Style and Technique in the Cinema

-random thoughts on cinema

Technique:

-how does the story unfold technically?

-“technique” refers to what we might refer to as “discourse”

-story and discourse

-story is the set of actions that constitute a narrative. The story is the basic set of actions carried out by a set of characters or actants.

-story may be narrated in many ways, the most obvious being “linear”: beginning, middle and end.

-but think of a film such as Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO (2000).

This film tells its story backwards. The plot unfolds in a linear fashion, but in reverse beginning with the end of the story and proceeding to the end, which is the beginning.

-this brings us to discourse: how the story is presented.

-stories may be linear or non-linear. A good example of a non-linear presentation of story is Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).

-various shifts in plot can interrupt a linear telling: e.g. flashback (analepsis), flash forward (prolepsis), dream sequences, fragmented sequences (various characters with differing stories as in CITIZEN KANE orRASHOMON, 1950).

-discourse in cinema refers to more than the manner of setting out the plot: it also includes such things as camera position and composition (mise en scene), camera movement, cutting, casting and acting, lighting, sound, long takes/short takes.

Camera Position and Composition

-where the camera is positioned relative to what we see. Close to the action, politely distant from the action, removed from the action

-looking up at the people and place, looking down on the action and place, or looking directly at the action and place on a normal eye level.

-how are things arranged in the frame? Like painting, the cinema frames its images. It offers us a semiotic field. Our eye finds direction in what we see. In other words, the composition directs our sense of what is important within the frame. (An obvious feature here is the use or non-use of deep focus.)

Camera Movement

-does the camera track the action or does it simply record in a stationary position?

-does the camera pan horizontally or vertically, from a dolly or from a track?

-does the camera track from a hand-held camera or from a helicopter?

-is camera movement fluid or erratic?

-the wipe and the iris.

-how does the camera record the speed of the action? Slow motion, fast motion.

-the tracking shot from Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958)

-or any film by Robert Altman. Altman's camera prowls and scans and investigates and examines. It rarely remains stationary.

Cutting

-shot and scene: the shot is the specific picture we see at any moment as the film moves in front of us (the picture may be static or in motion); the scene is the collection of shots that form one sequence of action (a fight scene, for example, may be comprised of many shots. Check out Welles’s Chimes at Midnight).

-the close-up shot – from The Searchers (1956)

-left on the cutting room floor. Remember Kevin Costner and The Big Chill (1983).

-shooting out of synch, and then piecing the picture together – sort of like a jigsaw puzzle that you can create as you go along.

-classic cutting is unobtrusive, cutting away from a shot only after the business of that shot is over. In classic cutting, we see the action as “normally” as possible. Hollywood cinema from the 30s through the 60s most often used this type of cutting. In the wake of certain television shows and MTV, a different kind of cutting has taken prominence.

-quick cutting or montage may take more than one form, but essentially it involves cutting pieces of film into each other in a way that draws attention to the cutting itself. This type of cutting can be frenetic, as in many music videos.

-montage in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Casting and Acting

-casting has a degree of serendipity to it, but since the beginning of cinema, casting has been connected with celebrity. We sometimes speak of a film as an actor’s film (e.g. a Clint Eastwood film or a Bette Davis film, etc). The connection between the actor and the character is often intimate – Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft! That really is Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films. Some times an actor will play a character with the same name – hasn’t Jackie Chan done this? Or what about Being John Malkovich?

Often a film will cast against type – e.g. Collateral Damage with Tom Cruise or Once Upon a Time in the West with Henry Fonda. The force of the character comes from our knowledge and expectations of the actor.

-acting can take several forms from over-acting to method acting or inept acting to classical acting to silent acting. And sometimes, the camera does the acting.

Lighting

-the most obvious aspect of lighting comes in the difference between black and white filming and colour filming.

-neither black and white nor colour is one-dimensional. Lighting can make much difference in the black and white effect (see The Big Combo and Blonde Venus). As for colour, various colour effects are possible through the use of lighting and film stock. A film can accentuate one colour and de-accentuate others. The texture of the colour can change.

Sound

-silence, music, natural sound, voices.

Long takes/Short takes

Sample film: Tod Browning’s The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

Style

-now what about style?

-style derives from the manner in which a film uses technique. We might associate style with various components of a film: the director, the cinematographer, the actors, even the designers (see the work of William Cameron Menzies, for example – Things to Come 1936, The Maze 1953, Invaders from Mars 1954, and even Gone with the Wind 1939).

-director: often, perhaps most often, we think of style in film as the product of a director’s vision. Wes Anderson or Quentin Taratino have discernible styles that include such things as sensibility (difficult to define, but not impossible), use of colour, kinds of characters and stories (Howard Hawks worked in just about every genre, and yet he consistently shows an interest in similar types of men and women), use of camera (Robert Altman is noted for his almost continuously moving camera), use of sound and so on.

-cinematographer: the person who does the photographing can have an impact on the style of a film. John Alton who photographed The Big Combo can make a routine film special with his stylish lighting. Gregg Toland brings similar stylish flourishes to Citizen Kane. William Clothier has made many a mediocre film worth watching.

-actors: obviously actors can bring style to a film. We have distinctive actors such as Johnny Depp, Carrie Anne Moss, Kevin Spacey, Renee Zellwegger or Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford (alas!), Clark Gable who may or may not be fine actors, but who have something that lights up a screen. We also have the likes of Meryl Streep or Marlon Brando who can carry a film with the force of acting, a force that crosses over into style.

-style is what separates a film that is familiar in its use of conventions (amounting to cliché) from one that is unique.

RIO BRAVO (1959)

A Note on Epic
The question of definitions always irks me only because it is such a mug's game. We have to have a language to talk about whatever it is we talk about, and so we have legal language, medical language, sociological language, and so on and on. The study of the arts is no different. We have a language that is both consistent and inconsistent across the arts. Much of this language begins historically with literature (at least in western - that is, Eurocentric, cultures). Take, for example, "epic." This is a word that dates back to the Greeks who used the word to label long narrative poems on a grand scale (e.g. the Homeric epics, the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY– and we all know that the former was recently made into a movie with Brad Pitt!). Epics were about the adventures and the deeds of warriors and heroes. Epics employed myth and folklore and legend and history (is this beginning to sound a bit like SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON?) The epic in the sense I am using it here also has a nationalistic aspect. Homer's ILIAD is about the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Later Virgil writes a national epic for the Roman Emperor; this is the AENEID and it recounts the beginnings of the Roman empire. In English, we have Spenser's THE FAERIE QUEENE which relates to Arthur and the so-called "matter-of-Britain" (as does LA MORTE D'ARTHUR even earlier). I could go on and mention, for example, Derek Walcott's OMEROS (1990), an epic from the Caribbean. In the early days the epic contained specific conventions: the epic simile (works only in writing), the catalogue (in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON this occurs when Nathan recounts or catalogues the names of the soldiers killed with Custer), the epic epithet (standard and repeated descriptors - "rosy fingers of dawn," "the wine-dark sea," etc.), and the trip to the underworld. Epic usually takes the shape of a series of adventures or encounters with obstacles (monsters, temptresses, natural disasters). The big thing is scale. The epic is large in its sweep. It relates to what we now sometimes call "high fantasy." The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in either fiction or film form is a prime example. Despite periods when epic has little cultural purchase, it has never fully gone out of fashion in literature; we can find examples right up to our own day. Epics tend to be nationalistic and so they appear at times of national crisis. “The Lord of the Rings” cycle appeared at a time of cultural desire for support (post WW 2 and in the first years of this century 2001-2005). But the epic has certainly lost its place as the premier narrative art. And it has passed from the long poem into fiction (WAR AND PEACE), cinema, and perhaps the opera. Epic is grand, large, and sublime as opposed to modest, small, and beautiful.

The epic does appear in non-western art, notably in the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

In painting, we might include large historical canvases dealing with the likes of Hannibal or Napoleon and even Generals Wolf and Montcalm. I would probably include John Martin’s huge paintings or at least some of them in this category.

In cinema, epic has been around since the early days (see for example, Abel Ganz's NAPOLEON (1925) or D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1918)). It has usually been associated with "costume dramas" on a grand scale. Hollywood was interested in epic in the 1950s as a way of differentiating film from TV and keeping people coming to the cinema. Hollywood epic takes many subjects for its focus: the biblical epic, sagas of the Middle Ages and Knights of the Round Table and the Crusades and such, modern heroes such as Lawrence of Arabia, and other large-scale stories such as MOBY DICK or GONE WITH THE WIND. The one director most associated with the epic is Cecil B. DeMille who made many such films in the twenties and early thirties, including epic westerns (UNION PACIFIC, THE PLAINSMAN are two of these).

The western was also used for epic purposes. We have obvious examples: James Cruz's THE COVERED WAGON(1923), Raoul Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL (1930 and John Wayne's first starring role), THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), THE ALAMO (1960 and 2004). Not all westerns are epics. The films of Anthony Mann or Bud Boetticher, for example, are not epic. Films with or by Kevin Costner, however, tend to epic proportions – DANCES WITH WOLVES (199?), OPEN RANGE (2004). Epic needs grandeur and scale - HOW THE WEST WAS WON is a good example. In other words, most westerns are most likely not epic if we want to keep our definition strong. Our next film, for example, is not an epic. Hawks's RIO BRAVO is too internal and confined to be epic. Hawks and Ford are different in this way - Hawks is interested in individuals as they navigate small groups. He wants to understand something of their psychology. Ford, on the other hand, was interested in individuals as they merge into a group. He is less interested in psychology and more interested in the intersection between history and myth. In other words, Ford used epic conventions of myth, history, legend often on a grand scale - "guidons gaily flying, lusty men singing" and so on). Ford's visuals are carefully crafted to highlight shape and form and frame and the romance of land and animal and man. Hawks frames for more modest (and I do not mean any less "good") reasons.

