All the Memory in the World / Final thoughts on the class

All the Memory in the World is a great film to end on. There are countless examples of other films as the narrator, who deals with insomnia, tells his story. Every time the scene vignettes in or out, I feel like we are viewing as a camera would. Focusing on the whole subject and then drawing closer to individual parts of it. The narrator seems extremely creepy. His voice is monotone throughout the whole film. The narrator is also incredibly obsessed with images. It would be extremely hard to keep track of all the different images focused upon within the entirety of the film.  I like the fast paced style that we are given. It is very systematic, moving from one image to the next. Sometimes we are given a series of images in a row; well I guess the whole film is a series of images in a row now that I think about it. There are many superimpositions of images in order to tell the narrators story. The film really brings you to the same consciousness as the narrators. It does so with the pacing and editing styles. This is a film about thousands of films.

Now, as far as the course goes, I just want to say that I really enjoyed it. I was very much entertained with a lot of the films. Most of which, I would not have been exposed to had I not taken this course. This all was entirely new to me. I had not participated in a class like this before. I really enjoyed having our own special space on blogger to share thoughts and ideas. I feel like the most valuable part of the course, was our hangout sessions. During and after our hang sessions, I would start to look at the films in a way that had not come to me before. Sometimes I would go in not entirely understanding a film, and leave the session with a completely new understanding. Sometimes I would leave more confused than when I entered. Either way, I was still thinking about the films. After all, that is the point right? To develop some sort of new understanding. Or even to accept that somethings are to be misunderstood.  I also appreciated the texts shared, as those were very interesting as well. I think I will carry them with me through life. They definitely challenged my usual way of thinking. Which is important to me.

Well, it’s been real! Thank you for exposing me to some great films!

- Lynda Mouledoux

Final Post

For my final post, for many reasons, I would like to focus on the film Holy Motors. This film has stuck with me for the past few weeks. The film brings us into multiple different worlds, all while keeping us in one world. Because the film is so unrealistic, the unreal starts to seem real. Holy Motors brings us into a world without consequences. The film challenges our way of thinking and viewing the world.

The film starts in a dark theater. One thing to point out is that the audience eyes are actually closed. Which leads me to ask, who exactly is the intended audience? Are we? What world are we actually apart of? I would hope to have these questions answered. Although the film really does not leave us with any certainty whatsoever. Which is part of the reason why it is so great.

We dive into the movie. I almost forgot it was a film within a film. There are very few clues pointing to the fact that we are viewing a film within a film. One of them being, the audience in the beginning, of which all of them have there eyes closed. There is also a reminder every time the main character, Mr. Oscar, changes characters-- which I will dig into later. The third reminder comes into play when the boss visits Mr. Oscar in his limo. Olsen explains that the cameras have just gotten smaller over time. Even he may forget that he is acting for someone.

Every time the main character changes into a different character I do not question the reality of the situation. The costumes are great as well. Anyway—In Holy Motors, the unreal fades into the real. I did not question the reality of any situation, because I was already conditioned to expect the unreal. We are very much in a dream world. A world without consequence.  A world where Oscar can kill a man and jump back into the limo without any issue. We are the ones watching Mr. Oscars acting. As the film goes on, he seems to grow tired.

One of my favorite, and really most disturbing parts of the film is when Mr. Oscar is running in front of a CGI screen. He is three dimensional, but everything behind him is two-dimensional. That is, everything playing on the screen is two-dimensional. He is in a suit. The suit he is wearing is almost an elastic athletic suit, with little balls on it to detect motion. It is skintight. The whole atmosphere is very dark. His suit is black, the surrounding area is black. The only illuminated comes from the screen behind him. This was very much appealing to my eyes. It made me wonder, “What exactly is he doing?” Considering this was near the beginning of the film, I really had no idea what I was about to witness. He is running on this treadmill and ends up falling. After awhile, we witness a character change. He seems to change into a snake like creature mating with another snakelike creature. Which was extremely weird. It also set the tone for the film. There were going to be unrealistic things happening. But they are going to start feeling real.

Another crazy part of the film is when Mr. Oscar turns into a leprechaun monstrous creature. He runs through a public area and grabs a lady to take with him down to the dumpster. Before grabbing the lady, he bites the fingers off some innocent bystander. Why did this have to happen? This part was deeply disturbing for me because, well, who does that? The monster seemed relatively harmless after that. He then changes characters into a man playing the bagpipes. We watch him march and play music with other men. There was absolutely no consequence to his action.

