I Have Moved

For various reasons, I have moved this blog from its Blogspot origin to a new home at Wordpress. Many thanks to all those who have read and commented on what I've written so far, and thanks especially to Tuesy for organising the switch and making my pages less messy. I hope you'll like the new look, and I apologise for any fiddly inconvenience caused by updating a link. You can find the new Spectacular Attractions at http://drnorth.wordpress.com/.

Age Has not Withered Them

Just as I did with Flicker Alley's Georges Melies boxset, I need to pay my respects to another magnificent collection, Edison: The Invention of the Movies, from Kino Video. It took a long time to arrive in our university library, but I finally got to crack it open today. It's going to take a long time to get through it. Including documents and commentaries and interviews with historians, there must be over 20 hours of things and stuff spread across these four discs. You can either watch the films in isolation, or have them embedded in a series of sharp and detailed commentaries by the likes of Charles Musser, Eileen Bowser, Michael Wallace, Paul Israel and others.

From say-what-you-see titles such as Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze and Mr. Edison at Work in his Chemical Laboratory, to spectacular fictions such as Jack and the Beanstalk and The Teddy Bears, this is essential viewing for anyone remotely interested in early cinema, and I look forward to forcing it on anyone who isn't remotely interested.

The images above are from the earliest serviving camera tests made by Edison and W.K.L. Dickson. It's called Monkey-Shines no.1. If a monkeyshine is a kind of naughty practical joke, I can't really see one in here. Instead, we get a ghostly figure flickering in and out of focus, threatening to sputter out at any moment, and struggling to break into imagistic life. It is completely beguiling to look at, amongst the most riveting ten seconds of film you could hope to see. It's as though this long-dead being is trying to force its presence out of another time and into ours, fighting against the ever-increasing temporal gulf. Of course, this effect is not part of the art, but a side-effect of the camera's in-progress design. The imperfections, scratches and age-damage of these artefacts are signs of their historical distance from the present time, but they can take on a kind of beauty all of their own, as in the way Carmencita's dance seems to be showered with fireflies.

I can't wait to plough through the rest of this set. It feels important, edifying and educational. There's not many times you can say that about a bunch of movies, especially one that includes boxing cats...

Boop-oop-a-doop

Sometimes I like to add supporting shorts to my viewing schedule, and this usually means digging into some cartoon DVD box sets. For a while I've had a Betty Boop collection on my shelf that I bought in the US last year and never got round to giving much attention, but the other night, I needed something to lighten things up after watching Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jesus, so I dipped into a bit of Boop. I'd noticed that Betty's merchandise has been enjoying a bit of a revival, but I'm not sure how many of her new fans have actually had chance or inclination to view her actual films. It turns out my boxset doesn't include much of the earliest stuff, when Betty was actually a dog, or her first appearance in human form in 1932's Any Rags. But there are examples of beautiful, innovative animation in each cartoon, in contrast to the slightly less progressive sexual politics: having said that, it's probably easy to poke disapproving fingers in the direction of Betty Boop: she is a scantily clad cabaret perfomer, barely aware of the effect she's having on the slavering males who interpret her openness as availability. She is almost always held in the centre of the frame to emphasise that she is an object of clear and transparent spectacle, but on the other hand she is granted a level of independence and romantic (i.e. "sexual") appetite. She is a character in her own right, rather than a Minnie Mouse or a Daisy Duck, who exists as only a slightly modified version of a much more significant male other. Either way, Tuesy and I had some fun trying to untangle the innuendos and implications of the cartoons - is avuncular sidekick Grampy really just devoted to Betty out of pure friendship, or is he expecting something in return when he tidies her entire home following a particularly rambunctious party in Housecleaning Blues? And whose is that baby?......

I don't know enough about Betty to blog about her at any length, but I thought I'd go through one of the shorts that stood out to me in a bit more detail rather than attempting a complete survey. So, these are initial thoughts that may be subject to modification at a later date (surely that's what blogging is for, though...).

Betty Boop's Rise to Fame (1934) begins with a reporter interviewing Betty's creator, Max Fleischer about his star actress, with Fleischer illustrating her talents with clips from three of her earlier outings. In live action inserts, we see Fleischer himself drawing Betty and bringing her into hip-swivelling life before our eyes.

It's unlikely that Fleischer himself animated Betty, or even that anyone could do that kind of work single-handed, but positing him as a lone artist with singular life-giving powers was a common trope of early cartoons, as Donald Crafton makes plain in his superb book Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928:

"Part of the animation game consisted of developing mythologies that gave the animator some sort of special status. Usually these were very flattering, for he was pictured as (or implied to be) a demigod, a purveyor of life itself."

You can see this in James Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), where the frame incorporates Blackton's hand drawing a series of chalkboard caricatures, and Winsor McCay was a major presence in his own cartoons, either in live action sections showing the animation process, or in the priceless moment at the end of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) where he enters the frame to hitch a ride on the back of his pet brontosaurus. Crafton puts it beautifully when he states that appreciation of early animation was dependent upon "vicarious participation in the ritual of incarnation." That is to say, audiences were included in the processes of construction and always invited to contemplate the artifice of animated characters, even if they were being presented with an exaggerated or mythologised version of those processes.