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON is, I think, epic in size and intention. So too is THE SEARCHERS, although this is a very different film from YELLOW RIBBON.

I mention opera somewhere in this blog, and I might as well note that the Italian western (e.g. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) is unabashedly operatic. Epic and opera may go together, but not necessarily. Here, however, they do. “Spectacle” is important to opera. It too is grand and exaggerated, filled with colour and romance and broad action.

Now let me retreat: epic, like all categories is elusive and we may have films (e.g. THE WILD BUNCH) that may be or may not be epic. What do you think?

Howard Hawks and the western:
-Hawks made a few westerns. Although his output was modest, his influence was huge. He is also the director credited with making John Wayne an actor when he cast him in RED RIVER.
Hawks’s westerns:
Red River (1948)
The Big Sky (1952)
Rio Bravo (1959)
El Dorado (1966)
Rio Lobo (1970)
-the first two are epic; the last three are not, and they are usually thought to be a trilogy. I recommend EL DORADO, a film about aging and about pain.

Hawks’s themes:
-Hawks is probably thought to be a “western” director because of his interest in masculinity and male communities. See for example, the fliers in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939) or the big game hunters in HATARI! (1962). Hawks was known for his realism; that is, he had his actors actually do the riding, herding, working, catching big game, pulling boats, and so on.

-professionalism – Hawks’s men are often professionals (in one case, they are actually professors)
-the strong woman – see below
-the individual – the rugged individual who fights through adversity
-action as opposed to thought (see BALL OF FIRE, 1941)
-unlike Ford’s characters, Hawks’ characters work out their identities in local and personal ways rather than in conjunction with “nation.” (See the verbal jousting between Hildy and Walter in HIS GIRL FRIDAY.)

Hawksian Woman:
-both Ford and Hawks take an interest in women. Ford’s women are more often than not keepers of the home fires. They are domestic, and they represent the stability of home and family and civilization. We have exceptions, of course (see Ford’s SEVEN WOMEN 1966) or MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND 1936), but more often than not the woman is associated with the garden, the house, the east, marriage and motherhood. Hawks’s women are notable for their toughness. They attempt to get inside the male community, to be one of the boys, as it were. See Jean Arthur in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS or Barbara Stanwyck in BALL OF FIRE (1941). In RIO BRAVO, the girl who infiltrates the male group is Feathers (Angie Dickinson). She discombobulates the Sheriff, Chance. She makes him uncomfortable. She also helps to protect him. She must, because she is a woman, remain to some extent outside the male group, but she proves her worth. In the end, she proves worthy to be a helpmate/sidekick to Chance. In the film she is associated with both Colorado (youth) and Carlos (the Mexican), and this is a familiar grouping of woman with the “other.” The point here, perhaps, is that these usually ineffective (and sometimes fearful or caricatured) others are necessary to the hero’s survival and safety. The hero cannot (or does not) stand alone.

RIO BRAVO:
-the film is a parody of HIGH NOON (1952). HIGH NOON was an anti McCarthy film in which a sheriff, on his wedding day, faces four very bad guys (Frank Miller and his 3 henchmen) who come on the noon train. Rather than flee, he stays, against the wishes of his new wife, to face the baddies. He tries, vainly, to find help among the towns people. They refuse to stand up for what is right. The sheriff faces the bad guys alone or almost alone. RIO BRAVO reverses this situation. Here the towns people come forward to offer the sheriff help, but he keeps turning them down because they are not professional enough. Despite turning them down, he gets help anyway!

-it is also something of an anti-western, taking place mostly in claustrophobic places: hotel rooms, bars, the jail, the livery stable. Like HIGH NOON, RIO BRAVO is not so much interested in the myth of the west as it is interested in the question of ethics. Who is right and who is wrong? How should a community act when faced with peril? What is the responsibility of the professional policeman? What kind of person does it take to be a law enforcer? The characters are cowboys, but we are less interested in them as cowboys than as people in a tight situation. Whereas Ford’s SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON is necessarily a story of the “west,” RIO BRAVO is a story that just happens to take place in the west.

The characters:
the hero – John T. Chance (John Wayne)
His name might suggest that he represents “fate” or some such thing. He’s a guy who will take a chance (on luck, on love, on friendship, on being able to stave off the bad guys until the Marshall arrives). He is big, confident, capable, stubborn, consistent, reliable, and like his hat – a bit battered. He is self- reliant. He is the hegemonic male – except that he is not as self reliant as he thinks he is.


the borrachin – Dude (Dean Martin)
The friend who has been jilted by a woman, and who has, as a consequence, descended into self-pity and abjection. As “abject,” he is outside community, a laughing stock, worthless, and weak. His story is the story of confidence regained. He needs an injection of self-respect.

the old man – Stumpy (Walter Brennan), one of a line of limpers. His limp associates his with infirmity but also with the earth, nature, old verities. He is as old and strong as the earth. Stumpy reminds us of change and mortality – human weakness that is itself a strength. He does, after all, save the day when he brings the dynamite.



the woman – Feathers (Angie Dickinson)

-Feathers, as her name might suggest, is the sexual focus of the film. She represents the libido just as much as she represents female strength. More often than not, we see Feathers and Chance in her hotel room (she is closely associated with hotels and what they represent in the world of the cowboy). The frame often shows them separated by distance and by the doorframe and the stove pipe in the foreground. This distance is what Feathers has come to displace. She has him cornered, boxed in. She takes on the moral stiffness of Chance and breaks through his tough exterior. He gives her masculine strength and she gives him feminine warmth. The sexuality we can assume they will enjoy has nothing, or appears to have nothing, to do with domesticity. Feathers is not out to tame Chance, but rather to participate with him in enjoying each other. Her change of clothes from what we see above to the dance hall garb she later wears (see picture below) signals her erotic motive.

the young man – Colorado (Ricky Nelson)
what to say about this character? [In passing, I note that films of this time made a habit of showcasing young pop stars from the music world. The most obvious example is Elvis Presley, but we also have films with the likes of Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Jerry Lee Lewis, and you can most likely think of one or two others (e.g. Pat Boone).] Colorado is reminiscent of Billy the Kid in that he is young, a fast gun, cocky, and associated with a big cattleman, Wheeler (Ward Bond). (Billy the Kid was involved in the Lincoln County Cattle Wars in New Mexico on the side of John Tunstall.) He is young, but principled. He tries to stay out of the fracas, but he finds he cannot when he sees Chance tricked into a situation in which he (Chance) will have to get himself killed. Rather than see a good man go down, Colorado helps out and thereby finds himself involved in the situation. Shades of U.S. non-involvement before the second world war? Where Stumpy is the past, Colorado is the future.

-these are the five main characters, but we have several other important characters:
hotel man – Carlos Robante (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez)
the friend – Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond)
the villain – Nathan Burdette (John Russell)
the villain’s brother – Joe Burdette (Claude Akins)

-the film works as a dynamic examination of the interactions of the characters. At the center is Chance.

The Hero:
Chance is mentor to Dude
Chance is caregiver to Stumpy
Chance is father figure to Colorado
Chance is nervous roué (or a roué manqué) to Feathers
Chance is cared for by Feathers, Colorado, Dude, Stumpy, Carlos
-the trick is that the hero appears to be in control and alone – one man standing against the collective might of the villain – but in fact he is aided by a rag-tag assortment of ostensibly weak characters – an old man, a drunk, a kid, a woman, and so on.

[Clint Eastwood’s THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES 1976 does something similar with its hero. And then we have John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 1976, a film that is clearly a homage to RIO BRAVO.]

Chance is the moral center of the film
-he stands for duty, justice, the law, and professional pride.
-his morality manifests itself in his relationship to Dude: friendship and strength (“Sorry don’t get it done, Dude”)
-his morality manifests itself in his sense of civic duty and justice: his refusal to bend to pressure from Burdette
-his morality manifests itself in his relationship to Feathers: his disapproval of her clothing and her means of making a living

Dude, on the other hand, is the psychological center of the film.
-he is clearly a temporary alcoholic. His alcoholism appears to be a result of self-pity. His self-respect has crashed because he was jilted by a woman – a no good woman, as Chance would have it. Dude needs to find self-respect; he finds it within the male group.

-the opening sequence in which Dude grovels for money shows us how low he has sunk. He is just about to put his hand into a cuspador when a foot appears and knocks it away. The camera looks down on Dude and up at Chance; the one character has fallen low and the other is morally upright, stiff as a board. Chance looks down at Dude with both disgust and friendship. Dude, for his part, is so abject that he strikes his best friend – probably for two reasons: 1) to get the drink he desperately wants/needs, and 2) to register is own self-disgust. Striking Chance is tantamount to striking himself.