One thing that I have mentioned in a previous post is that “the camera acts like an accomplice.” Would the actor be doing all of these things if it were not for the camera? No, probably not. He is doing these things for an intended audience. Although it may not be clear whom that intended audience is.

Another part in the film worth noting is when Mr. Oscar plays a young girls father. He picks up this girl from one of her friend’s houses. He asks her if she had enjoyed herself. She says yes and basically lies about everything. The father catches her in this lie and is very upset. This has to be one of the most “real” scenes in the Holy Motors. Perhaps it seems real because I can relate to it. I have lied to my father before and I have been scolded for it. But Mr. Oscar was almost offended that his daughter would lie to her. This is when we really start to see the toll that the rolls Oscar has played are taking on him. Mr. Oscar is growing tired. He explains to his daughter, well the character that he is playing daughter that she will need to be punished. He asks her if she would do it again if she knew that she would not get caught. She says yes, she probably would. He then drops her off at her mother’s house. She asks him about her punishment. He responds, “Your punishment, my poor Angèle, is to be you. To have to live with yourself.”

Just when things start to almost seem normal, they change abruptly. The only constant in this film is the limo. WE have no idea who the main character is. Who exactly is the main character? It seems to be a big mystery. His true self really isn’t revealed. Maybe the closest reveal we have is of him and the limo driver sharing a laugh. Even at the end of the film, we are led to believe he is going home to his family, when in actuality he is just playing another role. He ends up going home to a family of gorillas. This is how Holy Motors messes with expectations. Just when I thought that we would be given closure I was proved wrong. But, I think it is great in that way. The film challenges our way of thinking and viewing things.

ATMITW + Final Thoughts

Since we focused on a lot of narrative metacinema in this class, it is nice to end with a big experimental piece, to show metacinema in a different mode of filmmaking. Mike Olenick’s All The Memory In The World is a fantastical ode to image making and images themselves. Olenick focuses on using a lot of popular cinema to do the heavy lifting, editing hundreds of movies together into a cohesive piece focusing on the camera’s ability to capture life. The narrator uses a creepy drawl to relate a hundred years worth of image making in the hour and fifteen minutes of ATMITW.

The film focuses heavily on photography for most of its runtime, showing us darkrooms, studios, framed photographs, and photobooks full of memories. The narrator muses over the nature of memory and captured images with thick vignetted scenes from movies. The vingettes focus us onto certain aspects of the moving images, usually photographs, while emulating a spotlight, or the circle of the lens.

Many of the films are recognizable, a few are ones we viewed for this class (Peeping Tom makes a couple of appearances). This serves to take context away from the films, reveling in their artifice. We are viewing photographs on a screen, from a movies, cut into another movie, vignetted and with voice over. However, even while removing them from context, a lot of the film are about memory and loss, so it works double.

I found Olenick’s Travolta piece to be a bit more fun, really examining an actor and using his roles to tell a completely different existential story. Both of them remind me a lot of the curators and editors over at Everything Is Terrible (www.everythingisterrible.com) who similarly re-edit and re-purpose old footage to different ends. Olenick feels like Everything is Terrible with a thesis.

• As for the class, I thought that all the films we watched were pretty essential. I am now a big fan of Wim Wenders. However, I thought the works that spoke to me most and were doing the most interesting things were the experimental works, like the television pieces and especially The Eternal Frame. While narrative meta-cinema is great, I thought the experimental meta-cinema was much more fascinating (I’m including Holy Motors in the experimental category). The readings were a bit dense, but also fascinating once their codes were cracked, LARGELY due to the online meetings we had. While those are hard to coordinate, I think they offer an extremely helpful resource for an online class, and an invaluable amount of help for dissecting these films.

The Act of Killing

The power the cinema has on individuals around the world has been well documented. Hollywood’s mass media machine has pushed American ideals over every continent, giving outsiders a glimpse into American lifestyles. Of course, these lifestyles are a fabrication; a simulacra of an America that glorifies crime and gangsters, like in noir films; or an idealistic United States of America: propaganda powered by capitalistic and nationalistic tendencies meant to generate revenue, like in Hollywood Westerns. These ideas manifest themselves in both docile and disturbing ways, fundamentally changing people’s behavior in nearly every country American films reach.

