Sunday, November 28, 2010

This Week in New Haven: "Films from the Darkest Hour: Europe, 1942-1943"

This week in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University will be presenting its seventh annual Film Studies conference and film festival dedicated to the work of a single year or two in European cinema.  This year's event, devoted to the cinema of 1942 and 1943, brings together nine features, four shorts and a collection of newsreels from eight European nations, with introductions and panel discussions featuring faculty members and advanced PhD candidates from Yale, Bard, University of Chicago, Columbia, NYU and SUNY-Albany.  All Whitney Humanities Center screenings and panel discussions are free and open to the public.  

Below is a complete list of the films, formats, times and dates, along with my program notes for the screenings.  "Films from the Darkest Hour" begins Thursday, December 2, with the screening of a subtitled, archival 35mm print of Manoel de Oliveira's first feature Aniki-Bóbó.  For more information, including a complete list of the speakers, please visit the Yale European Studies Council home page.

Aniki-Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira, 1942, Portugal, 71 minutes, 35mm with English subtitles)
Screening: 7:00 PM, Thursday, December 2, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira’s extraordinary first feature Aniki-Bóbó, following a Soviet-inspired, silent documentary short made eleven years earlier, Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931), takes its name from an “eeny, meeny, miny, moe”-style nursery rhyme, frequently repeated by the film’s mostly child actors. Oliveira’s children’s film centers on the experiences of a group of primary school-age boys as they suffer their disciplinarian schoolmaster, navigate pre-pubescent romance and commit more and less routine youthful transgressions – with the specter of the avowedly pro-Roman Catholic Salazar dictatorship fleetingly apparent in the slogan on a book bag (“remember the golden rule”) and in the persistent police presence on the centuries-old Oporto streets. Prefiguring his future directorial signature, Oliveira guides his young leads to remarkably “theatrical” performances, as Gilbert Adair has noted, in clear contradistinction to the more naturalistic acting styles that would emerge shortly in the neorealist movement. Oliveira’s feature-length debut, however, would prove much closer to the spirit of neorealism in its reliance on location shooting: the Douro’s banks in the filmmaker’s hometown once again provides the setting, as they did in Douro, Faina Fluvial, and as they would in many of the director’s subsequent works, including his most recent feature, 2010 Cannes festival-favorite, The Strange Case of Angélica. It remains to be said that Oliveira, at age one hundred-one at the time of this writing, persists in being the last active filmmaker of the silent era.

***
Once at Night / Odnazhdy noch’yu (Grigori Kozintsev, 1942, USSR, 22 minutes, DVD with no English subtitles)
Screening: 10:30 AM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Raisa Sidenova's program notes are available here.

Ukraine in Flames / Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine / Bitva za nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuliya Solntseva and Yakov Avdeenko, 1943, USSR, 80 minutes, DVD with English Subtitles)
Screening: 10:30 AM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Raisa Sidenova's program notes are available here.

***
World War II Newsreels (Presented on DVD with no English subtitles) 
Screening: 2:00 PM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943, France, 91 minutes, 35mm with English subtitles)
Screening: 3:15 PM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Produced during the Nazi occupation by Continental-Films, a company created and financed by Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda, Le Corbeau took as its subject a real-life incident that incurred in Tulle, France more than twenty years earlier: at that time, according to a 1922 New York Times report, a series of “poison-pen” letters were mailed that ultimately cost the life of a police official, the sanity of at least two others, and “the marital happiness of dozens of families.” In Clouzot’s update, the letters encircle the somewhat mysterious Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), accusing the physician of providing abortions and of conducting affairs with a pair of attractive young townswomen, who likewise receive anonymous messages from “Le Corbeau” or “the Raven.” With the villagers of the fictional St. Robin accordingly beset by paranoid speculation, Clouzot expertly invites parallel suspicion in his viewer, introducing pieces of circumstantial evidence to implicate not only Dr. Germain’s proposed lovers, but especially the underage, if treacherous Rolande. In the words of one of Rémy’s colleagues “since this tempest of hate and calumny hit our town all moral values have been corrupted.” Le Corbeau provides just stch a portrait of Provincial France, leading to the director’s censure immediately following the Liberation. Today, however, Le Corbeau is equally seen through the prism of anti-Nazi resistance, most recently garnering an affirmative quotation in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Day of Wrath / Vredens dag (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943, Denmark, 97 minutes, 35mm with English subtitles)
Screening: 7:00 PM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Born the illegitimate son of a maid and Swedish factory-owner in 1889, Carl Theodor Dreyer is widely considered today to rank among the greatest of all film artists, despite a relatively modest fourteen features in forty-five years. Of course, the works themselves display no similar slightness, with such confirmed classics as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Ordet (1955) numbering among the director’s unusually high proportion of masterpieces. Day of Wrath is certainly no exception with Dreyer providing an analogy to the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population (at least in the view of many Danish critics, according to film historian Paolo Cherchi Usai) through his treatment of religious intolerance in seventeenth-century Protestant Denmark. On a formal level, Dreyer builds causal ambiguity into his occult-focused narrative, while also constructing spaces wherein strong off-camera glances facilitate his viewers’ awareness of an invisible, off-screen field. From the outside looking into Dreyer’s visuals, the director extracts a mood of surveillance, again apropos of the period’s political situation, as well as a surfeit of suspense, though the diegetic source of the look, be it Rev. Absalon Pederssøn (Thorkild Roose), his mother, the townsmen or perhaps even a judgmental, wrathful God, remains uncertain. Indeterminacy likewise finds its way into the image in the expressions, or rather in the eyes of Absalom’s much younger wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin), with their piercing presence providing the film with its carnal core. Day of Wrath ultimately makes a strong case for being the very best of 1942-1943.

Torment / Hets (Alf Sjöberg, 1944, Sweden, 101 minutes)
Screening: 9:00 PM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven 

Jeremi Szaniawski's program notes are available here.

The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson, 1942, United Kingdom, 92 minutes, 35mm)
Screening: 9:00 AM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Commissioned by the British War Office as a training film for the benefit of counter-espionage efforts in the armed forces, Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin dramatizes the wartime admonishment that “careless talk costs lives,” charting a series of small disclosures, both verbal and visual, that ultimately forge a causal chain leading to the film’s “very costly” concluding battle – and thus to the notification of the “next of kin.” Lacking both the “conventional big scene” and the “star performer,” Dickinson’s narrative doggedly pursues its central security conceit through a shifting series of social interactions – many of which prove romantic in nature – with each offering, in the words of the director, a game of “what is wrong with this picture.” The Next of Kin likewise breaks with convention, or rather, again in the view of Dickinson, anticipates a new set of postwar norms, both in the United States and Italy, through its procurement of a fact-based approach that would prove authentic enough to lead Winston Churchill to temporarily withdraw the picture ahead of the Allied raid on St. Nazaire.

Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, 1942, United Kingdom, 20 minutes, 35mm)
Screening: 10:45 AM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Produced by the Crown Film Unit, Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister’s Listen to Britain discloses the film’s advocated method of spectatorship in its title, with an image track that frequently provides visual accompaniment to the documentary short’s aural content. Constructed of a series of sound motifs that emerge, disappear, and periodically reemerge, Jennings’s self-described “picture about music” scores a portrait of home front Britain, with the BBC Overseas Service and the chiming of Big Ben among the many recognizable symbols. Indeed, Jennings and McAllister articulate their nation’s specific identity through their soundtrack, with the film’s human subjects registering more often a familiar anonymity, a mirror for the wartime viewer. Then again, Listen to Britain does offer pivotal on-screen exceptions, with a uniquely indexical impact coming from the on-camera appearances of Flanagan and Allen crooning their war-era hit, “Round the Back of the Arches,” Dame Myra Hess performing one of her 1,700 lunch time concerts, and the future Queen Mother seated in Hess’s National Gallery audience. The image track here becomes as cardinal as the score, as it will remain with the pianist’s Mozart spreading out into the leafy capital, and with “Rue Britannia” juxtaposed over a luminous coal furnace and a windswept wheat field. Listen to Britain remains one of the uncontested masterpieces of the documentary mode, the short form and of the British cinema.