Unlike EL DORADO in which the cure for alcoholism is physical, RIO BRAVO focuses on a psychological approach to alcoholism. Dude pours his drink back into the bottle when he hears the Deguello (the death song).

The Deguello: played by the Mexican army on March 6, 1836 before the attack on the Alamo by Santa Anna. The music means, take no prisoners. In RIO BRAVO, the Deguello reinforces the resolve of the good guys to hold out at all costs; it brings them closer together as a group. It also gives the bad guys an edge of “otherness.” The bad guys are a threat from outside (both literally and figuratively).

-the death song reminds Dude of what is at stake here: justice, freedom, democracy, but most importantly friendship.

Music is important in the film because it is a reminder of friendship/comradeship.

“My Rifle My Pony and Me” – the performance of this song (followed by “Cindy, Cindy”) serves as an interlude in the film. But it is not a throwaway. The scene enacts the relationships of the film. Stumpy, Dude, and Colorado form a trio (Stumpy plays harmonica), while Chance remains on the periphery. Dude, Colorado, and Stumpy are a group, but the hero remains outside the group, appreciating it but not participating in it. We might remember how often Chance refuses the help of others. He positions himself on the periphery here and in the town.

The song speaks of friendship between a rifle, a pony, and the singer. But it also speaks of a love to return to. In other words, the song ties into the plot. The plot gives us a hero who has a rifle and a pony, and who is in the process of finding a girl. The point is that in a strong film everything serves a plot and a thematic purpose. The song’s meaning is opposite to that of the “Deguello.”

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

This is not a western; it is an epic. And it needs epic proportions. One aspect of these epic proportions is colour and density. The filming of Monument Valley in this film is breathtaking, and we should see it as breathtaking. The characters inhabit a landscape that is huge and dominating. Out of this land come danger and elemental forces that only the most courageous and even pathologic men can face. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of the land in this film. Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) says that Texicans are human men way out on a limb, but that once many of their bones are in the ground “this place will be a fine good place to be.” She might have said Texicans are human men and women out on a limb, but she knew her place. In any case, Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen) does not blame Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) for the death of his son Brad (Harry Carey, Jr.), because he believes that it is “this land” that is responsible for Brad’s death (“Oh, Ethan, this country...”). The land is hard, primitive, arid, wild, mysterious, and dangerous. And most of all, it is large and defined by colour and shading and brilliant skies. We have to see this. This is landscape as sublime, in the Burkean sense of a landscape that signifies pain and terror. It represents the limit of human thought and activity. The land is harsh but also compelling. It has a spiritual dimension. Men and women and animals die here, but they also create life here. This is a land of possibility, as Mrs. Jorgensen suggests, and it is a land of regressive desire. It is redolent of a distant past, and it is poised toward a future. This is limbo land. It is a border between times and places. This land represents both something to tame and something that cannot be tamed. It contains humans within an alien space; it looks like a moonscape at times. It suggests primeval time, the world in its beginnings. Human beings who are part of this land (the natives and Ethan and, for a time, Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) are frightening in their willingness to engage in violent acts. Ethan and Scar/Cicatrice (Henry Brandon) are the two characters most closely associated with the land. Scar, leader of a band of Comanches (“say they will go one way, then they go t’other.”), is a mysterious chief whose name causes tension whenever someone mentions it. Scar and his people come and go unpredictably; they are not fixed to a place. We learn that Scar has a reason for hating white people; his sons have been killed by white men. He is the double of Ethan whose family has been killed by Indians. We can see these characters as doubles in the scene in which Ethan tries to stare Scar down, and says to him: “You speak good American, for a Comanch. Someone teach you?” A moment later, Scar remarks: “You speak good Comanch, for a white man. Someone teach you?”). Each knows the ways of the other; they taunt each other. Ethan speaks Spanish and Comanche; he knows the ways of the Comanche. He is a creature of the land, as his association with dogs and horses might indicate. And he is crazy with hatred of the Indian, just as Scar is crazy with hatred of white people. These two men are larger than life and they need a larger than life space in which to function; they are both “scarred” by their pathologies. In effect, each of these men “wanders forever between the winds.” They can have no home if we think of home as a place of circumscribed space, or a place in which to settle. Ethan walks away from the Jorgensen home at the end of the film, and the door shuts him out.

Monument Valley echoes with time in this film. It is haunted. It is a land time forgot. It reflects unconscious forces, the deep well of desire and the perversions desire can seek. The journey of the characters in this film is as much a journey to the interior as it is a journey across the American southwest. This is an inner landcscape.

And so we need to see epic space in order to understand at an emotional level the size of these people, and the intensity of their quests. As in all epics, the plot here involves a quest, the five-year quest to find Debbie Edwards (Lana Wood/Natalie Wood). In the end, two men accomplish their quest. Ethan makes clear that they will accomplish their end “just as sure as the turnin’ o’ the earth.” Ethan’s resolve is elemental, just as certain as night turning into day or summer into winter. He is a force of nature; he just keeps coming on. The question is, why? Why is Ethan so hell-bent on finding Scar? At the beginning perhaps we can say that he and the small band of Rangers hope to find the girls alive. But even then, we know that Ethan is intent on riding the Comanches down, fully aware that to do so will mean that the Comanches will kill the girls. As time goes on, of course, he knows that Lucy (Pippa Scott) is dead, and that Debbie has been taken into the band of Comanche people as one of them. Then it becomes clear that Ethan’s only purpose is to “put a bullet” in Debbie’s brain (“Martha would want him to,” says Laurie (Vera Miles)). Why is he so intent on killing Debbie? Well, the answer is that he hates the Indians, and he thinks that Debbie has been transformed from white person to native person; she has been tainted, sullied by contact with the native peoples. This is clear. Miscegenation is the theme of this film, and it is something Ethan detests. Why does he hate the natives, and why does he hate the thought of miscegenation? We know that his mother has been killed by Indians, and we know that his brother and his family have also been killed by Indians. And yet his rage is pathological. He shoots buffalo just to keep food from the Indians. He looks with scorn and rage and disgust and hatred at the white women who have been rescued, and he scowls: “They ain’t white. At least not any more.” He is, in short, a racist. This is fine, but we might still ask why? Why does he hate with such vehemence? Revenge is one thing, and absolute and irrational hatred is another. Even after Scar is dead, killed not by Ethan but by Marty, Ethan scalps him. This is an act of desecration, violation, a sign of Ethan’s extreme hatred of this Indian leader. And then, if he hates with such immensity, why does he not carry out his resolve to kill Deborah when he catches up with her at the end of the film? Is the end of the film just a Hollywood happy ending? Or does it make sense in terms of the character of Ethan and what we experience in the film? What Ethan fears is, ultimately, himself. He is his very ‘other.’ He and Scar are two sides of the same identity, and Ethan hates the Scar side of himself. He wants to eradicate this, and once Scar is eradicated, Ethan is no longer whole. He needs to reconcile his two selves, but this does not happen. No reconciliation takes place for Ethan as a subject, He may renounce his desire to kill Debbie, but he cannot live a half person with others, just as he could not live with others when he was a double self. Ethan’s fate is “to wander forever between the winds.”

Like so many of Ford’s films, THE SEARCHERS celebrates the human capacity for survival. This theme surfaces early in the film in the conversation between Ethan and his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), when Aaron tells of others who have gone back east, and how his wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) just wouldn’t let a man quit. Perhaps this theme is best expressed in the character of Laurie. She has waited years for Martin Pawley to propose to her. She expresses her frustration and dissatisfaction with the life she leads. Having nowhere to go, she finally agrees to marry Charlie McCorry (Ken Curtis). We know that she does not love Charlie, but a young woman has to survive out on the frontier somehow. We might also consider her parents. Lars obviously has come to America from Scandinavia. His wife has been a schoolteacher (“she’s a schoolteacher, by golly.”), but they now live out here on the edge of things – out on a limb, as Mrs. Jorgensen says. Their house is larger and more architecturally elaborate (note the patterned woodwork on the porch) than the Edwards’s place. Clearly, they are trying to bring a touch of civilization to this outpost. We never do see a town in the film, and the forts that Ethan and Marty visit seem a long way from the Jorgensen’s or the Edwards’s places. One of the nicest touches in the film is Lars’s use of glasses. He cannot read, but whenever someone else reads a letter, he puts his glasses on. This gesture suggests that he ‘sees’ reading as important, an activity separate from his usual activities. He puts his glasses on as a gesture of respect for reading, even though he does not read. He also protects letters, taking the one Laurie had tried to burn and placing it in his pocket. Reading seems far removed from the necessities of life out on the frontier; nevertheless, it is crucial. The letter Jerem Futterman (Peter Mamakos) writes eventually leads Ethan and Marty to Debbie. The letter Martin writes leads to Laurie’s decision to accept Charlie’s proposal. Letters and reading suggest a new way of life coming to the frontier, and we know this way of life will remain; it will survive the vagaries of the land and its dangers. (Ford extends this theme later in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.)

