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.