The Lights Go Up...

Edit: Because this is a rather cheap cinema, it is run by one lone and overworked slave to the reel (i.e. me). And now, as you all shuffle out, I follow you with by broom and dustpan, shouting and grumbling about the 'kids, these days.' My shouting has come in the form of my slightly nonsensical comments which have been spread liberally across the blogs of those who attended the Wednesday screening of Cinema Y. Or, in other, less obscure, words: I think I've made my obligatory ten comments. But despite this, one's work is never done as I may have shouted at a few of Cinema X’s patrons (it sounds as though they were seeing something saucy, does it not?), so I'll try and make a few more comments, just to cover myself!

Cinematic Sadomasochism: Affective Grotesque in King Kong

Weston: Is this the moving picture ship?
Dock Worker: Yeah, you goin' on this crazy voyage?
- King Kong (1933)

Indeed, the moving pictures – cinema – have the power to take the spectator on a crazy voyage. Cinema, writes Anne Rutherford (2002), is not only about telling a story; it's about creating an affect, an event, a moment which lodges itself under the skin of the spectator. Taking queue from Rutherford, the objective of this entry is to discuss the affective power of King Kong. But prior to such discussion, we shall take a detour through Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (1952) in order to compare two episodes of cinematic magnitude.

In the first of these episodes, Hazel recalls attending a carnival at ten years of age. Here, Hazel pays for admittance into a tent which is “so SINsational that it would cost any many that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so EXclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time” (p. 41). In the tent Hazel looks down, with other men, “into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman” (42). Hazel leaves the tent, presumably due to fear of being seen by his father.

The second episode takes place subsequent to Enoch stopping “in front of a movie house where there was a large illustration of a monster stuffing a young woman into an incinerator” (94). After telling himself (eight times) that he would not watch such a movie, he finds himself sitting down for three films. The first two pictures – “The Eye” and “Devil’s Island Penitentiary” – seem horrific, yet Enoch sits through them both. The third picture – “Lonnie Comes Home Again,” a film about “a baboon named Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning orphanage” – is conducive to such affect that Enoch “made a dive for the aisle, fell down the two higher tunnels, and raced out the red foyer and into the street” (95).

Now, these two episodes echo one another in several respects: the subjects of each story pay money in order to see a grotesque spectacle, whether it be pseudo-necrophilic voyeurism or a film in which a monster forcibly inserts young women into an incinerator. However, it is where the episodes differ that is of interest.

In the first episode, Hazel expects to see something to the effect of men “doing something to a nigger” (42), yet encounters the more a grotesque tableaux that is simultaneously conducive to libidinal object cathexis and abjection. As grotesque as this image is, its affect is not half as powerful as that caused by a “nice looking girl” giving Lonnie, the baboon, a medal. The reason for the powerful reaction in the second episode is a subversion of desire: Enoch’s sadism toward the grotesque is defused by the humanisation and adulation of its object. This notion – the subversion of sadism – is something I shall now discuss in regards to my own experience of King Kong – my own “crazy voyage.”

To break formality and to speak anecdotally: I first saw King Kong at a bona-fide cinema – one in which the walls of the foyer were plastered with movie bills ranging from Spartacus to Oz from Rosemarie’s Baby to Endless Summer. The café at which I was working – not one hundred metres from the cinema – had been promoting and selling tickets to the cinema’s monster-movie double-bill, in which Werewolf of London was followed by King Kong. Upon closing up for the night, I collected one of many left over tickets and sauntered over to the cinema to catch the second picture. And, just over one and half hours later, I found myself leaving the cinema not in a rage like Enoch, but very much affected for the worse.

About half an hour into the film, if I recall correctly, Kong makes his first appearance, taking the form of a grotesque monster, and is juxtaposed to the nice-looking girl who he drags off into the jungle. My desires may not have been as sadistic as those of Enoch, but I was hoping for the men to fall this monster and rescue Ann. But in spite of this, as the film progressed, my semi-sadistic desires were subverted as the grotesque figure of Kong becomes more and more human.

