Aesthetics of Film

From Aesthetics of Film, Jacques Aumont et al., originally published in French; 1983.

“Aesthetics covers reflection upon the phenomenon of signification considered as artistic phenomena. The aesthetics of cinema is therefore the study of the cinema as an art and the study of films as artistic messages.” (6)

“The film image creats an analogy with real space; the resulting impression is usually powerful enough to make us forget not only the flatness of the image, but also, for example, the absence of colour if the film is black and white or the absence of sound in a silent film. In addition, while we may not be led to forget the edges of the image, we may be made to forget the fact that beyond those edges there is no image. [... André] Bazin’s point is that if the image works like a window to make a fragment of the (imaginary) world visible, then there is no reason to suspect that this world would stop at the image’s edges.” (13)

Free association and released imaginations

Two men, one of them a black God, are digging on a beach. A woman runs up to them.

Woman: ‘Are you looking for a dead body?’

God: ‘We are.’

Woman: ‘Well here are some coffee and sandwiches.’

God: ‘Never met a human being a didn’t like. Thank you.’

Tales of the Forgotten Melodies. Wax Tailor.

Amazing music is sometimes just what it takes to make the most crazy times seem almost okay.

A cinema of suspense

Adrian Martin writes that Raúl Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) is about, ‘Walking out of someone’s life, and then walking back in…about that particular gap, the mysterious hole in time between when someone says goodbye to you and when they next say hello. Or even just the gap between falling asleep next to someone in the night, and then waking up next to them in the morning. Is that other person still the same person – and are you still the same person?’

New museology in the metropolis

We can see them operating in the same way as new museums around the world, as trying ‘to avoid homogeneity by engaging with their specific political and cultural environments’ (Message and Healy). No longer did trams serve a conservative governmental attempt at controlling everyday experience, or at containing the identity of the city’s individuals within a single imagined concept. What they now did was offer a subversion to the narrative of a coherent, homogenous identity for Melbournians. Andrea Witcomb argues that the Museum of Sydney’s varied mix of everyday Australian products prevented people from subscribing the objects to a general understanding of what it meant to be an Australian. By developing this argument, new museums offer a challenge to the naturalisation of one-ness, or sameness, in our country, and the trams’ subversiveness operates in a similar fashion.

               – Excerpt from an essay I am currently not working working on.

Last night at work I spent over an hour alone in a big empty space, metaphysically trapped in my head. A lot of stuff was going on in there, it was not fun. I threw my torch across the room a couple of times.

Limited imaginings

Last year around Anzac Day I remember having a discussion with my brother about men who have fought in wars – I said that I would honour those who had died, but i no way did I agree with their any reasons for going to war in the first place, or with governmental justification for fighting wars or sending men off to kill, and to die. We are all just people, tied to our nations by political rhetoric and made to believe that other countries are our enemies because their national identities are different to ours. This is an entirely constructed belief, not a tangible reason at all but a dialogue that politicians, and citizens in turn, have invented in order to naturalise ourselves as ‘one’, and something else as ‘other’.

In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), he writes that regardless of actual inequality and exploitation, ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’ There are in fact more divisive communities within nations, but he has a point. Anderson continues, ‘Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.’

The Sound of Silence

 

In The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), the screen cuts to a blackout to indicate the first time that Benjamin and Mrs Robinson get together – then Simon & Garfunkel’s song ‘The Sound of Silence’ comes in. Nichols gives a new meaning to the lyrics, “Hello darkness my old friend.” Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) sees adults in the glare of the sun, only as dark silhouettes. He wears sunglasses to a strip joint.

Nichols also mutes the sound of adults’ voices. When his parents are yelling banal encouragements at him through his ridiculous scuba gear, when Elaine (Katharine Ross) runs of with Benjamin from her wedding. Only youths know when to be silent, don’t ruin every moment with horrible empty speech. The beginning of a new era.

My top ten?

Okay, so I have drafted a top ten favourite films. Still not sure how to classify my favourite, as in which attributes are most important to give them such a position. Also, I have made a conscious effort to make it a non-American centric list, so have made eliminations based on that. Whether this means that certain films would not be included without such an effort, I am not sure yet. But this is my first real attempt at such a list and as yet, there is no sequential order by which i rank them. That will come.

Will change, no doubt.

1. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

2. Les Parapluies De Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

3. La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

4. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

5. Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)

6. Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

7. The Goddess of 1967 (Clara Law, 2000)

8. Happy Together (Wong Kar Wai, 1997)

9. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

10. The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

And others I was toying with: Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), In A Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992), Raise The Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991), Written On The Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956), Love Me Or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955), How To Marry A Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953), What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962).

King Camera

In King Kong (Cooper & Shoedsack, 1933), when Anne Darrow is tied up to be sacrificed to Kong, she is filmed from in front and behind her. The camera also frames her from the side- focuses on her hands being tied to the post. Here, as well as being a sacrificial victim, she is also trapped visually be the camera.

When Kong is on Broadway, he becomes aggravated by the flashes of cameras and gains strength enough to break free of the chains of man. Yet as the movie camera lingers on a shot of the flashes of photographic cameras, their role in his escape is emphasised.

So we have here a film about the danger of the camera. Something that was created in order to commemorate reality and preserve life, actually leading mankind to risky ambitions, and potentially leading to destruction of the world.