Joshua Oppenheimer focuses on an individual who loves American cinema in his 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. The film follows Indonesian ‘politician’ Anwar Congo. Oppenheimer lets the movie unfold without narration, historical background, or context, letting Congo and his gang of lackies reveal themselves to the camera. We quickly learn about Congo’s past as the leader of a death squad, in Indonesia’s covered up 1965 genocide. Congo decides he wants to make a movie, like the American’s do, about what he sees as his grand achievements. Oppenheimer follows them during the making of their movie, a behind the scenes look at a mass murders vanity project.

The process echoes executive producer and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s style of truth-bending, with a love of recreations. The recreations in Killing however differ from Morris’ dramatized reenactments, in that Congo and his crew do it themselves, fully reveling in the atrocities they committed. In the beginning of the film, Oppenheimer and Congo go to a rooftop where Congo brags about choking a man to death in the very spot where they stand. Congo plays himself and eagerly acts out the murder for the cameras, keeping an eye on historical and physical accuracy. Anwar Congo is celebrated as a national hero in Indonesia, he believes he did a great service for his country and sees no wrong in his murder.

In a strange coincidence, Congo used to work at a movie theater that showed American films, selling tickets outside of the theater to make money with his gang before his rise. He speaks of American films in high regard. Congo likes to indulge in acts he thinks an American style gangster would: fancy suits, lavish meals, and ‘creative’ murder. His job at the theater is directly and economically connected to his hate of communists; as they began to ban American films, Congo and his gang started to make less money from scalping tickets outside the theater. As his sidekick says “Without (Hollywood movies), we gangsters made less money.” Perhaps without realizing it, these men have added a symbolic power to Hollywood film in addition to the films themselves. Congo walks and talks about leaving an Elvis movie, happy and catcalling, when he crosses the street to a paramilitary office where he regularly murdered Communists, he says “it was like we were killing happily.”

Anwar Congo mostly is entranced by the spectacle of American film. As Guy Debord states in The Society of the Spectacle, spectacle is “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Congo loves the spectacle so much, he decides his film must also have the same idea of spectacle behind it. There are dance numbers with a giant fish statue, a song about freedom where Congo is awarded a medal, and perhaps the most harrowing and challenging scene in Killing, a depiction of a town of Communists being raped and pillaged. All of the actors who participate in the latter’s destruction seem willing at first. Happy to be a part of a ‘great film’, and the men acting as the pillagers think this will be a fun scene to film. Intercut with Congo sleeping, these may be the demons that Congo repeatedly tells Oppenheimer haunt his dreams, causing him to lose sleep. It’s a disgusting simulacra of the crimes these men created. When the director finally yells cut, many people, including the children they used as extras are mentally distraught. The killers and rapists playing themselves even are put off by the realistic representation of what they have done. “Film stars only cry for a moment.” Herman Koto, Congo’s partner, tells his daughter. The ambient field recording nature of the sound in this scene detaches, yet enhances the dread. Debord says that “The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’” The Act of Killing turns this on its head. In Anwar Congo’s pursuit of the spectacle, he reveals his acts true nature, the awful guilt begins to consume him from the inside. Re-enacting these events has a therapeutic effect on Congo, finally allowing himself to accept the atrocious crimes he committed.

This culminates in Congo being tortured himself for the movie, after being blindfolded and whipped, he has a mental breakdown. He shows symptoms for shock: faintness, confusion, and chest pain. He’s barely able to move and talk. The scene is a stereotypical gangster interrogation scene, uninteresting and gauche, but Congo feels it as something else. The simulation of interrogation breaks him. What fantasies he used to have about filmic gangsters are having their revenge on his psyche. These simulations are what really opens Congo’s eyes. Jean Baudrillard examines this idea simulation in his work Simulation and Simulacra. Congo doesn’t realize he is not just being “interrogated” by Herman Koto acting, he is also being interrogated by the simulation of the interrogation. Congo isn’t feigning his ignorance to what he has done, he is a simulated nation hero. As this unravels, he sees the truth behind what he has done.

Oppenheimer builds to this in interesting ways. He regularly lets the behind the scenes footage of Congo’s scenes cut directly to Congo watching them back on his television in his home. His reactions start out joyful; he is pleased with himself and his creative talent. As he continues making his film, the more he seems disenchanted with it. He begins to build scenes into the movie to deal with his guilt, like the interrogation scene mentioned above, and a scene where his decapitated head is taunted by spirits.