We know that Ethan can read. He reads better than Martin. He reads in more than one sense. He reads letters and he can write his last will and testament in something resembling legal language. He can also read signs. He knows a Comanche lance when he sees one. He knows what the dead bull means (and by the way, the killing of the cattle is an act as ugly as Ethan’s killing of the buffalo later in the film). He can read Look’s (Beulah Archulette) reaction when she hears the name Scar. He can read the intentions of a man like Futterman. And yet with all his skill at reading, he is left behind by the coming civilization. He has no place in the social group. We might ask why he remains outside the group even after he has changed his resolve and returned Debbie to the Jorgensen place? Why does he not shoot her? A number of reasons come to mind. First, Debbie is Martha’s daughter. We see him lift her when he first returns to the Edwards’s home at the beginning of the film. He lifts her the same way at the end just before he says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” He learns during the five-year search for her that Martin Pawley is a good person, despite being an eighth (or is it a quarter? Ethan’s assertion is hardly a mistake.) Cherokee. Martin quite literally removes the poison from Ethan, and Ethan is prepared to leave all his worldly goods to him. The scalping of Scar serves as a ritual cathartic, purging Ethan of his hatred; the scalping is the only ritual Ethan participates in and he does so privately. Seeing Debbie cringe in fear moves him to change his resolve. And so we might conclude that Ethan is not the same demented person at the end of the film that he was at the beginning and through much of the action. And yet we know that he is a man marked by mystery. He belongs nowhere. He has this mysterious past. He has not changed his sword into a ploughshare, and he believes in taking only one oath at a time and his is to a lost cause, a war over and done with for everyone but him. He lives in the past, not for the future. He lives with an unrequited love. He is, in short, marked by something – call it a sin or an evil or a wrong choice – that keeps him from full partnership in the human community. This is why he has a special relationship with Mose Harper (Hank Worden), the half crazy old galoot who also knows how to survive (he eats dirt and pretends to be crazy when the Indians capture him). And even Mose joins the community at the end by succumbing to his insanity; he may be off his rocker, but he finally gets the rocker he wants. He won’t tell Ethan where the Indians are camped, but he will tell Marty (“Seven fingers, Marty. Seven fingers.”) Ethan is insane but not insane. He succumbs to nothing but his own iron resolve. Even at the end, he tells Clayton (Ward Bond) that there are about half a dozen Indians for each of the Rangers, “enough to go around.” Ethan, like his brother, has a biblical name. These two are Old Testament figures, members of the wandering tribes of Israel, although Aaron (brother of Moses) is a priest of the Israelites. Ethan is associated with music (possibly the author of the 89th Psalm). The names are not particularly precise, but they do locate these figures in a chronotope of search for a promised land.

References to belief systems run throughout the film. Ethan explains what the Comanche believe about death and the spirit world. We have the two Christian rituals of death (funeral service) and marriage (wedding dance). At both the funeral and the wedding musicians play, or the people sing, the same piece of music: “We Shall Gather at the River.” The Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton is also a Captain of the Texas Rangers. Religion and law go together. And religion and law are two things Ethan does not accept. Religion and law are marks of civilization. Both are associated with ritual, and ritual is also a mark of civilization. Even Marty and Charlie fight in a ritual manner, and Clayton keeps warning them not to cheat by biting or gouging. The clashes between white men and Indian that we see in the film also have the quality of ritual (the ritual putting on the war bonnet before the Indians charge). Indeed, the entire film has a ritual quality, beginning and ending with shots that echo each other. Standing outside the various rituals – even violating ritual -- is Ethan Edwards. We also have at least two other violations of ritual: the attack on the Edwards’s ranch and the slaughter of the native village (a scene that is reminiscent of the Sand Creek massacre). In other words, the wholesale slaughter of innocent people by either side is condemned in this film. We might remember that the cavalry are not always innocent or even ethical in their actions, and Scar and his group are not representative of the entire Comanche nation. Violence is not celebrated in this film.

We might also consider money and its uses in the film. From the look of things, money is not in great abundance on the frontier. It is also not necessary on the frontier since the ranchers seem to make a living from the land. And yet the opening scenes make clear that money is important. Ethan has a couple of bags of newly minted double eagles – gold coins that are obviously worth a lot. His brother shows his self-interest (greed?) when Ethan gives him the money. Aaron does not spend much thought as to where Ethan has got his money, and Martha seems anxious that no one probe too deeply into what Ethan has been up to for the past three years. Then we have Futterman who is obviously interested in money, even if he has to write letters to get it. Or even if he has to kill to get it. Money leads to criminal activity. Or we could say that money is just what serves as capital in a good market-influenced society. Money reminds us of capital. Capital for the Natives takes the form of goods such as blankets, hats, cigars, blue prize ribbons, and so on. Ethan wants to trade goods for information, but Martin ends up trading for a wife. The bartering for various things is a rudimentary sort of economic activity. What Martin’s mistake shows is the importance of communication in such economic dealings.

What do you make of Look’s role in this film?

Aside from the shots of Monument Valley, what is most distinctive about the filming of this film? For me, two aspects of the filming are noticeable. First, and most obvious, are the many doorways that frame things: the opening and closing doorway shots, the first time we see Martin as he dismounts easily from his horse and we see him through the doorway, the doorway through which we see Lucy and Brad kissing, the framing of Ethan in shadow of the doorway as he looks inside the burning building at the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law, the open teepee doorways (once when they find Look’s body, later when they sit inside Scar’s teepee, and still later when Marty rescues Debbie), and the distinct cave opening that is reminiscent of a doorway when Martin and Ethan escape from the “hostiles” in New Mexico. Have I forgotten any? Well, perhaps. We have clear use of a door in the scene in which Martin and Charlie fight when Ethan guides Mrs. Jorgensen inside the house and shuts the door on her. She just goes to the window and leans out, but this simply reinforces the framing motif and takes us back to the beginning when Debbie leaves the Edwards’s place through the window and her mother falls prostrate over the sill. And we might collects other doors – at the fort when Ethan and Martin see the rescued white women, in the New Mexico canteen, in Futterman’s place, the double doorway when Ethan, sitting outside on his brother’s porch looks back inside and sees his brother enter the bedroom to go to sleep with Martha, and the doors that the Reverend Clayton kicks shut and leaves from in the opening breakfast scene.

Mention of the opening breakfast scene allows me to segue into the second aspect that strikes me as important in the filming. This is when, at the end of the breakfast scene (which itself is amazing), Clayton stands at the table holding a donut and a mug of coffee. He looks to his left and sees through the bedroom door Martha picking up Ethan’s coat. As he watches, she strokes the coat affectionately (something early viewers of the film did not seem to notice). Then she comes back into the dining room and we have a scene in which no dialogue occurs and the viewer must watch two simultaneous actions – one is the stance of Clayton and his eyes as he stares intently forward, and the other is what goes on behind him when Ethan takes his coat from Martha and then leans down to kiss her on the forehead. Ethan then leaves, Clayton turns and he turns away from Martha so that he never does make eye contact with her as he departs through the door. She leaves her hand raised as if in futile gesture to caress the now departed Ethan. This is a remarkable scene. Clayton has respected the privacy of Martha and Ethan. Ethan and Martha have respected Clayton’s presence and their own position as brother and sister-in-law. And Ethan and Martha have expressed their own love. Nothing needs to be said in this scene and yet so much body language communicates more than words can say. First Ethan, and then Clayton depart through the door and this is the last they will see of Martha Edwards alive. Something we might note here concerning doors: doors shut out the outside; they are defenses from outside threat. But we learn that they are easily broken defenses.

And so we come back to doorways. The doorway reminds us of that which separates. Doors are reminders of passageways in and out, in and out both literally and figuratively. In John 10: 7-9, Jesus calls himself a door. In a film so resolutely about passage (from this life to another, from one state of being to another through marriage, from a wild past to a civilized future), the doors are reminders of the way—I mean this in the Biblical sense of the way to the Promised Land. Doors are also reminders of how vulnerable such a way is. Doors may be broken. From another perspective, doors, like windows, also frame characters. The frame is a richly ambiguous reminder of how circumscribed the lives of these people are. The frames belie the openness and freedom of the big sky and the far horizons. Only by being framed can people find safety and community. People need to be contained within structures, whether these structures be concrete (towns, forts, or ranches), or abstract (marriage, the law, believe systems and rituals). One thing noticeable in this film is the relative absence of fences. The front of the Jorgensen ranch appears to have no fence; it simply merges with the expansive landscape of Monument Valley, as unfettered horses wander about water holes. We do see a fence when Martin takes Laurie’s horse to follow Ethan. The fence is clearly visible because Laurie leans upon it as we see Martin ride away behind her. She leans on the fence for support—at this point in the story, she really does need support, something that Charlie McCorry will also offer to her. Ford often uses the fence (we have a clear instance of this in both STAGECOACH and MY DARLING CLEMENTINE) as a borderline, the thing that separates civilization from the wilderness. Here the fence separates (not literally when we watch the scene, but strongly figuratively) Laurie from that which she has waited and wished for- marriage with Marin Pawley.

