Reading Response 9: Due April 12

Reading Response 9: Due April 12

John David Rhodes, “Allegory, mise-en-scene, AIDS: Interpreting Safe”

1. For Rhodes, what is the distinction between intertexuallity (as in Pulp Fiction) and allegory (as in Safe)?

Intertexuality in contemporary cinema is often about naming, referencing, pointing; it is often a mode of consumption. As in Pulp Fiction that alludes to earlier film and film genres act less as explanations and more as clever announcements, winks at the audience.

In Safe, allegory is both a mode of reading (or consumption) and a mode of production. Haynes uses allegory as a means of recombination in Safe to metaphorically represent the AIDS epidemic.

Why is the concept of allegory important for understanding Haynes’s work?

Allegory is Hayne’s film style. The shift from intertexuality to allegory allows for Haynes’s complexity and seriousness in regards to his political and aesthetics investments.

2. What does Rhodes mean when he says, “Carol and her house compete for our attention, and the house has the upper hand”?

Haynes uses the overabundance in the visual filed of mise-en-scene to creat a kind of double vision within the shot. Haynes allows to brute materials, huge house on the outside, false beams on the inside and a number of sectional sofas to alienate Carol from the house. An example is Carol’s body shot as miniscule compared to the rest of the props in the room.

How does this relate to the mise-en-scene of Douglas Sirk?

Sirk uses similar tricks in his cinematography. However, Sirk is different in creating a more dizzying and disorienting experience of domestic space. It is an allegory to Sirk’s 1950s suburban domestic architecture. It is as if Haynes is pointing the audience toward the repressive suburban life of Carol, in a similar Sirk usage, however Haynes uses it only as a jump off point to go in his own direction.

3. What does Rhodes mean whey he suggests that “Safe can only be about AIDS by not being about AIDS; it can only embrace the crisis by not representing it”?

Films are not metaphors according to James Morrison. They can be full of them but not be one. Safe is an allegorical treatment of the AIDS epidemic via differences and similarities of Carol’s malady. The setting is in San Fernando Valley, 1987, white middle class not generally associated with the AIDS epidemic. However, 1987 was a critical year associated in the US history of AIDS, the year AZT was first approved. Linda and Carol’s half-asked questions about the death of Linda’s unmarried brother, eludes to the silence of Ronald Reagan not speaking out about AIDS after 6 years of it’s killing spree. Based on Haynes style of allegory, Safe can only be about AIDS if it’s not really about AIDS. By constantly inviting us to make a comparison between Carol’s illness and AIDS, Safe engages our allegorical responses.

Nick Davis, “The Invention of a People”

There’s some heavy Deleuzian theorizing in here. Do your best and focus on how the relationships between the characters are structured, and answer the following questions.

4. What three functions does Arthur Stewart serve within the structure of Velvet Goldmine?

1) The free-indirect surrogate for both Haynes as storytelling agent and the audience as fact-finding spectators

2) A full, gussied-up participant in the film’s glittery specularisation of genderfuck and camp identity

3) The subject of the film’s premier case history of sexual coming-into-being.

How is he similar and different from Thompson (the reporter) in Citizen Kane?

Both are investigators into finding out the story and the background of the main subject at hand. For Thompson it is Rosebud, for Arthur it is where Brian is 10 years later. However, they are different in that Arthur took an active role and participated within the world of Glitter 10 years earlier. Arthur had an emotional attachment to the story, differing from Thompson’s outside view.

5. Why does Davis argue that Arthur and Brian have a dialectical relationship to each other within the structure of the film?

Arthur’s life becomes constituted as Arthur both in how the film regards Arthur and in how Arthur seems to regard himself. He takes more and more cues regarding dress and cosmetics from glam rock Brian. Also, the two are linked as Arthur masturbates while looking at a newspaper image of Brian and Curt kissing. Arthur is associated with the newspaper industry, thus being aligned with media, also connected to Brian. The falterings or disjunctions experienced by one character repeatedly match with visual or narrative productions or consummations of the other is a recurring dialectical premise of Arthur and Brian’s inter-relations.

What are the two modes of fantasy that also serve a dialectical function?