The Silent Village (Humphrey Jennings, 1943, United Kingdom, 38 minutes, 35mm)
Screening: 10:45 AM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

On June 10, 1942, under the orders of Adolf Hitler, the entire adult male population of Lidice, Czechoslovakia was murdered, with its remaining women and children sent to concentration camps as retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, deputy Reichsprotektor of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. German and Czech radio publicized the event, claiming in addition that “the buildings of the locality have been leveled and the name of the community has been obliterated.” The Silent Village accordingly counteracts this attempted obliteration, superimposing the fate of Lidice onto the rural Welsh community of Cwmgiedd, where the events of 1942 are reenacted by the village’s population, who play themselves rather than the fallen and imprisoned former residents of Lidice. In this way, Jennings’s short film not only memorializes the victims of the Lidice massacre and the decimated village, but also reminds its British viewers of the stakes of the current war, in addition to providing a troubling counterfactual scenario of life in Britain had Germany been successful in their 1940 invasion. At the same time, there remains “a civilised reticence about Jennings’ treatment,” in the estimation of British critic Dave Berry. “Sometimes the approach seems distant and the film occasionally has a desiccated feel,” he continues, “but overall Jennings instinctively finds the right tone.”

Romance in a Minor Key / Romanze in Moll (Helmut Käutner, 1943, Germany, 98 minutes, 16mm with English subtitles)
Screening: 1:45 PM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Inspired by the Guy de Maupassant short story “Les Bijoux,” Helmut Käutner’s Romance in a Minor Key withdraws to late nineteenth-century Paris, a city under German occupation since June 1940, for its tragic retelling of Madeleine (Marianne Hoppe) and Michael’s (Ferdinand Marian) extra-marital love affair. Käutner’s film opens among the city’s chimney-tops, his camera craning as it moves toward Madeleine’s bedchamber. Pushing into the room, the female lead lies motionless, a pearl necklace around her neck and a vial of poison at her bedside, as her husband (Paul Dahlke) arrives home following a late night out. Unfolding thereafter through a set of flashbacks, Käutner’s narrative stages the married woman and composer’s initially and ultimately “minor-key” romance, with major-key moments emerging in between, beginning with Käutner’s elegant ellipsis linking Madeleine’s insistence that she will never be Michael’s mistress to her symbolically rich performance of her lover’s composition with his gift strung across her declitae. This latter object, the prompt for Dahlke’s discovery of his wife’s indiscretion, calls to mind German-Jewish-born auteur and fellow Maupassant screen-adapter Max Ophüls’s masterpiece Madame de… (1953), as does the crane-facilitated fluidity of Käutner’s mise-en-scѐne.

Desiderio (Roberto Rossellini and Marcello Pagliero, 1943-1946, Italy, 79 minutes, 35mm with printed subtitles provided at the screening)
Screening: 4:00 PM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Though it was begun in partnership with Ossessione screenwriter Giuseppe De Santis – much to the consternation of Luchino Visconti, who according to De Santis, “wouldn’t speak to me for some time and did everything to hinder the collaboration” – and though the film’s second part, if not significantly more, would be shot by Marcello Pagliero in 1945, Desiderio nonetheless emerges, in the words of Rossellini biographer Tag Gallagher, as “the most seminal of his early pictures.” Starring Elli Parvo as runaway cum prostitute Paola, “the first full-fleshed character in Rossellini,” Desiderio depicts its heroine’s chaste romance with horticulturist Giovanni (Carlo Ninchi), and her consequent attempt at shielding her profession from her new lover. This leads Paola to return to her rural home, where she is received coldly by her father and lusted after by her sister’s husband Nando (Ossessione’s male lead Massimo Girotti). Indeed, even in this setting, Paola remains unable to escape the unwelcome, coercive attention of men, compelling an act of desperation that will conclude the film as it had began, with an act of suicide. In introducing this particular motif, which Rossellini added in his rewrite, Desiderio significantly prefigures Germany Year Zero (1948) and Europa ’51 (1952). Together likewise with the director’s La paura (1954), these later works accordingly form a sub-corpus of despair for which Desiderio provides a clear template.

Gente del Po / People of the River Po (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1943-1947, 10 minutes, Blu-Ray with English subtitles)
Screening: 8:00 PM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Following a short stint as a critic at the publication Cinema in Rome, and work as an assistant for Marcel Carné (on Les Visiteurs du soir, 1942) and as a screenwriter for Roberto Rossellini (on A Pilot Returns, 1942), Michelangelo Antonioni began shooting his first documentary in 1943, based on an article he published in 1939, “Concerning a Film on the River Po.” With the Allied liberation of Southern Italy in mid-1943, Antonioni was forced to suspend shooting. After concluding production four years later, Antonioni lost seventy percent of his footage in a development accident. Even so, the truncating finished product displays interest for its disclosure of information “on purely visual terms,” according to Antonioni scholar Peter Brunette, and as the fount of the director’s consequent career, in the opinion of the director himself.

Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943, Italy, 135 minutes, 35mm with English subtitles)
Screening: 8:00 PM, Saturday, December 4, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

The Milanese-born son of an aristocratic father and an extremely wealthy mother, Luchino Visconti began his work in cinema as a third assistant to French master Jean Renoir, after an introduction to the filmmaker by Coco Chanel. Renoir would subsequently furnish Visconti with the script for his first feature Ossessione, based on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), with shooting conducted on location in Emilia-Romagna (the Po Valley) and Marche in 1942. The extraordinary resulting feature has frequently been credited as “the first neorealist movie,” due to its “hardscrabble look and focus on the have-nots.” However, as critic Philip Lopate has pointed out, “to the degree that Italian neorealism was a specific response to a historical moment (the end of the war and its aftermath), it would be more accurate to say Ossessione was pre-neorealist,” or as Millicent Marcus has described it, a “harbinger” of the movement. In fact, Ossessione has as much in common with the French cinema of the late 1930s as it does the Italian cinema after 1945, displaying the same planar organization of space as Renoir’s supreme masterpiece, La Rѐgle du jeu (1939), as well as the “sensual fatalism” of the earlier period’s “poetic realism” (again to quote Lopate). In this respect, Ossessione proves pivotal in the migration of Europe’s broader realist tradition from France to Italy, and for the introduction of a pervasive eroticism into the nation’s cinema that would find its most famous expression in co-screenwriter Giuseppe de Santis’s postwar Bitter Rice (1949).

Select Bibliography
Andrew, Geoff, ed. Film: The Critics’ Choice (2001).
Armes, Roy. French Cinema (1985).
Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1998).
Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini: His Life and Films (1998).
Horne, Philip and Peter Swaab, eds. Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film (2008).
Jackson, Kevin, ed. The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (1993).
Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (1986).
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema (1996).

"Films from the Darkest Hour: Europe, 1942-1943": Raisa Sidenova on Once at Night & Ukraine in Flames

Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Once at Night / Odnazhdy noch’yu (Grigori Kozintsev, 1942, USSR, 22 minutes, DVD with no English subtitles)
Screening: 10:30 AM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Kozintsev’s short is representative of the Soviet wartime genre, boevoi kinosbornik, a thematic compilation of short films. Once at Night, made in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan at the evacuated Mosfilm studio, was released as a part of Boevoi Kinosbornik No.2 entitled Our Girls and dedicated to the courageous Soviet women. The film was paired with Abram Room’s short Tonia, which showed a sacrifice of a woman. In a suspenseful yet comedic manner, Kozintsev, faithful to the avant-garde roots of his earlier ‘eccentric’ works, tells a story of Nadia Shilova, a young and naïve veterinarian (played by a hilarious Nina Petropavlovskaya), who encounters two soldiers, one of whom is supposed to be a German spy and saboteur. Nadia identifies the enemy between her two visitors by declaring that she put poison in their tea. The atmosphere of duplicity, fear and doubt is masterfully captured by the camera of Andrei Moskvin, who two years later worked on Sergei Eisenstein’s magnum opus Ivan the Terrible. Despite being set in the time of war and dealing with the controversial subject of war treason, Once at Night is delightfully thrilling and somewhat inappropriately funny. Due to the formal and narrative ambiguity of both Kozintzev’s film and Room’s Tonia, Boevoi Kinosbornik No.2 was banned by Stalinist censors and was not released until the Thaw.

***
Ukraine in Flames / Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine / Bitva za nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuliya Solntseva and Yakov Avdeenko, 1943, USSR, 80 minutes, DVD with English Subtitles)
Screening: 10:30 AM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Ukraine in Flames is Dovzhenko’s first WWII documentary. The film’s central story is the Battles of Kharkov, put into the context of Ukrainian history and the excruciating struggle of its people during the war. Compiled out of documentary footage made by more than a dozen cameramen as well as German newsreels, Ukraine in Flames presents a powerful montage of Nazi atrocities and its toll on the filmmaker’s native soil. While Dovzhenko’s wife Yuliya Solntseva and filmmaker Yakov Adveenko were credited as directors of the film, Dovzhenko, who worked as a war correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper at that time, authored a passionate and didactic (if at times clichéd) text to accompany the images (narration by voice-over actor Leonid Khmara). Dovzhenko’s poetic sensibility shines through the Russian language narrative with the quotations from Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, folk songs, and heartbreaking testimonies of Ukrainian villagers and partisans (in Ukrainian). The tragedy of the war is both universal and personal for Dovzhenko: he cannot stay indifferent to the struggle of his country, whose history and beauty he so lovingly glorified in his celebrated masterpieces Earth (1930) and Zvenigora (1928). Like many Soviet films of the war era, Ukraine in Flames was made as a cry for help to the rest of world. In his diary, Dovzhenko wrote: “Yuliya and I are working on this film that is addressed more to the world rather than our own audience.” The film was a success in the Soviet Union as well as abroad, where it was shown in 27 countries.

