xerxes, the priests of Ormuzdthe magicians, reduced the scope of Ormuzd's creation to the Persian territories. All the lands beyond were delivered to the yoke of Ahriman: "The country that preserves the children of light is the country where the sun voluntarily discloses itself to its most beloved creatures, the land of Ormuzd, Iran. Beyond the mountains and streams there is another country covered with fog, darkness and evil: the land of Ahriman, the Touran53." The Talmud calls Babylon the "House of learning54." Recent scholarship has established the late capital of Assyria as the place where the Jews wrote down the "Torah" The Books of Law or Pentateuch. The Jews confront a country settled by semi-
52 Bataille, Georges, Thorie de la Religin, p. 79 53 53 Frdric Creuzer, Religions de l'Antiquit, tr. J.D. Guigniaur. I, 1 (Paris: Treuttel et Wrtz, 1825), 320. 54 Talmud. Sabbt, 116a, cited by I. Scheftelowitz, Die Entstehung der Manichischen Religion und des Erlsungsmysteriums (Namburg: Tpelmann, 1922), 3.
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103 human beings, the people of Canaan, whom they should destroy in order to acquire their Promised Land: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them55." Recent excavations in the region have proved the inexactness of the biblical accounts of revenge and destruction. Manichaeism is first conceived as a semiotic interpretation of reality. As early as the 9th century AD, the apparent intolerance of the Old Testament was reinterpreted in a more tolerant light by Jewish Philosophers and Christian theologians56. Manichaeism, also a creed with followers and dissenters, announced the irreconcilable dichotomy between good and evil. It was masterly exposed by Mani (215275 AD,) a Persian seer chosen by God and instructed by the archangel Saint Gabriel to conciliate the manifold religions of humankind. Alongside Judaism, Manichaean evolved in the bosom of Europe, founding churches in the confines of Asia and the Islamic world. Mani altered Persian theology by opposing the visible world to the invisible, and by attributing earth and life an infectious and evil character. Satan was the creator of the ephemeral and material world, whereas God was reduced to the making of the immortal souls. Both divinities were fated to a continuous dispute. At the end of time men and women would be judged by their allegiance to the triumphant god of light. The Arab
Deuteronomy, 7, 1-2. Exegesis, linguistics and archeology should be called to assist those who decide to understand the ethics of ancient civilizations. The writer of a cinema handbook is limited to a synchronic view of contemporary perceptions in literature and cinema.
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104 biography of Mani by Ab'lfardsch Muhammad ben Ishak al-Warrk attributes the philosophy of Mani to Christian and Magi sources: "Mani's studies diverted him from the Magi to the Christian gospels in the same way that he furnished his religious writings with Syrian and Persian theology57." The Manichaean gospels opposed the wickedness of the world to the purity of an otherworld. Jesus and Buddha were depicted by his proselytes as previous paths of salvation, both given by God to humankind, and the everlasting contemplation of the soul was the believers final reward58. By blending the scriptures of the most powerful religions of his time, the missionaries of Mani succeeded in converting people from all lands and races. Contemptuous of the body, they were easily recognized by their meagre and pale appearance. By reinforcing antagonism, Manichaeism influenced Rome, China and Mecca alike: "The Manicheans dispersed their fantastic opinions and apocryphal gospels; the churches of Yemen, and the princes of Hira and Gassan, were instructed in a purer creed by the Jacobite and Nestorian bishops59." In spite of the efforts of the Roman rulers to extirpate the sect of Mani, the Catholic Church assimilated many of his precepts. Saint Augustine, himself was a Manichaean for nine years before his conversion to Catholicism. Reflecting on the influence of his heretical years, Saint Augustine writes in his "Confessions:" "For I still held the view that it was not I who was sinning, but some other nature within me I very much preferred to excuse myself and accuse some other thing that was in me, but was not I60." Manichaeism survived in China and central Europe through new forms of worship.
Ab'lfardsch Muhammad ben Ishak al-Warrk, Mani, seine Lehre und seine Schriften, tr. Gustav Flegel (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1862), p. 85. 58 See Samuel Lieu, Manichaeism in the later Roman Empire and Medieval China (Dover: Manchester University Press, 1985.) 59 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, V, 47. 60 Saint Augustine, Confessions V, x, 18.
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105 As late as the 13th century, his ideas were still debated in Europe by the pacifiers of the Cathar heresy61. The contempt of the followers of Mani towards the papacy may have survived in the bosom of the counter-reform through the iconography of Hieronymus Bosch62. In the twelfth century the principles of Mani regained strength in Europe through the Cathar heresy, a derivation of the sect Paulina, eradicated in the ninth century by the Byzantine emperors. The Cathars, following the doctrine of Marcione, despised the Old Testament and promulgated the hypothesis of two gods, a creator of the world of matter (the stern god of the Old Testament,) the other architect of the spiritual world (the benevolent god of the New Testament.) In the early thirteenth century, after spreading their faith through the villages of southern France and northern Spain, the Cathars were besieged, dilapidated and slaughtered by the troops of Simon de Montfort IV under the connivance of Pope Innocent III. Having survived the brutal suppression of the Inquisition, the Cathar heresy eventually deteriorated the power of the Holy See. Cathars will influence artists and free thinkers of the Renaissance. Their antinomies will reinforce the bourgeois ideology of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Manichean thinking feeds on the rationality of revenge, from the witch burnings of Torquemada, Luther, Calvin, and Sir William Phils, to the show trials of Hitler, McCarthy, Stalin and Fidel Castro.
Manichaean drama In the fifth tablet of the " Poem of Gilgamesh", the hero and Enkidu desecrate the
See Durand de Huesca, Liber Contra Manicheos, ed. Christine Thouzellier (Louvain: Spicilegium. Sacrum Lovaniense Administration, 1964), 9-14. 62 See Lynda Harris, The secret heresy of Hieronymus Bosch (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1995.)
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106 Forest of the Cedars in order to provoke the demon Humbaba, its only inhabitant. After a bloody fight Gilgamesh defeats Humbaba, who at his feet beggs for his life:
Gilgamesh, let me go, I will dwell with you as your servant As many trees as you command me I will cut down for you63
Enkidu intervenes, urging Gilgamesh to gain fame as the murderer of Humbaba. Gilgamesh doubts whether to annihilate Humbaba or enslave him. Forgiveness is not an option. Gilgamesh' final decision expresses a desire for glory in a pitiless context. Gilgamesh rips his rival's body apart, including his tongue. Revenge is his primal motivation, the belief that destruction should be paid with destruction, even at the cost of mutual destruction. But Gilgamesh' revenge bears a cost. Anticipating the Greek myths, Gilgamesh slays the sacred bull, and the gods condemn Enkidu to a slow death. The poem of Gilgamesh, composed around 2000 BC, outlines the traits of the Manichean narrative structure. Readers or viewers identify themselves with a hero, the favorite contender of a duel. His rival doesn't have a history. His friends and family are conspicuous by their absence. "There is a typical early culture hero who goes around slaying monsters. Now, that is a form of adventure from the period of prehistory when man was shaping his world out of a dangerous, unshaped wilderness. He goes about killing monsters64." But whereas the antagonist of antiquity and modernity is a supernatural diabolical figure, a vampire, a demon or a monster (Gilgamesh, Mephistopheles, Bluebeard,) the antagonist of the industrial age is, as we shall see on
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The Epic of Gilgamesh, tr. by Maureen Gallery Kovacs 64 Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, p. 135.
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107 film ethics, a man of the city (Frankenstein, Professor Moriati, The Invisible Man.) At taking his rival's tongue out, Gilgamesh succumbs to the temptation of Enkidu and erects an everlasting monument proclaiming how Gilgamesh destroyed the demon Humbaba. Glorious are the epic expressions of the Manichean discourse. The tablets of clay discovered by archeologists in the Mesopotamian cities bear witness to the admiration of antiquity for soldiers, generals and tyrants. Brute force is the most celebrated skill of the hero, but cunning is also appreciated. In The Iliad Achilles, neglecting the possibility of a long and quiet existence, and lured by eternal glory, agrees to fight along the army of Agamemnon. The call for glory is the main motive of the poem:
But Pallas now Tydides soul inspires, Fills with her force, and warms with all her fires, Above the Greeks his deathless fame to raise 65
A warrior's fame was warmly appreciated by the peoples of the ancient world, where victory was a matter of survival. Alexander the Great lamented the absence of a Homer in his generation able to chant his deeds. To a greater extent than their Greek predecessors, Roman historians praised warlike heroes and glorious deaths: "[Romulo] felt that the immortality he gained with his courage... will be eventually his reward66." The glorious Manichaean discourse of the first chapters of "The Iliad" is replaced by compassionate chapters on Hector's private life, his defeat and his burial. The warlike
65 Homer, The Iliad, translated by Alexander Pope, V, 1-3. 66 Immortalitatis virtute partae ad quam eum sua fata ducebant fautor, Livio, Tito, Ab Urbe Condita, I, 7
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108 vein is now in conflict with a tragic discourse. Some of the adventures of "The Odyssey" demand the destruction of the enemy; others, as Calypso's captivity and the chant of the sirens, require a tragic approach. The crisis of glorious Manichaeism is deeper in "The Aeneid," where Aeneas defeats and kills his rival not only for the purpose of achieving fame. The hero of Virgil is an invader that battles in agreement with the policy of expansion of the Roman Empire. The hero, though bold and daring, is keen to preserve his life and is reluctant to reconciliation. In his studies on religion, George Bataille attributes this change in sensitivity to the rise of the military: "The principle of the military is to vent methodical violence out... So, the military order is contrary to the forms of spectacular combat, a solution that is more due to uncontrolled explosion of anger that the calculation of the efficiency rationale67". The erosion of the glorious Manichean discourse also affected the sensitivity of the Roman people. The change was so abrupt that a historian could propose the thesis that the ruin and fall of the Roman Empire was due to the sudden invalidity of a warlike narrative discourse. In Plautus' "Miles Gloriosus" the Latin poet mocks the profession of the soldier:
Before you, Mars no longer dares to call himself a soldier He's afraid to compare his strength with yours68
Centuries later Edward Gibbon, flattering the discipline of the army, rather than the physical strength of the soldiers, regrets the cowardice of the late citizens of the
67 Bataille, Georges, Op. cit., p. 88 68 Tum bellatorem Mars haud ausit dicere neque aequiperare suas virtutes ad tuas Miles Gloriosus, 11, 12
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109 Empire, men who, unlike their Republican ancestors, were less than willing to shed their blood for the welfare of the State. In first century AD, and in an effort to inspire courage or obedience to the imperial armies, Tacitus praised the barbarous customs of the tribes that swept northern Europe. Always ready to use any means to achieve victory, the Germans are not averse to flight, as long as it's motivated by guile. Their leaders are chosen according to their courage. Their actions are example for future generations. Sullen or belligerent characters, the barbarians attended their meetings and executed their business transactions in view of their swords and hammers. Medieval writers of Icelandic sagas made of vindication a selfish and honorable task. The sagas present intricate characters in a time when men prevailed for their independence in a lawless country where "All creatures were moving quietly about hunting grounds, for humanity was unknown69." The old Icelandic proverb that "A slave takes revenge immediately; a coward, never" reflects the ideology of individuals who disbelieved of politeness or hypocrisy. Courage is expected from the glorious hero, but also from the infamous villain. The saga of the cunning viking "Hen-Thorir," for instance, chronicles the life and deeds of Hen-Thorir, a greedy landlord who burns alive the relatives of Blund-Ketil. The poet describes Hen-Thorir as a man unable to please his fellow. Christendom marks de decline of the warlike ideology of the Vikings. The word replaces the sword. Hate is healed with forgiveness. In "Men of Vapnfjord" an ancestral cycle of revenge ends with the reconciliation of the parties.
Hvalkomur voru og miklar, og skjta mtti sem vildi; allt var ar kyrrt veiist, er a var vant manni, Sturlson, Snorri, Egils Saga Skalla-Grmssonar, XXIX.
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110 "The Poem of the Cid" is the last expressions in the West of a discourse that Christianity had not tamed entirely after the fall of the Roman Empire. In later poems the Cid makes a final sacrifice in order to defeat the moors. Glory returns at the price of martirdom. Glorious Manichaeism still gleams in the earliest works of Shakespeare and in the swashbuckling dramas of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. But the ideological embodiment in characters censured by the new morality borders on the grotesque. Cervantes realized that the hour of a hero that places his sword over his word was pass. "The Adventures of Don Quixote from La Mancha," chronicles the adventures of a middle-class gentleman who has come to believe that the world is made of good and evil entities. By placing his characters in a credible sociological context, Cervantes satisfies the modern drive for reality. Don Quixote fights against Ogres, trolls and witches, even if we are told that they are windmills, arsonists and Duchesses. Boccaccio staged the comedy of adultery in "Decameron." Under the influence of the Latin comedy and the Commedia del Arte, Spanish and Italian playwrights exposed the moral inferiority of their characters. Columbine falls in love against the wishes of his father. Once married, she displays her cunning by honouring her lovers. The hero of the farce and the picaresque novel owes directly to the type of the parasite from the Latin comedy. The lover displays a charming selfishness that
Hollywood joyfully embraced. Groucho Marx personifies the vital superiority of the profit-seeker selfish hero over his fellow citizens. Marx does not make fun of a particular character. He mocks a discourse that preaches that all men are equal. The final scene over a racetrack of "A Day at the Races," stages a crowd of children, women and men from all
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111 races. They all sing waving wads of cash in their hands. Our expected joy refutes the pessimistic prognoses of Alexis de Tocqueville, who never believed in the assimilation of minorities to American society. Money doesn't discriminate on the basis of race or social ascendency. The world is divided then between smart individuals and those unable to amass a fortune. The vindictive Manichean narrative emerges as a mathematical reasoning able to balance a social order disrupted by a offense. Its origins date back to the lex talionis prescribed in the "Code of Hammurabi" in Babylon. The symbol of equality, wilfully blind to compassion, predetermines revenge, and the waves of chance are excluded by a logic that favours the stronger. In Mystic River (2003) Clean Eastwood presents human fallibility as the most disturbing cause of a vindictive narrative. The tragic is not that Sean Penn avenges the death of his daughter. The tragic are the series of coincidences leading to unleash Penn's character's vengeance against the wrong man. Death occurs according to the mercantilist ideology of trade. Absurd revenges are a theme of dark comedies. Herodotus wrote that Cyrus, enraged at the insolence of the river Gindes, in which a flow of his sacred horses had perished, decided to take revenge scattering the current of the Gindes in three hundred sixty-six channels, so that even women could cross it "without even wetting their knees." In his "History of the French Revolution," Thomas Carlyle blamed a mistress of Louis XV for the death of five hundred thousand French soldiers. Madame Pompadour was offended by an epigram written by Jean Frdric Phelypeaux, Minister of State. The vexed lady persuaded the King to fire Phelypeaux, who was duly replaced by one of
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112 Pompadour's a protg70. The Manichean discourse of social vindication discriminates and demonizes behaviours that if once tolerated, are now condemned as morally wrong. The duel shifts from the individual Vs. the individual to the individual Vs. an unfair social system. In 17th-century Spain, Lope de Vega turned murderers into avengers. Lope confronts the individual against feudal behaviours embodied in characters that threatened the newly acquired privileges of the peasantry.
Truth is that by law If I speak to God or King I don't disrespect them at all71
Lope de Vega remembers audiences that all humanity is related to the king "Through Adam72," and in another comedy is happy to point out that social roles such as the noble and the villain can be easily swapat least in comedies:
Haven't you see seen in comedies The villain as a knight And the gentleman as villain73?
"Do the 'five hundred thousand' ghosts, who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields from Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an epigram, crowd round thee in this hour?" Carlyle, Thomas, The French Revolution: a History. I, 1, 4. 71 Verdad es que a Dios y al rey No por tratarlos es ley Que se les pierda el respeto Vega, Lope de, Valor, Fortuna y Lealtad, I, 3. 72 Vega, Lope de, Los Prados de Leon, VI, 3 73 Vega, Lope de, Valor, Fortuna y Lealtad, II, 9
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Society becomes the democratic character for antonomasia. Typical heroes incarnate the discourse of social vindication. In "The conspicuous Asturian women" the heroine speaks on behalf of her community; in "Fuenteovejuna," Pascuala answers as Mengo, and Laurencia speaks just as both of them, for they all are children of a morality that since 15th-century Spain checks the sexual abuses of the powerful. A rape can be perpetrated, but its legal consequences and the final judgement on the guilty will follow Lucano's motto: "A sin of many is always forgiven74." Social vindictiveness was also the narrative discourse of Gerhard Hauptmann's "The Weavers" ("Die Weber".) A dramatization of a revolt of Silesian weavers in 1844, "The Weavers" was represented before communities of workers brutalized by hunger. Under the influence of Zola, Hauptmann avoids theorizing about the causes of the revolt. No weaver or employee speaks about the political forces at the stake. Thomas Mann's remark on Arthur Miller's characters appears to be better suited to Hauptmann's types: "They are like aborigines75. Hunger becomes the primal force that sketches the heroes and antagonists of the play. But the ideological power of "The Weavers" can be only understood at the light of the labor movements of 19th-century Europe. The censorship imposed by the Berlin authorities on Hauptmann's play is symptomatic of the apprehensions of the European bourgeoisie of fin de sicle. Unlike Lope de Vega and Gerhardt Hauptmann, the novelists and filmmakers of the Soviet Union took pains to confront the soviet hero against the forces of a State suspicious of crime, corruption and moral decadence. The most acute demonization of
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Quidquid multis peccatur, inultum est Miller, Arthur, Introduction to Miller Plays, Vol. 2, p. 1.
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114 capitalism had been already proffered in 1840 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon76. Karl Marx, who owed much to the work of Proudhon, was presented by Lenin as the main critic of the capitalist system. With the triumph of the Bolsheviks "Das Kapital" became a compulsory textbook at schools and universities across the nation. Authorities planned to rip revolutionary work from novelists and filmmakers willing to persuade the world of the advantages of Marxism and Leninism. The first films of Sergei Eisenstein present the weaknesses and contradictions of an economic and political system already defeated by communism. A project commissioned by the committee in charge of the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin recreates a system of government that oppresses children and soldiers. The raise of the lion of concrete marks the beginning of the revolution, but any feeling of indignation is only possible after the executionof a woman who moans over the carcass of her son. Eisenstein had already outlined his discourse on social vindictiveness in Strike (1925) his first long-feature film. The discourse is articulated again in October and in some scenes of Alexander Nevsky. It fades off in with Ivan the Terrible, a film that articulates a more classical tragic discourse. In Arsenal (1918) Dovzhenko staged the malevolence of the bourgeoisie, a workers' strike, machines that can't stop, hungry mothers and threatening rifles. The Manichaean villain has been carefully singled out from society. In its final scenes, we watch a rich man being executed by a mob of workers. Italian Neorealism found inspiration in the representation of stories able to raise social discontent. The unemployed and the outcast who Chaplin had already represented
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"La proprit, c'est le vol!" "Property is theft."