Brian conjures fantansy in the sense of performativity and impossible fabrication. In connection with Deleuze, Brian does not confine himself inside contradictions, he opens out. Arthur is the fallen artist, a more sedate and subtle figure of Brian. The divergence in character is the not-quite opposition between the audience and the peformer, the fantasist and the object of fantasy, the homograph and the performative, the movement-image and the time-image. P.93 Arthur’s subjectively reconstructed history and that of Brian’s dispersed and weaves with fantasy.

6. What is “missing” between the narrative time-frames of the seventies glam rock and eighties corporate culture?

The non-chronological time that links and disjoins the shots and sequences. The seams in its montage correspond only to a void of time, that intervals are empty of content. The film is heavy with historical and epochal markers but doesn’t fill in the gap between the seventies glam rock and eighties corporate culture.

Reading Response 8: Due April 5

Scott MacDonald, “From Underground to Multiplex”

1. In what ways did experimental film and filmmakers inform Haynes’s film education and early filmmaking?

During Haynes early years in High School, he was exposed to the experimental style of Stan Brakhage. He began studying feature length feature, yet experimental such as Riddles of the Sphinx. He and two other started Apparatus Productions to help others who created experimental move toward the shift of genre and commercial work.

To what degree did Superstar fit or not fit into trends in experimental filmmaking in the early 1980s.

Haynes experimented in Superstar by using plastic dolls as the main characters and carefully followed all the rules of narrative structure. It was a hybrid film that fit between experimental film venues and broader arts and semi- theatrical venues.

2. Haynes says, “I’ve never felt that anything I’ve done was particularly original. My work is about appropriating and responding to cultural influences and stimuli and ideas, and recombining those elements in ways that make you think about them or see them differently.” How does this relate to our discussion of authorship so far in this course?

Gus Van Sant would recombine many movies with his own thoughts to make a new meaning. In My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant used scenes from Chimes at Midnight, which was also a play on Henry IV. Van Sant played on the fact of Scott and Falstaff being gay lovers as a recombination from using the known usage of all boys in Henry IV. He also used inversion with the remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Homosexual Perkins played Norman Bates character in Hitchcock’s version, and heterosexual Vince Vaughn plays the Bates character in Van Sant’s version. Van Sant made this obvious switch to play on the character psychology of Bates. Also, Van Sant used Anne Heche (a “lesbian” at the time) to enforce the “male gaze” of Vince Vaughn. These were not the original meanings of Hitchcock, but knowing that Van Sant is a gay man, he put his personal thumbprint of playing with a gay role in Psycho through recombination.

3. What are some observations that MacDonald and Haynes make about popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s? (In relation to Lucille Ball, Douglas Sirk, etc.)

Haynes experienced the duality of Lucille Ball’s character of child woman, fascinated he mirrored a different duality of his life and his fantasy world. Haynes learned about the 1950’s from the films of that time period. Haynes feels that his films are different from Sirk’s when Haynes would use actors that looked too much like real people. Sirk’s films were first presented to Haynes at college positioned as something of intellectual value.

4. Which experimental filmmakers are discussed in relation to Poison?

Haynes uses the influence of Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’ amour as a ghost text that inspired him to create Poison. The scene of the men getting married in the “Homo” section of Poison depicts the rustic courtyard referred to in Genet’s depiction of Metray in Miracle of the Rose. Also, Scorpio Rising and Fireworks are brought up as being “multifarious and composite,” themes of Haynes.

What controversies developed around Poison?

A review by the Hollywood Reporter misdescribed the film as if it were “Homo” and the entire film was about anal sex in prison. Donald Wildman of the American Family Association and a couple senators took up cause. Poison was given a $25,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts, thus the AFA felt this homo movie and others that would offend the American sensibilities should not have money put into.

James Morrison, “Todd Haynes in Theory and Practice”

5. What is the theoretical tension between the post-structural idea of “the death of the subject” and Haynes’s interest in “the status of emotion in the formation of cultural identity”?