Ukraine in Flames will be screening courtesy of the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University, the only permanent forum of Ukrainian film in North America since 2004.

"Films from the Darkest Hour: Europe, 1942-1943": Jeremi Szaniawski on Torment

Torment / Hets (Alf Sjöberg, 1944, Sweden, 101 minutes)
Screening: 9:00 PM, Friday, December 3, 53 Wall Street, New Haven

Torment, Ingmar Bergman’s first produced screenplay, is a dark coming-of-age drama about a high school senior, Jan-Erik Widgren (Alf Kjellin), terrorized by his sadistic Latin teacher, nicknamed Caligula (Stig Järrel). Caligula also happens to be involved in a weird and lurid relationship with Widgren’s lover, the troubled Bertha (Mai Zetterling), a petty store clerk with a taste for alcohol and rather loose morals. When Caligula’s schemes and sick games occasion tragedy, it is uncertain as to whether any good can come for the tormenter’s victim. Torment, whose Swedish title Hets in fact translates as “incitement” or “baiting,” thus shifting the focus of attention from the suffering of the characters to the nature of the film’s actual protagonist, deals not only with the constrictions of Swedish bourgeois society, but also, however cryptically, with the demons of Nazism and totalitarianism at large. A tale of the uneven fight between the all-powerful and profoundly iniquitous teacher and the mass of alienated, powerless students, the film often teeters on the borderline between nightmare and reality, while the cinematography, informed in places by German expressionism, helps to further the allegory, in line with the theses of Siegfried Kracauer. Still, since Caligula is as much a Caligari-figure (the names’ quasi homonymy cannot be pure coincidence) as he is inspired by The Blue Angel’s loathed, yet tragic Professor (Un) Rath, nothing is ever all black or white in this harrowing psychological tale.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

New Film: Ha Ha Ha

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

In Ha Ha Ha (2010), recipient of this year's Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes, leading Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo substantially modifies the "twice-told" narrative format that he inaugurated in his masterful second feature The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), transforming his signature two-part structures into a series of alternating inter-cut episodes narrated by a pair of conversing friends.  Ha Ha Ha accordingly represents 2010's second high-profile abandonment of one of the key trends in early twenty-first century world cinema, joining Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010): the Structuralist-inspired narrative diptych.  While Apichatpong's relinquishment facilitated the Thai director's epic return to his "exquisite corpse," Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) narrative origins, Hong's eschewal, by comparison, suggests a path forward for the Korean filmmaker.  Or at least Hong's capacity to make an old subject new.  In this regard, Hong remains ever the Structuralist; his oeuvre, taking its cue from Eric Rohmer's, may just be the cinema's closest equivalent to Piet Mondrian, with Ha Ha Ha thereby representing something akin to the painter's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" (1942-1943), though this writer is most certainly not suggesting that Hong has reached his artistic endpoint.

Ha Ha Ha opens with a series of black-and-white stills, where the viewer hears two men speaking in voice-off.  As the film progresses, their conversation, to which Hong repeatedly returns, utilizing the same black-and-white still motif - Hong's strategy feels like the latest of the director's increasing set of Gallic references; in this case to Chris Marker's sub-thirty minute masterpiece, La Jetée (1962) - becomes the impetus for the film's narrative, with incidents from the lives of each in the same coastal Korean town alternating in succession. Though it is not at first clear as to when these two stories are occurring in relation to one another, the film's progression confirms their overlap, not only temporally, but also, and more importantly, in terms of those figures that populate the two comic narratives.

In particular it is leggy tour guide Seong-ok (Moon So-ri) who proves pivotal to both story-lines, as the girlfriend of handsome poet Jeong-ho (Kim Kang-woo)a friend of the "severely" depressed first narrator Joong-sik (Yu Jun-Sang), and as the love interest of his conversant, Jo Moon-kyeong (Kim Sang-kyung), a relatively infantile out-of-work film director from Seoul.  As Ha Ha Ha proceeds, potential romantic rivals Jeong-ho and Moon-kyeong cross paths, first outside Seong-ok's door; then on the street where Seong-ok unexpectedly offers her (by this point) ex-lover a piggy-back ride - which she administers in her high heels to disastrous results; and finally after a play where Jeong-ho executes a beating to the supposed former member of a South Korean airborne division.  Joong-sik and Jo, however, fail to meet, despite their shared network of friends, and even though, on at least one occasion, both find themselves concurrently in Jo's mother's restaurant.  Ha Ha Ha choreographs the experience of lives lived in parallel, which fail to intersect.

Ultimately, though, it is the portraits of Seong-ok and Jeong-ho sketched by Hong's overlapping stories that provides Ha Ha Ha with its substantial auteurist interest.  While the writer-director's 'twice-told tales' (as for example Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, 2000) introduce a comparatively novel form of subjectivity in their two presumably objective views on a single series of events, Ha Ha Ha proffers its fuller view through its twinned subjectivities, unfolding in stories whose overlap the two narrators fail to see.  Indeed, it remains to be said that neither Moon-kyeong nor Joong-sik realize that the other is speaking of their mutual acquaintances, Seong-ok and Jeong-ho, as they causally take turns relating their experiences in voice-over and on-screen.  All of this is to say that Hong persists in showing two views, even as he dispatches with his former two-part structure.

Ha Ha Ha however does not simply prove exceptional within Hong's oeuvre for its introduction of original narrative strategies, but instead also emerges as exceptionally notable for its consistently successful comedy and for the overall strength of the film's performances.  Of particular note is Moon So-ri, who combines a sexual appeal concentrated in her much commented upon legs, with a pronounced awkwardness, both in the manner in which she carries herself, and also in her sudden verbal outbursts.

Ha Ha Ha additionally represents a greater assurance in the zoom-lensed aesthetic that Hong has developed since A Tale of Cinema (2005).  In Ha Ha Ha, Hong seems to move past the somewhat more impressionistic application of the zoom figure in the director's archly French, comparatively lesser Night and Day (2008) - Hong's other recent break from the 'twice-told' pattern - adopting the strategy instead to degree that it serves his narrative. With Ha Ha Ha, Hong selects points of interest within his mise-en-scène and gracefully reframes within his single-take scenes.  In this respect, Hong has transformed his static one-shot set-ups - again of works such as The Power of Kangwon Province - no less than the narrative strategies of his 'twice-told tales.'  

My special thanks to Lisa K. Broad for her substantial insights included in this piece.  Ha Ha Ha is available on English-subtitled Region-3 DVD through YesAsia.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

New Film: Unstoppable

With his 2006 masterpiece Déjà Vu, Tony Scott, the much-maligned "action hack director" of such blockbuster-mode entertainments as Top Gun (1986), Crimson Tide (1995) and Man on Fire (2004), produced  a work of mainstream Hollywood cinema that had as much insight into the contemporary, post-9/11, post-Katrina American spirit as any film released in the past decade.  Combining these two tragedies with a third, Oklahoma City-style act of domestic terrorism, Déjà Vu provided a means by which the film's unsolved composite trauma could be undone by the efforts of law enforcement lead Denzel Washington.  In Scott's science-fiction narrative, time-travel presented this opportunity, with an ostensible tool of surveillance in fact acting as a means of bringing the past into physical proximity with the present (and thus allowing for Washington's return to the scene of the New Orleans crime, before it had occurred).  In this way, Déjà Vu eschewed Bush-era concerns regarding the defensibility of preemptive action, opting instead to engage only with the traumas themselves, for which the film would offer a momentary, virtual form of psychic relief.    