Martin rides off to catch Ethan. And eventually Martin will kill Scar. Why have Martin kill Scar and not Ethan? The act of violence that results in Scar’s death is “justifiable” because Martin acts in self-defense. What follows is not justifiable – the raid on the Indian encampment. In this raid, we see an innocent mother and child shot. The raid reminds us of the earlier raid in which Look was murdered. Violence, the film seems to say, is irrational, an aspect of life lived without reason. Take for example, the scene in which the Indians attack the Rangers across the river. As they retreat, Clayton says let them carry off their dead, but Ethan continues to fire his rifle until Clayton physically stops him (“Well, that tears it, Reverend,” Ethan spits out. He uses the word “Reverend” rather than “Captain” to show his contempt.). Ethan’s savage shooting marks him as wild, uncontrolled, irrational. He is marked by violence. The scene in which he tells Brad that Lucy is dead serves to clinch his impossible connection to violence; he remains passive as Brad rides off to his death. Brad’s act is as irrational as anything in the film, and Ethan lets him go accepting Brad’s need to succumb to violence. But let’s return to Martin. Ethan gives him reason to want to kill Scar when he tells Martin that one of the scalps they saw on Scar’s lance was that of his mother. Martin pauses and then says, “But that don’t matter.” This is a crucial moment in the film. Ethan’s motive has had something to do with vengeance since the beginning, and he expects Martin to seek vengeance too. But Martin renounces vengeance. He is a man of peace, not a man of violence. When he shoots Indians at the river early in the film, he breaks down and cries and Old Mose takes his rifle to continue the shooting. Martin can look to a future with the Jorgensen family (Lars never carries a gun), whereas Ethan can only remain part of the wild and irrational land that has witnessed so much bloodshed.

The structure of THE SEARCHERS, beginning and ending with the same (or a similar) shot, gives the film a classic form. The plot is circular, taking the characters away from home and returning them to home at the end. This is the plot of THE ODYSSEY. The hero moves away from home, leaving a woman and family behind, and returns to make a life with that woman and family. In between the initial departure and the final return, the hero faces many challenges, even descending into the underworld where the encounter with death is most intense. The structure gives the film an overall frame, but it may also create some artificiality in the action. Why, for example, should Scar and his people return to the area of an earlier crime just at the end when Marty and Ethan return to interrupt the wedding? The hero in this case is ambiguous, in two senses: both Marty and Ethan are heroic, and Ethan’s heroism is anti-human.

What role does the Cavalry play in this film? The easy answer is that the film makes fun of the cavalry, especially in the person of Lieutenant Greenhill (Patrick Wayne). But our answer should be complicated by the very medium of film itself. Film differs from literature in significant ways, one of which has to do with the fact that we often (if not always) know the characters on the screen in a double sense. We know Ethan Edwards as a character who takes part in certain actions in the plot; in other words, we know Ethan as one of the actants in the diegesis. But our viewing is complicated because we also know that Ethan is John Wayne and John Wayne brings to the screen a whole range of meanings that are outside this film. The same is true of most of the “stars” who perform in films. In the recent film, MR AND MRS SMITH, we know the eponymous characters as characters, but we also know them as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Consequently we are seeing double when we watch actors (or some actors) on screen. And so we might know that Lieutenant Greenhill is also Patrick Wayne, son of John Wayne. And the actor young Greenhill most interacts with is Ward Bond, close friend of John Wayne off screen. We might extend this to the whole Ford company in this film, and we then add a dimension to our viewing of the film. But what has this to do with the cavalry? Well, Patrick Wayne plays a cavalry officer, a role his father John Wayne had played in three previous Ford films (and in at least one more to follow). And so the relationship of this film to other Wayne films and other cavalry films is evident. Here the tone is parodic; Ford and his actors are having fun with a theme they have used seriously in earlier films. But the fun is parodic rather than satiric. In other words, Ford continues to show sympathy for the cavalry, although he does so in a gently humourous manner. The humour cuts across yet another dimension of the cavalry in this film: they are murderous. In other words again, the ambiguity apparent in the hero Ethan is also apparent in the heroic Cavalry. Ambiguity is the watchword for this film. It is deeply ambiguous, bordering on tragedy. Ford is beginning to examine values he has held for many years and to see some of these values in a darker light than he had once done.

Oh, by the way, New Mexico became a state in 1912. It was proclaimed a territory (much larger than the later State of New Mexico) in 1850, 18 years before the action of the film.

Jean-Luc Godard WEEKEND (1967)

This is among the small number of Godard’s films that received commercial success. But the film is by no definition “popular.” It sets out to be anything but popular, if by popular we mean a film that attracts a wide audience, deals with familiar storylines in familiar ways, and makes a lot of money. WEEKEND does none of these things. It attracts a limited audience, deals with familiar storylines in unfamiliar ways, and made not a lot of money. It fits, perhaps, the Russian formalist idea of “defamiliarization.” This is not precise, but it does twig us to the film’s desire to reconfigure our sense of reality. WEEKEND gives us something we had not expected – even now 40 years after it was made. It tests the limits of what film – narrative film – can do. It combines action with contemplation, movement with stillness, word and image, sound and silence, music and noise, sense and nonsense, realism and fantasy, past and present, and montage and mise en scene.

Godard invokes both Lautreamont and Lewis Carroll, important 19th century precursors of surrealism, and he makes his point even clearer by invoking 20th century surrealists such as Breton, Bunuel, and Bataille. Surrealism challenges reason and progress based on class division. It attacks sentimental bourgeois beliefs that mask a rapacious self-interest. It attacks an art that is driven by realism, and the sense that reality can be known. It challenges common sense. One of the two protagonists in the film (Roland) remarks that he is in a rotten film because he only meets crazy people. These crazy people test the limits of realism and ask us to reconsider what is real. Another layer of the film suggests that as long as we accept enlightenment values of utilitarianism, we are bound to descend into barbarism. The film foregrounds the chaos and carnage and uncaring lack of community in modern life. Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte represent a past that was at least thought-provoking, but our protagonists burn poor Emily. The surrealist edge to WEEKEND is both a sign of its satire of popular art and, paradoxically, its attempt to attract the popular mind. Remember one of the writers invoked is Lewis Carroll, author of the children’s classic ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Surrealism was attracted to Carroll because of his combination of play, nonsense, satire, childhood, and a celebration of the body as both physical and spiritual.

At one point in the film, the protagonists come across a troup of Italian actors. These actors remind us of Grand Guignol, as well as Commedia del arte – forms of art that foreground violence and the carnivalesque. Godard’s film celebrates, while at the same time it castigates, the grotesque lower bodily strata. It finds humour in the grotesque.

And yes, Godard’s film is a popular film. One reason for this is its insistence on populism, pornography, popularity, and pop. I mean by populism that the film is interested in class and the conflict between classes, and although it seems resolutely neutral in its presentation of the classes as corrupt, it also has sympathy, if it has any sympathy, with the populist classes (see especially the scene in which we listen, along with those in the film, to Mozart). I mean by pornography that the film is interested in pornographic displays to a degree that would make Bataille take note. The opening sequence and later when the cook break eggs over the woman’s opened legs and then inserts a fish in the same place are pornographic in the sense that they distance sex from us, place it as a performance that tests the limits of our patience and our imagination. This is pornography that does not set out to arouse in the usual sense, but rather to challenge our jaded sense of morality. Surrealism was interested in pornography as an expression of the futility and decadence of a system we call capitalist. I mean by popularity that the film does seek an audience; it does not simply defy its audience to accept it. It draws us in, especially by its comic moments. It is a funny film, even when the comedy turns abruptly to something horrific. Surrealism employed a dark humour, a comedy of the grotesque. And finally, I mean by pop that the film has a connection with the Pop Art movement we associate with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, and others in the 1960s. It has what today we might call “product placement (e,g, Shell Oil truck, advertisements for Esso, a variety of cars, mention of Gitanes, and a Hermees’ handbag), but Godard uses such brand names and their signs not to ‘sell” them, but rather to undermine them. He empties such signs of meaning by investing them with negative meaning. Surrealism has a tendency to move us to the surface of things. In short, this is a film that debunks popularity of a variety of kinds. Perhaps I should also add popular psychoanalysis. Early in the film, an inter-title sets up the word “analysis” as “ANAL YSE.” Throughout the film, Godard takes an interest in shit, the anus, garbage, waste, detritus, offal – the stuff of decomposition.

But analysis itself is invoked in the opening scene in which the woman tells of her sexual encounter with a man and a woman. What we observe is a bizarre analysis, reminding us of both the psychiatrist’s “talking cure” and of classic painting in which we see fully-clothed males and semi-clad or nude females. This opening allusion to psychoanalysis returns near the end of the film with the words “Totem” and “Tabou” flashed on the screen – a reference to one of Freud’s works.

But my point is too easy. The notion of pop works another way. Take, for instance, the mention of such popular films as JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS. The revolutionary group in the woods uses these titles for their two-way radio names. Mention of these two Hollywood westerns reminds us of Hollywood and commercialism, non-canonical works, popular film genre, and film’s ability to reach a wider audience than most art forms. Both JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS are films that offer the viewer formal beauty, a formal beauty that we might compare to the formal beauties of painting or music. The co-opting of these titles by the revolutionaries suggests the inadequacies of the films to civilize. If art is supposed to make those who admire it urbane, then something has gone wrong here. The revolutionaries also use BATTLESHIP POTEMPKIN and THE ATONEMENT OF GOSTA BERLING (a 1923 film by Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo’s first important film) in conjunction with JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS to suggest the way film brings together both highbrow and lowbrow. Film is perhaps the second democratic art. And yet here film titles serve the purposes of a cannibalistic group of barbarians who live in the woods and eat their enemies. What good is art in a world like this?

