Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol. 40 Number 4. March 21 1977
Film
Film
Dreams of Purify
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Werner Herzog.
The proper, or pure form of any particular art has always been the subject of much investigation, The question boils down to technique. Almost as long as film has existed, man has tried to discover how the available technical means can create a meaning or effect unique to that art. By the 1920s, montage—the juxtaposition of one shot with another to achieve a result which superceded the power inherent in each separate shot—was thought to be the method by which film achieved purity. It was visual and it communicated beyond words, thus it was distinct. Montage was not the product of hybrid but of solely filmic properties.
Furthermore, it allowed man to dominate space and time as never before. This was the crux, for the strength of art was seen in the way it formed its own reality in order to reflect back on life. Life's reality is defined in temporo-spatial terms beyond our control. Film's greatest freedom from this restriction lay at the very heart of its power. Anything which threatened to tie film to reality was therefore seen as a debasement.
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The desert: Fata Morgana.
The advent of talking-pictures was anticipated as such, because speech (sound and the body making it) implied a biological relationship independent of man's creative faculty. Film would revert to being a mere recording device. Speech, in fact sound generally, the purists claimed, must only used where its relationship to the visual image was man-made and served man's purpose.
Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana is a fascinating resolution of this conflict. Narration aside, both the music and the words within the film act as a single coherent entity. They are the aural element, standing in counterpoint and with equal importance to the visual image. The narration is imposed on this duality, providing signification at the point of synthesis which flows back into the sound and image and assists in the mutual transcendence of each.
The breathtaking combination of German oratorios and long tracking shots through the desert is the best example. There is nothing in the songs requiring this or any other image, and vice versa. The two elements are artificially related. That they do relate is incontestable, that each brings to the other a sublimity beyond the scope of either acting alone is also incontestable. Neither our watching nor our listening takes precedence: our reaction lies between the effect of the two.
Over this Herzog has laid an extraordinarily rich creation myth, whose gist is that none of the creatures of this world, least of all man, is capable of fulfilling the gods will. For this ineptitude (mark that) man is destroyed in the flood. Immediately we are presented with a paradox. Man created the myth which belittles him. Man created the beautiful music we are listening to. And man created the film by which all this is conveyed. Yet in these creations ineptitude is the last thing we think of. The narrative does not contradict everything else in the film, it allows us deep understanding. In a filmic metaphor, man is to nature what sound is to image.
Herzog has said that his films go beyond words, that like dreams they reveal something incomprehensible to our logical modes of thinking. In other words, they present paradoxes such as the one I have just suggested.
Much later we get documentary-type footage of various people explaining the fauna of the desert. Their speeches are left untranslated. From this we can infer that what they are saying is unimportant and jump straight to the essence of the scenes: words, even when observing strict fidelity to the moving mouth, have an artificial nature which makes them ultimately nonsensical. Although those people are telling us about things, we recognise they are simply obeying the compulsion to communicate, a thing far more important than the actual content. An understanding of German would not alter this. Herzog's dogmatic insistence on bringing us back to them, of matching the visually and aurally uninteresting, heavily underlines the point. The paradox of the desert sequences here receives non-aesthetic expression. In a similar way, Leonard Cohen's songs are annoying only because we get caught up in the familiar words. As sounds they are exactly right.
We are several times told: "In Paradise, you call hello without ever seeing anyone." This is not the voice of a cynic. Paradise is the accepted place where paradoxes don't exist. The only way this can happen is for each individual to lose his concept of other individuals, to be absolutely alone. Vet only through those others do we have any sense of separate identity. I cannot say "I am me," without implying "I am not you." So the paradox is inescapable. In Paradise, alone, we must continue to call out. The filmic aspect reflects this: we "call" but we don't "see." In Paradise, the aural and the visual are in discord and create nothing.
Herzog is not suggesting futility. Quite the opposite. This paradox is inherent in our life. Beyond words, beyond meaning, it is the fountainhead of all beauty, all truth, all faith. The mere fact that we can live with it attests to this. It is not Paradise we seek, it is Life.
Thus we have film's full potential: the ability to explore the profoundest level of man's experience. Because film alone incorporates space and time in complete subervience to man's will and imagination, its powers of presentation and evocation are the broadest of all the arts. However, this does not make it the greatest art. If perfect expression brings man face to face with his God, what is the result? Does Fata Morgana prove its maker a prophet of film, or is it the wax and feathers of a new-found Icarus? Significantly, of the three divisions in the film-Creation, Paradise, the Golden Age-it is to Creation we feel most drawn....