Unstoppable (2010), Scott's latest from a Mark Bomback screenplay, continues in the post-9/11 and Katrina vein of the 2006 work, albeit from source material based on true events - the immediately pre-9/11, "Crazy Eights" runaway train incident of northwestern Ohio.  Shifting his narrative to a present-day fictional set of small and mid-sized rural western Pennsylvania communities, in an area not far from the actual crash site of United flight 93, Scott re-conceives his subject in view of the 2001 act of terrorism, with the film's mode of transport described as a "missile" by Rosario Dawson's highly skilled yardmaster Connie Hooper.  Carrying toxic chemicals and heading unmanned at very high speeds toward the population center of Stanton, PA, following prior human error at the rail yard, Washington and Chris Pine's railroad engineers, Frank Barnes and Will Colson, voluntarily risk their lives in an effort to prevent mass civilian casualties.  In so doing, the film's leads emerge as post-9/11 era domestic heroes, preventing the further loss of innocent American lives on its native soil.  Though again the film's non-fiction source precedes that aforementioned September Tuesday morning, the film's re-situation in the present moment suggests not only a shadow history of heroic action and terrorism-prevention in the years since, but also reminds its spectator that the 9/11-era has yet to conclude.

Hence, whereas Déjà Vu presented a scenario whereby a traumatic history might be revised, Unstoppable depicts the prevention of further tragedy.  Or, to put it another way, the former deals with the past and the second with the present - with a second 9/11 or Katrina-style disaster being prevented in both films.  Of course, Déjà Vu's science-fiction scenario insures that the past is not simply engaged from a point in the present, as Washington and company do as they view the past brought near through that film's meta-cinematic "Snow White" (surveillance) technology, but that it is engaged moreover as a second present, from a position within.  In this way, as this writer has argued previouslyDéjà Vu introduced two forms of diegesis: the video-gaming inspired viewer-activated form that presents itself in the film's present-tense, and a classical, impenetrable formulation that comes to supersede the first when Washington's Agent Carlin travels back in time, immersing himself in the world of four days past. Unstoppable, by comparison, relies strictly on the latter classical-style conceptualization of fictional space, with its heroes located in a world not subject to Déjà Vu's viewer-activated space, which cannot be impacted from the outside, as can be the past in Déjà Vu.  Instead, Unstoppable registers a single present that only those inside the world can affect.

Then again, Unstoppable does not lack Déjà Vu's profusion of images and screens, which in the latter look into a world of the past, brought near by an enormous expenditure of energy, and through a technology that greatly resembles Google Earth.  In fact, both remain quite prominent in Unstoppable, with Hooper manning a control center that might have been lifted from the 2006 film or from the director's previous, lesser, though still authorially notable Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009).  In Unstoppable, the film's high-def monitors and unending streams of video footage not only present CCTV-style constant surveillance, but much more explicitly signal the current method of broadcasting breaking news events, both on twenty-four hour news outlets and on most local affiliates (as well as the large number of broadcast options and information alternatives).  Scott in fact cuts to a pair of separate local news reports periodically as he alternates between an immersion-based presentation of the action, and its coverage on a pair of Pennsylvania stations - from which Hooper and others frequently get their news as events unfold.

Indeed, Unstoppable  presents a world in which major events are captured on-screen from a near ubiquitous number of sources and angles, which are limited not only to the aforementioned broadcast networks, but also include crowds filming events as they happen on their cell phones, which Scott highlights in one particularly noteworthy long-shot. Unstoppable in this regard re-conceptualizes the surveillance-style footage of Scott's masterpiece to reflect the way in which most Americans consume breaking news stories, with events streaming on a variety of networks and platforms, and with private videos shared by on-the-scene amateurs.  Unstoppable is thus a work of its imagistic moment, and may even retrospectively provide a hermeneutic key to the director's earlier surveillance-obsessed work.

Unstoppable is also exceedingly a film of surfaces, both those of the flat screens that transmit the broadcasts, and also those that in some respect filter the images, such as the constant transparent surfaces that come between the camera and the performers.  In these many images, such as the frame reproduced at the outset, Scott manages to maintain moment-to-moment visual interest - not unlike one of the best-looking productions on cable television today, the Scott-inspired "White Collar" on the USA Network - while also reminding his viewer of the barrier between apparatus and subject.  The world of Unstoppable is foremost a filmed world, a world that is constantly and ubiquitously mediated, though not exactly manipulated in the sense of the earlier film.  If Déjà Vu indeed presented a filmed and viewed world within its world, Unstoppable re-frames the object of surveillance as the world of today.

Scott's Rust Belt-situated film also reflects America's present day socio-economic reality, with African American Washington's twenty-eight year railroad veteran facing forced retirement, while Caucasian Pine's low-wage, union trainee - and beneficiary of nepotism - receives assignments over his more qualified co-workers.  (In this way, Scott succeeds in revising subtle racial stereotypes.)   Colson, however, does manage to prove himself in the course of the duo's efforts, thus conferring his value in Scott's extraordinarily Hawksian world - Will indeed shows himself to be "good enough," and thus to be a fit member of Unstoppable's male homo-social group engaged in dangerous work.  In the film's privileging of intuition, practical knowledge and competence, Unstoppable proves a profoundly American work of film art, despite its British helmer.  Then again, Scott's inclusion of Dawson and Kevin Corrigan's Inspector Werner suggests that women and theoretical knowledge likewise have a place in Scott's world, so long, that is, that they prove 'good enough' - an equally Hawksian inclusiveness to be sure.  Less inspired by Howard Hawks, perhaps, though again very much of the moment are Scott's execrable corporate villains, who prove willing to risk lives to save a few dollars.

In sum, Unstoppable may fall short of Déjà Vu's elegant interrogation of various forms of cinematic space, but it cannot be said to lack comparatively in its presentation of the America of its moment.  Unstoppable is indeed vitally of its time, as was the earlier feature, and of its national place of origin (despite Scott's), and for these two reasons alone would qualify among the more notable films of its year.  Of course, Scott's mastery of the music video-brand aesthetic that he helped to invent, decipherable in the film's consistently mimetic use of scoring and sound effects to convey character psychology, and his direction of characteristically fine performances from Washington - himself a master of timing and tone in his delivery of dialogue - and Dawson, among others, only add to the film's already substantial quality.

Friday, November 12, 2010

"Resurrecting the Rube: Diegesis Formation and Contemporary Trauma in Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006)"

In Cinemascope’s winter 2007 publication (no. 29), Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson declare Tony Scott – whom they contend is “regularly dismissed by critics as an action hack director” – “overdue” for reappraisal (Huber and Peranson).  The occasion for this reassessment, according to Huber and Peranson, is Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006), a “surveillance-era, post-Hitchcock concoction” that the authors claim as the director’s “masterpiece” (Huber and Peranson).  The authors likewise reference the “Master of Suspense” in the piece’s title, “World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo,” in order both to emphasize the thematic affinities between Déjà Vu and its specific Hollywood antecedent, and also to catalyze Scott’s and Déjà Vu’s entries into the canon, following on Hitchcock’s famously belated inclusion.  Indeed, Huber and Peranson’s decision to title their Déjà Vu piece thusly actively courts the same controversy generated by Robin Wood when he stated that Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is the director’s “masterpiece… and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us” (Wood 108).  “World Out of Order” represents the next disparaged frontier for 1960s-style auteurist criticism, though at a juncture long after its tacit acceptance as a default classificatory system for film studies.  The critical dismissals of Tony Scott’s corpus suggest that select traditional binaries – art and commerce, high and low, good taste and bad – have not disappeared, but instead have moved underground.  With Déjà Vu the old debates again become new.
               None of the above meta-critique, however, is intended to foreclose against legitimate criticism of Scott’s work, which includes potential claims that his films are overly commercial, products of low culture (or in today’s parlance, geared toward the “lowest common denominator”) and representative of bad taste – in a word, that his films can be trashy.  Rather, this recognition of Huber and Peranson’s auteurist project is meant to perform a different set of tasks: first, to acknowledge the preceding interest in Déjà Vu and its acceptance (in certain quarters) as superlative film art; second, to highlight this essay’s engagement with a recognized object of film art, rather than with cultural detritus – to respond to Déjà Vu is to engage with the extraordinary, not the ordinary; and third, to provide an analogy in Hitchcock’s similar passage from exemplary auteur to a subject of theoretical interest.
The subsequent analysis will not in fact consider how Déjà Vu relates to the remainder of Scott’s body of work, as is Huber and Peranson’s primary topic, nor will it confirm or reject their assertion that Déjà Vu is the director’s masterpiece, even if this last claim seems wholly plausible.  Rather, the following text will begin with a single theoretical dimension of Scott’s film, its construction of diegesis, which occurs both on the level of the film’s narrative and also in the figuration of a visual field of surveillance.  While the latter is presented within the former, and therefore relies upon the prior construction of the narrative space of the film, clarity can be gained nevertheless from discussing the surveillance space first.  As such, Déjà Vu’s surveillance imagery, its film-within-the-film or image-within-the-image (as it will be referred to hereafter), will be analyzed at the outset, and thereafter, the contours of the narrative’s more classical diegetic space will be located.  For both, the texts of Noël Burch (“Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits”) and especially Thomas Elsaesser (“Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film Between ‘Attraction’ and ‘Narrative Integration’”) will serve to clarify Scott’s conceptualization of diegesis, as will a short comparison with Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).  Following these analyses, the implications of the film’s content, as enacted in and through its diegesis, will be examined, with particular emphasis given to its status as a contemporary “rube” film, using Elsaesser’s terminology; to its emphasis on the previous decade’s surfeit of collectively-experienced American traumas; to the role of the ethics of preemption in Scott’s film; and finally to the religious iconography that coalesces at the film’s conclusion.  As Déjà Vu’s tagline purposively asks: “What if you could change the past?”  The answer for Scott and screenwriters Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, like for so many Americans in the early twenty-first century, begins with the tragedies of Oklahoma City, September 11th, and Hurricane Katrina.  
  
