March is Women’s History month in a handful of English-speaking countries, and it’s Film Theory month at my house, and one of my books just happens to be perfect for both. Backwards and in Heels, by TCM’s own Aussie presenter Alicia Malone, is a passionate and informative dive into the criminally under appreciated history of female contributions to the film industry. If you don't get the reference to Ginger Rogers in that title, you really need to read this. I’m reading it everyday during my lunch break and loving it, while simultaneously deepening my loathing at how horrible the Hollywood system is in particular and how it has suppressed women and minority communities for decades for the DUMBEST reasons.
My evenings, on the other hand, have been filled with a daily allotment of pages from the college-level textbook How to Read a Film by James Monaco, which is in its fourth edition and shows. It definitely brings me back to my narrative film class days at UF. I am drinking it up like a camel coming out of the Nefud desert. I even busted out my set of Sharpie highlighters for the occasion.
So far, it’s been an introduction to the concept of film as art, how it was influenced by established art forms, and how it ultimately influenced everything since its inception. Having just finished that entire 36-part lecture series on Great Courses about art appreciation, I was thrilled to have a greater context illustrated for me. Turns out, the core reason painting and drawing started in with impressionism, expressionism, cubism, and abstraction is due to the photograph usurping the memetic goal of the art. Artists were freed from the obligation to record with fidelity, since the recording arts (photography, cinematography, audiography) picked up that mantle and ran with it. Color film, paired with audio, creates a powerful semblance of reality and communication, and so became a tool of science as well as the arts.
Film has touched everything about human culture in a fundamental way. It’s universally understood and embraced, and can be disseminated almost instantaneously, only hindered by the speed of light. The dramatic arts are exceptional, in that they have the distinct advantage of being live and in person. Therefore, stagecraft adapted to the arrival of the recorded arts by gaining a potential to provide the most intimate, unique, and transcendental experiences of all forms of entertainment. Without diminishing each other’s power, film and stage occupy the top tier for realism in art.
I wish I could suitably express how refreshing it is for me to rediscover the power of film through theory like this. Thanks to my formal education on the subject, I’ve been at an advantage for decades to appreciate this often misunderstood medium, but returning to first principles still excites, and it sharpens my skills for properly assessing filmic experience.
There’s a line in the first chapter of Monaco's book that surprised me with its precision in describing my very life philosophy:
"In qualitative terms, the observer/consumer does have it within his power to increase the sum value of the work by becoming a more sophisticated, creative, or sensitive participant in the process."
YASSSSSSS thank you for confirming the legitimacy of all the Roland Barthes-style analysis I was taught to do in college (S/Z: An Essay was dry AF but it made a lot of sense). I don't believe that it always pays to be a complete bore about film analysis (unless you're a paid film critic) but having a functioning knowledge of how to extract meaning and wisdom and aesthetic pleasure from sitting on your ass and staring at a screen for two hours is TOTALLY WORTH YOUR TIME. Which is why I still get all giddy about this shit.
As a kind of first test of my freshly honed skills, and thanks to my dearest Criterion Channel, I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso (1964). Monaco mentioned it alongside Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) as a good example of how a good print of a film can transform your experience, and now, having seen both, I'm inclined to agree. Like Malick, Antonioni concentrates on painterly compositions of frame, and where Malick is an old fashioned master of realism, Antonioni is a abstract modernist.
Antonioni sticks to his usual theme of bourgeois ennui and mode of aimless, impenetrable characterization, and like bright metal on a sullen ground, the shocks of color enhance an atmosphere of flat, poisonous anxiety. By regularly using zoom and telephoto lenses, which flatten the imagery, he further emphasizes abstraction, inviting justified comparison with work you would find on the walls of MoMA. Shots feel claustrophobic due to their lack of depth, which acts as a cinematographic index for the kind of shallow, empty lives the characters are leading. Antonioni wanted to represent the potential for new technology to create a wasteland in modern life--subversive at the time, since the 50s and early sixties (in America at least) were awash with candy-colored notions of a Jetsons lifestyle that could come from the atomic revolution of science.
The genius stroke of the film comes when the main character--Giuliana, the mentally unstable but smolderingly gorgeous housewife and mother--tells her young son a story about a girl who lives on a beach in a faraway land. Antonioni yanks us out of Giuliana's grim life and hits us with a starkly bright and lush new environment of impossibly blue waters, pink sand, white sails, and a brown-skinned young girl swimming in the crystal-clear ocean near her home. By the time the story ends, a viewer can be so enveloped in this warm and inviting world that when Giuliana stops, and the film unceremoniously dumps us back into her life with a shot of her face with a bleak 100-mile stare, your heart breaks for this poor woman's crushed soul that still has a glimmer of a memory of hope.
I'm so glad I did my homework this week. Learning the basics about lenses and film stock truly gave me the tools to better appreciate the artistry of Il Deserto Rosso and I am more than ready for more. BTW, that is a young Richard Harris in there, probably speaking terrible Italian that was dubbed, but what the heck, how's that for some fun random casting? Go check that shit out.
Finally, because I forgot to post it last week, here's my self portraiture I did as my "Final Project" for February.
Next week: I'm willing to bet that I will be glad I had a thing for Max Von Sydow this summer because it appears that this book has hard-on for Bergman films. I'm totally down for that.