The author | William C. siska
Translated | Zhu Puyi
Proofreading | issac
Source | Film Quarterly
Reflexive cinema – about cinema, about filmmakers – must be understood in both the context of tradition and modernism.
In the orthodox concept of traditional cinema represented by Hollywood genre films, the purpose is to hope that the audience ignores the form, and orthodox storytelling requires that the narrative structure be transparent.
In many Hollywood and Hollywood-style films, we don't see a change in the traditional narrative rules of filmmaking. "Sunset boulevard," "singing in the rain," and "day for night" are reflexive films in the traditional model.
Sunset Strip
Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard is not about the Sunset Boulevard filmmaking itself, but about the characters depicted in the story. The film in the movie is the key to the reflexive element. Traditional reflexivity emphasizes the transparency of the narrative structure, while the reflexivity of modernism strives to reverse the transparency of the narrative.
For shaping "film within a movie", the reflexive elements of modernist cinema, such as in "Eight and a Half" (81/2), "Persona", "Wind from the East", "The Secret of the Organism" (wr), are of secondary importance or even unimportant.
"Masquerade"
Instead, they are all directly related to the film itself. Unlike traditional films, which ignore form, the reflexive elements in modernist films make people pay more attention to their forms.
Reflexivity means that consciousness returns to itself, and there are two manifestations in the aesthetic medium: first, the artist reflects on their medium of expression; second, the artist reflects on himself. Therefore, in the art of cinema, reflexiveness is particularly evident in films about filmmaking, filmmakers (or both).
An early example of these approaches is Gyga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, which is about gathering, sorting, and disseminating what has already been shot. There's also Gucteau's Blood of a Poet, a journey into the artist's soul to explore complexes, fears, and childhood traumas that are the source of his astonishing creativity.
The Man with the Camera
We can call these two models reflexivity formal and reflexivity personal, respectively.
The reflexive cinema that makes people realize that the film is a film can be divided into two categories: first, to show the process and mechanism of film production and screening; second, the incoherence of the narrative structure.
Joe Gillis (William Holden) painstakingly wrote the script in Sunset Boulevard; the carbon rod of the arc lamp in Masquerade gradually brightened and began to play through a projector movie; The end of Yezh Skollimovsky's "Le Depart", where the camera freezes and the film is slowly burned; the wool film in "The Last Tycoon" and even the script meeting are examples of the first type of means.
We've seen the whole process from inspiration to box office calculation of movie production. Exposing the mechanics of filmmaking is a means shared by modernist reflexive films and traditional reflexive films.
Narrative incoherence rarely appears in traditional films, although they are the most common reflexive means in modernist films. The narrative is incoherent when the causal chains that inspire action and drive the plot are interrupted or confused by the breaks of space and time, or the introduction of heterogeneous forms and contents.
Both René and later Buñuel tried to mystify the film in this way. Godard and Makawiev inserted literary works, burlesque skits, speeches, and printed slogans into films as an integral part of their style, which is now taken for granted. In their works, reflexive means make the film lose its transparency and become the object of the audience's attention.
Traditional cinema does not expose the filmmaking process and alienate the audience from the story being told; yet the cameras, the lighting, and the mechanics are all used to reinforce the authenticity that we are appreciating behind the scenes of how the industry "really works."
On the other hand, the reflexive technique of modernist narratives wins the sympathy of the audience by weakening the authenticity of the characters and actions in the film.
Hollywood illusions allow the audience to identify with fictional characters as if their fates were closely linked to us, while formal reflexiveness in modernist cinema serves to debunk them.
It denies that our real lives have anything to do with what happens on the screen, and it confronts us with filmmaker subjectivity. At the same time, it highlights the material reality of cinema as a "movie".
Individual reflexive films, or reflexive films, are typical in both traditional and modernist films. Day and Night and Eight and a Half provide good examples of the difference between traditional and modernist reflexive narratives.
"Day as Night"
The conflicts in Day and Night stem from practical problems that can be resolved during filming. The conflict in "Eight and a Half" is an abstract dilemma derived from the self-consciousness of the protagonist Guido.
Truffaut, as the director of "Day and Night", needs to face the problem of tight schedule and budget constraints, and to solve the emotional interference of the actors and staff. Although Guido in "Eight and a Half" faces similar problems, these problems are insignificant to the questions that Guido asks himself.
Guido would ask, "Can I make the movie I want to make?" If not, should I continue? ”
If Guido's problem is simply how to deal with his films, then Eight and a Half is not modernist. His problems are related to himself, making a film is essential, and conflict is metaphysical.
"Eight and a Half Parts"
In "Eight and a Half" and other modernist reflexive films such as Lion's Love, Hour of the Wolf, David Holzman's Diary, and The Man Who Left His Will on Film, the central theme is the search for the completeness of the broken self.