“A single trailing moment of now, in the past”
            Déjà Vu opens with what Huber and Peranson call “a nine-minute bravura sequence of dialogue-free ‘pure cinema,’” in which five hundred forty-three men, women and children are killed in act of terrorism centering on a New Orleans ferry (Huber and Peranson).  Among the initial law enforcement respondents is Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington), a locally based A.T.F. agent who begins his crime scene investigation as the aforesaid “pure cinema” passage continues.  From the first, Carlin’s investigatory brilliance is unmistakable: he notices a thin fragment of plastic on the riverbank; he climbs under the Crescent City Bridge to collect residue from the explosion; in examining a woman’s corpse, he spots transparent adhesive on the victim’s lips.  It is Carlin who determines that the explosion was an act of terrorism – no doubt aided by his experience with the Oklahoma City bombing – and Carlin again who will be entrusted with the task of locating the perpetrator in the extant surveillance footage. 
            Carlin is assigned this task by F.B.I. Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer), who stipulates that he needs “someone who can look at a crime scene exactly once.”  As the protagonist and the film’s spectators soon learn, Pryzwarra means this literally.  Entering into the investigation’s media-saturated operations center, Carlin is confronted with a large, flat-screen monitor presenting multiple windows and a pair of multi-screen, vertically-oriented television consoles flanking the larger panel to the right.  A New Orleans satellite map fills the largest segment of the big screen – the “Jumbotron” for Huber and Peranson – and is soon replaced by footage of the ferry.  Subsequently, Carlin will be asked for another focal point to which he offers the address of the dead woman Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton).  With her location cued on the large monitor, the initial satellite mapping is progressively replaced – in a single, simulated (craning) camera movement – by closer and closer views of her French Quarter apartment.  Ultimately, the exterior view is displaced by an interior image featuring a mobile, partially recomposed Claire, with streaks of light trailing her cyborgian facsimile (see Figure 1).  Successively, this holographic figural flux is replaced by a denser, more sculptural reconstruction that ultimately seems to show the former corpse alive once again (see Figure 2).
            Here, Scott’s image-within-the-image closely mirrors the satellite-imaging technology of Google™ Earth, including its fluid replacement of cartographic, aerial views with increasingly immersive images of the earth’s surface (see Figures 3 and 4).  Of course, Déjà Vu represents the extension of this technology from photographic stills showing select cityscapes (and in some cases, its population) frozen in time, to moving images of a targeted place at a particular time.  Simply put, Scott has made the photographic technology of Google Earth cinematic.
            This specific time, Carlin has been assured, occurred four days, six hours in the past.  Indeed the technology that allows for this implicitly global surveillance (though, as the dialogue soon dictates, the viewer may only see into the past within a limited radius of their present location), codenamed the decisively meta-cinematic “Snow White,” requires precisely this time delay due to the massive amount of digital data required for this recreation; it takes this long to render a fluid space, which, while navigable, cannot be stilled or reversed.  It is for this reason that Carlin’s superlative abilities are needed: to know where to look in the continuous flow of a past, four-plus days before, or as Dr. Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) puts it, “a single trailing moment of now, in the past.” 

“Strictly one way”?: Scott’s Two-way Mirror
Dr. Denny’s conception is particularly revealing as it captures the unique construction of Déjà Vu’s image-within-the-image: namely that it is a space connoting surveillance (for its locatable spatial coordinates and continuous image stream) and even a televisual liveness, which nonetheless figures a time that has passed.  This live quality issues less from the image stream itself, though this is a property it shares with surveillance, than from the reaction of the object of vision to the image’s spectator.  (The alternative, namely indications of liveness through content that is verifiably occurring in the present, is of course foreclosed by the aforesaid time gap and particularly by the fact that Claire died at the time of the terrorist act.)  As Carlin, Denny, Pryzwarra and the rest view Claire on the big screen, she glances back as if aware of their viewing act.  Claire even tells a friend over the phone that she feels as if she is being watched and then repeats the same point in her diary.  In the process, the viewer’s presumption of “invulnerability” to use Noël Burch’s terminology, which is to say his or her insulation from the act of being looked at, recedes (Burch 24).  The spectator (or spectators: Carlin, Denny, et al.) can no longer look at the image with impunity.   
This sense of interchange between viewer and viewed is reinforced further by the light that issues from the flat screen panel that frames Claire’s likeness.  Significantly, Scott does not project the aforesaid image from the rear of the space; there is no shaft or stream of light transporting above the actors’ heads.  They are not positioned amidst the flow of images.  Rather, the light from the screen reflects back and conspicuously paints the performers throughout their viewing (see Figure 5).  In fact, the degree to which light reflects from the image, or conversely the degree to which we see the figures in the media room reflected on the screen, is far greater than it ought to be, absent the process of projection.  Scott adds these reflections, or rather paints his viewers in sheets of light, to connote the two-way process that Claire’s returned gaze makes explicit.  The image does not seem to be “strictly one way” in the terms of Scott’s visual rhetoric.
Pryzwarra, however, assures Carlin that it is.  After finding nothing in their navigation of the exterior to suggest that Claire’s comments could refer to somebody else, Carlin asks if in reality it is possible for Claire to see them.  Pryzwarra responds with the above quotation, that it is “strictly one way,” which accordingly reaffirms cinema’s uni-directionality (using the term “cinema” liberally enough to include television and surveillance technology), while contradicting the imagery that distinguishes the scene.  In Pryzwarra’s and more traditional conceptions of cinema generally, the medium acts as a two-way mirror in which the spectator occupies a position in the present – on the side of the mirror through which the glass is transparent (and from which the past may be seen) – whereas the object of vision analogically faces the reflective surface of the mirror, denied a vantage of the future instance on the other side.  The future, of course, is never visible, whereas, as Déjà Vu makes explicit, we hnvariably see into the past via reflection, whether it is light bouncing off a mirror or the reflection of a distant star.[i] 
Carlin’s question therefore presents either an extreme form of naiveté, or an equally radical skepticism,[ii] given that in both instances it was Carlin himself who touched Claire’s dead body.   His personal experience at least dictates that the likeness on screen must be a representation of the past.  Cinema’s act of resurrection consists in allowing its spectators to see the past in the present, not in bringing the past to renewed life.