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115 in a farcical context are now personified by men and women at the brisk of destruction. But unlike their Soviet counterparts, the Italian filmmakers of the post-war years were careful not to present clear-cut endings in their films. The actant of the destinatary remains uncertain, and we don't know whether the hero of The Bicycle Thief will find a job, or whether Umberto D will get a place where to spend the night. By demonizing the deficiencies of a political system, Fellini, Visconti and De Sica achieve the status of social reformers. I, the Worst of All (1989) by Maria Luisa Bemberg, stages the life of 16th-century poet and scholar Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who tragically battled the system of repression of the Catholic clergy and the Holy Inquisition. Sor Juana embodies the ethics of learning from antiquity: "I have a body that in one of my poems I called 'abstract'," she says to a pregnant woman. One of the very few female Latin-American filmmakers, Bemberg reflects her personal struggles in Sor Juana, who at some point prescribes that: "many woman want to be educated, but they can't." With modernity theatre triumphed in Spain, England, Italy and France. After "Hamlet" and "Don Quixote," Manichaeism was discreetly confined to folk stories, and a renaissance of the classical tragic spirit of the arts and literature shone for several decades. Another literary troop was clinging to their pikes, though. In 1697 Charles Perrault published the first collection of folk tales in "Contes de ma mre l'Oye," featuring ogres, princesses and fairies77. In 1786 A. Galland translated and published the first European edition of "The Arabian Nights" in France. Many a story of this anthology happens during the caliphate of Al-Rashid, who reigned in Bagdag during the 8th and 9th century AD. The
The origins of the collection is extensive, "Little Red Riding Hood" is originally from China, while "Bluebeard" goes back to Canada.
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116 dualism of the Magi, the intolerance of the Christian Bishops and the zeal of Manichaean missionaries found a common ground in stories that oppose demigods and demons to young men and chaste maiden. In these accounts jinn and devils favor or impede marital happiness of young girls and lads. The immediate popularity of "The Arabian Nights," the more influential symbolic Manichaean compendium in the history of imagination, established the Manichean ethical structure of story telling as the new trait of Western literature. French and English writers discovered the Asian and Arab folk stories that opposed men to alien forces. They adapted them in the arena of naturalism. New translations of "The Arabian Nights" inspired the writings of Voltaire, Stevenson, Machen, Beckford, E. A. Poe, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens78. They would also, eventually, and according to the warlike ideology of their times, propagate the Manichean ethical structure as revenge in the Western world. Galland translation includes the story of a lad who gets married to a woman of poor appetite. Intrigued by her fasting, the lad decides to follow her secretly at night, until in horror discovers that his beloved one is actually a ghoul or vampire that sucks the blood of unsuspecting boys. In 1797 Goethe emulated such story in "Die Braut von Korinth" ("The Bride of Corinth",) where a deceased leaves her grave to suckle the blood of the husband promised to her in her early infancy:
I emerge from the grave Seeking my lost happiness I own my lost husband
See J.L. Borges, Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford, in Otras Inquisisiones (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1976), pp. 133-137.
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117 I drink the blood of his heart79
Goethe exalts love over death, and gives us the vampire, an entity that blends gentle felings and atrocious instincts. His poem became a source of inspiration for 20thcentury writers. In the introduction to "The Vampire" John Polidori acknowledges his debt to Arabic literature. "The Vampire," the first vampire story in English-was conceived one night in the summer of 1816, when Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Polidori discussed on the shores of Lake Geneva two French books translated from German horror stories. Then Byron proposed to each of the presents to compose a horror story. After some fruitless efforts Mary Shelley conceived in a dream the first version of what would become his most famous work: "Frankenstein". In this novel, almost imperceptibly, Mary Shelley moves from the supernatural to the real. Science is the new sorcery that awakes the dead. Thus, the demonization of the human feeds on the prejudices of Puritanism. The transition from the symbolic to the concrete occurs almost imperceptibly, an outcome of the fall of institutionalized religion and the raise of naturalism. The being created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein is hellish not by virtue of the underworld, but by the concreteness of the world. In the preface to her novel, Mary Shelley confesses to have based her creation on a nightmare: "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital
Aus dem Grabe werd ich ausgetrieben, Noch zu suchen das vermite Gut, Noch den schon verlornen Mann zu lieben Und zu saugen seines Herzens Blut
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118 motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world80." The materialization of nightmares became the method of the Gothic novel. Nineteenth century playwrights and writers emulated Mary Shelley's fears. Thus in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) the creature's inborn evil comes from another human being, in this case of a murderer whose brain has been stolen by a servant of Dr. Frankenstein. The perversity is no longer metaphysical. It becomes scientific. The enthronement of science in the realm of fiction had been already suggested by Percy Shelley in the introduction to the first edition of "Frankenstein": "The incident on which this fiction is founded is not, in the opinion of Dr. Darwin and some German writers-physiology, impossible to happen81". Shelley alludes to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the leading exponent of the theory of evolution82. Erasmus wrote: "[Hume] concludes that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fire.What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of THE GREAT ARCHITECT! THE CAUSE OF CAUSES! PARENT OF PARENTS! ENS ENTIUM!... For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves83." The metaphysics of Darwin imports the ideology in Mary Shelley's work: "And what was I? .. I was not even of the same nature as man84." The malevolence
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, p. 4. Ibidem, p. 9. 82 Often confounded with the theory of natural selection made noteworthy by one of his grandchildren. 83 Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia, vol. 1 (London: 1794), p. 509, citado por Bernard Shaw en su introduccin a Back to Methuselah (Oxford, 1945), p. xx. 84 Shelley, Mary, Op. cit., 13, p. 93.
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119 of Victor Frankenstein's creature is not confined to the realms of imagination, as in the Arab vampires tales. While African and Asian bards attributed absolute evil or wickedness to uncontrollable beasts or demons, Mary Shelley's supernatural creature was conceived as a hybrid between beast and man. Gradually, thoughts and feelings overcome his outward figure: the movements and countenance of a beast: "You can blast my other passions, but revenge remainsrevenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict85." Mary Shelley presented the wickedness of her daemon as an upshot of puritanical prejudice towards ugliness and difference. Her voice was hardly heard by the 19thcentury writers or melodrama. The industrial revolution have created a new world of merciless gods. Lucifer, the antagonist of Milton's "Paradise Lost," was able to smile in adversity, anticipating thus the villains of Clint Eastwood and the Cohen brothers.
The Puritan vindication Sherlock Holmes's short stories present the confrontation between the pure and the impure in a universe of absolute dichotomies. Good and evil is represented as a confrontation between the legal and the illegal. Rational men are members of civilization. Dark-skinned foreign men are but villains, animal-like creatures with innate madness and malevolence. The denunciation of the impure becomes the battle flag of German idealism While Hegel refers to Africa in condescending tone, Joseph Conrad celebrates in books of adventures a century of European colonialism. By the turn of the century H. Rider
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Ibidem, p. 129.
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120 Haggard popularizes the story of Tarzan, a white men that control foreign worlds. A discourse is elaborated on the assumption that the suffering of secondary characters such as children, maidens or elders can't stir a barbarian's heart. If Dickens and Hugo opposed the philanthropy of their heroes and heroines to the misanthropy of their opponents, a new generation of writers opposed the humanity of their heroes to the perversity of their rivals. The heroes of Dumas and Conan Doyle are imperfect. Excess has sickened them. Nonetheless their characters acquire heroism in comparison to the wicked tendencies of the antagonists of the plot. "The Count of Monte Cristo" is an inventory of offenses with an atrocious revenge. "The Three Musketeers" stages the mortal fight between four men and a rival; the rival happens to be Milady Clarick de Winter, a femme fatal, later revealed as a branded thief.
The greatest attraction of the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle is not the intricateness of a given mystery, as young readers assume, but the living representation of fear. Borges remarks that many of the mysteries spoken on Baker Street are solved by the use of a magnifying glass. After Sherlock Holmes the reader doesn't have to travel to the plains of Transylvania to experience fear of the monster. Sinister forces are now human on the streets of London. A Victim of racial prejudice in Victorian England, Conan Doyle does not hesitate to demonize men according to their racial constitution. In "The Sign of Four," written in 1890, Sherlock Holmes reads a scientific article to Dr. Watson: "The aborigines of the Andaman Islands may perhaps claim the distinction of being the smallest race upon this earth... They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained... They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes,
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121 and distorted features." In subsequent pages of this story readers found out that the quoted villain has perpetrated heinous crimes. Holmes and Watson intervene timely and kill him. The Manichaeism of the novel of adventures is absorbed by the American popular theater of the nineteenth century, where melodrama, action, spectacle and farce anticipated crosscutting forty years earlier86." There are two true American inventions, said C Eastwood: Jazz and the Westerns. Such appreciation should accept many variations. From the fox-trod and the Soul, to the Techno-pop and rap; from the gangsters flicks to the science-fiction sagas of Hollywood. But as jazz has almost dispersed from the spotlight in order to give space to its most fashionable modern manifestations, Westerns faded with discretion in order to be revamped into fantastic/symbolic action films. Since the 1970s Manichaean conflicts with historical claims have been effectively checked by politically correctness. Overall American cinema didn't evolve an art, but as an industry, a pastiche of the action-theatre from the late 19th century. In an early essay, Sergei Eisenstein associates film narrative to popular literature, particularly to Dickens' novels: "From Dickens, from the Victorian novel, stem the first shoots of American film esthetic, forever linked with the name of David Wark Griffith87." The first famous director of American Cinema, Griffith achieved the major hit of his career with The Birth of a Nation, a worldwide blockbuster that tells and justifies the existence of the Ku Klux Klan. This film is, in fact, the representation of the Manichaean narrative that has dominated the first century of American cinema. It portraits the story of a slave freed by the victorious side of the American Civil War. Enacted
Ellis, Jack C., A History of Film (New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, 1979), p. 27. Sergei Eisenstein, Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today in Film Form, tr. & ed. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harvest Book, 1949), p. 195.
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122 by an actor with inhuman conviction, the antagonist kidnaps, rapes and murders a defenceless maiden. The Sogdian Manichaean term Kyn conveys both the meaning of hatred and revenge88. A Manichaean narrative requires a primary offense against the hero, a motivation capable to articulate in the reader or spectator a feeling of hatred towards the antagonist such a feeling demands immediate revenge. The goal of this type of narrative is the destruction, Wgyn, of the enemy. His/her elimination is irremediably decreed, and the hero/spectator is gratified with erotic compensation. To give voice to the antagonist is very rare. It may create feelings of sympathy, moving the spectator to a tragic reading. We may be inclined to classify most films as Manichean. But as we have already pointed out, Manichaeism was conceived first as a religion. The symbolic narrations that describe the origin of good and evil belong to an ethereal world, the opposite of the naturalist cinematic representations of a world split between heroes and criminals. What is poetry for the believer appears as raw footage at the eyes of the profane. Joseph Campbell's studies on comparative mythology praise the role of the hero as conqueror of fate. The Californian film director George Lukas has publicly expressed his debt towards Campbell, from whom he learnt to furnish his screenplays with new popular myths. In his early writings Campbell compares myths from several cultures and ages in order to reveal their common traits. Influenced by the observations of Sigmund Freud, Campbell grounds the creation of myths in the arena of psychology. Campbell attempts to classify all prophets in a single group. Mani and Buddha are compared to Jesus and Mohammed; the Virgin Mary to Io. His first book, "The Hero of the One Thousand
88
Ilya Gershevitch, A Grammar of Manichean Sogdian (Oxford: Basil Balckwell, 1954) p. 16.
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123 Faces," blends the good-fellow figures of humankind in one primitive archetype; a Manichean trait that Campbell justifies: "There is a typical early culture hero who goes around slaying monsters. Now, that is a form of adventure from the period of prehistory when man was shaping his world out of a dangerous, unshaped wilderness. There is a typical hero actdeparture, fulfillment, return." Campbell not only describes the melodramatic common structure of Hollywood cinema. He also is aware of the influence of Hollywood in the Churches of our age: "our own mythology, for example, is based on the idea of duality: good and evil, heaven and hell. And so our religions tend to be ethical in their accent. Sin and atonement. Right and wrong." But "Star Wars" remains as a story of the imagination, rather than a myth. Filmmakers fail too often to contrive a Manichaean myth in a universe conditioned by the chart of human rights.
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8. Submissive Cinema The submissive discourse stages the struggle of a hero or heroine who attempts to adapt to the demanding conditions of his/her world or society. Soup operas, light comedies and family dramas adopt the submissive discourse, the representation of a graciously distorted vision of society. Submissive producers distance themselves from politics. They are the social actors who quote the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ars Gratia Artis.
Figure 2. Submissive Actantial Model
Sender MISUNDERSTANDING
>
Object SUBMISSION Subject HERO
->
Receiver HAPPINESS
The submissive discourse was contrived by the first poets of the most ancient civilizations in India. Manu, the great-great-grandson of Brahma, prescribed that the creator had rank all human beings according to the deeds and misdeeds of their previous
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125 lives. Manu established a tripartite cast system, the living offspring of the heard, arms and feet of Brahma. Several Upanishads convey also a discourse of submissiveness that should have pleased the missionaries of the ancient caste system. In the "Isavasya Upanishad" we read: "Be happy and self-resigned, and do not covet the riches of your neighbor." Brahmanism greatly influenced Buddhism, a religion that describes suffering as a devious state of the mind caused either by desires or karma, the predetermined punishment for offences committed here or in previous lives. If an individual endures poverty, pain or anguish, he or his family should be blamed. The Chinese mandarins also consolidated a society of infallible hierarchies ruled by an emperor exempt of guilt. The philosopher Han Fei (died 233 B.C.) wrote that "Nothing is more worthy than the royal person, more praiseworthy than the throne, more influential than the position of the ruler." The submissive screenplay has been the backbone Asian cinema. The daughters of An Autumn Afternoon (1962) and Ran (1985) are victims of inherited social codes. Japanese filmmakers such as Ozu, Mizogushi and Kurosawa adapted to the screen many popular stories and novels, all of them following the paradigm of the submissive discourse. Judgments are cleverly avoided by characters who struggle to survive. Conflicts unfold with grace in particular political contexts where tradition ranks human beings according to their birth. The Babylonian distinction between good and evil vanishes before the universal concept of Nirvana. Suffering as redemption becomes the ultimate explanation of reality. All conflicts in a film are then motivated by a cosmic need of redemption. The hero is not less important than the antagonist, and both characters are presented as essential elements of the same reality. In The Seven Samurais (1954) a township of farmers hire a
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126 group of starving royal mercenaries in order to combat the criminals that oppress them. By hiring these noble warriors the peasants become exemplary men that recover the lost dignity of the samurais and revive the rituals of Japan. The films of Ozu where the Japanese and American cultures meet, express a submissive universe that mainstream Manichean sensitivity can hardly assimilate. The imposition of American habits in Japanese society is presented without pathos in the metaphor of leaves falling from a tree. Ran (1985,) Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare's Lear, reveals the ethical concerns of the Japanese director in the late stage of his career. The screams of Shakespeare's characters against the universe are incarnated by Kurosawa's actors with silent resignation. By adapting the pageant echoes of Shakespeare's verses to the refined and elaborated sentences of Buddha, Ran becomes a picture of patient despair, a consolation against our Freudian fascination with death. Life, nonetheless, is presented as an unbearable phenomenon. The King suffers by his attachment to his family. The King's proscribed son displays an unseasonable concern for the ultimate fate of his father. Characters live a maya, an illusion that tradition perpetrates in order to quell fears of rebellion. In the West the submissive discourse found expression in the stoic philosophers, but also in the comedies of Menander, Plato and Terence, in which the main characters struggle to fit into society. Cinema often blends Manichean and submissive conflicts. Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) is a melodrama between a writer and a woman that ends up entangled with a lesbian friend. Instead of developing loath against her lover, Woody Allen submits to his fate almost without reproach. Death in Venice (1971) represents the sacrifice of a music
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127 conductor for an unknown teenager. Death is staged as the natural outcome of devouring passions represented in a decadent world. Mainstream cinema often blends Manichean and Submissive conflicts, e.g., The Mission (1986,) narrates the story of two Jesuit priests that evangelize and educate a community of Native South American Indians. Whereas Robert de Niro incarnates a revengeful Manichean hero, Jeremy Irons embraces his death and that of his congregation in the hands of colonizers. Comedy TV shows are proof of the popular taste for submissive narrations. The hero of the comedy accepts without question to deal with the best of the possible societiesthe hilarious gag relies on his/her incapacity to adapt into society. The daily sitcoms or the comedy of manners represent the struggle of a character or a group of characters that struggle to survive. The most beautiful comedies are still found in the films by Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Their characters incarnate the struggle for survival. The hardships and injustices of a hostile society are digested by organisms that are forced to blame themselves for their suffering. Politics and technology may be overcome, but only in imaginary worlds. Chaplin is aware of the limitations of the art, but by stressing the false logic of the unfit, his comedy becomes a dark parody of politics. Limelight (1952) has a scene in which Charlot is happy to go to prison. We should be happy for him, for behind bars he will get the bread he can't get as a free man89. In Our Hospitality (1923,) Keaton withstands the revengeful behaviour of his Southern relatives. Keaton avoid confrontation once and again. Resigned and humble, he risks his life in order to achieve the forgiveness of his enemies.
Last week I read that this practice has become quite in common in China today. We may infer that such absurd situation has not been inspired by Chaplin's film.
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128 Many Horror films rely on a submissive discourse from which no victim can escape. External entities dictate the fate of characters trapped by forces they can't fully understand. The metaphysics of horror excludes coincidence. All the characters, actions and elements of the script are harmonious elements of a universe that play with fear. The most successful attempts, however, should be traced in the arena of melodrama. Society's disdain for the impure was cruelly represented by the tram. The comedies of Chaplin narrate the adventures of a social misfit in universes of absolute dichotomies. Chaplin's exile from the US was a reaction to the aesthetic ideology of his movies. The naturalistic discourse of fin de sicle was now unsuitable for public entertainment. The melodrama is the language of the mass, wrote Gramsci behind bars. In India a film character that sides with goodness is plainly called a hero, and players are expected to behave accordingly in public. Hollywood, Madras and Mumbai are but the social reproducers of melodramas. We expect certain melodramatic conventions, which one way or another are fulfilled by most films, e.g., the presence of an attractive girl on the screen before the first quarter of the film, already overshadowed by the threatening actions of a villain that, nonetheless, will never be punished by the hero, but by a providential divinity. A melodrama represents a conflict according to the conventions of popular stories or fairytales. Peter Brooks refers to melodrama as the narrative embodiment of the ideology of democracy. "Melodrama starts from and expresses the anxiety brought by a frightening new world in which the traditional patterns of moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue90." With modernity, a new narrative was constructed in a world
Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 20.
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129 where the authority of the King was no longer infallible. Melodrama is a response to the power vacuum left by the sudden impracticability of a discourse that post-revolutionary Europe could no longer follow. By rendering heroism to characters of the bourgeoisie, the Manichean narrative becomes representative. The tender feelings of theatre become the bread of the modern circus, as Fellini so aptly understood. Identification with heroes such as Ugly Betty, who achieve happiness after a life of sacrifice and suffering, become the pastime of a crowd that longs to escape from reality. But melodrama is a pre-revolutionary invention. It dates back to La Commedia del arte, the Roman theatre and the new attic comedy. The comedies of Menander represent melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains fighting against forces of social misunderstanding. Their mishaps are the source of jokes and gags, for their struggles are caused by irrefutable social differences. A disgrace that turns out to be a happy event marks the climax of the play. The Romans perfected Menander's melodramatic invention. In Terence's "The Eunuch" a raped virgin suffers the oppression of a slave society. Social conventions appear to crash her happiness. The climax approaches when the public learns that the servant is in fact a citizen. Such resolution allows a happy marriage and a happy ending. After the disintegration of the power of the Church, melodrama preserved the spiritual legacy of the past. There is no reason for suffering, for the melodramatic hero relies on the omnipotent will of the divinity. God, free from the dogmatic interpretations, becomes the force or entity that shapes destiny, the natural or dive being who with a hand of justice will punish the wicked and honour the unrighteous. The antagonist of the postrevolutionary melodramatic novel is a man who sees his aspirations truncated by a
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130 virtuous hero. He renounces to the temptation or revenge, for he truly believes that the overwhelming forces of Heaven will punish the villain. The perverse often purge his/her offenses with suicide, imprisonment, exile or violent death. The most popular novels of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens are vast confrontations between a puritan hero and a demonized villain. The heroes of Dumas, Hugo and Dickens happen to be exemplary citizens: from the philanthropist of "Les Miserables" to the hero of "Martin Chuzzlewit." Their antagonists are punished. In the novel of Victor Hugo, Javert commits suicide, the most offensive act according to Christian morality. Most Latin American films are submissive melodramas. The metaphysical connotations of a universe ruled by a supreme good satisfied producers and TV spectators eager to consume the mise-en-scne of dogmatic believes in a society far from real. As the heroine of Samuel Beckett, most people claim to be happy and only happy in their blind struggle for existence. Latin American cinema had a relatively successful commercial development thanks to the golden age of Mexican Cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, with an average production of 70 films per year. Most of these films were melodramas or comedies by Cantinflas and Tin-Tan. Mexican cinema began in 1896 and is one of the most developed in Latin America, along with Brazil and Argentina. Filmmakers like Arturo Ripstein, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and Jorge Fons made films that examined recent political events such as the slaughter of students in Tlatelolco in Red Dawn (1968.) They also encouraged the revival of films that were banned in the past. Adapted from Garca Mrquez'
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131 homonymous novel Ripstein's Nobody writes to the Colonel (1999) stages a melodramatic view on a retired colonel who awaits in vain for the payment of his retirement wages. Latin American melodrama shares a comic vein that can turn into sarcasm. La Zona (2007) is a bleak portrait of a society that redefines segregation. The world is a safe place to live as long as richness remains invisible to the poor. Sorin's Bombon the dog (2004) is a poignant portrait of a desperate unemployed middle-age man who develops a relationship with a dog. Umberto D comes into mind, but humor maintains the melodramatic tone along an acrid portrait of modern Argentinean society. In Intimate Stories (2002) Sorn had already staged a tale about an old man and his dog. The resourcefulness of Sorn's heroes are consolation of a society at the brink of poverty. They share Glauber Rocha's claim that the philosophy of the Latin American man is hunger, By defeating social evils, Sorn's old men made their the Ancient Greek proverb: "Need is the mother of invention". From a naturalistic standpoint, the main characters of Gregory Nava's El Norte (1983) are epitomes of melodramatic sensibility. Born in the bosom of a peasant family, Enrique and Rosa endure hardship and injustice in their exodus from Guatemala to California. We identify with two nave victims of legal and illegal abuse who behave according to a patriarchal moral pattern. Their decisions are easily influenced by external factors. Sexual tensions are avoided by turning a youngster and his sister into the main characters of the filma common Latin-American soap-opera convention. [Nava] applies a variety of sophisticated rhetorical techniques to a sentimental, manipulative story line Nava is clearly less interested in exploring the tragic reality of
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132 the situation than in wringing a few tears from Anglo audiences. Though his subject is a serious one and his intentions are apparently noble, Nava has made a film that is essentially indistinguishable from Love Story91." Although El Norte is promoted as a dangerous journey to a better life92," Nava's discourse on immigration appears, in effect, to lack consistency. Conformity, obedience and alienation, rather than indignation and protest, are the dominant passions of the film. Nonetheless, El Norte was named an American Classic by The Library of Congress. Twenty years after its release and against the forecast of its detractors, Nava's Opera Prima preserves its lyrical appeal. I contend that a naturalistic approach to El Norte is misled beforehand. Its melodramatic framework is merely a structure that supports the complexity of its discourse. As Homer, as Camoes, Nava recreates migration as an epic justified by a collective memory. As its title suggests, El Norte articulates a ceaseless shifting of land, from Guatemala to Mexico, from Mexico to California, from California to Illinois. The journey of Enrique and Rosa is not geographical, but mythicalas Mario Barrera pointed out as early as 1992: What lifts this film [El Norte] above the ordinary and gives it its extraordinary lyrical quality, however, is its connection to myth. The story of Enrique and Rosa, and much of the symbolism of the film, comes from the creation myth of the Maya As in the Popol Vuh, there are twin heroes who must undergo a series of trials and tests before reaching their goal. The twin heroes represent an inherently dualistic concept of the universe93.
Dave Kehr, in The Chicago Reader. Publicity slogan of El Norte, Cinecom International, 1983. 93 Barrera, Mario, Story Structure in Latino Feature Films in Chon A. Noriega, ed. Chicanos and Film. Representation and Resistance. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992,) p. 233.
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133 Barrera's comment echoes Joseph Campbell's definition of myth: [Myth] puts you in touch with a plane of reference that goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and thought. Yet that which transcends all talk is the very essence of your own being, so you're resting on it and you know it. The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of "Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it's myself."94 But the ruses contrived by Hunap and Xbalanqu against the Lords of Xibalba95 are strange to Enrique and Rosa. Although Gregory Nava weaves his narration from a variety of sources, reenacting myths from Greece, Central America and Mesopotamia, his work articulates the passive ideology of the New Testament. Hunap and Xbalanqu, as Gilgamesh, Joshua and Ulysses are colonizers who act with boldness and defiance: vengeance is their fate. Enrique and Rosa, by contrast, are immigrants, conspicuously perseverant. They have assumed a destiny of exile: as Joseph and Moses they live and die in a foreign land. Immigration is the antonym of colonization. From the massacres of Canaan and the battles of Aeneas; from the Nordic sagas to the series of George Lucas, the colonizer demonizes his enemy in order to justify his/her destruction. The immigrant avoids conflict. He/she submits to his enemy in order to achieve conciliation. The medieval legend of the wondering Jew is, in fact, the legend of the quintessential immigrant. He and his offspring travel from Israel to Egypt, to Spain, to Portugal, to the Netherlands, to
Campbell, Joseph Mythic Reflections: thoughts on myth, spirit, and our times, interview with Tom Collins, In Context No 12 (Langley: Winter 1985/86) (Langley: Winter 1985/86,) p. 52. 95 So impressed were the Lords by [the twin's] powers over death that "their hearts were filled with desire and longing" to submit themselves as volunteers for so marvelous a piece of magic. "Do the same with us! Sacrifice us!" they exclaimed. The twins agreed. "And so it happened that they first sacrificed the one and then the other of the Lords. And the twins did not bring them back to life." Everyone in Xibalba panicked and ran. "This is the way the Lords of Xibalba were overcome." McClear, Margaret, POPOL VUH: Structure and Meaning (Madrid: Coleccin Plaza Mayor Scholar, 1973) p. 31-67.
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134 England and to the United States as a community that conveys knowledge, industry and experience to new countries. The Jew that invades a territory with sophisticated weaponry is, by contrast, a colonizer. Immigration and colonization are mentalities in ceaseless conflict with each other. The birth of a mythical narration is spontaneous, rather than conceived. I was about five years old when I met a rambling child in Bucaramanga, Colombia. I asked him about his family. He told me that long time ago, in a remote region, he lived with his parents and his siblings in a luxurious farmhouse, along a lakeshore. His parents had several horses and a train of servants. They lived happily, until certain day a jealous neighbour burnt their house and murdered his family. He miraculously survived and moved to the city. That was why, he added, he had to beg his daily bread every morning, from door to door. His story caused an indelible impression in my imagination. His humiliating work was invested thereafter with a noble purpose. Yeas later I understood that he had enacted the myth of the fall of Adam and Eve, the epic of the son of Aphrodite, the sale of Joseph by his brothers. A victim of poverty, he had given a cosmological dimension to his childhood. He was aware, as Homer, that gods gave suffering to men, so that the bards might sing their woes96. The myth renders the complexity that morality, sociology and psychology tend to abbreviate. Life relies in complexity, rather than on unity. The characters of El Norte are resilient to an anthropological, psychological or sociological discourse. Had Nava included schizophrenic patients in his film, El Norte would have become another exploration of the weakness and failure of family bounds in contemporary society. Instead, Nava recreates
96
Odyssey, V, 804 - 806.
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135 types that embody humanity as a whole. Voices of a dominant discourse bind Nava's cinema to the artistic expression of a particular minority97. Without denying the cultural background of his work, El Norte appeals to viewers of all races, creeds and nations. By drawing episodes from a particular mythical consciousness, Nava re-enacts a universal epic. El Norte enacts several scenes the bafflement of several characters before geography. First when they are discovered by a truck driver; then when they are under interrogation by two US custom officers; and then again when Enrique speaks to his illegal-Mexican immigrant friend: ENRIQUE He is also a Mexican, isn't he? JORGE No! He's a Pocho, he can't even speak Spanishthe dummy... ENRIQUE What does Pocho mean? JORGE A Chicano... He's an American citizen, but his family came from Mexico. (laughing) That's why he has to do the same shit we do [to wash dishes.] The viewer, who had previously identified Enrique as a Guatemalan illegal immigrant, complies with his new identity without resistance. Mexico becomes the common place of Latin-American kinship. A mythical land consecrated by religious traditions, necessarily unreal in time and spaceas once Africa was for the African-American artists of the
On the control of multiculturalism as akin to the control of discourse see the last chapter of Michel Foucault, Les Mots et Les Choses.
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136 1920's98. A mythical space grows as law constraints the social mobility of the immigrants. By approaching vast groups of illegal immigrants under a single category collective memory is born. Africa and Mexico gain terrain in the US, as Zion gained terrain in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The historical and geographical Guatemala of Enrique and Rosa, is absorbed and ultimately replaced by a new mythical space. This sacrifice creates, nonetheless, a growing feeling of culpability. The French writer Paul Ricur beautifully explores the variations of this conflict. [Myth] is a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in this world99. As the first images of El Norte roll on the screen, Nava re-enacts the myth of the creation. From the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters (Gen., 1: 1-2.) A void background is lit by clouds in movement. We hear water running as the screen becomes loaded with biblical imagery: a steep mountain, an abysm, dense vegetation, birds, dogs, men The film introduces us to the family life of Enrique and Rosa in Guatemala. Civilization and primitive life are interwoven during the first part of El Norte: Josefita meets Enrique's family in a house lit with candles, although the park in front of the house is lit with electric
It became clearto Langston Hughes at leastthat the Africa being evoked was not the real one but a mythological, imaginary Africa of noble savagery and primitive grace. Kobena Mercer, Black Hair/State Politics, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures ( New York: MIT) p. 256. The author relies on Hughes sensibility towards Africa: I was only an American Negrowho had love the surfaces of Africa and the rhythms of Africabut I was not Africa. Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea (London: Pluto Press, 1986) 99 Paul Ricur, The Symbolism of Evil, tr. Emerson Buchanan, p. 5.
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137 bulbs. Josefita talks about the US life style, prodded by Enrique and Rosa, but almost immediately we realize that Enrique has already acquired a prior knowledge of the US through TV: And in TV, [life there] looks superb. Where has Enrique seen TV before? Does not Enrique's family house lack electricity? When and how often does he see TV if (as the first scenes suggest,) he's used to work from dusk to dawn everyday? Unresolved questions. The next sequence of El Norte dramatizes Enrique's father's death by Government soldiers. Why is he murdered? Is he a member of a revolutionary group? Is he a founder of a communist organization? Is Guatemala undergoing a civil war? Again, it will be pointless to formulate answers. The death of the father has occurred at a symbolic level. His head hangs from a tree, as the forbidden apple of the Eden. Nava presents El Norte in three parts: Guatemala, The Journey and The North. In Guatemala Nava appears to reject the conventions of naturalistic cinema. Such lack of coordination is a constitutional element of the myth: I shall regard myths as a species of symbols, as symbols developed in the form of narrations and articulated in a time and a space that cannot be coordinated with the time and space of history and geography according to the critical method100. We are before the logic of a dream, or, as Kafka wrote, of a nightmare. As Enrique and Rosa move away from their Motherland, historic and geographical references become clearly outlined. During The Journey Enrique and Rosa meet El Coyote, who cunningly persuades them to hasten their journey to the US. A true knowledge of the world seems to lie beyond. And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil (Gen., 3: 3-4.) El Coyote describes
100
Ibid., p. 18.
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138 Tijuana as a Lost city [where] no one owns anything. But almost immediately we learn that Mr. Gutirrez owns a restaurant in Tijuana. Spatial and temporal coordinates remain unclear until Enrique and Rosa arrive at San Diego, and the Promised Land is unveiled before their ecstatic eyes. El Norte slowly emerges as a symbolic representation. The perils endured by two Central American peasants are ennobled by their cosmological fate. We participate in the reenactment of the human fall, the expulsion from paradise and the exodus from an oppressive country to a Promised Land. This reenactment is solemn. Enrique and Rosa represent the viewer from the perspective of a collective memorythey are not realistic characters, but symbolic representations of the Male and the Female humanity. Eve, then, does not stand for woman in the sense of a 'second sex'. Every woman and every man are Adam; every woman sins 'in' Adam, every man is seduced 'in' Eve101. The epic of El Norte is the epic of any past, present and future immigration. Someone has broken a covenant by leaving his/her native country. Religion, family and land are betrayed. The sequence where Rosa walks through his town in the middle of the night, prior to his journey to the US, is revealing. Rosa's nervousness is mainly due to a growing sense of culpability. She enters into a church to offer three candles to the Virgin Mary: one to her father, a second to her mother and a third to the village. A clear betrayal of her ties with religion, family and land. Once outside the church, she covers herself with a scarf. Her hands tremble. A window is abruptly closed, and she meets two old women. This scene is edited in a sinister mood. One of the women asks Rosa three times Where are you going? Wrinkled women who recall the Fatesthe third being enacted by Don Ramonwho
101
Ibid., p. 255.
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139 besides a water wheel warns Enrique about the perils of his journey102. Rosa hesitates, unable to articulate her answer. Her ties with her past had been abruptly cut. As she runs away the town fades off from our memory. We witness an empty space: the memory of a dead memory. Rosa trembles, for she has sinned. Sin is a religious dimension before being ethical; it is not the transgression of an abstract ruleof a valuebut the violation of a personal bond103. The betrayal of this triple bond (religion, family and land) is displayed at three levels: cosmic, oneiric and poetic. The above mentioned sequence closes in an image of the moon. Enrique and Rosa must leave in order to accomplish their epic: Exile is a primary symbol of human alienation104, writes Ricoeur; an Alienation that, nonetheless, becomes a liberation. Submission is ameliorated by faithor by a firm belief that any suffering will be shortlived. Exile appears to be the main theme of any mythology. Gilgamesh, in fear of death, travels in search of an answer to immortality. Ulysses and Sinbad abandon their motherland in search of glory or prosperity. The Old Testament is a ceaseless chronicle of banishment and exile, e.g. Joseph's sale, Moses' exodus, Elias' journey. The migrant, on the other hand, is guided by his/her dreams. Deprived of wealth and power, Enrique and Rosa obey the whispers of nightly visions. Rosa's agony is announced by her mother in a dream. She solaces her daughter, whose lonely life in the US has become harder than in Guatemala. By appearing from the dead, Rosa's mother prepares her
resurrection. In a second dream Rosa's father gives her a bunch of flowers and a fish
The wheel is one of the oldest symbols of humanity. Kurosawa made use of it in his adaptation of Macbeth Throne of Blood. 103 Paul Ricur, Op.cit., p. 52. 104 Ibid., p. 18.
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140 symbols of love and eternity. Soon after she dies. The poetic dimension of El Norte is articulated by folk songs, e.g., Rosa's song before her father's burial, and the voice over when Rosa and Enrique leave the village. But the myth does not only justify the being-there; it also purges moral guilt. Immigrants never leave their motherland by their own will; there is an external force that drives them off. Would Enrique and Rosa have remained in Guatemala, they would have undergone torture and ignominy in the same way that the Jewish community would have continued enduring slavery in Egypt. As Adam and Eve leave the paradise under the sword of an angel, thus Enrique and Rosa leave their village instigated by the soldier's weapons. By blaming an external force, the mythical hero is exculpated. Arguing from the fact that our freedom is beset by desire, we seek to exculpate ourselves and make ourselves appear innocent by accusing an Other105. The myth, as a fictional creation, manipulates the historical truth. Nava, as Homer, becomes a lawgiver and historian. In the last section of El Norte Rosa contracts typhus. A growing guilt worsens her condition. Rosa has sinned, and her sin brands her with defilement. Whereas the doctor wants to find out whether Rosa has contracted a contagious disease or not, Rosa's main fear is to be identified as impurean impurity which is not caused by a physical disease, but by her guilt and shame. She has not only abandoned her motherland; she has pushed her way in a society that is not her own. Her uneasiness grows in the belief of chastisement: suffering is surcharged with ethical meanings. If you suffer, if you are ill, if you fail, if you die, it is because you have sinned.106
Cfr. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p.31. In demanding that a man suffer justly, we expect the pain to have not only a limit, but a directionthat is to say, an end... Punishment would then no longer be the death of a man in the presence of the sacred, but penance with a view to order and pain with a view to happiness. Ibid., p. 43-44, and the
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105