Formal reflexiveness and personal reflexiveness can be found in both traditional and modernist films. The difference between the two films is the conflict that drives the behavior. In traditional cinema, conflict is concrete, or, in phenomenological terms, a "existential" problem; in modernist narratives, conflict is abstract and conceptually a "raised" problem.
In "Song in the Rain" and "Day and Night", the "existing" problem is how to make the film and how to overcome the obstacles that threaten the completion of the film. Modernist films such as "Dongfeng" and "Eight and a Half" focus on the "raised" question - "what does it mean to make a movie?" ”
Song in the Rain
Because the reflexiveness in the modernist narrative returns to the essence of cinema, this is the real meta-film. Reflexiveness in traditional narratives has become a specialized theme, and reflexiveness is almost indispensable in modernist films, becoming one of the essential characteristics of the modern worldview.
This modernist project needs to examine its roots and origins. This reflective, or more accurate, reflexive task stems from what Husserl researcher Maurice Tannersen called phenomenologists "in search of the true truth."
Edmond Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, summed up the modernist worldview in his book Cartesian Meditations:
Every man who sincerely wants to be a philosopher must return to himself "once in his life" and try to overthrow and reconstruct by himself all the sciences that he has hitherto accepted. Philosophy—as wisdom—is entirely a matter for the philosophical researcher. Philosophy must be his wisdom, the knowledge he himself acquires and which is constantly pursued universally—knowledge for which he can be held accountable from his own absolute insight from the beginning and at every step. ”
From this concise passage we find the creed of modernism not only in philosophy, but also in literature and art. This return– reflection – and overturning the old way of seeing the world reminds us that revealing processes is one of the imperatives of our time.
Although the goal is an understanding of all experiences (universality), there is still a subjective acceptance (a completely personal matter) and an emphasis on perspective (his wisdom and the knowledge he has acquired). The task of reconstruction made modern plans for a post-Nietzsche's career.
Revelation is far from enough: new structures, even temporary, must be done. The emphasis on "the search for absolute truth" is about "searching," and Husserl, as a philosopher, has always insisted on being a beginner.
This search to trace the roots of the discipline was evident in literary and artistic works around 1890. The characteristics that characterize it—concepts such as perspective, subjectivity, relevance, open structure, etc.—can also be found in the humanities: social and political theory, legal theory, history, and also developing.
Opinion and subjectivity illustrate that there is no comprehensive knowledge of the world that implies absolute truth; truth is related to the speaker's point of view. The subject, the "I" who speaks, determines the scope of things being perceived.
For modernists, the world in any statement that attempts to describe the world is an unspoken "minecraft" or "world I have experienced." Open structures are the natural result of the collapse of absolute belief in social, ethical, and aesthetic systems.
The open structure describes the modernist tendency to integrate a single work into many previously different forms, for example, beginning to produce narrative works that include prose and lyric poetry (speeches and poems), as well as multiple quotations.
In painting, modernism did not focus on reproducing objects on the canvas, but rather saw the canvas as a plane that could be used to arrange changing shapes, tones, and colors. The Cubist painters Braque and Picasso no longer painted objects as they looked, but painted from multiple points of view from all angles at the same time.
Poets Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens began writing about the nature of poetry and the poet's disposition, e. e. Cummings. e. cummings) focuses his attention on the meaning of the shape and sound of words, rather than merely the meaning of signifiers.
In the novels The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, Henry James argues that the essence of reality is intimately related to the speaker, the speaker's consciousness (the Rashomon effect, which he describes fifty years before Rashomon).
Like Cummings, James Joyce placed great emphasis on the nature of language in his work. By changing the dramatic elements, such as exposing the position of the stage lights, keeping the lights on when the scene is switched, and letting the actors jump out of the role and call the audience directly to participate in their interactions, Berto Brecht makes his performance exactly the same as the text. The role of modernism in traditional art is to make it lose its transparency.
Although the development of cinema as an art form was closely related to the modernist movement, until the mid-fifties, examples of modernist cinema were limited to experimental and avant-garde films. What we call art cinema began to emerge at that time, bringing modernism into the feature films.
Art film, this modernist narrative method, can be defined as a film that takes abstract, conceptual questions, that is, "raised" questions, as the theme.
Both traditional art and the examples of modernism in drama films demonstrate the artist's reinforced sense of subjectivity. The ever-increasing sense of self forms a meta-art whose subject matter unabashedly becomes the essence of art and represents the true colors of the artist.
Speaking of modernist artists, we can associate Bergman, Godard and Makawiev in the film with Picasso, Cummings and Joyce.
The modernist narrative is a wonderful metafilm because it has the most recognizable and typical feature of returning to oneself to rethink its essence and structure.