“’Death of the subject’ holds that coherent selfhood is the fictions of a suspect humanism, and that modern strategies of instrumental rationality and systematization in social organization render the notion of individual agency outdated. The split self, the alienated subject, the interpellated body, …even the literal zombie are the figures that populate the post-structuralist landscape and, in turn, make up the casts of Todd Haynes’ movies. Haynes’ characters describe a spectrum of ‘dead subjects’ duly coordinated with appropriate theoretical cognates like Karen Carpenter in Superstar. Though a certain corrosive, mordant detachment has earned Haynes the moniker (nickname) of ‘post-humanist’ in some quarters, he remains concerned throughout his work with the status of emotion in the formation of cultural identity. Without denying the force of Theory’s claims regarding ‘the death of the subject’, Haynes seems aware that such assertions might come as new to populations outside the spheres of their immediate audiences. What seems to interest Haynes above all is that dead subjects often do not know they are dead.”

6. What are the characteristics of post-modern melodrama?

“Postmodernism is often associated with difference, separation, textuality, skepticism. ‘Postmodern melodrama’ is something of a paradox in the sense that post-modernism proclaims not just the death of the subject but ‘the waning of affect’. Once subjects are dead, after all, they can hardly be expected to go on upholding such an inner-directed project as emotion- at least not in the ways they presumably once did - and in turn, the genre of melodrama. By the same token, however, if subjects continue to feel, they may not be dead – and it is this possibility that draws postmodern filmmakers again and again to the materials of melodrama.” A metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemes. Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts.

For Haynes’s work a defining feature of postmodern melodrama is that such suffering remains ‘real’.

Which filmmakers are associated with melodrama and why?

Sirk, Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar.

Douglas Sirk is said to create postmodern melodramas because they laminate techniques of distanciation over the template of standard melodrama without subverting to the latter. Sirk presents many of his characters as vapid non-entities, but insists that we weep for them all the same. Fassbinder or Almodovar, pathos is often a casualty of the texts’ ornery, acrimonious self-consciousness, laying melodrama bare as an expired genre, an empty category that is put through the performative paces nonetheless.

Side notes: Pathos thus refers to both the emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on an audience, the power with which the writer's message moves the audience to decision or action. Accomplished by a metaphor or story telling, common as a hook. Pathos represents an appeal to the audience's emotions. Interpellated is to identify with a particular idea or identity. For example, if someone were to shout your name at you in the street, you would recognize that salutation to mean yourself. It is basically thinking 'that means me'. It is the process by which you recognise yourself to belong to a particular identity.

7. Why does illness play an important role in Haynes’s films?

Haynes’ treatment of illness in films like Superstar and Safe illustrates this peculiar interplay of postmodern theory and melodramatic pathos. A common spur to pathos in traditional melodrama, illness appears there in a nexus of chance and character.

Sam Ishi-Gonzalez, “To Appear, to Disappear: Jean Genet and Poison”

8. Why was Un Chant d’Amour an important turning point in Genet’s career?

It is with the mark of this movie that Genet begins to disappear from the text. It was made during a six-year gap between Genet’s first period of literary activity and his second.

Why was Genet’s view of the “homosexual life” incompatible with the Gay Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s?

The 1960s and 1970s was a time of Gay Liberation, “consciousness raising and direct action urging lesbians and gay men to “come out”, and publicly revealing their sexuality to family, friends, and colleagues as a form of activism”. Genet could not comprehend its affirmation of a gay identity or the demand for positive gay images. Genet would be involved in gay subjects but refused to be taken in by it.

9. How does Ishi-Gonzalez characterize the structure of Poison, and the relationship between the three stories within the film?

“Horror” tells the store of Dr. Thomas Graves that accidentally swallows a serum that can harness the sex drive. 1950s b-movie thrillers

“Hero” is about a 7-year-old, Richie Beacon, who according to his mother, shoots his father and then takes off through the bedroom window into the sky. Flat lighting, talking heads and fictional reactions

“Homo” is told from the perspective of a prisoner, John Broom, who explains to us and himself his growing obsession for a fellow prisoner, Jack Bolton. John Broom being an English translation of Jean Genet. Shot partly on sound stages, has lushness of Hollywood melodrama.

Haynes relates the structure of Poison to both to his earlier formal experiments and to Genet’s novels, ‘the way he’s constantly paralleling different stories’. These stories spiral in and out of each other and the borders become permeable.

What traditions of montage are drawn upon in the film?

D. W Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the director’s most extreme experiment in parallel editing or montage. This parallel editing is used to establish simultaneity, temporal contiguity, between events occurring in different locals and to construct thematic relations, forging links between characters and actions taking place in different historical moments. The second tradition is the theory of montage proposed by the Soviet theorists and filmmakers of the 1920s.