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141 Rosa ultimately incarnates the lamb of the New Testament. With her death Enrique is redeemed. His compassionate feminine sensitivity grows with his sister's death. By forgiving the world that destroyed her, Enrique is healed from his selfishness and ambition. Jorge, the Mexican, had already taught him that loneliness was the condition of survival. Happiness, as it was experienced during his early days in Guatemala, must be indefinitely procrastinated in the United States. Enrique becomes a workman, an alien controlled by a system no less unfair than the system he withstood in Guatemala. With such an end El Norte accomplishes the teleological function of the myth: it is projected towards the futureits real function is to justify the being-there-now for the being-there-for-always. The fulfillment of the Promise, which at first appears to be at hand ('All the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever... Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee' [Gen. 13: 15-17],) is constantly postponed. After enduring painful experiences Rosa and Enrique accept their ultimate fate in forgiveness. The wealth of the interval [of the exile] is such that the end itself changes its meaning107. Enrique and Rosa's cosmological journey is not accomplished in this life, but in eternity. Immortality unfolds and preserves the myth. Past, present and future are diluted:
On the peak of the past The future still sings108
myth, in naming Adam, man, makes explicit the concrete universality of human evil; the spirit of repentance gives to itself, and the Adamic myth, the symbol of that universality. p. 241. 107 Ibid., p. 263. 108 En la cima del pasado Cantando el futuro est Salinas, Pedro, Poesas, p. 799.
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El Norte acquires ground as a universal epic. The cadences of verses have been replaced by the lyrical images and sounds of Central America and California. Enrique and Rosa re-enact the first couple who once upon a time migrated from Africa to a hostile world.
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9. Tragic cinema Manichaeism is so widespread that narrations with a tragic discourse are rare nowadays109. Such stories, though, were the backbone of ancient poetry.
Figure 3. Tragic Actantial Model
Sender HYBRIS
>
Object DEATH Subject HERO
->
Receiver GLORY
Homer is perhaps the first poet to have structured a tragic discourse. The official poet of Athens chant the stories of suffering and defeat of Hector. His example was emulated by the Athenian playwrights. In 479 BC, Aeschylus wrote "The Persians," a
"'Themythsofparticipationandlovepertainonlytotheingroup,andtheoutgroupistotally other.Thisisthesenseoftheword'gentile'thepersonisnotofthesameorder".
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144 remarkable effort to understand the failed ambitions of the Persian Empire. Staged and acted by his author, "The Persians," became a compassionate celebration on the victory of the Greeks in Plataea. In crystalline verses Aeschylus sympathizes with the defeated enemy. Instead of writing an epic poem on the triumphs of his communityas any Assiryan or Indian bard would have done, Aeschilus moves the reader to share the pain of the Persian monarch by the loss of his army:
Ye faithful Persians, honour'd now in age, Once the companions of my youth, what ills Afflict the state? The firm earth groans, it opes, Disclosing its vast deeps; and near my tomb I see my wife: this shakes my troubled soul With fearful apprehensions; yet her off'rings Pleased I receive. And you around my tomb Chanting the lofty strain, whose solemn air Draws forth the dead, with grief-attemper'd notes Mournfully call me: not with ease the way Leads to this upper air; and the stern gods, Prompt to admit, yield not a passage back But with reluctance: much with them my power Availing, with no tardy step I come.
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145 Say then, with what new ill doth Persia groan?110
Shakespeare represented in "Macbeth" the price of power. In a tragic story, spectators identify with the antagonist. Feelings of compassion, reconciliation and
forgiveness are stage in nightmarish scenarios, be it at the desolate Philadelphia library of Citizen Kane, the cliff at the end of The Field (1990) or the corridor of Dead Man Walking (1995.) Narrators influenced by the tragic discourse represent thus the drama of the outcast or the defeated. His sufferings may be the result of courage (Aeschylus,) wisdom (Sophocles) or cunning (Euripides.) Fate hangs over the victims, but there is space of interpretation. Racine finds the drive for death in the inevitable birth of consuming passions, while T.S. Eliot reveals a universe of sacrificial suffering. In a tragic narrative recrimination is deadened by compassion, hate by understanding and revenge by forgiveness. The New Testamentwhich Coleridge used once as a tool of moral indoctrination, appears to be the most influential compilation of tragic narratives: the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the passion of the Christ. The most sensitive poets and filmmakers have been tragic narrators: in "Eumenides" Aeschylus stages the inner struggles of Orestes after his matricide. In "Romeo and Juliette" Shakespeare drives spectators to sympathize with characters at war one against each another. " By sympathizing with the foolish and the grotesque Cervantes gave birth to the
110
Aeschylus, The Persians.
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146 modern novel, a narrative in which existence overcomes characters, plot and diction. The shift in sensibility encouraged narrators to explore their own lives as source of inspiration. The 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire wasaccording to Walter Benjamin, the first narrator that made of his own experience the main subject of his work. Modern novelists such as Proust, Mann, Joyce and Beckett have widened the abysms of the self by producing pseudo-autobiographical, self-compassionate works. "Waiting for Godot" might be remembered as the main metaphysical work of the twentieth century, deeper than Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit" and far more human than Sartre's "L'tre et le Nant." From its opening in Paris in 1953, literary critics pointed out the play's allusion to an immaterial, never-present God. But to reduce the complexity of Beckett's play to a single line would be misleading. To that effect, the credit should go to Balzac, who in 1847 wrote "Mercadet" a comedy where a character called Godeau is expected to solve everyone's troubles, and who, as in Beckett's play, never appears. Waiting for Godot expresses an existential theme: faith. As many Irish children, Beckett received a dogmatic religious education, which was soon questioned by his readings on science and philosophy. But the metaphysical questions raised by the Christian faith haunted Beckett until his death. Centuries before Beckett, Abelard had redefined faith as: subtantia rerum sperandum (He 11,1,) a definition that may well convey the plot of Waiting for Godot: the substance of the things we are waiting for. Vladimir and Estragon are tortured by the evidence that Godot won't ever come, and yet they keep their faith. Both characters, however, avoid any direct reference to faith. Only on one occasion Vladimir describes Lucky as a faithful servant (fr. fidle serviteur,) a statement that can be overlooked as a familiar expression. But the act of being faithful
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147 is, as we will see later on, a tragic commitment. Beckett prefers to use two verbs along his play: to believe and to think. Vladimir, Estragon and Pozzo use them as synonymous. In the French version Vladimir replies Je crois when asked whether the name of the man they are waiting for is Godot: I believe so, a statement that Beckett renders into English as I think so. For centuries philosophy confined the problem of faith to religion. Theology, on the other hand, reduced the problem of belief to Christian dogma. The immaculate conception of Jesus of Nazareth and his miraculous resurrection were events beyond the grasp of common sense that had to be authenticated by the reduction of faith to absurdity. I believe, because it does not make sense, wrote Tertullian in De Carne Christi 5. Faith, nevertheless, is not a condition imposed by a given creed. Aquinas described it as a state of being based on habit and virtue; Hegel as a manifestation of the mind that a philosopher cannot dismiss on the grounds of irrationality. Kierkegaard was the first philosopher who understood the close relationship between faith and consciousness. The will to believe is also the need to believe. The interior convictions of a man cannot be dismissed as the incidental product of a historical process. Husserl wrote sharply that consciousness lives originally in the element of belief. Unamuno wrote that existence would be unbearable without faith. His interpretation is as evangelical as philosophical. In the gospel according to Saint Matthew, the disciples are on a boat threatened by a tempest. They decide, then, to wake up Jesus. Before calming the sea, Jesus reproaches them for their lack of faith. But skepticism had already appeared in the book of Genesis as the cause of the original sin. In Waiting for Godot the core problem of existence was not faith alone, but the
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148 continuous dilemma between faith and skepticism. Willingness to believe, and yet, by the very nature of the mind, reluctance to believe. The solid habit of existing is constantly hindered by the pale touches of thought. In a tour de force, Beckett stages the tragedy of pondering about an illogical world. First, when Pozzo asks Lucky to think. His monologue, as it is well known, is pregnant with metaphysical themes: Given the existence of a personal God with white beard outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda Second, when Vladimir and Estragon are tortured by their previous thoughts:
VLADIMIR. - When you seek you hear. ESTRAGON. - You do. VLADIMIR. - That prevents you from finding. ESTRAGON. - It does. VLADIMIR. - That prevents you from thinking. ESTRAGON. - You think all the same. VLADIMIR. No, no, it's impossible. VLADIMIR. - What is terrible is to have thought.
In a time dominated by the mirages of nationalism and communism, Beckett realized that no ideology or dogma could fully solve the problems posed by metaphysics. Becketts allusion to Vladimir Lenin cannot be overlooked as simple irony. As the main
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149 character of "The Happy Days" most human beings live immersed in the quicksand of uncertainty, occasionally consoled by glimpses of hope and more often darkened by outbursts of skepticism. Godot must exist, but merely as a hypothesis. Would he appear onto the stage, his very existence would be put into question. At some point Vladimir wonders whether Pozzo is in reality Godot, but he immediately dismisses his conjecture with horror. As with the main character of Mercadet, Vladimir understands that a materialized Godeau/Godot/God will prove to be less useful than an immaterial, absent Godeau/Godot/God. Vladimir's hope works as absolute hope, that's to say, as an everprotracted realization of itself. When by the end of the second act, Estragon is told that Godot has not come, he asks Vladimir to commit suicide. Faith is fortified by hopes and doubts, rather than by realizations and certainties. Take doubt away from the wealthiest and healthiest man on earth; he will hang himself immediately. Give hope to the weakest man, he will risk his wealth, his health and even his life for that hope. The characters of Waiting for Godot will never commit suicide, for they have fully accepted the absurdity of hope. It is hope alone which keeps so many men and woman alive under the yoke of so much misery and oppression. The resilience of Vladimir and Estragon is indeed more heroic than the blind despair of Lear and Romeo. Faith manifests constantly in believing. Believing in what? Overall in believing, the most rational and still the most illogical manifestation of the mind. Logical minds never believe; they merely accept facts. Scientists are never expected to believe whether the volume of a cone is one-third that of a cylinder on the same base and of the same height, in the same way that surgeons are never expected to believe whether blood
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150 circulates or not. These are demonstrable concepts, and as such they are plainly accepted. Science's deep distrust in belief explains why any discussion on faith is rhetorical beforehand, for it does not address a particular subject, such as the soul, God or love, but rather the very act of believing. To answer positively to the question on whether someone believe or not in love is as naive as to ask a mathematician whether he believes or not that one and two equal three. The question on God hovers over play. Will he, by any chance, come to save the characters? To save them of what? Of death? Of hell? But the main doubt posed by the characters of Waiting for Godot is not on the nature of Godot, but rather on the character's faith in their own existence a life which is never static, but dynamic, fully expressed in the act of waiting. This attitude, which cynics associate to optimism, constitutes the faith that fortifies existence, from that of the first African nomad to that of the last early Roman Christian, from that of the last surviving Jew in Auschwitz to that of the father-of-three unemployed citizen of today. Beckett's character's survival is no less admirable, though, for they have rebuilt their faith from cinders. As Camus's Sisyphus, they survive in a world that has made of sweet religion a rhapsody of words. Their condition, that's to say, the condition of the modern man is certainly absurd, for how can anyone believe in an existence threatened by decay, while suffering from the cradle to the grave, without clear consciousness of birth and death: "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth". The inverted chronology of Vladimir's cry is intentional, for time can only exist by common agreement: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? Beckett, as Rousseau, believed that most people were able to go on with their lives
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151 without realizing the absurdity of their toils and pangs. To this belief we owe the unforgettable image of a woman praising life as she is buried alive. Towards the end of Waiting for Godot Vladimir incarnating Beckett's alter-ego, suffers insomnia while Estragon dozes off. Vladimir refers then to his partner with a hint of envy: He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot, as he deems his suffering greater than Estragon's, for he has discovered the absurdity of effort in a world of uncertainties. Beckett expressed out this realization along his life. In Enueg II (1931) he writes:
world world world world ... de morituris nihil nisi [From the dead alone]
And in What is the World (1990):
what is the word folly from this all this folly from all this
But either by ignorance (e.g., Lucky) or by skepticism all the characters of Waiting for Godot keep on with their lives. As Averroes, they believe that being is better than not-being, and believing better than non-believing, even under the realization
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152 that such belief will never cease. Beckett expresses this paradox in beautiful passages of his work. In "The Unnamable" a blind maimed torso ponders:
"I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." The tragic ethical narration of screenwriting of today bears the influence of the Bible and Greek poetry. In Beyond the Walls (1984,) the adaptation of Eran Preis's theatre play "Behind Bars", Israeli director Uri Barbash represents the life in prison of a Palestinian terrorist. Our sympathies are with the defeated political enemy of Barbash' nation. Most tragic characters appear to be criminals: a man that kills his father and spouses his mother; a middle-aged woman that harasses his stepson; a father that murders his children; a youngster that stabs his mother. Socrates and Plato used to deride the morality of tragedy, which turns criminals into heroes. Centuries later, G. Bernard Shaw justly accused William Shakespeare of writing tragedies about capricious men and women. These three great writers were unable to understand the purpose of tragedy, which has been the representation of what Karl Jaspers calls profound moments of unique self-recognition, confrontations vis--vis with death before spectators in search of their authentic self. Those who have lost everything become the heroes of tragic narrations, as in Samuel Beckett's novels and plays. By exposing misery, readers develop feelings of pity and compassion towards the defeated, in agreement with the precepts of the Gospels. All suspect criminals, says Orson Welles in "The Trail" are somehow attractive. A particular story reveals the love toward the tragic sensibility of the Ancient Greeks. According to Plutarch, during the Peloponnesian war several Athenian soldiers
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153 captured by their Spartan enemy saved their life by reciting passages of Euripides: "Several were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose poetry, it appears, was in request among the Sicilians more than among any of the settlers out of Greece. And when any travelers arrived that could tell them some passage, or give them any specimen of his verses, they were delighted to be able to communicate them to one another. Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how that some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems, and others, when straggling after the fight, been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics. Nor need this be any wonder, for it is told that a ship of Caunus fleeing into one of their harbors for protection, pursued by pirates, was not received, but forced back, till one asked if they knew any of Euripides's verses, and on their saying they did, they were admitted, and their ship brought into harbor111." The ethics of compassion of the Christian dogma is tragic, as Schopenhauer remarked. Dante represented the Demon with piety in his Comedy. In the final verses of his Comedy, the love of God is extended to the deeps of Hell. The Elizabethan and Spanish playwrights of the 16th and 17th century revived the tragic sensibility in the bosom of the Christian Church. Circumstances, accidents and misunderstandings are the cause of suffering; the upshots of anguish are shared by characters and spectators alike. In "Life is a Dream," the punishment of Segismundo is counterbalanced by his misbehaviours at court, where he stabs a courtier. In "Hamlet" the Prince murders Polonius, which turns him into a mortal threat to his family. Good and evil are categories of interpretation unsuited to grasp the particular. Noble intentions can trigger
111
Plutarch, Nicias, p, 456.
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154 death, as in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck," or wickedness can be graceful, as in Shaw's "Saint Joan." On a remarkable page on "Macbeth" Thomas de Quincy stresses the ability of the bard to bring us into the life and mind of the murderer. Tragic filmmakers develop his/her sympathies towards the more questionable characters. Horror and repulse is the row material of his/her work, a glimpse into the abysms of survival. In Dead Man Walking Susan Sarandon moves spectators to compassion by enacting the confessional journey of Sister Helen. In the final sequences of the film Tim Robbins juxtaposes the images of the criminal walking towards his execution with the memories of his rape and murder. The brutality of his crime is counterbalanced by his agony. Matthew Poncelet becomes part of the existence of Sister Helen. The tragic discourse unfolds in a space where the hero cant control death and life. The massacre of The Mission (1983) shares the cries of Prometheus against Zeus, the exile of Oedipus, the blood on the hands of Hercules, the agonizing reconciliation of Lear with Cornelia on the threshold of their death, the regrets of uncle Vania, and the narcissistic solitude of Kane. Representation happens in a universe of feelings. Audiences become participants of a drama that reflects times of emotional turmoil in their lives112. Horror and suspense films embody our primal fascination with death113. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) reflects continuously on murder114. Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) commit a crime "for the sake of danger". They want to
Octavio Paz, La Hija de Rapaccini, p. 90. Jacques Choron has defined three varieties of Death Fear: 1. Fear of what happens after death, 2. Fear of the 'event', of dying 3. Fear of ceasing to be. Cf. Choron, Jacques, Death and Modern Man, pp. 73-83. This categorization of fear doesn't contemplate a fearless death, as staged by Welles at the end of The Trial (1962) or by Gibson in The Passion of the Christ (2003)
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155 experience the risk of being discovered. To that purpose they set up the elements that drive spectators to the climax of the film. They placed the cadaver of the victim in a box upon which they serve food and invite guests to dine; amongst their visitors they meet the family of the victim and a University Professor (James Steward,) who becomes gradually their prosecutor. The Seventh Seal (1956) is a poetic reflection on dying, a lyrical representation of faith before doomsday. Bergman plots three stories in the film: the medieval legend of the Knight playing chess with Death, the story of a theatre troupe struggling to survive, and the despair of the multitude during the years of the Black Death. Death unfolds from the lofty pedestals of reflection. The medieval characters of Bergman display an apprehension that goes beyond the grave. They are suffering what Unamuno calls the tragic sense of life. Jof the player embodies Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, a man who having overcome his aesthetic and ethical compromises is able to embrace life as a gift. Jof sees visions of Mother Mary and her child that are contested by his sceptical and charming wife. He is goofy, but he finds his way to smile at the most adverse circumstances, even when he's forced to dance on a table on fire washed with alcohol. Block the Knight, by contrast, embodies the discourse of modernity. He has been compared to Don Quixote, but his doubts appear closer to those of Hamlet: "To sleep! perchance to dream; ay there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?" The anguish of the Elizabethan poet had just been revived by the post-war French existentialists. Death approaches and the Knight calmly challenges the allegory to a chess game, presenting as arguments of persuasion chronicles of ancient times and depictions in folk songs and paintings. Only at end of the
