Film theory& Johnny Guitar

 What is theory?

1.    “thinking with the information we have at hand to think with.”

2.    “an act of bricolage.”

3.    “an end to innocence.”

4.    theoria – contemplation, spectacle, mental conception

5.    theoria comes from Greek and is connected with theater and seeing (thea)

6.    “Self consciousness about what we are doing.”

(All of the above derive from my essay, “Looking in the Mirror: Pedagogy, Theory, and Children’s Literature,” Teaching Children’s Fiction, ed. Charles Butler. London: Palgrave, 2006. 85-105.)

What is film theory?

1.    thinking about film with the information we have at hand to think about film with. A sort of bricolage.

2.    an end to innocent viewing.

3.    self-consciousness in our viewing of film.

4.    conceptualizing the activity we call ‘watching movies.”

5.    asking how film works as an artistic medium

6.    asking how film works as a social medium

7.    asking what is film?

8.    approaching film from a particular methodological position.

9.    being aware of the ideological implications of method. For example, formalist readings tend to be conservative; this is why the formalists had a difficult time in Soviet Russia. The Soviet government wanted socialist realism and its attendant themes.

Methods of Approach:

Here is a sample list: formalist; structuralist/semiotic; historical; generic; Marxist; psychoanalytic; mythic/archetypal; gender (includes feminist, masculinist, and queer approaches) and so on.

-each of these is complicated in the sense that each one – gender studies, for example – may focus on 1) the style of film-making, 2) the content of a film, 3) the presentation or construction of gender positions in a film, 4) the reception of a film, 5) the connection of a film with history.

-as the last of the list above should indicate, methodological or theoretical approaches are seldom pure. For example, a feminist approach to a film may at the same time be Marxist in focus, leading to what we see termed a “Marxist/Feminist” approach.

-as my locution, “methodological or theoretical,” should indicate, theory and practice are more often than not connected. Theory simply “guides” or organizes critical practice.

Pure Cinema/Impure Cinema

-pure cinema:

a.    The idea that cinema is hermetic in the sense that it has its own parameters as an art and does not pilfer from the other arts.

b.    The idea that cinema is an art complete and whole, without fissure or alienation. (Bazin)

c.    The idea that film criticism constitutes a discourse unpolluted by anything outside film itself.

-impure cinema

a.    The idea that cinema inevitably and necessarily pilfers from the other arts.

b.    The idea that cinema must draw attention to itself as a medium and therefore break the illusion of ‘realism.’

c.    The idea that film criticism is an interdisciplinary discourse.

Johnny Guitar and Film theory

Pure Cinema: film as self-contained

-this approach may be either formalist or ‘realist’

-focus on the film’s shape, and perhaps its structures, and certainly its genre.

-shape: linear moving from lone rider on a horse, to a saloon and gambling emporium in the desert, to a rustler’s roost, and ending with two figures in embrace. The classic fairy tale plot: boy rides up and “saves” girl – only with a twist.

-structures: binaries include male/female, outside/inside, Europe/America, desert/town, black/white, lawmen/outlaws, fire/water, primary colour/pale colour, past/future.

         Characters in the film have a connection with the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The elements indicate that this is an “elemental” film.

Vienna: earth

Emma: fire

Johnny: air

Dancing: water

Vienna and Emma: earth and fire

Emma and Dancing: earth

Dancing and Johnny: air

Johnny and Vienna: earth and water

Posse: dust and death

Gang: dust and death

Turkey: earth

         The first and last in this list, Vienna and Turkey, make a couple, mother and child. Vienna in her white dress cradles the wounded Turkey in her arms in imitation of a Pieta.

         And what of semiosis? What to make of the film’s clear signs: the rock wall in Vienna’s place, the window between kitchen and saloon, the chandelier, the bridge, the river and waterfall, the blasting, the railroad, the familial hints, Vienna’s clothes, the wind and dust, the fire, the underground mine. Even the colour of the rock and the dirt carries meaning.

-genre: obviously this film is a “horse-opera.” It has the obvious western conventions: cowboy on horseback, saloon, shootouts, outlaws and good guys, contrast between east and west, tension between feminine and masculine elements, the hanging, and the hideout. We can read the film as fitting into the western myth or not fitting in, as the case may be. We might also see how the film stretches genre; it contains elements of the gothic and the noir.