Across the “Einstein-Rosen Bridge”
Carlin, however, remains unconvinced by Pryzwarra’s assurances and shines a laser pointer clandestinely toward the flat screen.  Its red shaft breaches the space, becoming visible inside Claire’s apartment.  As she notices the beam bouncing off a lamp in the center of the room, Carlin and company lose their feed, and in the process, black out a substantial portion of the city.  Realizing that the image is something other than a representation of the past, Carlin interrogates his law enforcement colleagues.  It is imperative that this result does not compel Carlin to question his prior experience at the morgue; he loses no faith in his earlier perception, even though it now seems that he is interacting with the dead.
This results in the Bureau agents’ eventual disclosure that the image-within-the-image is in fact Claire’s room, four hours, six days in the past, brought near by an enormous expenditure of energy (known as an “Einstein-Rosen Bridge”).  In other words, they are faced not with a past, perfectly reconstructed in cinema, but with the past itself, though filtered through the flat surface of the screen in a manner that is not precisely indicated in the film.  (It is as though Scott and company are willing to say, evoking Bazin, that the image “is the model” (Bazin 14).)  The sensation of liveness that codes the image as surveillance is therefore a genuine liveness, and as such actual surveillance, though again in a manner that resembles more closely the two-way mirror than the disembodied vision of closed-circuit television.  As Thomas Elsaesser has argued for “the media worlds we inhabit,” Déjà Vu permits at this juncture “different spaces to coexist and different times to overlap” instead of relying on the “single diegesis of classical cinema” (Elsaesser 216-217).  The parallel reality is more than a representation within the contours of the diegesis; it is a second possible world, a second diegetic reality whose distinguishing feature is its setting four-plus days in the past.  It is not so much that it overlaps but that it exists in parallel to the world occupied by Carlin and his Bureau colleagues.  The Eisenstein-Rosen Bridge has made this second discrete world and parallel diegesis accessible to a sight mediated only by the two-dimensionality of the screen.  The laser pointer shows that the space between the viewer and the viewed can be traversed; to use Noël Carroll’s preface for the act of “seeing,” “[we] would know how to get to the place in question if [we] wanted to” (Carroll 71). 
This sense of a co-existent, permeable and living image-within-the-image distinguishes Déjà vu from contemporary Hollywood’s other recent ‘crime prevention among multiple temporalities’ narrative, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report.  In the case of the latter, two forms of film-within-the-film are embedded in the movie’s diegesis: hallucinated fragments of the future that permit the picture’s preemptive policing, [iii] and holographic home movies to which protagonist John Anderton (Tom Cruise) responds.[iv]  In each instance, the image-within-the-image does not correspond to an on-going second temporality, but rather represents a fragment of the film diegesis’s past or future.  With the home movie, it is a matter of a straight-forward recorded past that is projected holographically in the film’s mid-twenty-first century present.  Anderton reacts to these images by recounting the same words he presumably spoke off-camera during his initial filming of the fragments.  He relives this past virtually, rehearsing his original part.   By contrast, the so-called hallucinated fragments are moments that have yet to come into being, and which the film’s homicide detectives must decipher in order to determine where and when future crimes will occur.  In other words, Spielberg provides glimpses of the crime (to come) rather than its trace in the form of clues. 
Spielberg, however, will complicate the status of these hallucinated images by introducing the possibility of variations among multiple presentations of the same scene.[v]  As such, the hallucinated fragments theoretically are either visions of a future actuality or pictorially indistinguishable alternative scenarios.  Or, in each instance, pictorial-realist approximations of a future that might occur.  In neither case, however, does the image-within-the-image represent a co-equal world in the same respect as does the embedded diegesis in Déjà vu; that is, none of these depicted spaces continue to exist in the same manner as does Déjà vu’s four-plus day past, its “single trailing moment of now.”  Rather, these are impregnable indexes and/or digital-age facsimiles of the film’s diegetic world.                                

Activating the “Goggle Rig”
Comparatively, Déjà vu’s image-within-the-image diegesis can be breached, as happens during Carlin’s subsequent operation of the “goggle rig.”  This object is made necessary by the fact that the surveyed space is limited to a relatively small radius surrounding the site of spectatorship.  After identifying a suspect (Jim Caviezel’s Carroll Oerstadt) who is in the process of leaving their immediate field of view, Carlin and his associates employ the aforesaid technology, which allows for direct line-of-sight surveillance with its operation.  Carlin specifically utilizes the apparatus – a helmet supporting a camera and two LCD viewfinders in the place of eyepieces (see Figure 6) – as he takes the wheel of an SUV.  Carlin affixes the object as he aligns himself with the suspect.  Within both of the LCD eyepieces, as on the screen back in media operations center, the past, four-plus days earlier, is again made visible.  Carlin lifts the right viewfinder so as not to block his view of the congested midday highway, even as the pursued suspect – apparent again in the viewfinders and on the large screen – drives down the same, largely empty freeway, in the middle of the night.  In straightforwardly reflexive terms, Carlin has become the cameraman, shooting dailies they watch back in the media room.  He has become the conduit for their surveillance, which nonetheless possesses the temporal gap of cinema.  Carlin occupies the space in the present, which naturally is the place of surveillance, while witnessing the events of the past.  Washington’s character can not only see into both diegetic realities, but effectively exists in both at once – embodied in the present and as the (invisible) apparatus in the past. 
Likewise, the “goggle rig” and its footage, similar to the image-within-the-image, must be “activated”: in each case, the image is theoretically permeable and therefore changeable, which conceptually distinguishes it from traditional narrative cinema (Elsaesser 219).  (In the case of the “goggle rig,” Oerstadt’s reciprocal gaze establishes the image’s two-way interchange.)  Of course, Carlin’s initial act with the laser pointer precedes this revelation; he reacts to the on-screen object of vision, whom he again knows to be dead, as though she can see him.  In other words, he confuses the look into the camera and thus the loss of the spectator’s invulnerability with the possibility of actual vulnerability, of his being spotted by the dead. 
His behavior, in other words, is that of the classic “rube” who confuses representation for reality (211).[vi]  Carlin is the proverbial (though, as Elsaesser also points out, mythical) spectator who confuses the ontological status of persons and objects (213).  While modern “media-forms” and specifically video gaming and virtual reality permits this “ontological confusion,” Carlin’s attempt to interact with the image transgresses the norms of classical cinema and thus signals a suppression of what he knows to be real, through his prior haptic engagement with Claire’s corpse (213, 219).  In fact, that the image responds to his gesture should undercut its status as documentary record, and accordingly Carlin ought to understand it as a fictional world, rather than as the indexical (unmediated) recreation of a past time that it claims for itself. 
            However, Carlin’s subsequent attempt to communicate with his past self across the Einstein-Rosen Bridge confirms his faith in the factuality of the enframed image.  Carlin succeeds in sending the message, though with the unintended consequence of changing how his deceased partner will be killed.  Nevertheless, this achievement ultimately prompts Carlin, with Dr. Denny’s assistance, to chance the journey himself, though only after he and his colleagues have successfully solved the New Orleans bombing. 

“U Can Save Her”
            Appearing in a hospital emergency room with a message – “revive me” – written across his chest, a seizing Carlin has made it across the Einstein-Rossen Bridge, and in the process, into the image-within-the-image’s parallel diegetic world.  He is no longer synonymous with the apparatus as he was during his use of the goggle rig, but is rather within the world he was filming.  He has, like Sherlock, Jr. decades before him, entered the world annunciated by the screen.  Unlike Buster Keaton’s protagonist, however, he has penetrated a world in which his earlier self exists – though in a form perpetually four days, six hours younger. 
            The possibility of this encounter, however, will have to wait as Carlin’s immediate purpose is to save Claire from her fate.  After locating the beautiful young woman – blindfolded, bound and gagged – in Oerstadt’s bayou cabin, Carlin rushes Claire back to her New Orleans flat, where he attempts to impress her with the situation’s urgency.  Nonetheless, Claire remains skeptical of both Carlin’s intentions and also his identity as an ATF agent, which leads her to call his departmental colleague for a description (a detail that occurs without explanation in the film’s earliest section).  Similarly, a phone call caught as Claire’s answering machine picks up becomes an opportunity for Carlin – who had listened to the message during his earlier inspection of the deceased’s apartment – to predict every word that the caller will say.  In this way, Scott explains a few of the more quixotic details that had been included in the film’s earliest sequences, from the aforesaid phone calls to a message written by Carlin in magnetic letters on Claire’s refrigerator – “U Can Save Her” – to the profusion of the agent’s fingerprints throughout the space.  The identity of his trace is revealed retrospectively.
            This strategy of interpreting previously-opaque details shortly becomes one of narrative repetition as Scott re-screens much of the footage that opens Déjà Vu: a pack of sailors rush onto the U.S.S. Nimitz, a teacher mouths the word “okay” as she counts her students, a little girl drops her doll and yells “Mama,” a military band on the Mississippi riverbank plays “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and so on.  While some of the stylistic ornamentation that accompanies the opening sequence, Huber and Peranson’s “pure cinema,” remains – as for instance Scott’s utilization of slow-motion – other techniques have been expelled: the initial use of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” as a sound bridge, moving into and out of the diegetic space, for instance, has been replaced by the song’s full integration into the film’s narrative world.  In this shift, to be sure, the different narrational registers of the two sequences becomes clear, with the earlier passage highlighting the act of narrating the event from a position initially divorced of any protagonist, while the latter emphasizes the storyteller’s total immersion within the diegetic space – as well as the agency of Carlin, Claire and Oerstadt.  In the incipient passage, no human narrative agent within the diegetic world can be identified.  The effects of an action, withheld from our view, are highlighted, not its causes.
Indeed, this earlier emphasis on the act of narrating is made explicit in the picture’s first shot: a rectangular viewfinder zeros in on a Louisiana landscape, zooming in once the exact location has been chosen.  The filmmakers, in other words, are in control of the film’s narrative subject.  Then again, the rhetoric of the narration does not construe an unembellished documentation of events in this opening passage, but instead encodes its recounting as an act or remembering.  Connotations of memory proliferate: this is in an idiom that favors de-accelerated motion and shuffles fragments of ambient sound, live music and non-diegetic pop songs in order to imply a past recalled in vivid, if isolated detail; an imagined, fictional spectator might have seen the girl drop her doll or might have been listening to the song when the explosion occurred.  Scott thus imparts a sense of the subjective in this opening passage, though in a form that does not center on an individual viewer but rather moves freely between various centers of interest, as if adopting André Bazin’s “eye of God.”[vii]  The filmmaker’s ubiquitous control is filtered through a set of representational codes that read as subjective.  Yet, it is a subjectivity that does not belong to an individual spectator but to many synthesized viewers – it is group memory. 
The film’s memory-inflected opening meets its abrupt end with the explosion of the military vessel: digitally-produced fire balls surge from the ship concurrent with the sudden muting of the Beach Boys song (which had been playing on a local radio station at the time of the disaster).  With this, we see bodies flying from the watercraft, as if replaying the notorious imagery of persons throwing themselves out of the upper floors of the World Trade Center.  Scott switches freely from positions above and below the waterline, with audio points-of-view varying with the camera’s location.  When Carlin arrives moments later, the auditory point-of-view becomes his, initially cutting out most of the ambient sound in favor of a mournful non-diegetic theme.  However, as the ATF agent slowly soaks in the scope of the tragedy and acclimates himself to his surroundings, a more rapid tempo replaces the slower bars, thereby emphasizing his self-suturing into the world around him.  He is now prepared to commence with his investigation – and has become an active agent within the diegesis.  Still, it will remain for his travel back in time for Carlin to truly remake the narrative world in which he is present. 