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156 film spectators learn that the Knight played chess in order to save Jof, Mia and their child. The preservation of life gives thus meaning to death. Death dances followed by the Knight and his retinue towards a black cloud. Dancers are happy to realize that whatever awaits them beyond, certainty will be their reward. Sacrifice and redemption are thus the final notes of a film conceived in a sceptical milieu. A declared atheists Bergman used to sign his screenplays SDO, as Bach and Handel did at the end of their compositions: "Soli Deu Gloria" "For the glory of God alone". Many of his films are, in fact, structured around religious issues., e.g., the main character of Through a Glass Darkly wants to know the face of God; the Knight of The Virgin of the Spring believes in God, to whom he makes penitence for his revenge. Bergman was in conflict with his religious believes by the time he wrote "Wood Painting," the theatre play that inspired the screenplay of The Seventh Seal: "I was still very much in quandary over religious faith, I placed my two opposing beliefs side by side, allowing each to state its case in its own way"115. Kafka is, along Samuel Beckett (his most noble disciple) the tragic narrator of the 20th century. Not surprisingly Orson Welles adapted The Trial (1962) to the screen. Without consideration for the thirst of realism of his contemporaries, Welles displayed a nightmarish story with sophisticated cinematography in a universe of exuberant symbolism. Welles' Joseph K. is a hero that copes with defiance the affronts of modern bureaucracy. He embraces his execution with a laugh that becomes triumphal as he throws pebbles to the guards. His contempt for death is as great as Kafka's legendary contempt for posterity. The tragic discourse presents variations and reinterpretations from generation to generation. Amongst the European filmmakers of the 20th century Luis Buuel displays a
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Wakeman,John,WorldFilmDirectorsI,p. 235.
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157 particular obsession for metaphysical themes such as salvation, sin and death. During his golden years, at the peak of his career, Buuel frequently regretted his critic's disregard for his Hispanic cultural background. He indiscreetly denounced the politics of art and importance: Steinbeck wouldn't be someone without the American cannons... Is a country's power that decides over the great writers? Galdos is as a novelist as good as Dostoievski, but, who knows him outside Spain?116. Buuel's international renown remains associated to the surrealist movement, an offshoot of 1920s European culture. Buuel himself often corroborated his surrealistic credentials. Nonetheless, he spent most of his childhood in Calandahis hometown. In 1917 he moved to Madrid, to pursue a University degree in entomology. In addition to studying the instinctual behaviour of insectswhich he displayed skilfully later on in films such as Susana, Devil and Flesh (1951) and Wuthering Heights (1954) Buuel had the opportunity to meet the most prestigious Spanish writers of his generation. It was only in 1925, after completing a fourteen-month military service, when Buuel went to Paris as secretary to a Spanish diplomat. A screening of Fritz Lang's Der mude Tod (Weary Death, 1921,) persuaded him to devote his career to cinema. He volunteered as an assistant of Jean Epstein for one year, until, during the production of La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher, 1927) Buuel called Abel Gance a hack (pompier.) Epstein sustained a bitter argument with his Spanish assistant and dismissed him. After two years of imprecise work, as a cine club consultant and theatre director, Buuel associated with his old friend from the Madrid University years,
Buuel, Luis, Mi Ultimo Suspiro (Madrid: Plaza y Janes, 1982.) p. 216. Mon dernier soupir (Paris: R. Laffont, 1982.) The US translator softens the meaning: "It seems clear to me that without the enormous influence of the canon of American culture, Steinbeck would be an unknown..." My Last Sigh (New York: Knopf, 1983.) p. 222
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158 Salvador Dal, to write, produce and direct a surrealist film: Un chien andalou (1928.) At that time surrealism was a dissident movement. Poems and photographs were published in their official magazine, La Rvolution Surraliste. Un chien andalou was screened to a private audience gathered by Man Ray. The film was a grand success and the surrealists immediately approved and promoted the public opening of Un chien andalou. This film turned out to be the artistic work that introduced surrealism to the Parisian Bourgeoisie. After an eight-month run in Studio 28, Buuel saw suddenly himself in the paradoxical role of being the most prominent member of a group he scarcely knew. Un chien andalou remains, seventy three years after its release, the most representative film of surrealism: The second [French] 'avant-garde' had its roots in the literary and artistic movements of dadaism and surrealism.. [surrealism] wished to create a pure cinema of visual sensation divorced from conventional narrative... Un chien andalou represents the [French] avantgarde at its most mature, most surreal117. Buuel stated his relation with the surrealists in terms of affinity, rather than of dogma: More than anything else, surrealism was a kind of call heard by certain people everywherein the United States, in Germany, Spain, Yugoslaviawho, unknown to one another were already practicing instinctive forms of irrational expression. Even the poems I'd published in Spain before I'd heard of the surrealistic movement were responses to that call118 Buuel, as many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century artists had understood innovation as a precondition of success. As early as 1910 Leon Trotsky had put into question the condition of the artist: They [writers, artists, sculptors, entertainers]
117 118
Ellis, Jack C. A History of Film, p. 327. Buuel, Op. cit., p. 105.
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159 offer the public their work or their personalities; they depend on its approval and its money, and so, whether in an open or a hidden way, they subordinate their creative achievement to that great monster which they hold in such contempt: the bourgeois mob119. Trotsky's remarkmore inspired by Nietzsche than by Marx120, lay emphasis on the socioeconomic factors that influence artistic creation. Surrealism, as Dadaism, was first conceived as an uncompromising response to both the ideological numbness of the bourgeoisie and the intolerant insight of Communism. Buuel often justify the
ideological imprecision of a movement mostly recognized as a formal breakthrough: [Poets] write verses that seem to be surrealistic, but they are only on the surface Surrealism is another thingit's a moral121. Although surrealism, as a movement, relied on scandals, Buuel preserved a conservative temper: I'm lucky to have spent my childhood in the Middle ages, or, as Huysmans described it, that 'painful and exquisite' epochpainful in terms of its material aspects perhaps, but exquisite in its spiritual life. What a contrast to the world of today!122 Jeanne Rucal, his wife, depicted Buuel as a possessive patriarch who reduced her artistic aspirations to the care of her children and her husband123. Surrealism was assumed by Buuel as an aristocratic response to the ailments of capitalism: Most surrealist institutions were correctfor example, their attack on the
Trotsky, Leon. The Intelligentsia and Socialism, in Fourth International, Autumn-Winter 1964-65. Sie [Knstlers] waren zu allen Zeiten Kammerdiener einer Moral oder Philosophie oder Religion; ganz abgesehn noch davon, dass sie leider oft genug die allzu geschmeidigen Hflinge ihrer Anhnger- und Gnnerschaft und sprnasige Schmeichler vor alten oder eben neu heraufkommenden Gewalten gewesen sind. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, 5. 121 Aub, Max, Entretiens avec Max Aub, p. 61. 122 Buuel, Op. cit., p. 18. 123 Rucar de Buuel, Jeanne, Memorias de una mujer sin piano, written by Marisol Martn del Campo (Mxico, D.F.: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1990.)
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160 notion of work, that cornerstone of bourgeois civilization, as something sacrosanct124. L'ge d'or (1930,) his second film, was entirely subsidized by de Noailles, an aristocratic couple who sponsored the artistic manifestations of the avant-garde: 'Our proposal,' Charles de Noailles said to me after dinner as we sat in front of the fire, 'is that you make a twenty-minute film. You'll have complete freedom to do whatever you want. There is only one condition: we have an agreement with Stravinsky to write the music for it125'. Buuelin a display of political adaptability, also managed to collaborate as a spy for the Spanish socialist interim government of 1936126. Buuel was introduced by the surrealist to the work of an aristocrat writer, Alphonse Franois Donatien, Marquis de Sade, whose introduction to 'Cent Vingt Journes de Sodome' consolidated his distrust towards religious and political institutions: Criminal in virtue, and virtuous in crime127. But, contrary to most of his contemporary artists, Buuel avoided nihilism. He believed, as one of his characters from Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) that it's not enough to reject acquired beliefs. It's necessary to replace them for a personal morality128." By placing the individual over his institutions and creeds, Buuel echoed the existentialist philosophy discussed in Spain during the 1910s. During his stay in Madrid he had discussed the scope and boundaries of an art constrained by tradition: There was also [in Madrid] the great Eugenio d'Ors, a philosopher from Catalonia... He was the author of a line I often cite against those who
Buuel, Op. cit., p.123. Ibid., p. 115. 126 See Aub, Op. cit., pp. 84-93, and Buuel, Op. cit., pp. 150-170. 127 Criminel dans a vertu et vertueux dans le crime. Sade, Marquis de, Cent Vingt Journes de Sodome, introduction. 128 Il ne suffit pas de rejeter les ides reues. Encore faut-il les remplacer par une morale personnelle. Cited by Carrire, Jean-Claude, Prface to Aub, Op. cit., iv.
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161 seek originality at the expense of everything else. 'What doesn't grow out of tradition', he used to say, 'is plagiarism129. Those of us who grew up in the early teens were profoundly influenced by the extraordinary writers Spain produced at the turn of the century. I was lucky enough to know most of themOrtega y Gasset, Unamuno, Valle Incln, d'Ors...130 Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) remains as the most renowned Spanish philosopher of the 1898 generation. He published "Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida" in 1913. Widely read in Germany, France and the US131 "The Tragic Sense of Life" turned Unamuno into an international figure. His vehement opening paragraph announces existentialism as an intimate, rather than a systematic discourse: Our man is the man of flesh and bone: me, youmy reader, he who is beyond us. All men who are on earth at this very moment132. Drawing passages from classical and modern poets, from Terence to W. Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, Unamuno criticizes the dehumanization of instituted philosophy. His main inspiration is the work of an unknown philosopher from Denmark: Sren Kierkegaard. Unamuno learnt Danish in order to translate and quote extensive passages from Kierkegaard's work. Originally written against Hegel, they apply to systematic philosophers such as Plato and Marx: 'The [Hegelian] abstraction's risk is precisely in reference to the problem of the existence, which Hegel ignores in order to resolve. He brags afterwards about his resolution. Hegel beautifully explains immortality as a general concept, and identifies it with infinity which is, precisely, the mean of thinking. But his abstraction fails to cope with the real problem: whether we are immortal or not. Abstraction is just not interested to answer, but
Buuel, Op. cit., p. 70. Ibid., p. 58. 131 Unamuno, Miguel de, The Tragic Sense of Life tr. By J. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1921) 132 Unamuno, Miguel, Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida, p. 25-26. Quoted and translated passages from this edition.
130 129
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162 existence remains interested in existencethat is the real difficulty. Whoever exists longs for an infinite existence ' How truthful this bitter invective against Hegelthe prototype of a rationalist, who intends to cure our fever by taking away our life, and who promises us abstract immortality, rather than the concrete immortality we all long for133. Unamuno proceeds then to analyse the concept of immortality. Life implies an instinctual acceptance of eternity. Man creates God as a response to his desires and emotionsmanifestations of his essential nature. Following Kant, he recognizes that God cannot be grasped from a rational standpoint. He assumes, accordingly, an irrational perspective. Without an instinct for immortality, man's existence would be annihilated: What we called logical truth, prompts me to consent that the immortality of the individual soul is a contradiction in itself. It is not only irrational, but against reason. Nonetheless, certitude drives me to affirm I can not accept such logical truth, and I protest against its validity. Truth is felt, rather than thought, and is based on what I see, what I touch and what I heara stronger truth134. Buuel left in his memoirs an account of his personal relationship with Unamuno: [Unamuno] used to visit us often in Madrid... He was a serious and very famous man, but he always seem pedantic and utterly humorless to me [Years later] I found out that Unamuno was in Paris... He participated in a daily meeting at La Rotonde in Montparnasse... I went to La Rotonde almost every day... and sometimes I walked with Unamuno back to his apartment near the toile, a distance that gave us a good two hours' worth of conversation135. Whereas Sade's work allowed Buuel to stage and discuss perversity throughout
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Ibid., p. 128-129. Ibid., p. 135. 135 Buuel, Op. cit., pp. 78-79.
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163 his films, Unamuno's existentialism prompted his own conception of morality. His curiosity in Catholic theology intrigued supporters and detractors. When the Spanish writer Max Aub praised him for his theological erudition, Buuel retorted with edgy modesty: Those are things I have read lately, while shooting Simon of the Desert136. Buuel also imbibed from Unamuno his fascination for mysticism. The tenth chapter of "The Tragic Sense of Life" entitled "Religion, afterlife mythology and
apokatastasis" is a brief metaphysical treaty. In a clear and vibrant style, Unamuno quotes poets, mystics, saints, philosophers, theologians and atheists to point out that immortality, rather than death, is the constant drive of human nature: Eternity, as our present, would be lifeless without memory and hope137. A quote from the Spanish mystic Miguel de Molinos anticipates the happiness and frustrations of Buuelian characters such as Viridiana, Nazarin and Simon of the Desert: Whoever comes to mysticism must deny five things: first, creatures; second, temporary goods; third, spiritual gifts; fourth, the self, and fifth, God himself138. Buuel, as many mystics, assumed atheism as a religious experience. The Jesuit priests Artela Lusuviaga S.J., whom Buuel regarded as the only man who ever grasped his religious disposition, described him as a saint: I see a consummated atheist in Buuelas a result of an ideological decision. In private Buuel is a strictly religious mansubconsciously or effectively: you cannot be precise. And he is a strictly Christian religious man. That's why I find the mystic theme in him, and that's why I often include him amongst the greatest mystics139. Buuel's interest in metaphysics consternated conservatives and liberals alike.
136 137
Aub, Op. cit., p. 19. Unamuno, Ibid., p. 262. 138 Ibid., p. 230. 139 Aub, Op. cit., p. 323.
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164 The irreverent portrait of the Catholic clergy in L'ge d'or caused the expulsion of Charles de Noailles from the Jockey Club: The Pope was on the point of excommunicating him140. On the other hand, the The Milky Way offended the sensitivity of anticlerical Latin American writers: At a private screening, I [Buuel] invited some friends: Hernando Viez and his wife, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortzar, etc. When it was over, Fuentes was enthusiastic but Cortzar was very cold. He bid me adieu very politely and left. I asked Fuentes: 'What did Cortzar think of the film?' Carlos answered, 'He said it was paid for by the Vatican141'. After a journalist inquired him about his faith, Buuel answered I'm an atheist, thank God. To those who, as Cortazar, were unable to conciliate atheism with immortality, he displayed his atheist prize, the Prix du Chevalier de la Barre142. Buuel's sensitivity and ideology start as a revolt against an injustice. An injustice justified by a particular religion or faith143. But his critique was not limited to the clergy. In 'The Forgotten' he portrayed a devoted mother scorning her own son; in Susana an exemplary father who courts and seduces his son's lover. In Diary of a Chambermaid a would-be aristocrat sexually harasses his oldest atheist maid. She cries ambiguouslyeither of happiness or pain. The struggle of a particular existence against dogma is the main Buuelian theme. The particular existence of Viridiana, Tristana and Simon of the Desert are in open conflict with their religious and secular institutions: The God created by manthat's the soul of evil144. Such a God has been incarnated by the inquisition, the Napoleonic chauvinism, the Nazism and, more recently, by
Colina & Perez, Objets of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buuel, ed. and tr. by Paul Lenti (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1986) p. 25. 141 Ibid., p. 199. 142 See Ibid., p. 200. 143 Aub, Op. cit., p. 323. 144 Ibid., p. 19.
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165 fundamentalist Islam. Unamuno had already taught him, in his early youth, that ethics determine metaphysics, rather than metaphysics ethics: When Catholic theologians want to justify rationally the dogma of an eternal hell, they are ridicule and childish... What is goodness and evilness? It should be approached by ethics, instead of religion145. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz, accepting religion as a human manifestation, and denouncing any dogmatic conception of God, writes about Nazarn (1959): Buuel drives us to experience... the banishment of the divinity's illusion and the discovery of the man's reality146 Born in a nation scourged by inquisitors and tyrants, Buuel continuously denounced in his work the hypocrisy of new dogmas. Glauber Rocha, one of his closest friendsand his disciple, wrote about Buuel's work in 1981: In the absurd framework of the reality of the Third World, Buuel is the possible consciousness: in the face of oppression, the police, obscurantism, and institutional hypocrisy, Buuel represents a liberating morality, a breaking new ground, a constant process of enlightening revolt147. Artela Lusuviaga S.J. may add that we cannot grasp Buuel's themes, in particular eroticismwhich is one of his greatest themes, without Christian mysticism148. A critic of Christ, but an admirer of Virgin Mary, Buuel understood mysticism as an unconditional dissolution of the self and its beliefs into an unpredictable ecstasy: I see the Virgin, shining softly, her hands outstretched to me. It's a very strong presence, an
Unamuno, Op. cit., p. 253. Paz, Octavio El cine filosofico de Buuel, p. 39. 147 Rocha, Glauber, Revoluao do Cinema Novo (Rio: Civilizaao Brasileira, 1963) Quoted in translated by Miriam Rosen in World Film Directors I, ed. by John Wakeman (New York: The H. W. Wilson company, 1987,) p. 91. 148 Aub, Op. cit., p. 324.
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166 absolutely indisputable reality. She speaks to meto me, the unbelieverwith infinite tenderness... My eyes are full of tears, I kneel down, and suddenly I feel myself inundated with a vibrant and invincible faith. When I wake up my heart is pounding, and I hear a voice saying: 'Yes! Yes! Holy Virgin, yes, I believe!' The erotic overtones are obvious149. Buuel never accused men of wickedness: Society is the wicked one150. His work is a reflection on freedom, and on the right to imagine a depiction of the voluntarily perverted mind's virtues and the mechanically virtuous mind's crimes. Viridiana suffers on account of her idealization of human nature. She wants to see poverty as a gift, and invests whores and beggars with the innocence of a dogmatic heaven. Raped and nearly killed she pays the price, but instead of rethinking her dogmatic mind, she hastens her doom by engaging in a mnage trois. Raised by nuns, without a space for imagination, her attitudes are extreme: good or evilwithout happiness between: saint or whore. Jean-Claude Carrire, Buuel's closest collaborator, concisely wrote: After writing nine scripts with Buuel, I can give testimony of his particular talent. He often repeated that imagination is innocent. Each one of us can think on cutting our father's neck, in raping our mother, in betraying our nation. No crime is committed then. The sin of intention only exists in the catechisms. Every artist has even the duty to practice this exercise151. Buuel was, amongst the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, the most serene artist. His main characters are overcome by the serene happiness of their friends or servants: Viridiana by her cousin Jorge, Simon of the Desert by a dwarf, Sverine by
149 150
Buuel, Op. cit., p. 95. Aub. Op. Cit., p. 169. 151 Ibid. iv.
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167 Pierre. Having denounced the religious institutions of his time, Buuel was pleased to include priests and nuns amongst his audience: I know the Jesuits liked Nazarin. The film the Dominicans liked was Simon of the Desert. A confessed atheist, Buuel was fascinated by the ceaseless manifestations of religion. In L'ge d'or the male character casts an archbishop to his unfaithful lover through a window. In Simon of the Desert a saint says to his mother: No earthly love can be interposed between God and me, mother. Soon after a bishop proposes him to become a priest. Simon, who recognizes the Church as his metaphorical mother, rejects his proposal with contempt. In Nazarin a priest confesses an agonizing woman who, unable to accept heavenly happiness without the company of her lover, replies: Heaven no, Juan yes. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie a moribund calls an archbishop for his last sacrament. The man confesses to have murdered a couplehis patrons, decades ago. The archbishop walks out and comes back with a rifle. He announces to be the orphan of the deceased patrons and shoots the contrite parishioner in the head. Buuel goes as far as discussing the morals of the uncanny. He affirmed to have met in Calanda, as a child, a man who recovered his chopped hands by the intersection of the Mother of God. He staged his miracle in Simon of the Desert. The handicapped is a robber whose hands were chopped by the hangman. After a vehement petition, Simon and his community pray on his behalf. The handicapped recovers his hands and uses them immediately to punch mercilessly his child. Buuelian characters struggle against the mud of written morality and law. They are the couple buried in the sand at the end of Un chien andalou, or the crowd of 'The Exterminating Angel,' who unable to move dies of hunger in a luxurious house. Their
