Film Theory: Ch. 1, Cinema as Window and Frame

Elsaesser & Hagener

Summary from Introduction Chapter

• Framing the filmic image as its essential element
• “Cinematic image offering a privileged outlook onto, and insight into, a spatiotemporally consistent, that is, diegetically coherent, but separate and self-contained, universe”
• Bazin’s theory of filmic realism or Bordwell’s staging in depth
• By contrast, other authors, such as Arnheim and Eisenstein, have emphasized the principles of construction governing the image’s composition within the frame-as-frame.
• These two positions, often opposed as realist and formalist, resemble each other more than is generally assumed
• In both cases, perception is treated as almost completely disembodied because of its reduction to visual perception
• Rear Window

Window and Frame - Common Elements

• Provide ocular access to an event
• The (real) two-dimensional screen transforms into an (imaginary) three-dimensional space
• The (real and metaphorical) distance from the events renders safe the act of looking

Differences

Window:

• Looking through
• Transparency: losing sight of the glass pane
• The medium becomes invisible

Frame:

• Looking at
• Awareness of the content, surface, and constructed nature
• Emphasis on the medium’s material specificity

Classical Theory

Realism

• The cinema has the capacity to reproduce reality and make the invisible visible

Formalism/Constructivism

• The cinema is different from physiological perception
• Filmic perception can be constructed and manipulated

Leo Baudry

Open Cinema (Window)

• Snapshot of pre-existing reality which continues beyond the frame
• Centrifugal
• Audience as guest

Closed Cinema (Frame)

• Everything in the frame has a specific function
• Centripetal
• Audience as victim

Classical Cinema

• Combines window and frame
• Sophisticated technique to create the effect of transparency
• The effect of an unmediated view is highly constructed through codes and rules
• Spectator as invisible witness
• Disembodied and kept at arm’s length while film draws you in

The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)

More Dichotomies

• Passive/Active
• Manipulation/Agency
• Voyeurism/Witnessing
• Moral Response/Irresponsibility

Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)

Arnheim

• Weimar Germany
• Film as Art, 1932
• Difference between film and reality
• Concludes that cinema does not copy or imitate reality, it creates a world and a reality of its own
• Frame as perceptual constraint and cognitive task
• Not about realism, but about distance between everyday and filmic perceptions
• Film doesn’t affect spectator like reality does - if it did, it’d be indistinguishable from reality (a mechanical double)
• This could not achieve status of art at the time since art presupposes human involvement and cannot be generated by a machine
• Rejected sound film - too close to reproducing reality (unacceptable combo of silent film and radio drama)

Eisenstein

• Hugely important director and theorist!
• Theory and practice compliment each other
• Frame and depicted object are in a productive tension
• Position of the camera represents conflict between organizing logic of director and inert logic of phenomenon in collision, producing dialectic of the camera angle
• Objected to “scenic,” “artificial” staging
• Preferred Japanese method of using the frame to choose a detail from a totality
• Lens “cuts” a piece of reality
• Montage!
• The shot is a montage cell, a microorganism in relation to a larger whole
• Important elements must remain implicit if spectator is to become active
• Conflict and Collision as the fundamental relation between elements (within and between shots)
• October, Battleship Potemkin
• Hollywood’s use of montage: (Up, Rocky IV, Scarface, Team America)

Eisenstein Cont...

• Montage of Attractions
• Spectacular moments to stimulate emotions - like the circus, fairground, vaudeville, etc.
• Collision Montage:
• Antithetical elements clash to produce larger meaning
• Intellectual cinema
• Figurative, metaphorical, synecdoche, comparisons, juxtapositions, etc.
• Produce thought sequence...
• Obviously not interested in mimetic reproduction of reality…
• 5 types of Montage:
• Metric: temporal
• Rhythmic: relation between length of shots and their content
• Tonal: relates to stylistic techniques - “vibrations”
• Overtonal: marginal or variable elements of the shot
• Intellectual: not harmonious, no CHC, Conflict and Collision, etc.

Bazin

• Antipode to Eisenstein
• Catholic humanist (compared to Eisenstein’s revolutionary communism)
• Commitment to Italian Neorealism
• Catholics and Communists coming together against fascism
• Taking back from propagandist machine of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalinist Soviet Union
• Precursor to “New Waves”
• Realism
• Didn’t rule out montage, trick shots, cuts, etc., but didn’t like manipulative editing that formed a specific message
• Not a style one can apply but rather an attitude or stance
• Reality as inseparable whole, ontological unity
• The “fact” as smallest unit in cinema, not shot or scene

Bazin Cont...

• Meaning doesn’t come from conflict or collision, but from ontological presence of the things themselves
• “A conventional (non-Neorealist) film creates things and facts, while a Neorealist film subordinates itself to these. Ideally, it is a window on a given reality or a specific milieu … or a specific historical situation” (31).
• Logical conclusion of his theory is the disappearance of the medium and its artificiality
• “...in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema” (31).
• Traditional realism: bricks to build a bridge
• Neorealism: boulders in a river
• Connection to Cahiers du Cinema, “Godfather of the French New Wave”

Conclusion

• Bordwell’s pragmatic view - make spectator understand a story’s temporal unfolding through organization of space and compositional constellation of characters
• Stylistic devices - narrative and expressive functions - window and frame have centripetal functions
• Window also interpreted as imaginary curiosity cabinet or urban shop window
• Highlight of objects and selling of merchandise!
• Commodification, consumerism, and advertising more so in the 80s and beyond
• Window converges into a mirror, reflects back on desiring subject
• Window shopping - Consumer-oriented films overlap with the real