Category: aesthetics

My Darling Clementine: John Ford telling stories

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Can a work of art tell us something about the character of the artist?

At the beginning of John Ford’s My darling Clementine (1946) there is an interaction between Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) that portends things to come. At the end of that conversation Earp rides his horse away and Clanton presumably drives his wagon away. Ford adds a wonderful little sequence of images and sounds at this point that, in effect, sums up the entire film. It goes like this:

Clanton uses his whip to get his horses going. We see the motion of his arm and the curling of the whip in the air.

We then hear the loud, sharp crack of the whip as we cut to Earp riding away.

Earp continues to ride quietly away.

Then, as the shot is beginning to dissolve to the next, we see a fire burning as though it is Earp on fire.

Once the dissolve is complete we discover the fire is the campfire of the Earp’s camp.

The story has Clanton and his sons stealing the Earp brothers’ cattle and killing the youngest brother. This action brings Wyatt Earp out of retirement. In order to mete out justice and get revenge, Earp takes over the recently vacated marshal job for Tombstone.

What I love about this little cinematic moment is the way Ford subtly used the language of cinema to tell a story within the story. The juxtaposition of the whip crack with the image of Earp, and then the fire growing within Earp, tells us what the story arc will be. What I also love is how Ford, in my opinion, frequently demonstrated, with moments like this, that he was every bit the filmmaker of Welles, but that he didn’t care for so much bravado as we find in Kane. He was servant, as it were, to the art & craft of cinema rather than to his ego. He was a master storyteller more about the story than the teller.

Both Welles and Ford needed and respected their audiences, for sure, but Ford’s respect was more self-effacing, more about others than about himself. At least that is what I take from their works of art. Am I right? You tell me.

theology and the narrative arts

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[In this post I ruminate on the relationship of art to our belief, or absence of belief, in God, god, or gods. As is typical for me, my train of thought is more lurching than steady, and my end goal is more personal than pedagogical.]

Our lenses
I love Pasolini’s seminal filmIl Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964). It is a work of great and simple beauty. It is also a powerful film that flies in the face of the overly sentimentalized and often lifeless versions of Jesus’ life that came before. And yet, Pasolini, though he seems to be taking the story directly from the words on the page (the Gospel of St. Matthew), understands Christ through his own political and personal commitments. In other words, Pasolini, the devout Marxist, unabashed homosexual, and hater of the Catholic Church, saw a Christ that was thoroughly materialist (philosophically) and politically radical (of the socialist ilk).


An earthy, socialist Christ
Enrique Irazoqui as Jesus
from Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)

As I understand it, for Pasolini, Jesus was a kind of pre-incarnate Karl Marx (rather than the incarnate God) who challenged the status quo of his day, and died as the earliest socialist martyr. Pasolini’s belief in the non-existence of God played a big part in how he saw Jesus and why he made the film. In a sense one could say Il Vangelo secondo Matteo is a kind of materialist corrective to the church’s position.

As I said, I love Pasolini’s film, but he got it wrong. I say this because of my own beliefs about God and about Jesus which, though personal on the one hand, I believe are also objectively true. My understanding of God is integral to the set of the “lenses” through which I look at the world. In other words, the difference between me and Pasolini is not really about any of his films, rather our differences go back to our presuppositions about God, truth, and the goals of human existence – even if we may agree on many things, and no doubt I am generally in awe of him as an artist.

Certainly great works of art are not, in our experience, predicated on any particular belief about God.

The God Who Is There
I have been thinking lately (and off and on for a long time) of the role that theology plays, or does not play, in how one approaches watching a film, looking at a painting, listening to a piece of music, or reading a book. So much of what we get out of a work of art comes from what we are able to bring to it, especially what it is we want from that particular work of art, and of art in general. What we want, I believe, is deeply affected by, and even grows out of, whether or not we are convinced of the existence of God, or god, or many gods, or none at all. So much depends on whether we are convinced of some ultimate meaning in the Universe, or whether we believe there is no ultimate meaning. And so much depends on how honest, even ruthlessly honest, we are with ourselves about these issues and their implications.

I use the word theology specifically. The term “theology” is a compound of two Greek words, θεος (theos: god) and λογος (logos: rational utterance). What I am interested in is a reasoned and rational examination of God, not merely of some vague spirituality (but that’s another presupposition isn’t it). What I find critical is the blunt question: Do you (do I) believe in God? How one answers that question has profound implications.

But the question is already on the table. We have inherited it. We can’t get away from it, just as we can’t get away from a myriad of other questions. And how we live our lives, including the art we make, is directly related to our answer. Art is a part of how we live our lives and, in many ways, emerges from the very heart of the matter. This is as true for Pasolini as it is for Spielberg as it is for Tarantino.

Often a work of art has, embedded within it, the answer to the question. Sometimes that answer is obvious. More often the answer is like backstory, a kind of presupposition that sits in the background and informs the art out front, as it were.