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168 liberation may be easy, but as Estragon and PozzoSamuel Beckett's charactersthey are reluctant to stand up. His cinema exposes the absurdity of self-imposed burdens. Family ties are literally portrayed as ties: in Wuthering Heights and Viridiana thoughts of incest annihilate the main characters. Patriotism is staged as a crime: in Diary of a Chambermaid a chauvinistic citizen is rewarded after he rapes and murders a child. Even sainthood is put into question: Simon of the Desert becomes a bitter and unhappy man. Longing for the divinity, he spends his life over a column, scorning his fellowmen and nature. Dogma drives Simon to see perversity in every creature that crosses his eyes: sodomy in a joyful priest; zoophilia in a friendly dwarf; incest in his abnegate mother; gluttony amongst his protectors; masochism, transvestism and pedophilia in Satan. Aristotle wrote that all men desire their Supreme Good152. Buuel grasps desire as anterior to wellbeing. Women and men long for loveunboundedly given and unboundedly received. Mysticism emerges not as a manifestation of eternity, but as eternity itself: an impetuous force able to defeat laws, nations and creeds. Reason may flounce as a constraintfor, as with Don Quixote, the good deeds of Nazarin and Viridiana are damned beforehand by the yoke of the Realpolitik. In a medium conditioned by financial gain, very few filmmakers can articulate a personal discourse. Buuel not only succeededin doing so he became the main character of his films: from the barber that cuts the eye of his viewer in Un chien andalou to the mall that goes off with the main characters of That Obscure Object of Desire (1977.) Reality, which has been seen with an eternal eye, is ultimately consummated in eternity. Throughout his films, Buuel debated ethics in a negative wayfor, as Dante, he
152
. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, I, ii.
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169 is interested in the tortures of the doomed. His cinema invites viewers to recognize their animalistic drivesto listen to instinct before logic, in order to conciliate life and death, heaven and earth, the universe and the particular, men and society. Only then humanity can be. Unamuno, Buuel's foremost influence, appealed to the irrational in order to understand existence. The Exterminating Angel (1962) was prefaced by a title card that echoes Unamuno's philosophy: If the film you are going to see strikes you as enigmatic or incongruous, life is that way too Perhaps the best explanation for Exterminating Angel is that, 'reasonably, there isn't one'.. Buuel remained faithful to irrationality until the end of his life. In That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) Fernando Rey identifies two women as the same. But Buuel's irrationality is not chaotic. His discourse is the discourse of eternity, oras Artela Lusuviaga S.J. understood, the discourse of a mystic. The cinema of Buuel cannot be fully grasped without Hispanic culture. He, as Unamuno, as Molina, as Saint Theresa, was born in a nation of saints and visionaries. E.M. Cioran, a philosopher profoundly influenced by Unamuno's work, wrote succinctly in 1937: Spain symbolizes the pitiless desert of the soul. Its merit is not only to have saved the absurd for the world but also to have demonstrated that man's normal temperature is madness. Thus saints come naturally from this people which has done away with the distance between heaven and earth153. Latin American Cinema became popular during the Second World War, and later on during the Cold War. Since the Cuban Revolution (1959) politics have played an important role in Latin American Cinema. Whereas Cuban cinema struggled to represent
Cioran, E.M., Tears and Saints, tr. by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995) p. 61.
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170 films according to the premises of Socialist Realism, most of Latin American cinema has been greatly influenced by Italian Neo-realism. Glauber Rocha revealed to a generation of leftist intellectuals the hypocrisy of politics in films such as White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, 1964) and Terra em Transe (1967.) As Expressionism and Soviet cinema gained world-wide admiration as an art form, Hollywood hired German and French filmmakers. In 1927 William Fox persuaded Friedrich Murnau to move to America, where he directed Sunrise (1926) and Tabu (1931.) In spite of their melodramatic finale, Murnaus' films are but tragic depictions of contemporary life in prosperous societies. As in many Euripides' tragedies, the Deux ex Machine is the defective dramatic devise that turns an unbearable tragedy into drama154. The dialectical discourse of narrations under the direct influence of theatre and novel inspired John Cassavetes' Shadows (1968) an apprehensive portray of American society and an achievement of resourceful cinema. Spielberg's Schlinder List (1993) Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1976) are world-wide achievements of Hollywood's tragic vein that sill finds expression in the work of Tim Burton, the Coen Brothers, Jim Jarmush, Todd Solonz and Terry Zwigoff. Critically successful foreign filmmakers have been welcomed by Hollywood as well, e.g., John Schlesinger, e.g., Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Roman Polanski's China Town (1974.) Schopenhauer wrote that art dissolves the principle of individuation. Many scenes of cinema touch us even more because somehow we know that the heart of humanity is at the stake. One of the most enduring satisfactions of a professor of cinema is the revelation of the emotions of cinema to the poets of tomorrow. In Satyajit Ray's Pather
Such defectiveness provides a metaphysical reading more suitable to the logic of compassion. See Gilles Deleuze page on for Buuel's Susana (1951) in Cinema 1, p. 101.
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171 Panchali (1955) Apu's mother breaks down when her newly-arrived husband gives her the gift he bought for their dead daughter; in Ozu's Tokio Story (1953) a grandmother talks to her grandchild about the trials of a long life; in De Sica's Umberto D (1951) Umberto carries the dog who saved him from suicide; in Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987) a powerless child is exposed to insitutional injustice. American cinema is at its best when it presents us stories of tragic love or friendship. There is a borderless sense of correspondence between the main characters of Hollywood tragic films, from Von Stroheim's Greed (1924) to Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991;) from Broken blossoms (1919) to Reiner's Stand by Me (1986;) from Citizen Kane to Zwigoff's Ghost World (2001.) Friendship hardly survive the test of time. In Greed the main characters end up killing each other; in Citizen Kane an enraged Welles fires Joseph Cotton from his newspaper; in Ghost World the recently graduated school girls end their relationship by their divergent philosophies. Only death appears to reconcile friendship in the limbo of memory. Thelma and Louise consume their relationship in a pact of death; in Stand by Me the narrator recalls happy moments with his best friend once he learns of his friend's death. The first scenes of Ghost World offer a bitter view on American society. Enid and Rebecca are unique characters; they wear out-of-fashion clothes. They also hate sports, nerds and everyone who complies with the system. Enid goes so far as to start a romantic relationship with an elder man and a misfit. Rebecca, in a display of American pragmatism, gets a job and rents an apartment in the belief that she will share it with Enid. Their divergent views on society end up in a subtle confrontation that is just too
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172 much for an already shattered friendship.
10. The ascendancy of poetry over theory For centuries the intelligentsia spoke under the assumption that any theoretical work should grasp the universalthat is, that it should settle the flux of reality into concepts. As Social Sciences tabulate statistical data in order to associate their endeavours with those of mathematicians and physicians, knowledge appears to be the product of a chronological discovery. Scholars quote exhaustively each other in specialised journals and newspapers to reassure readers and students of their progress and co-operative effort. A writer who ignores this linear progression is regarded with suspicion. He relies on the particular. He relies on existence. He relies on fiction. The distinction between art and philosophy is entirely academic. Plato, according to Diogenes Laertius, wrote several lyric poems and tragedies. But his voice was feeble, a serious impediment for a playwright obliged to sing and perform his own verses. He was about to contend for a prize in tragedy during the Dionysian Festival when he met Socrates. The lucidity of his new acquaintance drove him to burn his verses and to apply his days and nights to the study of philosophy. Plato institutionalised philosophy as a profession; he founded the Academy and travel to Syracuse to carry out his political theory. From his early dialogues he attacked the philosophy of poetry: I went to the poets I took them some of the most elaborate
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173 passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them - thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them155. Socrates elicited clear definitions from his interlocutors. But definitions rely on single general perceptions. A concept taken out of context presents fissures and contradictions. The Athenian poets, politicians or fellow philosophers targeted by Socrates' maieutics were all systematically refuted. Plato's characters, which Schopenhauer dismissed as unbelievable, shared Socrates' presumption that definitions demand universal validity. Socrates and Plato long for a stable, reliable and universal truth. The certitudes provided by the formulae of mathematics encouraged their search for definitions of universal validity. In his search for a universal discourse, Socrates associated knowledge to politics with an eye on ethics: Socrates was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions; Plato accepted his teaching, but held that the problem applied not to sensible things but to entities of another kind--for this reason, that the common definition could not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing156. Aristotle formulated definitions as well157. He prescribed that poetry was more philosophical than history, and yet he wrote that poets were possessed madmen. Poetic
155 156
Plato, Apology, tr. by Benjamin Jowett. Aristotle, Metaphysics, tr. by W. D. Ross I, 6. 157 Giving very much criticized attention to his treatises on "the world of nature."
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174 inspiration was subtly discriminated as mythmaking. Unity happens in a universe of multifarious manifestations. Life presents itself as a series of characters that toil until death: 'We do not travel to arrive', says Goethe The journey is pleasant for those who are willing to undertake itfor those who recognise in their path the main purpose of their journey. What is essential is the climbing the mountain. The view from the top is rather disappointing. Who looks for the fineness of natureits manifestations and mighty effects, will joyfully discover in his path the pleasant whispers of the present. He will achieve a regular and lasting happiness, a serene and vivid mirth. The rambler finds his fate in his very path; nothing disappoints him, for he discovers the world in every casual circumstance. In the same way we, wanderers of life, should manage our soul. Fate would never be so heavy against us as it is against those who long for a final respite to their efforts158. Poetry, the dialectical and metaphorical labour of seers and prophets, never longed for an absolute understanding of reality. Until the industrial revolution, poetry was the mind and soul of men. The greatest ethical changes in history were as much the work of philosophers as the toil of poets and novelists. The Bible has provided the ideology of the most influential revolutions of the past two thousand years. In the 1980s Kundera wrote with circumspection that Cervantesrather than Descartes, was the first and greatest writer
Man reist doch nicht, um anzukommen, hat Goethe gesagt Genuvoll reisen wird nur, wer es um des Reisens willen tut, wem der Weg selbst das Ziel ist. Das Steigen am Berg hinauf ist das Wesentliche; der Blick vom Gipfel ist meistens eine Enttuschungen. Wer nur das Auerordentlich in der Natur sucht, ihre Phnomene und gewaltsamen Effeckte, der wird sich um den Genu des Weges bringen, auf dem die tausend Stimmen der Gegenwart flstern. Das heit: um den Genu eines gleichmigen und dauernden Glcks; um das Glck, das in der belebten Ruhe ist. Wie es fr den Wanderer, der im Wege selbst schon das Ziel sieht, keine Enttuschungen gibt, weil sich ihm in jeder zuflligen Wirklichkeit immer die ganze Welt abspiegelt, so knnen auch den Lebenswanderer, der mit seinem Dasein so verfhrt, Schicksalschlge niemals so schwer treffen wie den, der nur in der Idee lebt. Diesem ist gleich sein Leben zerstrt, wehh ihm das imaginre Ziel ganommen ist, weil all sein Lebensgefhl in der Idee des Ziels aufgegangen ist. Scheffler, Karl, Das Glck der Gegenwart, in Gesammelte Essays (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1912) p. 17.
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175 of Modernity. For centuries the academy has been unable to accept within its marble precincts the meagre presence of a madman and the obese silhouette of a dreamer. Poets write about the obstacles and changes of the particular, e.g., whereas a historian or philosopher may discuss whether Creon, King of Thebes, was wicked or kind, Sophocles ponders according to his particular context. Creon was kind, as Oedipus recognised it at some point in his life:
...Bless you, Creon! May God watch over you for this kindness, better than he ever guards me159
This very King Creon, who in later years became cruel:
You and your wicked way with words, Creon I've never known an honest man who can plead so well for any plea whatever160
Complexity, rather than unity, is the essence of any literary work, a paradox that resists the approval of logicians. Philosophers are used to hinder each other in their search for the hydra of unity. Poets, on the other hand, enquire in the abysms of existence:
I've much to ask, so much to learn,
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Oedipus King, 1618-1620. 160 Oedipus in Colonus, 920-922.
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176 so much fascinates my eyes, but you... I shudder at the sight161
An artist wades on the waters of life, taken by streams that vary from day to day, from port to port, adapting his/her endeavours to new unpredictable circumstances:
We are not allowed to be. We are merely streams We willingly flow in all possible shapes162
Universal judgements are contrary to poetry. In the last book of the Republic, Socrates remarks that if the poets had a real understanding of their inspiration, they would apply them to their lives. His intolerance for those beyond the reach of morality clouded his vision. Socrates failed to understand that whereas philosophers long for rules, poets provide understanding. The greatest dramatic characters are not virtuous men, but thieves and murderers, as Thomas De Quencey remarks: What then must he [the poet] do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,not a sympathy of pity of approbation163.) Aristotle distinguished three kind of poets: a) those who portrait characters worst than they are, b) those that portrait them as they are, and c) those that portrait them as they must be. The truth is that poets are free to depict characters as they wish. Their creativity is
161 Oedipus King, 1440-1442. 162 Uns ist kein Sein vergnnt. Wir sind nur Strom Wir fliessen willig allen Formen ein Hesse, Hermann, Gesammelte Werke 9 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987,) p. 472. 163 De Quencey, Thomas, On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, p. 391
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177 not confined by the theory and syllogisms. Shakespeare, in fact, was able to stir waters in the three oceans. In Aristotle's categorization philosophers fall into the third category. They are ethical or espiritual men--as defined by Kierkegaard. A bard who aspires to the universal becomes a scholar. Goethe is widely admired on account of his dialectics. His style, notwithstanding, has the air of a commercial transactionas Novalis remarked. Goethe's predictable characters, his expository style, his repetitions and twisted endings are mended by the weight of his ideas. The institutionalisation of the Academy implied the institutionalisation of the Philosopher. As universities bloomed in Europe, scholars embraced the systematic style of Aristotle. By the end of the 13th century the dramatic dialogues of Plato had almost become unfashionable: Platos writings represented, and still represent, a major hermeneutical puzzle. Even if one could be sure which dialogic voice was Platos, in order to get at his philosophical position one still had to deal with developmental problems and contextual problems, literary problems of levels of meaning, degrees of seriousness, and irony that the scholastic method of reading texts was unable or unwilling to face164." When Whitehead wrote that the European philosophical tradition consisted of a series of footnotes to Plato, he relied on the certainty that Plato's dialoguesas any artistic work, were open to diverse interpretations. The most prestigious philosophers have been frustrated poets. Socrates composed a hymn to Apollo and a verse adaptation of Aesop days before his suicide. Plato wrote his dialogues in a musical style, halfway between prose and poetryas Cicero observed. Tradition has preserved a series of dry epigrams and poems composed by Aristotle. Seneca wrote the better-preserved Latin tragedies. Schopenhauer
164 Hankins, J., Antiplatonism in the renaissance and the Middle Ages, in Classica et Mediaevalia: Revue Danoise de philologie et d'histoire, XLVII, 1996, pp. 359-376.
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178 published his complete poems months before his death. In one of his most pessimistic passages, he lamented the disadvantages of philosophy before poetry: The great advantage of poetry over philosophy is that poems subsist without impending one to each other. We can, indeed, enjoy and appreciate the heterogeneity impressed on them by a single spirit. A philosophical system, on the contrary, has scarcely come into being when it is already being threatened to death by its brotherslike a newly crowned Asian King165." Schopenhauer accused Fichte, Schelling and Hegel of grasping metaphysical concepts as poets and artists do166. His justification of Plato is rather elusive: The written dialogue is a manifestation of philosophical thought. It presents two or more different, entirely opposite intentions on a given object. Such intentions are made either to engage the readers' judgement, or either to present a complete understanding of the matter into question Without this purpose [a philosophical dialogue] would be just a trifle167." Schopenhauer's attack against his fellow philosophers was perhaps less discreet than Hegel's attack against Kant, Kant's against Hume, or Hume's against Locke. Whereas a poet longs for recognition as another poet, the philosopher strives to become the summus philosophus. Hegel entertained poetical aspirations in his youth, until his acquaintance with Hlderlin persuaded him to pursue a more suitable career. His philosophical work,
nonetheless, displays his artistic sensitivity. M. H. Abrams compares the development of philosophical consciousness in Hegel's "Phnomenologie des Geistes" to the growth of
165 Ein anderer groer Vorteil, Den poetische Leistungen vor philosophischen haben, ist dieser, da alle Dichterwerke, ohne sich zu hindern, neben einander bestehn, ja sogar die heterogensten under ihnen von einem und demselben Geiste genossen und geschtz werden knnen; whrend jedes philosophische System, kaum zur Welt gekommen, schon auf den Untergang aller seiner Brder bedacht ist, gleich einem asiatischen Sultan bei seinem Regierungsantritt, Schopenhauer, ber Philosophie und ihre Methode, 4 166 Ibidem, 9. 167 Ibidem. 7
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179 poetical sensibility in Wordsworth's Prelude168. Despite its longing for universality, Hegel's writings bear the craft of the Bildungsroman. The table of contents of his "Philosophie des Geistes" announces a series of metaphysical characters: Physical Soul, Sensibility, Feeling Soul, Habit, Intellect, Consciousness, Reason, Intuition, Recollection, Imagination, Memory, etc. Unlike Plato, Hegel recognised the relationship between poetry and the particular, butalways in compliance with the academic ideology, he ranked poetry below philosophy: Equally little is it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called knowledge of menthe knowledge whose aim is to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unless on the assumption that we know the universal169 ." Hegel presents his philosophy as pure thought, divested of the passions and interests of art: This science [philosophy] is the unity of Art and Religion. Whereas the visionmethod of Art, external in point of form, is but a subjective production and shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes...170." Hegel attempts to elaborate a hierarchy of reality where the particular is subordinated to the universal. Actions, individuals and nations are but bypassed stages of a relentless movement: The progress of mind [Geist] is development171." Consequently Hegel dismisses poetry as a thing of the past172", arguing that thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art." The formulation of a new
168 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971,) pp. 225 ff. Quoted by Desmond, William, Art and the absolute (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986) p. 16. 169 Hegel, G.W.F., Philosophy of Mind, p.1. 170 Hegel, G.W.F., Ibidem, p.302. 171 Ibidem, p. 183. 172 Hegel, G.W. F., Aesthetics, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, p. 392.