Comfortably “Unobserved” in the Present
While still maintaining the opening sequence’s ubiquitous camera, the closing segment refuses its identification with either collective recollection or individual response (until its very final moments, where an analogy to Carlin’s earlier point-of-view is found in the narrative’s sudden focalization through Claire’s subjectivity).  Rather, Scott has replaced the opening past-tense with the present.  The director no longer assumes a position after the explosion; instead, he narrates through his selective framings of Carlin, Claire and Oerstadt as the first two attempt to stop the third in his act of terrorism.  These are added to a series of reused shots that likewise maintain the same selective disclosure and withholding of ambient sound that contributes so strongly to the earlier scene’s evocation of memory.  The film’s trauma looms in the future rather than in the past; the narrative occupies the same present tense that it has since Carlin commenced in earnest with his investigation, though the ground has shifted to a time before rather than after the event.
The legibility of this modification of tense is similarly discernable in Scott’s new refusal to use the segment’s pop songs non-diegetically.  Here, both “Don’t Worry Baby” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” are fully locatable within the space of the diegesis and are audible only when a camera and microphone is near a radio (as in the case of the Beach Boys tune) or close to the riverbank where the military band performs the second tune.  In resisting the earlier technique, Scott increases the “diegetic effect” that Burch argues is fundamental to the “general experience of the classical film” (Burch 16).  It is not simply that we are observing these people in this setting unawares, but that our spectatorship represents a duration as well.  We watch a present as it unfolds.     
Concurrently, none of Scott’s characters look into the camera during this closing, classically-articulated passage.  Rather than the two-way exchange that defines the image-within-the-image’s diegesis, the final segment’s diegesis is strictly uni-directional with the roles of viewer and viewed clearly separated.  In fact, this is the relationship between image and spectator that Déjà Vu maintains throughout, including those passages that house the image-within-the-image.    Whereas Carlin acts according to the norms of the “rube,” following his misapprehension – or as the case may be, his apprehension – of the meaning endowed in Claire’s look into the “camera,” Scott does not challenge his Déjà Vu spectators similarly.  Theirs is the traditional role of the classical spectator, comfortably “unobserved” in their act of spectatorship (22).
           
“Lord knows the [country] has seen its share of pain”
At the same time, Carlin is not “disciplined” for his naïve response to the cinematic image (Elsaesser 213).  If the conventional “rube” film trains its spectators to inhabit an appropriately inactive relationship to the screen, through “a subtle process of internalized self-censorship” that flatters its audience for not sharing the rube’s untutored response, Déjà Vu reverses this schema in its tacit encouragement of Carlin’s suspension of sophistication (213).  To put it somewhat crudely, “a superior form of spectatorship” would not get either Carlin or Déjà Vu anywhere.  We as spectators encourage Carlin’s ontological confusion in our shared desire to write the wrongs of history, to “prevent” crime in Carlin’s words, rather than to simply solve it.  
The crime presented in Déjà Vu once again is a composite of more familiar mass-tragedies that have claimed large numbers of American innocents.  The first of these, annunciated in Carlin’s own professional history, the bombing’s modus operandi, and in the identification of the bomber as a white male who speaks of “patriotism” (as opposed to the more familiar Islamic villain of the post-9/11 world) is the domestic terrorism of Oklahoma City.  As such, Scott seeks to deflect questions of external state support and a potential military response that inheres in acts like those conducted against the U.S. on September 11, 2001, in favor of a crime whose recourse is necessarily prosecutorial.  In other words, a domestic bomber gets Scott the mass-victims of 9/11 without the messy international political ramifications or potential cultural/racial discourse that typically follows.  Then again, 9/11 does resound in Déjà Vu in the experience of death shared by many of the victims: once more, we see persons hurled from the burning ship, their bodies on fire as they plunge into the surrounding water.  In the annals of contemporary American tr`uma, no event continues to figure as large as 9/11; to ignore it would be to inadequately engage the subject.
            Aside from 9/11, the responses of the local, state and national governments that preside over New Orleans represents the most conspicuous of recent American tragedies.  This context is made explicit not only in the film’s New Orleans setting but in the banners that refer to the spirit of the people after Katrina, contemporary footage of the then still devastated Ninth Ward (where Oerstadt continues to reside), and in a closing intertitle that proclaims the film to be “dedicated to the strength and enduring spirit of the people of New Orleans.”  Each of the above historical events rank as crimes – perhaps even equal in Scott’s eyes – against segments of the American people, whose traumatic memory we nonetheless all share.
            Nevertheless, Déjà Vu is about the prevention, not the prosecution of crimes.  If this situates Scott’s piece as a corollary to the logic of preemption, which resonates not only with the Anglo-American response to 9/11 but also with the increasing presence of surveillance (CCTV) technology in urban centers throughout the West (and particularly on the British Isles, Scott’s homeland), Déjà Vu’s novel invention is metaphysical certainty.  To be able to know the future beyond all doubt is to foreclose against any of the potential ethical dilemmas that are implicit in preemption.  (Minority Report is, in this regard, the film’s negative, in its promotion of epistemological uncertainty.)  “Snow White” indeed becomes the perfect tool for a world beset by terrorism: it is a means for changing the past, for redirecting time’s flow around the events that would adversely shape it otherwise.  In this respect Déjà Vu submits itself to the criticism that it is an abjuration of real world ethical concerns.  Yet, the very impossibility of the process through which Scott condones preemption indicates that this set of questions ultimately exists outside the reality that Déjà Vu wishes to treat.
The reality that Déjà Vu does concern itself with is the emotional aftermath – shared by all Americans – of Oklahoma City, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina.  Like the picture’s opening, Scott’s film speaks to a collective memory and the desire to reverse the past’s larger tragedies, which in the American context have been in greater supply over the course of the past decade.  Déjà Vu diagnoses a nation’s psychology and telegraphs its collective fantasy life.