-history of film and film genre: if we locate Johnny Guitar in the history of popular cinema in America, then we will most likely see that it participates in a redefining of the western genre in the post war period. After 1945, we begin to see a turn in the western to what we might call psychological themes. Westerns such as Pursued, Duel in the Sun, Rawhide, and Colorado Territory show the influence of the cinema noir style and themes; they also show a new emphasis on raw emotion and the psychological states of the characters. This psychic aspect is manifest in the many high angle and low angle shots, shots reminiscent of noir style. What we might think of as “adult” themes enter the western. Johnny Guitar reflects this new maturity in its themes of obsession and addiction. The characters in this film are obsessive (Emma, Vienna, Johnny are the ones I am thinking of here). Passion is front and center in this film. Rather than the straight-ahead shoot-em-up we might expect from a western, we have in Johnny Guitar a more cerebral action. Much of what happens takes place inside the saloon or the hideout. The familiar western emphasis on landscape is muted in favour of inside. The focus on inside is a metonymy for the psychic (and psychotic) emphasis in the film. Characters caught by forces that seem as inevitable as fate (the wind outside Vienna’s blows inexorably) are a feature of cinema noir, as is the inclusion of the fatal woman motif. Turkey and Dancing both die, and they are trapped like so many noir characters. And yet the film is transitional, a western that bends the genre almost to breaking. The rather camp style indicates the turn in 50s films to the outrageous, the stylish, the unusual. Film is trying to capture an audience that is finding TV an easy lure.

Inpure Cinema: cinema as pilfering medium

-an awareness of film’s various possibilities as a social form of expression. It exists within the world, not hermetically sealed.

-an understanding that film has implications beyond the closed space of the film diegesis.

-gender approach: here is a tangled tale, as it were. Is this film about normal heterosexual relationships or does it explore non-traditional sexual behaviour. Take Emma, for example. How do we explain her style, her plaything (the gun), and her hysterical reaction to Vienna? Does she protest too much?

         And what of Vienna? Does she revert at the end to the dutiful domestic woman ready to cook for her man? Or does she remain strong, and does Johnny remain her lapdog? (She tells him to “sit down” while she cooks the eggs – a master feeding her pet.)

-individual vs collective: in this case a sort of red individual set opposite a sort of fascistic collective. In other words, we can read the film from an ideological perspective. Take, for example, Emma’s speech to the posse just before they go to Vienna’s place. Among other things, Emma says that if they (she and her fellow members of the local elite – the big ranchers like McIver) are not vigilant and keep out people like Vienna, then many people she refers to as “dirt farmers, squatters” will come in to their area. In other words, she hates the thought of the great unwashed or the proletariat invading her property. She is for property rights (private property) and keeping it at all costs. Vienna, on the other hand, wants to make money, but she wants to do so by opening her place to any and all who come to her place. She is open to change, as opposed to Emma and McIver who are resistant to change.

-psychoanalytic exploration: here is a film rich in psychic drama. Take Johnny, for example. He is a guy who has ostensibly traded his gun for a guitar. What does this mean? Well, he has a history of out-of-control violence based on his love of the gun. He likes to shoot. But he has repressed this desire to shoot, and covered it with another phallic object, the guitar. He wants to make music, not mayhem (love rather than war). The gun and the guitar are both fetish objects. That is, they both are defenses against fear – the fear of lost manhood. But the guitar cannot cut it; the guitar is not an adequate substitute for the gun (or the phallus). To satisfy his woman, Johnny will have to set aside the guitar and resume his affair with the gun. As for Vienna, how do we understand her desire? She is a woman in a man’s world, and she plays like a man. She too has a gun. How are we to understand her relationship with Emma from a psychoanalytic perspective? First, we might notice that Vienna and Emma both wear guns, and they both dress in black, although their black clothes are quite different. They are both powerful women, women who function successfully in a male world by acting as efficiently and ruthlessly as males. Both these women are on the edge of normalcy in terms of gender; in fact, they teeter into abnormalcy. They desire that which they cannot have; they must either die (Emma) or return to normalcy (Vienna cooking for her man near the end of the film). Vienna must face her doppleganger and eradicate her. From this perspective, the film is about deviance and enforced normalcy. For psychic health, male and female should take their proper place in gender negotiations.

         We might also read the film as an exploration of desire. What is it that all the characters desire? Money, land, power, independence, love, that which has been lost and that which is supposed to cover over a lack. Take Emma for example. She is the most hysterical character in the film. Why? Well because she is the most confused in her desire. She loves the Dancing Kid, but she hates him. She hates Vienna, but perhaps her very hate hides an attraction (note how they wear either the same colours or opposite colours – green and black). She has lots of money (she and her brother run the bank), but she fears losing her position. She kills or tries to kill the very things she loves. Her problem is a confused identity. She desires conflicting things – what Lacan might call the Real and the Imaginary, and yet she is stuck in the Symbolic.

Real = that amorphous and chaotic brine from which we come.

Imaginary = our Ideal-I, our fascinating “other.”

Symbolic=the law of the Father, the world of language and social activity.

For Emma, her little gun is the object that represents her desire. Through the gun she hopes to achieve the stability she desires, but of course the gun can only disappoint in its destructive rather than constructive significance.

history: placing this film in its time – 1954 – and noting its director’s background, we can easily see how the film relates to the HUAC investigations, the Hollywood 10, and the whole context of post war panic over the “red menace.” From this perspective, the film is not so much a western, as it is an allegory of America in the post war period.