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Tag: Robert Bresson

  • This is the Problem: Writing About Film

    marlene

    How can I communicate the importance of a film without one dimensionalizing it and destroying its magic? I don’t know.

    I never want to discuss cinema in a leaden and academic way, but what other way is taken seriously? Emotional discussion of film is often dismissed as juvenile, and this is unfortunate, but also strange. I have no interest in seeking objectivity through art, and since our idea of the objective in regards to art criticism means “from a white, male perspective”, it has no interest in me either.

    Now, let me make this very clear, because there seems to be a little confusion:

    This is not a blog about race, and it is not a blog about gender. It is a blog about film.

    But because I am a woman, and because I am a woman of color, it will of course be about those things in the same way that a white male writing about a film, whether he knows it or not, cannot divorce his experience as a white male from any essay. Since “white male” is the world’s (and Hollywood’s) default setting, he believes that he moves through life race-less and gender-less, and so quite naturally, many of his reviews will not include mentions of gender or race. So deeply rooted is the white-male default viewpoint, even I find it hard to escape this thinking. When I think about script ideas, very often times I realize that the character I’ve been imagining is unconsciously a white man. From the moment he is born the way a white male sees the world, the way he forms sentences, the angles that catch his eye, will be different from a woman’s or a person of color’s. Of course this is the case for every person, but race and gender, along with class, are the largest dictators of how the world interacts with us, yet speaking explicitly from these experiences (as opposed to the implicit white male speech) has long been diminished or dismissed as a niche. When you write about a film, you write about yourself, and if you are not, it is bullshit.

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  • The Cinema: Deadly & Holy

    The other night, in a sleepless mania not unfamiliar to me, I rummaged through all my old school papers. They were abysmal, as unfortunately all academic writing is, but I paused self-beration to read one paper in particular. I remember it was handed in for extra credit in a last attempt to pass Dramaturgy. In it I reviewed theatre and film director (Marat/Sade) Peter Brook’s fantastic book The Empty Space and his categorizations of the theater: Holy, Deadly, Rough, Immediate. And as I trudged through my soulless, double spaced writing it suddenly occurred to me that these categories could be applied to the cinema. With the exception of the Immediate, they really are applied quite neatly, and I admit this gives me great pleasure. When things click together, the feeling is one of such satisfaction, it tips into sordidness. When this happens suspicion is the key in saving yourself from obnoxiousness. Fitting pieces of a puzzle together is satisfying, but always mock your vulgar fondness for completing puzzles in the first place.

    I will try to split the word [theatre] four ways and distinguish four different meanings—and so will talk about a Deadly Theatre, a Holy Theatre, a Rough Theatre and an Immediate Theatre. Sometimes these four theatres really exist, standing side by side, in the West End of London, or in New York off Times Square. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles apart, the Holy in Warsaw and the Rough in Prague, and sometimes they are metaphoric: two of them mixing together within one evening, within one act. Sometimes within one single moment, the four of them, Holy, Rough, Immediate and Deadly intertwine. The Deadly Theatre can at first sight be taken for granted, because it means bad theatre. As this is the form of theatre we see most often, and as it is most closely linked to the despised, much-attacked commercial theatre it might seem a waste of time to criticize it further. But it is only if we see that deadliness is deceptive and can appear anywhere, that we will become aware of the size of the problem.

    In this post (part one) I’ll discuss the Deadly and Holy Cinemas. In part two the Rough and Immediate. Can the Immediate be applied to Cinema? I am not so sure. We will see.

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