Finally, we have Godard’s insistence that the popular is political. Whatever this film may have to say about art and modernity, it clearly has much to say about the state of modern life. It takes familiar plot lines from popular cinema – the road movie, the murder movie, the musical, the historical movie, the movie about revolution – and uses these to plot the decline of western civilization. WEEKEND begins with the modern capitalist state, then moves back through a sort of military democracy, until it arrives at a revolutionary state in which barbarism seems the fate of humanity. We move from scenes of human brutality that are funny (the first scenes of road rage), to scenes of carnage that we pass over in a desensitized manner (our protagonists do not appear to see the carnage and later they take things from the dead without a shred of hesitation), to scenes difficult to watch because they show the slaughter of animals (a chicken and a pig). While Godard is showing the decline of humanity and civilization, he is also manipulating the viewer into a position from which he or she can only be shocked. Why are we not as horrified by the deaths of people in car crashes as we are in the slaughter of animals for food? The movement of the plot is retrograde, backwards, towards decline and degeneration. And yet the movement to cannibalism merely makes clear the condition of the human condition under capitalism – under capitalism, the oppressor devours the oppressed. The captains of industry are vampires sucking the life-blood of the workers.

Another aspect of the popular is the car. The car is perhaps the ultimate image of modernity and capitalism. It has a long history in the cinema as a kenotype (a “new form,’ in contrast to the archetype, which is an old form). Its connection in this film with money, with escape or the impossibility of escape, with sex and death, with gridlock, with class, with industrialism and the machine, with brutalism, with rage and anxiety, with all the symptoms of modern malaise, and with apocalypse is clear. The car is a petit objet a; that is, it represents the thing that organizes desire, and yet it is illusory. The car is a fantasy, a symptom of our desire for fulfillment, and an indication that fulfillment is always receding, just like the road ahead that quickly becomes the road behind. It represents a futile attempt to fill in for the emptiness of life, in the way that money too does the same thing. What price do we have to pay to go through all these things twice? The wrecked cars and the cars ablaze remind us of the Real that threatens to destroy the delicate and vulnerable reality we try to create around ourselves.
One final note here: the inter-titles in the film (“Film found on a dump heap;” “End of Film – End of World,” and so on) are reminiscent of Situationist pronouncements. “Beginning is Flamboyance, especially in film” is another statement that reminds us of the Situationist’s interest in spectacle. Spectacle, according to the Situationists, replaces reality. We are surrounded by spectacles that only pretend to be real; real life has retreated. Only an art that decries modernity’s interest in and creation of spectacle can be revolutionary. Only an art that abolishes the notion of art as a separate and rarified activity, can be real art. In other words, art is a people’s art (i.e. popular). I think we can argue that WEEKEND both presents a spectacle and is critical of spectacle. For example, all the scenes of crashed and burning cars remind us of a staple of the spectacular in Hollywood films from very early on – the car crash. WEEKEND, however, does not show us the crash, only the aftermath. The point is to debunk the spectacle and to point out the unfeeling horror of what we see. I know that Guy Debord did not champion Godard’s A bout de soufflé (1959; trans. Breathless), but Godard obviously knew about Debord and by 1967 he (Godard) had assimilated the whole tradition from Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism.

A moment in the film reminds me of the world in a grain of sand, a Romantic vision of nature as art. This is when Emily Bronte holds a pebble and the camera moves close to it while she speaks of the pebble’s age and significance. What we look at is a natural form that has affinity with a Henry Moore sculpture. The rock reminds us of the beauty we overlook, ignore and step on every day.

WEEKEND invokes Marx, Engels, and Mao. But does so, not in any coherent or programmatic manner. Godard clearly dislikes American imperialism, and a capitalism that he equates with Fascism, but this does not mean that he champions what we might perceive to be Fascism’s opposite: Communism. The Maoists in the film are cannibals. The film is more apocalyptic, than straight ahead political. When the two garbage men speak of the evils of imperialism and the oppression of multinational exploitation of Africa, they speak in front of a huge pile of garbage. Irony is the mode here. Is what they say a bunch of garbage or are they speaking about the garbage created by the injustices of the imperial powers, especially America? Like 'Les Chants de Maldoror' by Lautreament, WEEKEND contemplates human cruelty and brutality in a world seemingly without transcendental truth. The film refuses to offer a vision of revolutionary hope in its diegesis; however, it does offer a revolutionary hope in its form. This is art as action; this is art as analysis in every sense of the word. It analyses capitalist society, and it analyses contemporary hysteria.

And so this film is both popular and anti-popular at the same time.

Mise en scene
Literally “putting in the scene.” Mise en scene has to do with space (where does the action take place?), as opposed to montage, which has to do with time (how many shots make up a scene and how much time do they occupy both within the diegesis and without the diegesis?). Film, like just about any of the arts, has to take account of both time and space. WEEKEND is careful to set the space of the action – in a country road, in a forest, in, on, and around a garbage truck, in a farmer’s yard, and so on. I’ll look at one instance, the initial scene in which the woman tells her story about a sexual encounter to her lover. This scene is insistently placed in one space in a room by a bright window, and the camera moves in and out from the characters slowly as the woman tells her story. The two characters do not move about; they remain in their positions vis a vis the camera, he in the background and she slightly above him in the foreground. As she recounts her story, the effect is almost that of voice-over because despite the camera’s unwavering focus on the two people (the scene has no cuts or pans away from the two characters), we cannot see either of them clearly. The reason for this has to do with lighting. Godard uses back lighting in this scene; that is, the light for the scene comes from behind the two characters rather than from in front of them or even above them. The effect of back lighting (also used in CITIZEN KANE) is to cast the characters in shadow. We see them not quite, but almost, as silhouettes. These people live shadow lives, not quite real. They inhabit the Platonic cave, not seeing the light behind them.

But the back lighting has another, even more important effect. In front of us occupying much of the screen space is a woman wearing only a bra and panties. The viewer will (naturally?) want to see this woman, and see her clearly. But we cannot see her clearly. And so perhaps we strain trying to make out her figure as best we can. If we assume that the viewer tries to penetrate the shadow to see the characters, and we recall just what the woman is saying, then we can hardly avoid the uncomfortable fact that we are positioned as voyeurs trying to spy on this scene of sexual confession. We are, in effect, made complicit with the perversions (sado-masochistic activities) of the characters we hear about in the woman’s story. Godard has complicated the usual filmic gaze. By usual filmic gaze, I mean the usual position for the viewer of a film is as the owner of the gaze, that look that owns what it sees because it is not looked back upon. We see the beautiful woman on the screen; she is there displayed for our appreciation and pleasure. She does not look back knowingly; she does not know she (or he, at times) is the object of someone’s gaze. And yet we know that she (or he) is aware of the gaze, and in this awareness there is, in effect, a returned gaze. But because of the unease with which we must look at this scene straining to see the characters clearly, we are thrust back on ourselves, made to contemplate just what is going on. We are placed within the mise en scene, we are that camera with its roving eye trying to get a closer look at these two people to savour both the woman’s semi-clad body and to probe the man’s reactions.

I take this scene to be a particularly effective example of what Slavoj Zizek describes as the effect of pornography:
[pornography’s] perverse character lies not in the obvious fact that it “goes all the way and shows us all the dirty details”; its perversity is, rather, to be conceived in a strictly formal way. In pornography, the spectator is forced a priori to occupy a perverse position. Instead of being on the side of the viewed object, the gaze falls into ourselves, the spectators, which is why the image we see on the screen contains no spot, no sublime-mysterious point from which it gazes at us. It is only we who gaze stupidly at the image that “reveals all.” (Looking Awry 110)

In the case of the scene in WEEKEND, however, nothing is revealed except the viewer’s stupidity, as he or she strains to see what is not revealed. As she or he strains, she also listens (perhaps lasciviously) to what the woman says. Her account “tells all.” But of course in telling all, it tells nothing. What is missing in all of this is emotion. We have motion, but no emotion. Pleasure without emotion – is this the pornographic experience?

Sound works in a similar way in this scene. When I say the viewer “listens” to what the woman says, I am not precise. Her words are constantly in danger of being drowned out by the ominous and loud music of the soundtrack in this scene. Without the subtitles, we would have difficulty hearing what she is saying, and we would have to strain to hear her, just as we have to strain to see her. Both sound and lighting force the viewer to become conscious of the filmic quality of this scene, of the voyeuristic nature of viewing and overhearing.

Montage
Different effects derive from montage. Godard uses montage in the scene of the mother’s death near the end of the film. Just as the mother is killed, the film cuts to a shot of a skinned rabbit and we see blood spilled over this gruesome carcass. The combination of shots informs us what happens to the mother without showing us what happens to the mother. What we do see intensifies the ugliness of the act. We see an act played out in time, foreshortened and rendered metonymic. Perhaps a more telling use of montage is in the scene in which the two garbage collectors eat their sandwiches, and one speaks for the other in sequence. As we watch each one in turn eat his sandwich, we hear the other one speaking in voice-over as the film gives us a series of montage shots. What we get is a collapsing of time in these shots, both the time within the film and the time of imperial activity over the past century or so. History comes in a series of interconnected shots connected by the voice we hear over the scenes. Whereas the mise en scene keeps us in the space of the protagonists as they make their journey, the montage allows for a rearranging of time. Montage can layer time, show more than one action taking place simultaneously, but not at the same time.