Fleischer exerts his control over Betty at every turn, but the diegesis suggests that, once drawn, she is independent of the artist. This is that neat compromise between a depiction of the animator as a powerful being, and the need for his creations to seem to have a life of their own. Fleischer sets out a series of backgrounds for Betty to dance in (each one recalling one of her earlier films), proscribing the spaces in which she can perform. When Betty dances the hula, a cutaway to the reporter's hand shows his pen gyrating like a curvy butt. Her sexuality spills out from the cel into the real world, an effect to which Fleischer himself, as Betty's good "Uncle Maxie" seems to be immune: he administers and sets the boundaries for the allure she will inflict on others, but keeps a professional distance. It is his spell that is being cast, and Betty is his intermediary.

The film concludes when Betty, harrassed by the Old Man of the Mountain and his somewhat tentacular beard, flees the frame and escapes by jumping back into the safety of Uncle Maxie's inkwell.

Again he offers a paternal protection from the dangerous sexual opportunities to which he had introduced her in the first place. Pimp. In other Betty cartoons, the relationship between creator and creation is not as explicitly obvious as in this portmanteau piece of her greatest hits, but its a tidily condensed statement of how things work.

Betty Boop article at Bright Lights Film Journal.
You can see some of her work at Vintage ToonCast.
Better-than-most history at Wikipedia.

Vengeance is Mine

I'm not always inclined to post about entire movies, especially as most of what I post here is initial responses on a first viewing, partly to try and get my own thinking in order, and hopefully to share some unvarnished points of interest that make a contribution, however tiny, to the knowledge sediment that is the blogosphere (there must be a better word for it - any ideas?). So, I thought I'd say something about just the closing shots of Shohei Imamura's Vengeance is Mine (1979). I don't think I'm giving too much away about the plot that isn't given away at the start of the film, but obviously I'm talking about the ending, so don't read on if you want to go and watch it: you can always read about the film from far more well-versed commentators with these links:

Jasper Sharp Essay
Movie Martyr
Midnight Eye
Roger Ebert review
DVD Beaver

When I'm introducing new students to the study of film form and giving them sequence analyses to carry out, I always warn them not to attach fixed meanings to particular formal techniques or types of shot, mainly because meaning is always a fluid thing inflected by context of the film and the particular proclivities, interests, intertexts and expertises brought to the film by each spectator, but also because there is simply no easy connection between a type of shot and the inference that is designed to be drawn from it in every case. Each close-up, each match cut or tracking shot must be taken on its own terms as part of a broader formal system. The last few shots of Vengeance are a good example of a series of freeze frames which are specifically significant to this film rather than the ritualistic enactments of a constant piece of filmic syntax. To be a bit less convoluted about it, the same shot will do different things in different films.

Vengeance is Mine is a largely factual account of a notorious Japanese serial killer, Iwao Enokizu (in real life the killer's name was Akira Nishiguchi, and you can learn a litte more, but not much, about his case here) filling in the details of how he spent the last 78 days of his crime spree on the run prior to his apprehension. Much of the story is told out of sequence, but the ending shows his wife and father, who have explored but ultimately resisted consummation of their mutual attraction throughout the film, scattering Iwao's bones from a mountain overlooking the city in which he'd lived. As each bone is thrown, it stops dead in the air, failing to fall to earth as expected.

The effect is achieved by means of simple freeze-frames, a basic technique which is peculiar to cinema, often as a way of adding emphasis to a particular shot, allowing it to be inspected more closely than other images and therefore to be privileged, making it an indicative image of a broader theme. The rest of the film has been constructed in a starkly realist fashion, cataloguing events in a soberly distanced and seemingly unemotional way. This is probably the only instance where an expressionistic formal flourish is allowed to come to the fore and issue a powerful statement. What makes it most striking is that the two characters in the scene seem to be able to see the bones stopping in the air, which is obviously not possible and contrasts with the diegetic logic of the rest of the film.

The POV shots, eyeline mathes and reverse shots, connect the shots of the flying bones to the faces of the people throwing them and watching them fly. They become increasingly frustrated at the failure of the bones to return to the ground and be reclaimed by the land. It appears that, even in death, Iwao's memory cannot be banished. The legacy of his killings and the shame and abuse that he heaped upon his family will always hang over them, whatever rituals of expurgation and excommunication are performed. This seems like an obvious point that would have been made anyway - his execution concludes his life but it is clear just from the looks on their faces that his family have been deeply affected by events. I think that the use of such an anomalous technique is a self-conscious point of stylisation that pushes the closing statement beyond the diegetic space of the film and out into the audience. That is to say, it shows that the effect of the murders will resonate beyond the lives of those directly involved and send shockwaves into wider society. By unsettling the structure of the film itself, the viewer can be jolted out of an externalised engagement with the story: the viewer is usually protected by being a voyeuristic onlooker, a watcher who cannot be watched, and the fictionalised characters of the film cannot witness the mechanics of the film that tells their story, but in this case Imamura connects the two zones by having them both see something impossible at the same level, with all protective boundaries ruptured.