Pedantry Adrift
Durgnat on Film
It is beyond me how Raymond Durgnat ever achieved his status. A critic of international note, he appears to be without love for his subject, without communicable insight, without even a serviceable method. In short, an academic without vocation. For those who missed his recent lecture tour, here is the book to prove it.
Durgnat on Film is basically an amalgam of earlier works, designed as an introduction to the critic's thought. Finding that thought is difficult. Durgnat is much given to pointless observation. For example, "Much science fiction is in the tradition of 'Paradise Lost', in that it relates the human condition to the basic physical and mental structures of the cosmos." The considerable qualification which follows does not really help.
Even on those occasions when he does attempt serious reasoning the results are unsatisfactory. Chapter One is mainly devoted to proving the inseparability and mutual value of content and form, using all the tricks from false analogy to bewildering grammar to justify a narrow point of view. Naturally we accept that meaning emerges from the utilisation of means (such as subject of focus, appearance of the baddie, etc) yet nowhere does Durgnat seem to realise that with a given piece of film we can separate what is said from the techniques used, and can judge one against the other. This is exactly what we do with well-made commercials. Roving around these 'ideas' of his are a whole host of film examples. The author's adherence to the current trend of calling on Hollywood B-grade movies instead of European 'art' films does broaden one's knowledge of titles, but defeats his own purpose. There is no index of films because little is said about any one; the general lack of conciseness prohibits inclusion of a subject index; and there is not even a bibliography. No attempt has been made at summation, nor to sub-head the cryptic chapter headings (I Was a Middle Aged Water Baby, Pizzicato Pussycats, and twenty more). The result is a book too ill-organised and ill-argued for reference value, and much too pedantic for pleasure.
Putting one's name in the title of a book must be a sign of something. Prestige? That the purely subjective lies within? Durgnat makes a farce of both answers—for him, it is nothing other than pretension.
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Double Feature Double Feature
Doctor Strangelove
In my opinion this is the greatest film ever made. From what I can understand from writings on film from all around the world this film has had the most positive political impact of any film ever produced. The subject: The world engulfed in a nuclear holocaust The story is about a mad General who believes that the Dirty red Rusky commie rats are ruining the country's "purity of essence" by infiltrating the water system with flouride among other things So he sends a wing of B52 bombers to drop atomic bombs on dozens of Russian targets. The administrations in both countries try desperately to stop the mission but...
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Peter Sellers...
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and Peter Sellers...
The film is brilliant in the extreme.—Its strength lies not only in its horrific theme or brilliant acting by Peter Sellers in three roles, but also in its structure, camera style, the background preparation, the set design the dialogue the performance of all the actors, the story line, etc etc... But I think more than anything the success of the film lies in Kubrick's complete control over his use of humour, (black humour).. The extremely funny and entertaining characters such as the mad Doctor Strange love, a military scientist, are combined with the unbearable consequences of what these people are doing to the world.
This is not merely some comedy that one might go and see if one felt like it, this is an experience of a lifetime even more so than watching Gizago on TV.
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and Peter Sellers: Doctor Strangelove.
The War Game
An excellent film and a perfect choice to star in a double bill with Doctor Strangelove. This is the most powerful documentary I have seen. It is a dramatised documentary of a nuclear attack on Britain. It is a subject that could revolt anyone but so often films depicting this sort of thing leave no after-effects on the audience at all. But don't expect to see this film and walk out feeling that nuclear warships in our harbours is a non-issue.
Perhaps more than anything else the secret of this film's success lies in its style of extreme understatement. You have to see it to see what I mean.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
A fascinating film with brilliant cinematagraphy. How is it possible to make a feature film in which all the actors are seagulls and all the sea gulls talk. How is it possible to make the theatre feel as if it is flying through the sky like a bird on the wing; after all theatres don't have feelings. Its all as possible as flying Neil Diamond, who wrote and performed the brilliant music, direct to the wastelands of Mururoa where he belongs.
The Paper Chase
This film is about the trials and triumphs of a bright young Harvard Law student named Hart, His hero is Professor Kingsfield, a brilliant, irascible old professor of contract law, marvellously well-played by John H. Houseman. Kings-field, using the Socratic method of teaching, pushes, bullies and ridicules his students, with the aim of turning them into first-class lawyers. Hart is at first intimidated, and then challenged, propelled by an interest in learning, rather than in the material rewards that may follow. He has an affair with a pretty, independent girl who turns out to be Kingsfield's daughter.
Portrayed is the conformism of the Law School, the pressures of the Socratic system, and a mild rebellion.
This film is to be recommended to anyone who has done law, is doing law is thinking of doing law, or has been done by law!