Tracking Godard’s film or finding the Godardian chronotope
But things are not that simple in a Godard film. Take for example the mise en scene. More than once in the film, we have scenes in which our protagonists encounter people from the past (e.g. St. Juste, and Emily Bronte). In other words, the film does not simply invoke characters from the past (Lewis Carroll, Andre Breton, etc.), but it also gives us the past in the present. In other words, the mise en scene is implicated in time as well as space. What Godard does is fuse mise en scene and montage. He does this most obviously and most brilliantly in his use of tracking shots.
WEEKEND contains one of the most famous tracking shots in cinema (others are in Welles’s A TOUCH OF EVIL and Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER, and perhaps Hitchock’s FRENZY); certainly it contains the longest or most likely the longest tracking shot. Godard’s camera tracks along a country road for ten minutes (a long time in filmic terms), and as it does so it manages to fuse mise en scene and montage. Obviously, the placing of the scene is clear. The camera follows the film’s protagonists as they make their way through a long traffic jam, past cars, trucks, and even a sailboat. We see many small vignettes, people playing ball, playing chess, reading, arguing, eating, and so on. These vignettes are often framed by the poplar trees that line the road, and such framing works as a montage slicing what we see into pieces of time as people occupy themselves while waiting for the traffic to begin moving again. Crossing all these vignettes are our protagonists who refuse to wait for the traffic to move and just drive on rudely. They effectively take control of both space and time (fusing montage and mise en scene). We have the chronotope of the road, a picaresque plot with ironic twist. Our protagonists are their own antagonists. They take to the road as if it was their own, and find trouble along the way.
We have another instance of the flamboyant tracking shot in the Mozart scene. Here the camera tracks one way in a circle and then the other way in a reverse circle. This tracking shot contrasts with the insistently linear tracking shot of the traffic jam. In the latter instance, the linearity leads nowhere, except perhaps to death. In the circular tracking shot we have the camera remaining centered on the music of Mozart. It moves around the yard passing a variety of people, most of whom we would call members of the proletariat. Our bourgeois protagonists lounge against a post yawning and looking bored, but the working people are rapt. The music speaks to these people. And whatever it says, it keeps a circumference. The true art is for everyone; it does not separate.

The tracking shot suggests fluidity of experience, connectedness. It sees things as part of a continuum. In a film that consists of fragmented scenes and fragments of words and phrases and disconnected people, the tracking shot works to oppose fragmentation and separation.

What WEEKEND “tracks” is humanity’s decline, its slide into barbarism. The scene when we hear Mozart on the piano contrasts the slide with momentary hope for the embrace (the circular tracking) of art and humanity. As a film, it uses just about everything a film can use: camera positions, the range of shots from close-up to distance shots, perspective, montage, mise en scene, inter-titles, music, sounds, dialogue, voice-over, back lighting, tracking, framing, monologues, costumes, references to literature, and so on. The film aspires to the condition of pure cinema by assimilating the other arts. It challenges the viewer to take part in the dialogue the film begins. This is dialogic art. And one of its many ironies is the fact that the protagonists know they are in a film (This is a rotten film; all the characters are crazy), and yet act as if they were not in a film. They do not, in short, take part in the dialogue the film initiates. They are not interested in communicating or in pursuing ideas. They are the capitalist subjects, subject only to their desire for money.

Revolutionary Cinema
One of the most insistent themes in WEEKEND is revolution. We have the many references to the French Revolution (Liberty, Fraternity, Equality), references to Marx, Engels, and Mao, and of course the revolutionary group at the end of the film. We are told that the worker needs to be as brutal as the bourgeoisie to get results. We learn that freedom is violence. And yet, we see that violence is hardly freedom in any attractive sense. Maybe we see that revolutions only perpetuate the cycle of violence and brutality that the history of civilization chronicles. A revolutionary cinema is a cinema that promotes detachment from the cycle of violence. The only cycle worth pursuing is the cycle the camera performs while we listen to Mozart. The only true revolution is art itself.

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

This film is usually discussed as an example of Expressionism in the cinema.
Expressionism was first used in 1911 at an art exhibition in Berlin.
It uses exaggeration and distortion to express ideas and emotions.
Its sympathies are with pre-industrial society.
It is anti-naturalistic, fantastic, and open to impulses that are anti-rational (i.e. the unconscious)
In other words, Expressionism is the kind of art that might threaten authorities.

Take CALIGARI as an example: the basic plot concerns control and power, the control of a father figure over a son. Obviously, I speak metaphorically here, but the film brings us into metaphor in the first shot. We see two men, one younger than the other, seated in what looks like a bower, a garden, with strands and wisps of plant life draped over their bodies like webbing. We have an insistent use of the iris. These ‘signs’ inform us that we are entering a space in which things might not be what they appear to be. In short, what we see is metaphoric. If this is true, then what follows will most likely extend the metaphoric aspect of the film. In the world of metaphor, fathers and sons may represent various things (superego and ego, for example). Here the father may represent a number of things: the past controlling the present (Caligari is, we learn, a historical figure), the fatherland controlling its citizens by keeping them in a somnambulant state, the madman controlling the psyche and driving it to carry out unspeakable acts, the director controlling the inmates of an institution, the director manipulating actors and technicians in film making.

Let’s stop here for a second. The film makes it clear that Caligari is a mountebank, a charlatan, someone who proffers quack medicines from a platform, a conman. In other words, he is not a simple representative of the controlling power of the state. In fact, he is an outsider, someone associated with a traveling carnival. He objects to the way the state, through its petty clerks and bureaucrats, deals with people like him. And so the town clerk ends up dead. From a social and political perspective, Caligari represents something threatening and criminal. He works in silence, at night, in sinister and covert ways. In short, he has someone else do the dirty work for him. And who is this someone? Who is Cesare? Where does he come from? Why is he somnambulant? Why won’t someone find him a cure? Clearly the film does not take an interest in such questions. Cesare just is the way he is, and in some ways he is representative of the rest of us. He sleepwalks through life. But he does have a heart or conscience as his reaction to the girl indicates. His facial makeup with the dark eyes reminds me of the Pierrot, although a sad Pierrot and not a comic figure. He is the fool, the clown, the set upon, the madman. At the end of the film when things seem to have turned around, and after he is supposed to have died, we see him in the institution holding a posy and looking wistful and melancholy.

Where does this take us? Back to Caligari. He comes to us through the story of Francis, In Francis’s story, Caligari is the mad scientist, the evil force that threatens to shatter innocence and drive people insane through his machinations. In other words, the story begins as Francis’s narration, but we quickly see (literally) that the story we are receiving is not Francis’s, in the sense that it is what Francis actually experienced. For one thing, the story contains too many things that Francis could not have known – Caligari’s trip to the town clerk, for example, or his knowledge of Cesare’s reaction to Jane. And by the end, we come to see that the whole narrative has been contained within the confines of a mental institution, Francis is a troubled patient in the asylum, and the Caligari figure turns out not to be Caligari but rather the kindly (apparently) director of the asylum. And so the film ends (or just about ends) with the revelation that the entire story has been the figment of a deranged mind. Francis, whatever his problem, is paranoid and libidinous. We might reflect that in the story he tells, Cesare represents his own libidinous impulses, his desire for Jane. This might explain Cesare’s costume with the slinky black leotards that do not leave much for the imagination, and Cesare’s obvious libidinous attraction to Jane.

But we might remember that this is a film in which things are not what they seem to be. The final iris moving in to the good doctor as he tells us that he can cure Francis leaves us with a question: how will he effect this cure? All we have seen during the film are images of insane people either confined by straight jackets or isolated in cells where they are bound or chained or people allowed to walk in a confined space, along streets that look like corridors, or in the institution where they meander like prisoners in their daily exercise. Can we be sure that what we have seen at the end is any more actual than what Francis’s story has told?

But we can go back to “things are not what they seem to be.” From another perspective, things are exactly as they seem to be. This film is most famous for its sets, those strangely abstract and twisted views of streets or rooms or the circus or the asylum. And we notice little things such as how the twisted designs, the sharp angles, and abstract lines become stronger and more insistent as the film goes along. In other words, we notice more derangement, more hysteria, more paranoia reflected in the sets as the film moves toward its conclusion. We notice that the rooms of the two students, Alan and Francis, differ in the degree of their loopiness. Francis’s room is far more rounded and out of kilter, perhaps even resembling something of the crookedness of Caligari’s own little shack. In other words, the sets signal the emotional turmoil and the psychic disorder that characters who are mentally unstable manifest in their actions. And if I am right to see that the intensity of the derangement of the sets increases as the story goes along, then we might see the story as reflecting the disintegration of a mind, a descent into madness. The floor of the institution courtyard is a stylized mandala, a symbol of the integrated mind, only here off kilter, like the minds of the inmates.

The idea of descent brings me to the carnival. Before I focus on carnival, I note the opening shot of the town. The artist’s conception of the town is reminiscent of medieval conceptions of the pyramidal design of the cosmos, with the top standing for heaven, the middle for purgatory, and the bottom as Hell. I am thinking of the kind of otherworld cosmology we see in Dante. So let’s take this observation to the set designed to show the entrance to the carnival. Here we see the backdrop of various carnival tents and rides, the rides being of the carousel kind reflecting the circular movement of a mind stuck in constant return of the repressed. In front of this is the pathway that descends into the carnival, a pathway whose direction is accentuated by the railing in the middle ground that moves decidedly upward and the people on the path move downward. Then on the right of the frame we have an organ grinder with his monkey. At one point early in the film, we see Caligari stop and watch people give money to the organ grinder. One person in particular catches Caligari’s attention – a very short person. The very next shot shows a dwarf in the circus grounds carrying a standard. What is this all about? Anyhow, the way into the carnival is down, a descent -- into hell?