Consequently, when Kong is transported to America, I found myself in possession of an affect cinematic New York was unaware of: I had traded in my sadism for pathos or, rather, the cinema had forced the exchange.

And here, my viewing experience took on a masochistic colouring. In New York, the desires I held not an hour earlier were enacted against Kong: bullets tear into his flesh until he sets down Ann and gives one final roar, then plummets to his death from atop the Empire State Building. Then, in the film’s most famous line, Denham sums up the sympathetic appeal of the grotesque monster as he states “It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty that killed the beast.” At this point, the pathos of the cinematic spectator is defeated by the sadism of the film, and utter masochism prevails. Thereby, King Kong had taken me on a crazy affect-laden voyage – one that was so powerful for me it has rendered King Kong one of very few cinematic experiences the entirety of which I can still recall.

Works Cited:

O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.

Rutherford, Anne. “Cinema and Embodied Affect”. Senses of Cinema, 2002. Retrieved 22 October. 2007 from www.sensesofcinema.com

The Chinese Character (pt. 2): Ezra Pound’s Cinematic Calligraphy

‘Character’ is, quite obviously, a polysemous word. In my last entry, I employed it, primarily, to designate Shosho, thereby allowing ‘the Chinese character’ to realise semantic connotations based on identity and other living qualities. I then employed ‘character’ to designate the symbols of Shosho’s writing which, I asserted, metaphorise the aggregate of features that constitute her as a subject. Subsequently, the written Chinese character was attributed with similar qualities of otherness I posited on Shosho. Now, in this entry I intend to focus solely on the written character, but as I do so I hope to keep in mind Shosho’s character – for here, I will be once more arguing for a certain transcendent dynamism inherent in the Chinese character – and thereby extend an implicit otherness to the written character to be discussed henceforth, and a further dynamism to the living character discussed hereto.

Modernist poet Ezra Pound composed vast amounts of poetry in a style he christened ‘the Ideogrammic Method’ – a technique which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. A more notable example of Pound’s Ideogrammic poetry is as follows:

            In a Station of the Metro
The apparition             of these faces             in the crowd             :
Petals             on a wet, black             bough             .

The inspiration for “In a Station of the Metro” came to Pound one day as he exited a Metro train and was arrested by the image recorded above. Pound stated that for him, this was the beginning of a language in colour. And, consequently, this poem reads as though it is a painting and evokes the imagist principle that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind’s eye by naming them. The poem’s title – “In a station of the Metro” – presents the viewer with a large canvas: the train station. And as the poem progresses for its following two lines, the viewer’s attention is drawn to specific concrete elements of the painting: “these faces in the crowd”. Such reading is affirmed by the visual placement of words as the individual lines of the poem are, too, broken up into distinct images similar to how a large painting is viewed. For instance, the second line reads:

The apparition             of these faces             in the crowd             :

This spatial division between images gives the impression of someone viewing the faces in a painting and then changing their focus to once again observe the crowd as a whole. Here, it is evident that Pound’s poetry has taken on a visual logic: the logic of painting, as his poetry captures still images that can be explicated to their metaphorical potential.

However, the diachronic process of reading reveals the limits of attempting to depict reality by such logic: in spite the concreteness of the images generated, the process of reading strips the poetry of the element of natural succession or, more significantly in this case, the scope of the apparition in its entirety. To wit, instead of displaying the truth of visual perception, “In a Station of the Metro” suspends still images in time, and then orders them syntactically.

This limitation, like the textual cinemascape of Piccadilly, acts as a frame. The English text is stable, familiar, and order imposing. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the Chinese character (the ideogram) within such poetry warps its frame – as does the Chinese character in Piccadilly – and shatters the static order of the poem.

