Week 5

What We Think We Know

I'd like to touch on a couple themes that I thought both of these films really got across very well. Both of the films this week seemed like reflections on how we perceive art, and then going deeper, how we perceive anything. Both how we perceive art that we see and the art that we make. Both films are about characters who are in the process of making films, yet no one can really seem to get a handle on what it is that they want. In Contempt, we have a battle between the commercial and the artistic. What is worth making? What do we want to get out of filmmaking? What do we want to learn? Fritz Lang turns Ulysses into an art house film, much to the contempt (no pun intended) of Hollywood producer Prokosh. Even when Prokosh turns to Paul to make something more appealing to the masses, Paul finds himself changed by the check. Prokosh doesn't want his audience to sit in their seats feeling dumb because they are seeing something strange.

Paul's marriage very suddenly begins to falter after Paul "sells out" and allows his wife to be flirted around with by Prokosh. She seems to resent this change. Their relationship, especially through the scenes in their apartment, relate back to the central conflict: Paul losing his sense of what he knows and believes.

"I've noticed that the more we doubt, the more we cling to a false lucidity, in hope of rationalizing what feelings have made murky and obscure." 

This idea is further expanded upon in The State of Things. After Gordon leaves, the crew finds themselves questioning everything that they do. The more we think about something, the more we realize that we don't really know anything at all. The film attempts to make us question what it is that we think we know. Even when we write something in an attempt to lay our knowledge out in a way that can be understood, we try not to show it, but we are never sure. We are never sure what we know or what we want. The more we think about it the more "feelings make it murky and obscure", to reference back to Contempt. In The State of Things, two people on the film are talking about one of their past works, a piece about the love motif. 

"You don't know anything about love," he says cheekily. 

"Yes I do. I hope I do....the truth is you all seem so calm, and collected, but inside--inside we don't know what the fuck is going on."

What The State of Things is trying to say here is that we look around at other people, people that we know, people that we admire, people that we wish to emulate, and we think that they've got it figured out. Everyone seems to sure, so confident. But just like us, on the inside they are full of doubt. As well, sometimes we recognize something that we like, but we can't quite figure out where exactly the appeal lies. In The State of Things, we see an interaction between a little girl and a woman. She is sitting on a cliff looking out at the coast. 

"Why are you crying?" the girl asks.

"I'm crying because its so beautiful and I just can't get it....its all just a series of lights and darks."

We think that we recognize something as beautiful, as worthy of our admiration. We think that we understand what and why it is that we like something, but the truth is that all we really know is that we do like it, at least for now. All of this is hammered home by the themes in Contempt and The State of Things, in terms of our general attitudes toward life, and specifically our attitudes toward filmmaking. We see something we like and we try to understand it. But sometimes the more we try to understand it, the more we see it for what it really is: When you strip something down to its bare bones, anything is just something else that exists, as Heidegger might say, in a world of is and isn'ts.