Only through the process of filmmaking is Anwar Congo able to reconcile with the genocide he has committed. Influenced and nurtured by American cinema, he is deluded into glorifying a lifestyle without realizing the consequences of his actions. One of the last scenes in The Act of Killing is Congo returning to the rooftop from earlier in the movie. Just being present in the location is enough to bring Congo to the ground, lurching and belching out whatever evil still resides in him. “I know it was wrong,” he says “but I had to do it.”

Contempt

The word contempt is defined as a feeling that someone or something is not worthy of any respect or approval and also the state of being despised. Contempt the film, written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard uses the title as a device for graphing the plot of the story. This strategy begins to open the door on the satirical drama between the characters relationships in the film.

The opening scene where Camille and Paul are lying in bed together and she questions if he loves every part of her body details their relationship and builds irony for what unravels later in the film. Also this exchange of what part of her body does he like best has some undertones that speak directly to how a woman's body is objectified. Small lines of dialogue from this scene from Camille such as, “gently Paul not so hard” creates the notion that Paul was deeply expressing his love and affection towards Camille with a kiss that was exposing that Paul can’t contain his lust for Camille, because they are in love.   

Tensions arises between the couple after Paul neglects his wife. This scenario is reflective of the story within the film.

A theory form Fritz Lang about the Greek tragedy The Odyssey heavily relates to the status of Paul and Camille and how Contempt is a film with similar connotations.  

“They always said that Penelope went back to Ulysses but maybe deep down Ulysses had gotten really fed up with Penelope. That’s why he did the Trojan war and he no longer felt like going home, and he made his trip as long as possible discussing mans fate. He used the Trojan war to get away from his wife. Penelope despised him because the husband was seemingly not being possessive of her.

She discovered that she stopped loving him because of Ulysses conduct.”

It’s evident in the film that Camille was expressing similar longing for possessiveness from Paul. The back and forth bickering over going to Capri, Camille’s irritability over being around the American Producer (a suitor) , Paul taking on a challenging job (assuming absence), are all moments that clarify that the film is an artistic expression on another version of how The Odyssey could be interpreted.

“Even in our relationships with those we love, you aspire to a world like in Homers. You want it to exist but unfortunately it doesn’t, why not?”

This quote from Paul towards the end of the film is complex and foreshadows the confusing state he is endearing. If it were a world of Homers, one where you could kill your wife’s suitors would it really be a better world?

Earlier in the film this quote comes up, I think it is from Fritz Lang but I am not certain.

 “A Greek Tragedy was negative in that it made man a victim of fate as

Embodied by the gods, who abandoned him to his hopeless destiny. Man can rebel against things that are bad, that are false, he must rebel when were trapped by circumstance, conventions. But I don’t think murder is a solution. Crimes of passion serve no purpose. I’m in love with a woman. She cheats on me. I kill her.

So what do I have left, I lost the only love because she died, if I kill her lover, she hates me and I still lose her love. Killing can never be a solution.”

This quote is very ironic to how the film concluded. The producer and Camille died together in a very cinematic car crash.

Camille and her anti-damsel in distress attitude while still eluding to the classic females role in film to be beautiful and stunning expresses how Godard was trying to reconstruct how women are to be and behave in film. Bardot is often used as a sex symbol in films but in Contempt it feels her character is exposing herself on her own terms not for male figures in the film. She swears, smokes, and isn't afraid of leaving her husband, shes living her life on her own terms. I loved Camille's style all throughout the film. Her hair was a perfect balance of messy and chic.  Seriously, that's some iconic style. 

There were many eye catching shots of Bardot almost to the point of it being completely and obviously unnecessary. The aesthetic of the shots using CinemaScope allowed for the apartment to become a character in the film as well, and had me feeling a little like a fly on the wall capturing a mundane personal conflict between the intimate couple.  The simple white walls and symbolic contrasting details like the red couch and towel are commenting on French culture. Exploring and theorizing on why human relationships churn and burn and why it is worthy of making a film about makes me more attuned to the interactions I have with people and culture on a daily basis. 

------My favorite shot------

Contempt

The film Contempt, is very much a film about filmmaking. We are watching Paul write a screenplay and also viewing the relationship with his wife. It seems like his wife just needed to feel validated. In the beginning, before I knew the nature of their relationship, I remember a part where she was asking him if he liked every part of her body. This seemed to bother me a little bit. Did she really need to be validated by a man? I came to find out that they were both in love with each other, and it was more of just a conversation. Plus his answer was very nice. He said something like he loved her “Totally... tenderly... tragically.” Which is quite a beautiful thing to say.