The obvious contrast to this descent into the carnival is the ascent to the police station. The stairway into the police station is unnaturally steep, and once inside we see ridiculously tall chairs upon which the two policemen sit, reminding us of the even more absurdly tall chair the town clerk sits upon in an earlier scene. The message seems to be that the city bureaucracy is removed from the reality of people’s lives. In other words, we have the top of the social order where city officials work and we have the bottom of the social order where carnival barkers and circus people make a living. In between, we have the students and shopkeepers and landladies and business people of the town. From another perspective, of course, the tall chairs and steep stairs keep reminding us that what we are seeing is not “real.” The absurdity of the sets reflects the unbalanced nature of the mind conceiving this story.

But let’s consider the carnival a bit more. This film inaugurates something of a genre: the circus film. We have many examples from Chaplin’s CIRCUS to W.C. Field’s YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, and CIRCUS WORLD. Perhaps the most bizarre example is Tod Browning’s FREAKS. In general, the circus presents us with another world, a sort of heterotopia that may represent the world as “greatest show on earth” or as “nightmare” or something in between. In other words, the circus is a space where normal reality is exaggerated. Circus has something similar in it to “carnival,” that festival that turns everything upside down. In carnival, he or she who would be last is first, he or she who is on the bottom is now on the top. Carnival, like the circus, offers a space where we are free of the usual social constraints. This is probably why the town clerk in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is so dismissive and disapproving of Caligari’s request for a permit. He perceives the circus act—the display of a somnambulist -- as of dubious value and honesty. The clerk hands him off to minions. Carnival is leveling. It breaks down social class divisions. In this film, however, the circus is a space that threatens to overwhelm that which lies outside this space. It is the locus of horror. Not only does Caligari display a somnambulist, but he also presents his somnambulist as a fortuneteller. Our young friend Alan has the temerity (stupidity?) to ask how long he will live, and Cesare portentously tells him that he will die at dawn. The circus, then, is the source for the insanity that overruns the town. Does this film make a connection between circus and asylum? Does this film have anything to say about abnormality? The circus is a place for performance as the organ grinder and his monkey demonstrate, and in the scenes of the asylum we see that this too is a place for performance. The patients (inmates) are seen performing in various ways, one man obviously expounding or speechifying. Cesare performs, but we see that his performance is a command performance in that he performs at the command of his master, the sinister Dr. Caligari. We might extrapolate from this and note that everyone “performs” in some way. The town clerk performs his duties as town clerk. The two young men perform the way young men are supposed to perform, reading books, longing for experience, and lusting after women. Everyone performs in some way. When does performance become unacceptable? Well obviously Cesare’s performance is socially unacceptable; we don't like people to go around murdering other people. Caligari’s actions are also unacceptable and they get him certified and placed in an institution bound by a straight jacket. Francis’s performance has also been deemed unacceptable and we find him confined in an institution. This is a film about socially unacceptable people. Like circus films generally, Caligari focuses on people who do not fit nicely into the social norm. Society commands and demands normalcy; society places those who deviate from the norm in confinement.

An aside: I wonder if the circus is also the place where desire finds temporary satisfaction. We know that both Alan and Francis love the same woman, and after they walk her home Francis acknowledges that both he and Alan love Jane. He then urges that no matter which man she chooses, the two men will remain friends. Earlier at the circus, after Alan has asked his question concerning how long he will live, and after he has received his answer, we have two close-up shots, one of Alan whose face registers fear and trembling, and one of Francis whose face registers ecstasy as if he has just heard sweet words. Now right after the two men say goodnight we cut to the scene of Alan’s murder. We never do see who kills him; we just see the shadow of the death scene on the wall. Alan’s face registers horror and disbelief just before he dies. Who is the murderer? It is fitting that we see the death only as a shadow since this is a film that deals with reality only as a shadow world, a world of unreality. Reality has little or no substance in this film.

The great thing about this film is that it drives directly to the source of deviance – it takes us down into the mind and its desires. In other words, this film acknowledges (especially through its sets) the unconscious. If Freud lies behind the psychology of this film, then we might find the id, ego, and superego working (and I note the three openings before the stairs in the institution courtyard). We might also guess that everything from the opening frames until at least the revelation of Caligari’s ‘’true’ identity are an out issue of Francis’s mind. In other words, everything in the narrative he tells is an aspect of his own mind. We might have a clue to this at the beginning when Jane floats through the garden and Francis tells the man sitting with him that she is his “betrothed.” She appears oblivious to the two men. Here’s a prospective bride who does not even acknowledge the existence of her prospective groom. She is, in effect, his ideal-I, his fantasy. Then within his narrative we can see his desire at work, his desire to come out from the confines of his room, get rid of a rival, confront the father figure, defeat him, and claim his bride. Within his fantasy, however, the superego and id are at war; his desire for Jane is reflected in Cesare’s abduction of her and his fear of his own desire is reflected in the bizarre superego figure of Caligari. What chance does a poor ego have when such powerful forces of repression and un-repression are at work? This film is about the return of the repressed, the driving force of desire that will have its sway even unto destruction and dissolution.

But what of the good doctor’s “cabinet.” The cabinet is the coffin-like container that closes over Cesare when his master puts him to rest. (Cesare is, by the way, a puppet, a manikin, a rag-doll, as in the scene in which Caligari sits by him while his alter-ego is out stalking Jane.) The cabinet itself is a closet, a coffin, a bed, a crib, a container. It might represent the mind opening and closing. We see Caligari slyly open it on more than one occasion; for example, he opens it for Jane when she makes her way into he circus looking for her father; Cesare awakes, stares at her, and scares her away. The opening and closing of the doors of this cabinet draw our attention to just how many doors we have in this film: doorways in and out. The door to Caligari’s shack. The doorway into the town clerk’s office. The doorways in the asylum. The elongated and tapered door to the Director of the Institution’s office. Doors are thresholds indicating movement either inward or outward, either to confinement or to liberation. They indicate passage, the passage from one place or state to another. The mind is a doorway leading, in this film, to lunacy, to a paranoid release of repressed desire. The only way to keep anti-social desire repressed and safe is either by having a healthy and balanced psyche or by going insane. The insistent emphasis on doors reminds us of ways in and of ways out. The mind is a threshold between inner and outer. The psyche must negotiate its balance and health by locating an equilibrium of self and other. What we see in CALIGARI is an imbalance; the self is incapable of equilibrium.

Another point to make about the “cabinet” is that it represents masculine space. I especially like the scene in which the Dr. first “wakes” Cesare, and Cesare emerges from the upright cabinet. The scene reminds me of the emergence of the Mummy from its casket in Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY (1932). But I also note the phallic aspect of this cabinet and of Cesare. Cesare is a walking phallus; his weapon of choice (a long knife) accentuates the phallic implications. Compare this phallic space with the feminine space of Jane’s home, a place in the one location we see aside from her bedroom that looks like a large blossom or bowl with petals in the background, reminding us of the female equivalent of the male phallus. When Cesare enters Jane’s bedroom, he finds easy entrance through a window whose bars offer little impediment to him. These two spaces – the cabinet and Jane’s sitting room – give us spatial conventions for masculine and feminine that continue to our own day. We might also compare the rooms of the two men with Jane’s bedroom.

And what of this film’s influences? Comments on Blackboard have done a great job of tracing this film’s influence all the way from James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN to films by Tim Burton (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS comes to mind). Many of the conventions of the horror film turn up in this film from the woman threatened by a monster, to a mad scientist, to ghoulish sets, to the use of shadows. The film owes much to Gothic tradition and to German Romanticism, especially the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann (see his story, “The Sandman” that Freud analyses in his famous essay on “The Uncanny”). It contains the Gothic sense of dissolution, a darkness drawing down, a place where the terrifying monsters of the mind become actualized. It contains the Gothic sense of a world in which innocence is under threat and the forces of order are undermined. It contains the familiar fear of the young that an older generation will stifle them, control them to the point of degeneration.

Finally, the film uses flashback near the end to trace Caligari’s obsession with power. While Francis and the doctors and orderlies of the Institution read about the historical Caligari and then read the Director’s Cases and Notes, the film flashes back to the Director’s interest in Caligari, and then the arrival at the Institution of the somnambulist, and the Director’s temptation. Then we see the Director become Caligari as the screen shows us how his obsession with the historical Caligari overwhelms him. Then we return to the frame – the scene of Francis sitting in the bower narrating his story to the other man who had earlier told a story about spirits. The film seems neat enough: a madman narrates a story in which he explains his deranged sense of what has happened to himself and his “betrothed,” and then we discover that this story is a fantasy. Or is it?

Eisenstein refers to CALIGARI as “this barbaric carnival of the destruction of the healthy infancy of our art, this common grave for normal cinema origins, this combination of silent hysteria, particolored canvases, daubed flats, painted faces, and the unnatural broken gestures and actions of monstrous chimaeras.” And yes, CALIGARI does wrench film into another dimension, one we should celebrate. Yippee.