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180 aesthetic theory, or a new science of art, becomes a far more urgent necessity in our own days than in times in which art as art sufficed by itself alone to give complete satisfaction." Art is a mummy that the philosopher, the university professor or the journalist resurrects with his rhetoric: They [the philosophers] think they show a respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeternitwhen they turn it unto a mummy. All that philosophers have handle for thousand of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they killed it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their mind objectionseven refutations 'Moral: [the philosophers say] let us say No to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of mankind; they are all 'mob'. Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies173! The works of Hegel have been challenged by the flux of reality. Nietzsche was the first German writer to react against the academic ideology. Any attempt to discern his discourse would be doomed beforehand. The poet cannot be separated from the philosopher. Nietzsche articulated a far wider approach to existence than the one provided by philosophy itself. His invectives against Socrates and Euripides were but invectives against the philosophical schools of his generation: Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who must defend his actions with arguments and counter-arguments, and who thereby so often incurs the danger of forfeiting our tragic pity; for who could mistake the optimistic element in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates a triumph with every conclusion174. The stoicism of Socrates and Plato irritated Nietzsche: Let us but realize the
173 Nietzsche, F., Twilight of the Idols, p. 1. 174 Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy, p. 99.
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181 consequences of the Socratic maxims: 'Virtue is knowledge; man sins only for ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.' In these three fundamental form of optimism lies the death of tragedy175. But then, years later, he confesses his admiration for Plato. Nietzsche was well aware of his own contradictions, and try to mend them by formulating the theory of masks. In "The Tragic Sense of Life," Miguel de Unamuno refers to poets as philosophers. His standpoint was greatly influenced by Sren Kierkegaard176, who by the middle of the 19th century cracked the prismatic building of German Idealism with one single sentence: The [Hegelian] abstraction's risk is precisely in reference to the problem of the existence177. Decades later Theodor Adorno, a survivor of the wars that risked the very existence of humanity, wrote: The conception of a totality harmonious through all its antagonisms compels him [Hegel] to assign to individuation, however much he may designate it a driving moment in the process, an inferior status in the construction of the whole with serene indifference he opts once again for liquidation of the particularthe individual as such he [Hegel] for the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum178 . Centuries before the birth of Hegel, Shakespeare had already condemned any systematic approach to the individual. You won't pluck out the heart of my mystery, warns Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. One of the greatest misconceptions of aesthetics is that poetry corresponds primarily to emotions: There is no question, then, that a work of art is presented to sensuous
175 Nietzsche, F., Ibidem. 176 See Unamuno, Miguel de, Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida (Barcelona: Sarpe, 1983,) p. 128-9. 177 Kierkegaard, Sren, Afsluttende unidenskabelig Efterskrift, 3. Quoted by Unamuno. 178 Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia, p. 17.
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182 apprehension179. Thoughts appear to be the private privilege of philosophy. But emotions cannot exist by themselves. They require the assistance of the mind, oras Kant pointed out in his third critic, they must be subordinated to the mind in order to become sublime. Hegel was well aware of the dialectics of art: [Art's] position is of the nature, that along with its sensuous presentation it is fundamentally addressed to the mind180. And yet the utmost effort of German Idealism was the suppression of feelings in the individual. Kant, according to Thomas De Quencey, died most perplexed by the fact that one of his best students married a poor woman out of love. His rational and insensitive mind could only understand matrimony in terms of wealth and prestige. A writer divested of emotions is a nihilistic writer: Is not memory inseparable from love, which seeks to preserve what yet must pass away?... Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology181. Who cannot feel compassion becomes a misanthrope. Like Timon of Athens he would bark day and night about the pointless nature of existence:
Graves only be men's works and death their gain!182
Anthropological philosophy has been unable to answer to the question "What is man?" for man changes from age to age, from day to day, from hour to hour:
At Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I gather
179 Hegel, G.W.F., Philosophies of Art and Beauty p. 405. 180 Ibidem, p. 405. 181 Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia, 79. 182 Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, V, 1.
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183 my diapers and my shroud, and now I am A ceaseless series of cadavers183
In Macbeth, Shakespeare did not intend to portray a historical account of a Scottish Tyrant, but rather to give expression to a series of particular experiences. His poem includes diverse and contradictory attitudes towards lifea condition that a enlightened writer such as Voltaire could not digest. The stoicism of these lines may indeed have seduced his academic ear:
I have lived long enough: my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not184
Any conclusion on Shakespeare's "philosophy" would be immediately contradicted by other verses of his:
183 En el Hoy, y Manana y Ayer, junto Paales y mortaja, y he quedado Presentes sucesiones de difunto. De Quevedo, Francisco, El Parnaso Espanol, in Poesia de Francisco de Quevedo, ed. James O. Crosby (Madrid: Catedra, 1990.) 184 Macbeth, V, 3.
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184 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That shruts and frets his hour upon the stage, And there is hear no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing... 185
The cries of Macbeth anticipate the nihilistic philosophies that perplexed the 20th century. But Shakespeare never pretended to be universal. When his verses grasp the universal within the particular, the universal becomes the particular. His comedies and tragedies are sensitive works of understanding. In theatreas in cinema, we are allowed to share the thoughts and feelings of Oedipus, Fedra, Hecuba, Macbeth, Lear, Tartuffo or Falstaff:
...look on Oedipus (...) Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him. Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last186
Tragic poets are but witnesses of the sorrows of the doomed; they contemplate the depths of suffering as children who stand before the open sea:
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
185 Ibidem, V, 5. 186 Sophocles, Oedipus King, 1678-1684, tr. by Robert Flages. Op. cit.
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185 Shall never see so much, nor live so long187
The searchers of the Golden Fleece of unity are marooned. As the Academy slowly recognises the coexistence of diverse ideologies in diverse societies, the philosophical discourse becomes more poetical: In the hundred and fifty years since Hegel's conception was formed, some of the force of protest has reverted to the individual. Compared to the patriarchal meagreness that characterizes his treatment in Hegel, the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has enfeebled and undermined him188.
187 King Lear, V, 5. 188 Adorno, Theodor. Op. cit. p. 17.
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11. Resourceful Cinema In 1995, soon after I started my MFA in Film and Media Arts, I understood the democratization of filmmaking was at hand. The challenges ahead were still a hindrance. The costs of production, developing and distribution were just too high for independent filmmakers. Unless you had a friend or contact in the industry, you had to rely entirely on fortune. Most classmates used to shoot their documentaries on video, in the hope of getting screened at a film & video festival. But the texture of analogue consumer video cams was still very deficient. Dropouts and visual noise were the norm; it was very hard to cross the boundary of professional video. Most video projects produced before the 1990s were smashed against the pillar rocks of mainstream cinema and broadcasting. The advent of digital cinema turned tables around. Though many filmmakers expressed doubts about the qualities of digital cinema, there was a growing sense of change. From my early youth I read Grotowski's writings on poor theatre. Working with non-professional actors we managed to produce 4 non-budget theatre plays in Colombia between 1992 and 1994. Pavis' writings on theatre, Deleuze's studies on cinema and Zeami's thoughts on acting persuaded me of the symbolic nature of representation. During my years at Temple University I watched and analyzed in detail the greatest films of 20th-century cinema. The economy, versatility and depth of the films by Dreyer, Welles and Buuel were our point of reference for my first ambitious project: Hamlet Unbound (2012) an iconoclast adaptation of the great Shakespearean tragedy. We started
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187 production in the middle of the Winter 1997 and went on until August 1998, when I was offered a teaching position at the Universidade Catolica Portugesa. The precarious condition of digital technology, and research on this treatise delayed postproduction for more than a decade. In 2005 I was offered a teaching position at the Faculty of Audiovisual Arts at the Autonomous University of Bucaramanga. The challenge poised by the Dean of the emerging program was considerable. I was asked to teach students how to produce and direct 24-minute films in a city without film or TV industry. There was not a single professional theatre group in town and the only important artistic events in the city were an annual Piano Festival and a story-telling event. Eventually, after several years of teaching and research, I produced and directed Kennedy's Crimes (2011) a long-feature film based on my homonymous theatre play. Against all odds, the film was shot in four days with the help of four students and a budget of US4000 dollars. Film theory has taken flight from the essentials of filmmaking. Movies are overall products of the creative mind. They are artistic constructions conditioned by culture, the homes and receptacles of our imagination. They convey dramatic representation, an art that relies entirely on relationships. Give me an actor and I'll make you a film, is the motto of Resourceful Cinema. As conflict is the essence of screenwriting, acting has proved to be the essence of filmmaking189. We don't need to see characters in new colourful clothes in order to understand their passions. Once we accept acting as the core of cinema, we'll see lavish sets and costumes as what they really are: decoration Unfortunately fashion identifies homes with dwellings, dresses with characters
Movies such as Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio, 1982) are not exceptions to the rule; sound and music stand as a chorus.
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188 and beds with buildings. A young man can live in a shared room, in a small studio or in a mansion. We can even make the world our home, as Barbarians didaccording to Tacitus. But mainstream filmmaking has educated our eyes in the sets of the rich and powerful. The art of filmmaking, first developed by clowns, magicians and vaudeville entrepreneurs, has been the art of spectacle from its very inception, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno painfully understood in 1944. Commercial films are expected to have a special appeal to vanity. After all, they are the mirror of vice and virtue, the windows of fashion, the teachers of manners and the models of behaviour. Realistic cinema portraying the living conditions of the majority are ignored or suppressed for the sake of the commonwealth. The stylistic revolts triggered by plays such as Victor Hugo's "Hernani" or Ibsen's "A Doll House," are rare in cinema. If a woman objects that the social reflection on the mirror of the screen is distorted, she is told, following the Aristotelian discourse, that such film doesn't represent life as it is, but as it should be. The unfit, after all, is free to see her discontent reflected in the wrath of the villain, the criminal and the mad. The representation of a action gang of midgets, human torsos and dwarves taking revenge against the healthy in Tim Browning's Freaks (1932) was unbearable for a society unable to sympathize with the untouchables. The 19th-century freak show was immediately replaced by the special effects of the season. Frankenstein, the Monster of the Lagoon and the Wolfman could be as disturbing as a freak, but they were also evil, and as such they must always be destroyed. Magic, stunts and variety shows had been initially adopted by the aesthetics of silent cinema. Buster Keaton's Sherlock Holmes Jr. (1924) staged crimes and acrobatic persecutions in a melodramatic dreamy world.
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189 Keaton's comic approach to crime was reinterpreted by the aesthetics of Film Noir, a movement closer to German expressionism than to slapstick comedy. Keaton's dreamy world became a world of nightmares in the hands of a new generation of American directors. Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) stages the disintegration of a man's world in a society that never forgets a crime. Recent adaptations of comics books have been influenced by the aesthetics of silent cinema. Whedon's The Avengers (2012) makes a concession to the genre of superhero films by mixing terror with comedy. Hollow dialogues--which are, nonetheless, ingenious, several epic battles in a shattered New York, a Deux ex Machina and the resurrection of Lucky, the antagonist that destroys the earth, the film displays the latest audiovisual effects, a move that has made of cinema the herald of technology. Most cinemagoers of mainstream filmmaking expect, in fact, the same kind of emotions experienced by the passengers of a roller coaster. Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is the latest expression of a Roller Coaster Cinema of endless persecutions over seas and cities. With the introduction of 3-D and Imax spectators become eagles. Aesthetic theory, greatly influenced by Aristotles Poetics, has absorbed the political assumptions of mainstream filmmaking at their entire value. After all producers, actors, journalists and directors are members of a noble cast diversified in several courts. The social criticism of Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette (1948) was welcomed and shelved in the vaults of cinema history. Europe, after all, still takes care of the unemployed. As for the developing world, it still can produce realistic and entertaining films during times of economic crises, as it has happened in Argentina. Even Gilles Deleuze recoiled before this thorny issue, leaving testimony of his unwillingness to
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190 discuss the production of films in a milieu conditioned by profit. Waste also imports the annihilation of the competition, for any film without car explosions, lavish sets or celebrities is just dismissed as unprofessional. The practices of Resourceful Cinema are mostly felt in the output of Indie films, Independent Cinema and Mumblecore Cineastes. As the work of resourceful filmmakers threatens the establishment, Hollywood, Paris and Mumbai are keen to support new promising directors. Duplass & Duplass' Cyrus (2010) is a portrait of the loneliness and eagerness for love in Modern America. Structured as a romantic comedy, the film portraits the struggle between John, a divorcee in his late 40s who has fallen in love with Molly, and Cyrus, a 21-year old man who maintains an Oedipal relationship with his mother: Molly. The directors wisely unfolds the story from John's viewpoint, who appears for some moments to assume the fate of Sophocles' Laius. But the tide of intelligent, resourceful filmmakers from all around the world is at sight. Moreover, resourceful films are ubiquitous; they can be produced with meagre means. They can also get worldwide distribution in the Internet. The politics of hunger and third world exclusion exposed by Glabuer Rocha have been healed by the surplus of the digital era. Breathtaking scenarios, customs and decors are reduced to whatever is available. These accessories can certainly please the eye and easy the mind; the scope of their therapeutic effects can be measured by holidaymakers' preference for exotic locations. But clothes and settings are luxuries that can be suppressed at will. The impositions of mainstream filmmaking are justified by academics who identify culture with fashion. In another arena, this misconception is also the cause of a pretentious cinema that disregards conflict and dismisses plot as a cultural invention.
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191 Cinema is an illusion that takes form in the mind of the spectator through mechanisms of perception, and the arts of screenwriting and editing should be rethought within the frame of epistemology. Psychology intervenes in the process, as Joseph Campbell had already pointed out. The archetypes of the inner world, embodied in the mythical figures of religion, find their contemporary avatars in the heroes and villains of digital filmmaking. Cinema revitalizes and produces myths. The deeds of the Ramayana and The Bible are imitated by the heroes of Star Wars and the Kingdoms of The Matrix. Slavoj Zizek tackles this same issue from a different approach. His readings of Marx and Lacan are richly exemplified by the social imaginary of cinema, and Psycho is presented as an articulation of the psychoanalytical triad: the ego, the superego and the id. Scenarios are versatile settings in the mind that can be replaced at will. For space, as Kant points out, precedes experience. Before we hear a conversation, a scenario preexists in our mind. We assume that such event should have happened somewhere. The deservedly celebrated request of Peter Brook: give me an empty space, and I have a stage" is unnecessary, for any given character requires his/her own space. Of all artistic expressions, comics, I believe, illustrate best this precondition. The speech balloon combines thought with space, the abstract and the concrete, where word exists in space. In a comic's book readers are not only absorbed by the visual continuity of the drawings, but also by the modulations of the conflicts and the character's decisions. In an effort to dissociate theatre from film, Grotowski emulates Brecht when he turns spectators into characters: Since our theatre consists only of actors and audience, we make special demands on both parties190". The Polish director advocated a theatre where actors and spectators were able to communicate each other. His boldness gave
190
Ibid., p.33.
191
192 freshness and vitality to theatre, an art able to provide effective communication between players and viewers. The digital era extended such privilege to cinema. As the most expensive premires of opera and theatre are simultaneously screened in cinemas around the globe, we may reasonably expect the birth of virtual theatre groups, troupes of jesters and players offering immediate feedback to their viewers. But Grotowski's work is also a denunciation of the dissipation of dramatic arts. His celebrated performances with naked or semi-naked players proved to consumers the vanity and shallowness of props and sets. The uniqueness of his work was universally praised, the academy rejoiced with the legacy of his writings, and the innovative output of his theories were quietly absorbed or dismissed by the vanguard expressions of theatre, now in disarray by the revolution of filmmaking. Thus Poor Theatre was unable to trespass the fortresses of mainstream cinema. Film, after all, was the supreme orchid protected by the golden walls of Hollywood. The guardians of the richest of all arts could hardly sympathize with the semantics of a beggar and a jester, a man who shamelessly spoke of poverty before the glamorous halls of the wealthy. Besides, Grotowski was a communist with no apparent interest on cinema. By underlying the aesthetics of poverty, Grotowski deepened the gap between theatre and film for more than three decades. The aesthetics of Resourceful Cinema are the original aesthetics of filmmaking. Resourcefulness was at its cradle when the Lumire brothers shot their first films on whatever was at sight. Actors were friends and passersby, and plots were improvised under the sun. Unfortunately the Lumiere brothers appeared to have been not very fond of theatre, and the development of the new art was left on the hands of showmen and magicians.
192
193 During the 20th century documentary, Italian Neorealism, La Nouvelle Vague, Glauber Rocha and Dogma 95 attempted to reform the aesthetics of cinema. But the financial demands of film production and the constraints of distribution cut short their universal aspirations. The rebels of cinema were congratulated and rewarded, while scholars duly took note of their contributions. Eventually some invaders irrupted into the lofty fortresses of cinema, now crumbled by the commercialization of consumer digital video, the low cost and lightness of digital camcorders, their high-quality images and versatility. The main cause of this revolution was the struggle for a voice in the concert of public opinion; its main aftermath the free global immediate distribution of films via Internet. The war took place for several years on the fields of photography and lighting. Video presented its advantages with low production costs (El Mariachi,) and documentary-style cinematography (The Blair Witch Project.) Film reaffirmed its superiority by the sharpness of its image, the professionalism of its craft and the fame of directors and celebrities. Once consumer camcorders and photographic devises achieved an impressive level of broadcasting quality, the establishment shifted the discourse of its supremacy on the costs of production. Every year we are flooded with adds announcing the most expensive film ever made or sold. The freak show of the 19th-century has been replaced by the luxurious set, and art directors are enlisted from the ghettos of graphic designers, tailors, decorators and painters. With de development of cellular phones, digital video cameras became a component of public life. As Kodak goes into bankruptcy the digital image confines the rolls of celluloid to the walls of museums and film clubs. The democratization of Internet
193
194 has in fact ended the dispute in amicable terms. Though film preserves its celebrities and craft, video makers and filmmakers produce films that are uploaded in Youtube or Vimeo for worldwide distribution. Resourceful films are first watched with distrust; their aesthetics certainly violate old established filmmaking practices. But they also gain acceptance as new visions of reality. As any work of art, they absorb the chaos we live in order to render artistic harmony, thus plating the seeds of that personal universal experience we call beauty.
194
195
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Aesthetics