Visually striking, the ideogram acts as a sort of hieroglyphic verbal-noun. As Ernest Fenollosa writes in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1936), “the great number of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action” (p. 9). For instance, the following ideogram and its translation are taken from Pound’s Confucius the Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot (1951):

The light descending (from the sun,
moon and stars.) To be watched as
com­ponent in ideograms indicating
spirits, rites, ceremonies.

Here, the ideograph depicts the poetic subject both visually and temporally, in one instantaneous gesture. Chinese poetry, writes Fenollosa,

“speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate” (p. 9).

This – the watching of things in their own fate – is cinematic. The preceding Chinese character does not merely signify the light descending from the heavens; rather, is depicts such taking place: the light is cast down (the three vertical strokes) from the sky (the two horizontal strokes), and the visualisation is generated as though the sunlight is taking place on film.

The “thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely,” and, consequently, the ideogram “holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture” (p. 8). The Chinese character, as it is included within English poetry, is dynamic – it transcends its frame as does Shosho in Piccadilly – and adds a new dimension to poetry: the cinematic.

Works Cited:

Fenollosa, Ernest. 1936. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Pound, Ezra. 1916-17. “In a Station of the Metro”. In Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth. United States: The Library of America: 287.

__________. 1951. Confucius: the Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot. In Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth. United States: The Library of America: 615-650.

The Chinese Character (pt. 1): Confounding the Textual Cinemascape

Both Piccadilly (1929) the film and Piccadilly the geographical location are comprised of text; that is to say, Piccadilly exists as an environment which is to be read, like any sign system, and which subsequently writes its occupants - an environment which I hereafter shall designate the ‘textual cinemascape.’ Forming the central hub of this cinemascape is the Piccadilly Club, serving as an emblem of the textuality by which it is surrounded and geographical point in and through which text and textuality intersect.

The Club, by virtue of its designation ‘club,’ becomes a space of regulated flow in which its occupants fit themselves into the title ‘club’ by conducting themselves in an appropriate fashion: eating, dancing, and wearing dapper suits. And hereby, the sign, as it operates on the Club’s occupants, justifies its own existence by rendering the space it designates as ‘club’ the Piccadilly Club. As a result of this, Piccadilly depicts a state of symbiosis in which text (the signifier) and the cinemascape (the signified) are mutually reliant, coexisting with, in, and through one another. Piccadilly is, in effect, a structured machine.

The camera pans about this textual cinemascape passively and omnisciently, refusing to interfere with the state of symbiosis. Like the environment, the camera simply lends itself to the symbiotic mechanisms of Piccadilly and depicts the text which abounds on almost every surface – ostensibly relishing the words – foregrounding the machine at the expense of its occupants.

Yet, naturally, the first thing which truly stands out in this highly ordered cinemascape is disruption to the symbiosis: a dirty plate, no less! The mere existence of dirt on a plate challenges the standards of the Piccadilly Club and, by extension, the state of symbiosis itself. From behind the camera, we follow the relegation of responsibility, attempting to determine at which point the machine stopped working. The structure of relegation holds strong until, perhaps not at the hurricane’s centre but very close, we find Shosho: the butterfly, flapping her wings.

Framed by highly structured symbiosis in a fashion not dissimilar to how Cornell’s Medici Princesses are bound by form, Shosho disrupts the film, and warps the frame by which she is restricted. Her informal dancing is not only anathema to the textual cinemascape; additionally, the hypnotic rhythm of her movements penetrate the camera itself, drawing its intent gaze, transforming it from a passive spectator to an affected eye, actively conveying the mesmerised dream-like qualities attributed to the eponymous actress of Rose Hobart (1936). Hereby, Shosho seduces both the audience and the means by which the audience reach her. Thus, by virtue of the camera and of her audience – both wooed by that which is foreign and disruptive to the normative structure of Piccadilly – Shosho becomes the exemplary leading lady.