Cinematic meaning is not contained in an individual shot but in the relation between shots.

10. Why does Michael Laskawy make a connection between linear logic, causality, and narrative closure with a homophobic reading of the text?

To bring the film to a coherent whole, weaving for ourselves the philosophic net that unites all three stories.

Reading Response 7: Due March 17

Reading Response 7: Due March 17 (Wednesday)

Deborah Shaw, “You Are Alright, But…”

1. How does the multi-plot structure of Traffic lead to a reversal of traditional ethnic hierarchies and a weakening of the traditional hero-centered narrative?

The ethnics that were the heroes were black and Hispanic, Javier, Ray, and Montel. According to Shaw, it is the Mexicans that normally need the help of Euro-American heroes to save them from Mexican villians.

With several story lines, this created numerous “good” characters, destabilizing the traditional hero figure. Their worlds overlapped, instead of having two separate ones. Wakefield’s white middle class family is “featured” as a dysfunctional unit. He stands down from his public role to get his personal life with his family back in order. As the movie continues, Ray is killed and Javier only asks for a safe place for children to play baseball in exchange for information. “What is significant is that the lowest character in terms of social hierarchy is the highest in terms of moral integrity and is successful in taking on the drug traffickers”

2. Despite the “positive” Mexican, Latino and African-American characters in the film, how does the film nationalize and racialize the drug trade and drug users?

The White man (in the US) is one of the top drug ring leaders. However, even with the positive Latino role, most of the bulk drug trading is done in Mexico. Salazar commented that treatment for drug users is to let them die, less of them to worry about. Then the drugs were sold in the US by African-Americans. “Traffic, which follows in a Hollywood tradition of representing Mexico and Mexicans as a country and a people who are in need of moral, political and institutional guidance from the United States,”

3. How does cinematography reinforce differences between U.S. and Mexico? What are the cultural associations associated with each?

An image of Anglo-America as industrial, wealthy, and cold-hearted is given in the blue metallic tones used whenever Wakefield, wife and daughter are seen. A backward feel is given to the Mexican scenes through the use of a sepia tone; other colors are drained to heighten the sense of a sun drenched, parched geography characterized by lack and poverty.21 The sunny locations of California are shot and produced using a more conventional Hollywood

approach reminiscent of 1970s television shows; the bright sun-filled wealthy suburban settings provide a further contrast to Tijuana’s poverty.22 This, once again, reinforces cultural geographical tropes of “first” and “third” world; none of Mexico’s modernity is seen, while poor North America is not visible.

What is Shaw’s argument about a sepia-toned point-of-view shot?

The sepia point of view is shown as Mexico’s underdevelopment perceived by the North Americans.

4. How does the General Salazar character reinforce common Hollywood stereotypes?

Salazar’s violence, his psychopathic tendencies and his involvement in illegal exploits. Like the Hollywood bandit he is also sadistic and power hungry, and will use any tactics to achieve his ends.

How does Javier (Del Toro) reinforce common Hollywood representations of Mexico as a country in need of guidance from the U.S.?

Javier failed a drug raid in the opening of Traffic. However, Javier provides the DEA with information relating to his dealings, suggesting that the good Mexican cop can only get results if he works for the U.S. agency.

5. How does the representation of the drug trade in Traffic reflect larger assumptions about American foreign policy?

It argues for treatment over imprisonment for addicts,

for a holistic approach to the drug problem, but it also, implicitly, advocates intervention by the DEA in Mexico itself. Mexico’s perceived inability and unwillingness to address the issue of drug trafficking could certainly be used to justify the DEA taking over many of drug enforcement roles as part of a “war on drugs,”

Kaufman, 125-165

“Emotion, Truth, and Celluloid”

6. What are some of the key lessons Soderbergh took away from the Richard Lester project, and how did he apply those lessons to specific films?

7. How does Erin Brockovich represent a key change in how Soderbergh viewed “personal filmmaking”?

“A Maverick Director’s Route” and “Man of the Year”

8. What were some of the key advantages of the “run-and-gun” approach of Traffic, particularly in terms of performances? How did this approach affect Soderbergh's presence on the set?