Moral Objects
A work of art is, in some ways, a mysterious thing. Like love, we know what art is, but we can’t always nail it down and give it a clear definition and well defined boundaries. Art emerges from deep within our humanness. Every culture and society has organically produced art, that is, art which emerges naturally from withing that culture or society. When I was an art history major many years ago I was introduced to many ancient works of art, via slides of course, like this exciting number:


Seated female, Halaf; 7th–6th millennium B.C., Mesopotamia or Syria
Ceramic, paint; H. 5.1 cm, W. 4.5 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art

This little statuette dates from nearly nine thousand years ago. Most likely it is a symbol of fertility. And most likely it was part of the symbolic rites and proto-religious system of that time. Many thousands of figures like this one have been unearthed. This little object speaks volumes about what was important to that ancient culture, like the importance of fertility to agrarian societies, and the importance of sexuality, and the very human need to supplicate before a god for one’s well-being. It also speaks of the human tendency to create symbols and to understand the world in terms of abstractions.

What I find interesting is how ancient and deeply ingrained is the human need to grasp at metaphysical solutions to the everyday muck of life problems, fears, and desires. I also find it fascinating that humans have to make physical objects that express the metaphysical, the ontological, the teleological, etc.

Even the Israelites, who had seen the ten plagues on Egypt, who had witnessed the parting of the Red Sea, who had the pillar of fire and the pillar of smoke in the wilderness, who had seen the walls of Jericho miraculously fall, and who had seen many other wonders of Yahweh, still created the golden calf, and still kept idols of other gods in their houses, and still built or maintained the high places (religious sites on hilltops to worship gods other than Yahweh). Today we have our idols and gods too – witness the way we worship our sports teams, or entertainers, our possessions, ourselves, for example.

Moral Stories
What humans have always seemed to enjoy are stories of moral dilemmas played out in both mundane and fantastical ways. Consider the medieval mystery plays. These were more than merely pedagogical in nature, they were social events that brought people together and incorporated some audience participation, including talking back to the characters during the performance, etc.

I hear that in some movie theaters in other countries (I write from the U.S.) audiences are very vocal and even talk to the screen, as it were, and critique out loud the actions of the characters while the film is playing. Regardless, quiet or vocal, we all seem to gravitate toward the moral. We like passing judgment, we like justice, and, interestingly, we like wickedness too. However, without some kind of absolute from which morality emanates, having a moral opinion is, in final terms, as much comic as it is tragic.


Medieval Mystery Play

So why do we continue to hold moral positions in a morally relativistic and credulistic world? If I had a clear answer I could probably chair some philosophy or psychology department somewhere. My guess, though, is that we will invent an absolute if we can’t find one. In other words, if one doesn’t believe in moral absolutes, or in something big enough (God for example), then one will invent a substitute absolute, for example: an economic or political system, or a biological and physical set of laws, or maybe an absolute that claims there are no absolutes. Regardless, the moral story still digs deep into our souls.

Even the most mundane and vapid kinds of films have some moral content which can be understood within a larger framework of meaning. Consider this audio review of the recent film Tranformers by a pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. (The review is at the end of that post.)

Only Physical, or Metaphysical?
As I take a look at the popular art of today, that is, television shows (i.e. CSI, Survivor, et al) and film (i.e. Michael Clayton, Enchanted, et al), I see worlds presented that do not include God, or any so-called traditional god, that is, a creator deity with whom our destiny lies. These are materialistic worlds, worlds in which stuff is the ultimate reality, no final truth, and no source of meaning. Interestingly, the goals of the characters are all about meaning, and soul searching, and truth.

The characters or contestants are driven forward by things or ideas that they deem important. This is basic story telling. This is fundamental script writing. But it doesn’t make sense if there is no final meaning in the universe, otherwise it’s just a cruel game. Why should we care that someone is searching for something that doesn’t exist? Or even if, for some untenable reason, we do care, why should they search? Consider this quote regarding the modern predicament:

The quality of modern life seemed ever equivocal. Spectacular empowerment was countered by a widespread sense of anxious helplessness. Profound moral and aesthetic sensitivity confronted horrific cruelty and waste. The price of technology’s accelerating advance grew ever higher. And in the background of every pleasure and every achievement loomed humanity’s unprecedented vulnerability. Under the West’s direction and impetus, modern man had burst forward and outward, with tremendous centrifugal force, complexity, variety, and speed. And yet it appeared he had driven himself into a terrestrial nightmare and a spiritual wasteland, a fierce constriction, a seemingly irresolvable predicament.

~Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind
What does one do with this? How does one come to terms with a spiritual wasteland, or an irresolvable predicament? Is it so that rational human beings must suffer the conflict of a great desire for meaning in a world that has no ultimate meaning? Is religion an answer or a placebo? No matter what we do we do not get away from these questions. How we solve them, or come to terms with them, is a big deal (or maybe it is also meaningless). My contention is that there is a God, that that God is there, and that that God is knowable. But am I deluded? I don’t think so. And the person who thinks I am deluded believes from a place of conviction as well. I find this more than fascinating.