One of my favorite quotes from the movie is:

“To know that one does not know, is the gift of a superior spirit. Not to know and to think that one does know is a mistake. To know that this is a mistake, keeps one from making it. I have the knowledge here.”

I’d like to just touch on that because I find it extremely true. When you have knowledge that other people do not, you are definitely holding the upper had. After all knowledge is power. When you think you know something, but you actually have no idea what you are talking about, you look like a dumbass. And you usually sound like one too. Have you ever read the comments on viral videos? There are some great examples there. Anyways… When you know something is wrong, if you are wise, you tend to avoid it. Which keeps you from making mistakes. Sometimes you have to make a mistake once in order to understand that it is, in fact a mistake, to keep you from every making said mistake again. This is why I enjoy that quote so much.

The couple is everything but happy the whole movie. They seem to slit up in front of our eyes. Unable to satisfy each other as they did when we were first introduced to them. It seems like every ones relationships are clashing in this film. Even though Camille says that she still loves Paul, it is very much apparent that something is missing. It is not the same love that she once shared with him. Maybe it is because he is just too busy at work. At one point, Paul suggests that they go to the movies. Even though he should be home working on the script. He claims that it may give him some ideas. Camille responded by saying he should be looking into his own brain for ideas rather than stealing someone else’s content. I also enjoyed this dialogue. It seems like even present day, there are so many of the same films being made. Don’t get me wrong. Some films are great and completely original. But I’m sure everyone knows of at least one film that seemed exactly like another.

Anyways, I appreciated the film Contempt, although I have to admit it wasn’t my absolute favorite.

My apologies for the delay in this response as well. I’ve had some things come up these past two weeks.

Literally My Final Response

All The Memory in the World, as I interpreted it, is a reflection on how we associate ourselves with images, it is a reflection on our relationship and our reliance on images in general, as a concept. So much of what we see and do on a daily basis in current society relies so heavily on the fact that we can burn images permanently onto a medium for people to see forever. Olenick cleverly, and cheekily hammers home this point by giving us a series of images to rely on in order to understand the points that he is trying to make. I believe that he purposely chooses a lot of clips from films that we are familiar with as well, counting on our recognition of them as a reference to how much emphasis we place on their existence. Now, more than ever, since the creation of the camera (although you could argue that paintings and things like that did the same thing, its not really the subject of Olenick's work), we would be nowhere without being able to use these as a point of reference. One of the images that stuck out to me, although it might not be as obvious to anyone who hadn't actually seen the movie in which the clip he is using comes from, is when h e overlays a clip of Julianne Moore's character in "I'm Still Alice" looking at pictures in her book of memories. The movie is about a woman struggling to deal with her oncoming alzheimer's, and in such a way, makes these images one hundred times more important to her. She, more than anyone is relying on these images as her only reflection on the world, although we are all a vicim to it in one way or anther. One quote from of the films we watched earlier, about the reenactment of John. F. Kennedy's assassination said something similar to the themes in this film very well when the actor playing Kennedy said, "We exist in a time where I exist to you only in a series of images. I am not a man, but a series of images." And while this quote applies very specifically to the point that their own film was trying to make, it holds true with any kind of image in general. Everything that we see on a screen or on a canvas is simply one moment preserved in time, or one series of moments preserved in time, but what it represents is simply that: a representation, and nothing more. It is what we perceive it to be. And we cling to these images because it gives us some sense of control over what we try to grasp as our own physical reality. In his own reflexivity, Olenick overlays these ideas over different clips from different films, both old and new (it doesn't matter, they are all preserved) . In one clip, he shows a man working in a darkroom developing film, here the character says, "here, I'm in charge." Being able to store and categorize these different images gives us control. 

The voice acting did leave something to be desired. 

I think it is a really good choice of film to end the class on. It focuses on all aspects of image-making as a general medium. It makes the viewer more aware of what that what they are watching is am mere series of images on a screen, by way of images on a screen. This is something that this class over this month has done a great deal in teaching me. In my first intro post, I think it was pretty evident that I understood meta-cinema in a very causal and simply way. At the beginning of the class, all I had to reference was the typical "breaking of the fourth wall", or as I called it, "The Deadpool Style". It was the most obvious direction that meta-cinema can take. Now, and I hope that you and others would agree as evidenced in my more recent writings, I believe that I have a deeper understanding of the ways that reflexivity can be used in a way that delves deep into the culture behind it, and the human weltanschauung (finally got to use that word!) . 

This is Paul Christian...SIGNING OFF!