Subsequent to this performance, Willmot offers Shosho a contract to perform as the Piccadilly Club – an offer to place her disruption centre-stage, under the lights, for all to see! – an offer on which she takes him up. Significantly, such a contract not merely advances the plot but metaphorises the courting of Eastern culture by that of the West to very curious effects.

Shosho’s means of signing her name is simultaneously exquisite and subversive: the Chinese characters are elegant, exotic, and unfamiliar; and, by feigning ignorance, Shosho situates herself in a place of underestimation, hereby crafting a title for herself as the femme fatale. And through the complexity of her character – just like the Chinese characters she writes – Shosho transcends the textual cinemascape, for she becomes an elegantly and deceptively ornamental figure: the other.

Make it New!

Thus far, I’ve written mostly about cinema, and how cinema features in cinema. I now intend depart from this theme and focus on two particular artists with whom I am absolutely besotted: Anna May Wong and Ezra Pound. I intend to discuss both figures in the context of ‘The Chinese Character.’ And, for this discussion, I shall employ multiple designations of the term ‘character’ (significantly, that of a person represented in drama, and that of a symbol used in a writing system) while keeping in mind the particular definition that is “a significant visual mark or symbol.”

Also, I must pre-emptively make the following caveat: I have no intention to answer questions of why the Chinese character (read: I shan’t be explicitly engaging with the politics of racial difference); instead, because of the focus of this blog, I will be discussing what the Chinese character does – on screen and in poetry – as a result of artists’ engagement with that which is 'otherly.'

In short: the next two entries will be about cinematic elements and implications of the ‘The Chinese Character.’

Mechanisation and Movement-Image: The Cinematic Manifesto

As the Kino-Eye shut before me, mine couldn’t help but take queue and close as well. Slumping in my chair, I felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and completely drained by the not-so-passive act of viewing. The final minute of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is nothing less than an all-out physiological assault on the senses. In “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922), Vertov claims “necessity, precision, and speed are the three Components of movement worth filming and screening,” and that the “geometrical extract of movement through an exciting succession of images is what’s required of montage,” (p. 8). This is what had just hit me: Vertov’s montage.

In “We”, Vertov poses the following question:

The machine makes us ashamed of man's inability to control himself, but what are we to do if electricity’s unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly haste of active men and the corrupting inertia of passive ones? (p. 7)

However, Vertov does not simply exclude all human flesh from his film; instead, The Man with a Movie Camera’s path leads “through the poetry of machines... to the perfect electric man” who “will have the light, precise movements of machines, and he will be the gratifying subject of our films,” (p. 8). So, instead of focusing the Kino-Gaze on just machinery while excluding man altogether, Vertov synthesises the two in cyborgian fashion.

Such logic becomes evident when a series of bodies are depicted, whilst engaged in exercise, as becoming mechanical. In this scene, every movement is as stilted and unnatural as the accompanying music. And further to this evolutionary turn, the bodies on display are simultaneously sexualised – to put it bluntly, several of the women most certainly thrust their way through the scene. As a result of this, Vertov’s ‘new’ humans are both organic and mechanical.

Yet the power of Vertov’s cinematic manifesto is not strongest in what it can display; the power of cinema, for Vertov, is strongest in the technique by which its puts these things on display. Here, the power of Vertov’s kinochestvo is best described as the Deleuzian movement-image, the purely optical and sound situation. This image

can have two poles – objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental. But they give rise to opsigns and sonsigns, which bring the poles into continual contact, and which, in one direction or the other, guarantee passages and conversions, tending towards a point of indiscerniblility (and not of confusion). (p. 267)

In The Man with a Movie Camera these two poles are, quite obviously, man and machine. And by uniting the two, the Deleuzian movement-image forces its viewer to grasp “something intolerable and unbearable... something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities,” (p. 267).