Hugo Santander Ferreira

Think slow, act fast Buster Keaton

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Madras, August 15th 2012 SDG

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Part 1. Aesthetics of Cinema

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Pudovkin, Film Direction (New York: Grove press, 1978) p. 74.

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Diagram 1. The conflict A rouses several possible outcomes

Diagram 2. The conflict B rouses several possible outcomes

Aristotle, Poetics, tr. by S. H. Butcher, vii.

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

16 close conflicts in Psycho (1960.)

Conflict I Marion Crane Cause

Conflict II Norman Bates protects her dominant

Marion steals $40,000 in Phoenix, Norman Arizona mother

She tries to escape to California She is murdered

His mother murders a woman Norman is caught

FADE IN EXT. PHOENIX, ARIZONA (DAY) HELICOPTER SHOT

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Deleuze, Gilles, L'Image-Temps, Cinema 2, p. 134 -135.

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

For a definition of referent see chapter 3. Poetics, IX.

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

On the concept of Map see chapter 2.

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Peirce, II, 348. Peirce, V, 174.

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Figure 1. Greimas' Actantial Model

Figure 2. Greimas' Actantial Model applied to Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)

Lord Vader kills > Luke's parents

To avenge -> his parents

Luke defeats Lord Vader

Princes Lia Han Solo

Darth Vader The Empire

Figure 3. Greimas' Actantial Model 1 applied to Kramer vs Kramer (Brenton, 1979)

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

Figure 4. Greimas' Actantial Model 2 applied to Kramer vs Kramer (Brenton, 1979)

Joanna and Billy

Aesthetics and Ethics of Cinema by Hugo Santander

To destroy -> Mozart

Salieri kills Mozart

Figure 6. Polti's 36 dramatic situations