Reading Response 6: Due February 22

Reading Response 6: Due February 22

Alisa Perren, “sex, lies and marketing”

1. Why was 1989 considered a transitional year for independent distribution?

These larger companies had overextended themselves by supporting larger budget films, in-house productions.

In economic terms, what was the meaning of the term “indie-blockbuster”?

These indie films replicate big block buster movies marketing and box-office performance of major studios, including a cost-to-earning ratio that would be beneficial such as Soderbergh low cost and high earning sex, lies, and videotape.

How did the industry respond to the “indie-blockbuster”?

sex, lies, and videotape laid the groundwork for bifurcation, meaning that most of the larger companies decided to create or purchase one specialty division. Ex. Paramount Classics, Fox Searchlight, and Universal Focus.

2. What criteria guided Miramax’s acquisition strategies in the 1980s?

Miramax focused on smaller-scale quality pictures that centered around the foibles of well developed characters (aspiring to the status of “art” in terms of style and narration). Second, selecting nonclassical films that focused on unconventional subjects and styles. (aesthically different from Hollywood as well). Third, finding marketing hooks that would help the films move from the art world to the theaters. They used sex, violence and controversy as sales strategies appealing to multiple niches.

What additional strategies by the Weinstein brothers led to Miramax’s growth while other independent distributors failed?

Limited their spending, opted for continuing in acquisitions rather than producing their own, and restricted their release schedule.

3. Who financed sex, lies and videotape, and why did they allow Miramax to distribute the film theatrically?

RCA/Columbia Home Video and Virgin. They allowed the distribution based on the popularity at the films festivals.

Why did Miramax pursue the distribution rights to the film so aggressively?

They were establishing themselves as a distributor of niche films and they were trying to outbid the other independent distributors who wanted to purchase the movie.

4. What were some of the key promotion strategies utilized by Miramax for sex, lies, and videotape?

Marketed the film as a quality independent, and Miramax promoted itself as the leader in the independent industry as well as the main force and success behind the sex, lies, and videotape. The key targets included developing the pre-release buzz, winning the Palme d’Or, individually tailoring the film’s release to suit it’s particular strengths (packaged as though it were a major studio release),

What markets did they appeal to simultaneously, and how did they appeal to those markets?

-Art house audience: listing the most significant festival honors bestowed on the film, and below a number of positive press responses.

- Youth audience (college students): big ads that promoted edginess.

What is meant by “finding the high concept in low budget films”?

Targeting specific niches of low budget films with aggressive and skilled marketing to these niches.

5. What kind of distribution strategy did Miramax use for the film?

Released on about 350 screens, then opened it slowly and let it build on positive reviews and reactions over 6 months. Scheduled a platform release, opening it first in LA and NY, later moving it into nationwide release by the end of the month.

Contrast this strategy with current “saturation booking” of Hollywood blockbusters.

Currently, most of the Hollywood blockbusters are major films that try to show each blockbuster in as many venues all at the same time. Ever expanding monoliths cranking out cookie-cutter sequels with excessive action and minimal plots.

6. Why were Amir Malin’s comments about niche films prescient of broader industry trends, at a time where many people predicted the demise of niche films?

Middle class films would be less cost effective, being primarily based on their stories or their stars.

Studio events would be based on their appeal of action, special effects, superstars, and simple marketing hooks. If event films failed at home they could still make money abroad.

Using the label “sophisticated” marked the independent film’s distinction.

7. By the mid 1990s, what function did the term “independent” actually serve in the industry?

Niche-targeted and high-concept. Style and modes of story-telling were blended. Ex. Established talent merged with newer actors, directors, and writers.

What was ironic about the so-called “Year of the Independents” at the 1995 Oscars?

The four “independent” films nominated were released by major media corporations.

What were the repercussions of the bifurcation of the industry?

The press began to question the use of the “independent” label by specialty divisions.

Both Hollywood and indie films established two different distinct aesthetics.

Hollywood- glossy look and high production values

Indie – gritty look or edgy content needing to have a clearly defined niche, creating a decline in the types of low-budget films attained.

Miramax is now focuses on it’s own stable of talent, and films that would been labeled as indie are now being produced regularly by studio subsidiaries.

Upcoming filmmakers working outside of the studio environment have a much more competitive and bumpy road ahead of them now.