Blog #7: Eyes in A Single Man--The Cinephiliac Approach

Tom Ford offers multiple moments that could peak the cinephiliac’s attention, sparking unknown or even unintended emotions.  One particular moment, for me, was when George exits his car outside the convenient store, only to be encompassed by an enormous poster for the film, Psycho, which I assume had just been released in the film’s time period.  Initially, I remembered watching Psycho earlier in the semester, but then I wondered more about her frightened eyes.  I found all the scenes that forced me to stare directly, closely into someone’s eyes both startling and enthralling.  I imagined what George felt as he examined each new pair that appeared before him; he probably felt a sudden contrast in emotion, wondering one moment if he could stand living any longer, and the next reminding himself the subtle beauty in things, in eyes.  He fluctuates between dread and magnificence, and the eyes he stares into support the latter, bringing him back to the banal emotions that give life meaning.

When I look into someone’s eyes, I can hardly tell a lie (and if I try, I stumble over my words, clearly giving it away).  Think about when your parents interrogated you for something you knew you were guilty of, and then imagine them saying, “Look me in the eye and tell me.”  At that point, you’re through; you simply cannot lie to them, and more importantly, you cannot lie to yourself.  We understand Marion's emotions in Psycho through her eyes, but we also conjure our own emotions simultaneously.  I think George felt this same reaction when he saw other’s eyes in the film.  Eye contact is communication and connection, but not verbal, not even physical; it reassures us our place.  Like us, George feels dull and worthless in his loneliness, but when he views other eyes (his students, the man at the convenient store, Charley) it shocks him back into existence.  The eyes are the connector in the film; just when he is in his lowest place, the world throws him constant reminders to bring him back up.

Blog #5: Melancholia and Mourning: The Death of Cinema

In Melancholia, we follow the lives of Justine and Claire, two sisters coping with the end times as a rogue planet hurls towards Earth.  One moment captured my attention, and visualized the dichotomy in opinion regarding cinema today; it spoke to where we were, where we are, and where we might head next.  At one point, we see Justine walking on the sprawling lawn of the estate, at night, and two beacons light the sky. One is the moon, and the other, the planet Melancholia.  They sit separately in the air, with an apparent visual distance between them, but their light melds and meshes together by the time it hits Earth.  This perfectly contextualizes how I feel cinema has evolved in the past ten years.  Some claim the death of cinema, for technical or cultural reasons, but others believe it offers variety and impact even now; the main rift is between those who view cinema as art and those who view it as industry.  I believe that these philosophies may have been mutually exclusive at the beginning of this century, but like anything that defines human culture now, they melt together.

I compare cinema to music. Each struggles with two opposing philosophical factions (popular vs. artistic), critics who argue the death of the experience (watching in a theater or listening to an entire album uninterrupted), and incredibly rapid technological advances.  I look at the advent of digital cinema and computer innovation through an optimistic lens.  When cinema was on film, we had poorly made movies and masterpieces alike.  Why has that changed now?  Now the exploitative uses of the technology do not deter us from finding the films that address our life, our culture.  On one hand we have virtual robo-porn (cough...Transformers...cough), but on the other hand we have a film like Melancholia that uses CGI technology to further capture the human condition, commenting on issues and emotions that encapsulate so much about life.  We cannot give up on cinema as an integral part of our cultural identity.  We may never recapture the cinematic-viewing environment, but we will always have the cinema as an ideal, a way to best employ contemporary tools to visually define and discuss our world.

Essay #1: Moments of Meaning Scene Analysis--First Outline

I have the bulk of my ideas about Midnight in Paris sketched out.  I still need to find more quotations to back my claims, but I do have claims I feel represent the film using the formalist approach.  Here's my first outline:

Main Argument: I believe the formalist approach best describes the film, Midnight in Paris.  Through the use of shot, character, and dialogue in the scene involving Gil, Inez, Paul and Paul’s wife talking about Gil’s nostalgia shop book, Allen attacks a genre he helped perfect, and subversively sets the stage for the audience to grasp the ironic stance he has on his own film.

Claim #1: Using a single-shot and having the characters roam allows for them to speak freely on the matter of Gil’s nostalgia shop, and more correctly about longing for the past; instead of the hesitancy that comes with having a direct conversation, it creates a more professorial attitude, one that allows them to speak without the intimacy and negative reaction of the people around them.

Claim #2: The characters Allen uses in this scene—Paul and Inez, the realists, and Gil, the dreamer—represent the dichotomy of personality and lifestyle in the world; the one who dreams for big things, and the other who is steeped in reality.  Also, it shows the duality of ways the audience views film; they either become lost, like Gil, or they take a critical, objective view of its significance and its flaws, like Paul and Inez.

Claim #3:  The dialogue itself—talking about Gil’s story idea—launches Allen’s criticism of the escape of cinema and the romantic-comedy genre.  As the man who essentially perfected the genre, he now attacks it.  Just as Paul and Inez criticize the idea of a man working in a nostalgia shop and the longing of times past, Allen criticizes the audience for not thinking objectively, instead “escaping” into a fantasy world.

Blog #2: "Moment" in Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen introduces his film Midnight in Paris with a montage-style sequence of Parisian images depicting life as the city turns from day to night, followed by Gil and Inez at a Monet-inspired pond walk; Gil seems disillusioned and deeply affected by Paris’ magnetic power from the start.  Allen sets the stage for typical American cinematic fare, or so it seems. Because of this, we have to wonder—more accurately speculate—whether Allen simply accepted the cinematic norms he fought for so many years or if he concocted an elaborate hoax to make us think he did.

I highlight one “moment,” while subtle, that points to Allen acting more as magician than filmmaker.  Gil is walking with his fiancée, Inez, and her mother.  The mother remarks about seeing an American film while they are in Paris.  She seems indifferent to the film, and Gil remarks that the average film she saw sounds like something he could have written.  We could take this as criticism of the American tourist, who simply reenacts his typical life rather than immersing himself into the foreign culture.  I believe, though, that Allen subversively attacks the notion that he succumbed to creating passive film experiences.  While the simplicity of the overall plot points to a lack of refined filmmaking, the hints he buries in the dialogue crack at an industry, and more specifically, a genre of film that often repeats itself.

That genre of film, the romantic comedy, which sits at the top of the film’s Wikipedia page interestingly enough, generally involves boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl but eventually gets her back.  On the surface, we see that boy, Gil, and the girl he appears to desire, Marion Cotillard’s character Adriana.  Unbeknownst to the typical rom-com audience, this relationship has no significance in Allen’s eyes, harkening back to the opening montage.  The true romance on display is between Gil and the city of Paris; any feelings he portrays to the female characters merely distracts from his genuine love in the film.  Allen creates this film with an entirely separate, submerged story, and in doing so, creates a film that both embraces and attacks the straight-lined American romantic comedy.  He forces the audience to answer one simple question: What film did you see?