Romantic and Religious “Faith” in Déjà Vu
            Then again, neither Carlin’s nor the film’s spectators’ stake in the picture’s restorative fantasy is primarily public in nature.  In each case, it is a desire to save Claire that animates our interests.  Of course, in Carlin’s case specifically, it is not simply benevolence but a romantic desire that accounts finally for his willingness to endanger himself in his attempt to travel back in time.  In this respect, Carlin truly is the “rube” who has fallen for the embalmed image on screen.  We see her larger-than-life likeness in close-up profile view and then dressing in the distance as Carlin stands facing the flat panel.  In reverse shot, Scott discloses his enraptured gaze, which the filmmaker pairs with a romantic musical theme and the light dancing off the screen.  Scott signifies Carlin’s romantic desire rather directly, while inviting his spectator to share in this economy of desire.  He has made her “matter” to us in the same manner her father attempted to make her matter to Carlin – by supplying pictures of the beautiful, deceased woman.  Our desire to see her alive once again, and with the film’s star, leads to our affirmation of Carlin’s “ontological confusion.” 
            Carlin’s reclamation of his dead love assures the film’s debt to Vertigo that Huber and Peranson identify in their article.  It also introduces a directly Christian iconography to what had been an essentially theistic work.  During the initial debates surrounding the possibility of convening with the past via the picture’s “Snow White” technology, Carlin raises the possibility that there may be something more out there.  Dr. Denny understands Carlin’s theological implication and adds that God’s mind “is already made up,” thereby supervening further discussion on this basis.  However, when Denny later agrees to aid Carlin in his attempted time travel, he prefaces his assistance by admitting that he too believes in God.  In other words, he also holds out hope for the miraculous – in this case, for the possibility that Carlin could travel back in time.  As such, Carlin’s act is framed less in the naïve terms outlined heretofore than as an act of faith – in the possibility that the physical laws of the universe could be suspended, that a miracle could occur.
            Carlin entreats Claire to have a similar faith when he saves her from Oerstadt.  In this case, she was not made aware of her kidnapper’s identity and thus would be justified in doubting Carlin’s identity, as she initially does.  Certainly, Carlin’s true story is far more implausible than the alternative explanation that he is the kidnapper, which compels him to demonstrate his superior knowledge of the situation – to perform miracles (as in his perfect recounting of the phone conversation that Claire is having in the present).  The female lead, though initially skeptical, nevertheless does act in faith, particularly after she hops onto the ship once Carlin insists that she go to the police.  In decidedly Catholic terms, the same terms as Hitchcock, she shows her belief through her works.
            This faith is tested most severely when the pair finds themselves in the truck carrying the explosive device.  As Carlin puts it to Claire, “if we get out now, everybody dies.”  Claire reaffirms her trust and Carlin drives the vehicle off the side of the ferry, deep into the waters below.  Claire is able to escape, but Carlin dies in the now underwater explosion.  Unlike Oerstadt, Carlin shows himself to be willing to give up his life to save others.  As he tells Oerstadt elsewhere, this is the “price of freedom,” to “sacrifice” one’s self, thus clarifying the film’s Christian allegory as it mirrors Christ’s offering of his blameless life for mankind’s sins.
            And like the film’s religious precedent, the guiltless Carlin’s sacrifice entails a victory over death.  With Claire wrapped under a blanket along the water’s edge, Carlin suddenly emerges between a pair of nearby emergency vehicles, alive once more.  This resurrected Carlin, importantly, is not the Carlin of four days, six hours in the future but is instead the Carlin of the present – that is, the Carlin of the past.  Scott and his screenwriters Marsilii and Rossio have discovered therefore a second means of representing resurrection within the stipulative logic of the film’s science fiction narrative, while identifying a solution for the problems posed by the coexistence of Carlin’s past and present selves.  This diegetic world can move forward with the same number and identity of persons that had populated its mirrored past and future self.  This possible world can now be the real world – which it will be with the same Beach Boys hit playing on the radio as Claire asks Carlin the same question he posed to her earlier: “What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but they’d never believe you?”  Carlin responds that he’d “try,” before shrugging it off with a “nah” as he experiences the eponymous déjà vu. 

Conclusion
            Ultimately, Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu represents a classical understanding of the filmic diegesis, wherein a ubiquitous camera discloses its fictional subject in the non-fictional actuality of post-Katrina New Orleans.  Scott’s mise-en-scène presents its content unaware of its apparatus, and thus makes its spectator “invulnerable,” which according to theorist Noël Burch maximizes the “diegetic process” that is integral to the experience of classical film narrative (Burch 24).  In other words, the world created for the screen is not made for interaction but rather to be viewed by a spectator whose gaze will not be returned.  In this way, Scott’s conception of his screen world coheres with Burch’s analysis.
            Nevertheless, nested within Déjà Vu is a less traditional understanding of film space deriving from viewer-“activated” media such as virtual reality and gaming, to follow on Elsaesser’s contemporary reframing of diegetic formation.  That is, Déjà Vu establishes another method of relating to diegetic spaces that leads the film’s protagonist to immerse himself within the spatial coordinates of the depicted past.  In this respect, Scott’s picture converges with the same early film history – as instantiated by the “rube” genre – which Elsaesser identifies as a precursor to new media conceits of diegetic spaces that are manifest in the image-within-the-image.  Moreover, the multiplicity of diegetic or possible worlds in Déjà Vu likewise links to the theorist’s redefinition of the diegetic experience.  Hence Déjà Vu effectively acts out the unique diegetic production of new media (as anticipated by early cinema) within the parameters of a more traditional, uni-directional diegesis.
            At the same time, it is essential to remember that Déjà Vu’s invention of ontologically separable diegeses occurs within an “action hack” cinema that remains every bit as critically disparaged in our time as was Hitchcock’s in his, or as was the medium itself in the time of the “rube.”  Even if the film’s form can be made palatable (or useful) for its critics, as an exemplar of new narrative modes, this is not a cinema of ideas or “thought” surely (Rosenbaum).  Yet, what this criticism misses is Déjà Vu’s contemporaneousness.  To this end, the film’s adaptation of the “rube” trope exceeds its historical pedagogical function, becoming further the enactment of a shared national desire to rewrite its recent traumatic past.  This invented history, a synthesis of Oklahoma City, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, is made revisable through the film’s construction of an enterable diegetic space, literally brought into proximity with the diegetic world that houses it.  Consequently, the naïve act of the “rube” is encouraged rather than “ridiculed” (Elsaesser 213); it is the film’s means for saving the lives of the innocent, bringing the dead back to life and securing love across this un-crossable boundary.  It is the ultimate act of faith.  

This essay was originally published in Film Criticism, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2 (Winter, 2008-2009).  My warmest thanks to editor Lloyd Michaels and the editorial board for their kindly inclusion of my work. 

[i] André Bazin made the analogy of cinema to a mirror “that relays the presence of the person reflected in it – but… with a delayed reaction” in “Theatre and Cinema – Part Two” (Bazin 97). 
[ii] Déjà Vu does not, as might be expected, question the reliability of this earlier experience.  At no instance in the film are we given any indication that either Carlin or any of his colleagues doubt that he saw the woman dead.  Rather, her earlier death is stipulated as fact both in the film’s investigation and also in our understanding of character motivation and psychology.
[iii] Minority Report’s  future temporality is hallucinated, so to speak, by the film’s “Precogs” – a floating trio, whom one character classifies as “more than” human.  These Precogs have the ability to intuit future murders at variable distances from the present, which are thus recorded and deciphered by the film’s “Precrime” unit on a series of interactive, holographic screens.  With this data, the film’s law enforcement officers not only prevent homicides (specifically) from occurring, but prosecute those who would have been guilty of the crimes. 
[iv] Thomas Elsaesser, in fact, classifies Cruise’s Anderton as a “rube” inasmuch as he attempts “to ‘touch’ his missing son” (Elsaesser 219).  For the author’s definition of the “rube,” see endnote 6.
[v] Namely, Spielberg reveals that it is possible for one of the three Precogs to disagree with the other two – as to how or if a murder will occur – thus creating one of the film’s eponymous “minority reports.”  The film indicates that these visual files can represent future actuality in spite of their minority status.
[vi] The “rube” film, according to Elsaesser, “emerged with the origins of the cinema itself, at the turn of the century, first in Great Britain and the US, but similar films were also produced in other countries.  They often presented a film-within-the-film, that is, they showed a member of the cinema audience, who does not seem to know that the film images are representations to be looked at rather than objects to be touched and handled or scenes to be entered and immersed in.  These so-called ‘rubes’ or simpletons usually climb up to the stage and either attempt to grasp the images on the screen, or want to join the characters on thd screen, in order to interfere with an ongoing action or look behind the image to discover what is hidden or kept out of sight.  The best-known example of this genre is Uncle Josh at the Movies, made by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company in 1902” (Elsaesser 211-212).
[vii] As Bazin puts it: “It is like the eye of God, in the proper sense of the word, if God could be satisfied with a single eye” (Bazin 88).

Works Cited

Bazin, Andre.  Jean Renoir.  Ed. François Truffaut.  New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
---.  What is Cinema?, Vol. 1.  Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Burch, Noël.  “Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits: Noël Burch Questions the Centrality of Narrative to the Experience of Film.”  Screen 23, 2. 16-33.
 
Carroll, Noël.  “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image.”  Film and Philosophy.  Eds. Cynthia Freeland and Tom Wartenberg.  New York: Routledge, 1995.  68-85.

Elsaesser, Thomas.  “Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between ‘Attraction’ and ‘Narrative Integration.’”  The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded.  Ed. Wanda Strauven.  Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.  205-223.

Huber, Christoph and Mark Peranson. “World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo.”
Cinemascope 29. 

Rosenbaum, Jonathan.  “Déjà Vu.”  Chicago Reader.  17 November 2006. 

Wood, Robin.  Hitchcock’s Films Revisited.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

My Ping in TotalPing.com