And at this point it is nigh imperative to turn back to where I began this entry – slumped in my chair, utterly exhausted – in attempt to explain this cinematic phenomenon. Quite simply, The Man with a Movie Camera outstripped my sensory-motor capacities. Vertov shows us the poetry of machines; new man, the machine-man; and then he shows us our evolutionary weakness: we are not machines; we are just organic matter whose senses cannot keep up with the technology of kinochestvo.

Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera concludes with an act of violence committed against our senses. However, this act is utopian; it is the physiologically forced realisation of the ideals Vertov set out in “We”. And upon this moment of realisation, “[o]ur eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis,” (p. 9). And what does the future hold? To quote another, more contemporaneous, film: Long live the new flesh!

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. “Beyond the Movement-Image”. In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Baudry and Marshall Cohey. New York: Oxford University Press: 250-69.

Vertov, Dziga. 1922. “We: Variant of a Manifesto”. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson. Berkley: University of California Press: 5-9.

Symphony and Synecdoche: Walking in the Cinematic City

The cinema is a tangible space, bound up in the geography of the city. However, when thinking about cinema, consideration is rarely given to its position as a concrete part of the city's structure. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) locates the cinema within three structures: the symphonic structure of the film; the geographical structure of the city; and the structure of everyday life in Berlin. This entry is an attempt to discuss the cinema’s location within these structures and to suggest an apparent repercussion of its placement.

As we arrive in Berlin, it becomes clear that the city is built of a complex system of structures, communicative (telephone cables), functional (sewerage systems), and so on. These structures form the logic of the city, or, for Michael de Certeau (1988), they are the manifestation of the city’s strategies. These strategies are what give order to the city; these power cables, train tracks, and street signs are the score of the yet-to-be performed Great Berlin Symphony.

Soon after our arrival to the city, the orchestra take the stage, and the streets of Berlin begin to teem with pedestrians: the Berlin Symphony commences with the percussion of the pavement. Now, if Berlin is a city built of strategies, its people’s means of living with and in these strategies is what de Certeau describes as tactical. Such tactics wield the power to manipulate

spatial organisations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them. It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them, (p. 101).

With this in mind, we witness a mass of pedestrians walking in synchrony and harmony from the train station to their office or factory (with the exception of several improvising performers). For de Certeau, this constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” which causes some parts of the city disappear while exaggerating others (p. 102). In other words, the loudest notes are sounded when all of the orchestra – factory-workers, shop-keepers, and children – play at once.

In the fifth movement, the Berlin Symphony shifts from work to play – from alla marcia to scherzando – and, fittingly, the focus of the film shifts to the entertainment precinct which is where we find the cinema. What takes places in this movement is tactical: the Berliners are living in and with the strategies of Berlin the best way they know how, that is, by having fun. However, this tactical destination, by virtue of being situated within a strategically designated part of the city, is heavily influenced by strategy (i.e. entertainment districts exist to draw people in). As a result of this, the location imparts a unique significance to cinema: the cinema is emphasised both geographically and socially, both strategically and tactically.

To what effect does this significance come? As the cinema is where tactics willingly converge with strategy, it is rendered complicit with what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer designate “the culture industry” (1947). Under the rule of such, cinema

is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself, (p. 1229).

So, the tedium of work depicted in movements two, three, and four is only escaped from by approximation to it in the fifth. In essence, the fifth act, despite its change in key, simply modulates to its relative major (that which is consequential to its minor); and after this performance, the orchestra will return to playing in minor again, for day after day after day.

Yet most significantly, this placement takes impact on the role of cinema itself: by strategising the tactics of cinema, whatever movies are shown can be nothing but mass entertainment. Chaplin’s iconic feet and cane – metonymous for The Tramp’s struggle to survive in the industrialised world – are just another marketable variation. In cinematic Berlin, “even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system,” (p. 1223) and this iron system is what sustains and regulates the tempo of the Great Berlin Symphony.

Works Cited:

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1947). In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Leitch, Vincent B. Et al., 1220-40. New York; London: Norton, 2001.

de Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988.