Michael Clayton

What most recently sparked my thinking about all this God and art stuff was a recent viewing of Michael Clayton. The story in this film plays itself out in a Western (geographically & conceptually), materialistic world where there is no transcendent god. It is a thoroughly modern view of human existence. There are no moral absolutes. And yet, Clayton is a man in search of himself. He is in desperate need of a positive existential moment. He needs to make a self-defining, self-actualizing choice so that he can move beyond his cliff-edge existence and become who he should be. He needs to make the right choice even if it is difficult and painful, even if it means giving up who he has been. There is nothing narratively original in this aspect of the story. It is as timeless as a Greek tragedy.

The story revolves around a legal battle in which a company is being sued for its harmful actions. Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) is the attorney working the case. Unfortunately for his law firm and for his client he is deeply troubled by the case. He feels he is defending murder, in a sense. The firm sends Michael Clayton (George Clooney) to talk with Edens. Part of that conversation goes like this:

Michael Clayton: You are the senior litigating partner of one of the largest, most respected law firms in the world. You are a legend.
Arthur Edens: I’m an accomplice!
Michael Clayton: You’re a manic-depressive!
Arthur Edens: I am Shiva, the god of death


“I am Shiva, the god of death.”

Wow. Where did that come from? Shiva, the god of death? It certainly grabs one’s attention, and it sounds rather cool, but why, in this film, out of nowhere make a reference to one of the principal deities of Hinduism? I say “nowhere” because there is no indication throughout the film that any of the characters believe in any kind of god or religion. In fact, it could be argued that the problem facing all the characters is that, because there is no god, no ultimate reality to which they are finally accountable, they are lost in a sea of moral floundering. Morality becomes personal preference, personal conviction, and power.

Making a reference to Shiva, the destroyer and transformer Hindu god, makes some sense then. First, Edens feels like a destroyer, or at least one who defends the destroyer. He has personal convictions of wrongdoing and it is eating away his soul. Second, in a world personal morality one can choose, as one needs or sees fit, any god that works for the moment, so why not Shiva? Shiva becomes Eden’s god of choice because the concept of Shiva explains his convictions somehow. Shiva is his self-image for the moment. Tomorrow it might be a different god. Maybe Vishnu or Brahma. Or maybe a Sumerian god.

Interestingly the reference to Shiva comes up again. Once Clayton confronts Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) with the fact that he has carried out Eden’s plan to expose the company, we get this bit of dialog:

Karen Crowder: You don’t want the money?
Michael Clayton: Keep the money. You’ll need it.
Don Jefferies: Is this fellow bothering you?
Michael Clayton: Am I bothering you?
Don Jefferies: Karen, I’ve got a board waiting in there. What the hell’s going on? Who are you?
Michael Clayton: I’m Shiva, the God of death.


“I am Shiva, the god of death.”

Again it’s Shiva, the god of death, and this time the line is used as a final punctuation to the film’s climax. However, unlike Eden, Clayton uses the line more for its effect on Crowder and Jefferies than from a sense of personal identification. What might that effect be? Within the context of the film, and within the context of a largely non-Hindu society, this line comes as a kind of shock, a non-sequitur of sorts, that specifically draws attention to itself. I imagine the filmmakers intend the line to read something like “I am the fictional, mythological god Shiva (in a metaphorical sense of course) who is bringing about a kind of death to you, a death that you are powerless to avoid.” In other words, we are not to assume that the filmmakers or the characters actually believe in the existence of Shiva, rather the idea of Shiva is appropriated in order to convey something meaningful.

To the person who does not believe in Shiva, such a line might merely have a kind of cool factor. To a devout Hindu this line might be somewhat disconcerting – I don’t know because I am not a Hindu. What is interesting is that none of the characters have made a conversion to any religion, or even gone through any particularly religious experience. Edens has had mental breakdown because of deep moral tensions. Clayton has crossed over into a personally powerful existential decision. But neither have obviously embraced Hinduism. (If I missed something, let me know.)

Interestingly, the narrative arc of Michael Clayton follows a traditional Western style morality tale. And yet, one could say the characters, who do not overtly believe in any god, still wrestle with issues that derive their moral content from a Judeo-Christian heritage, and then, ironically, symbolically claim a Hindu god as justification for their actions. I find this both puzzling and not surprising. It is exemplary of the pluralistic/post-modern society that I live in.

In the film’s final shot we see Clayton riding alone in the back of a taxi. It is a meditative shot. He does not look happy or fulfilled. Maybe he is, but his countenance is rather sullen. Has he saved himself by his actions? Has he found redemption for who he was? How can he be sure he has actually changed as a person? None of these questions are answered. One could say that finally he made the right decision after a life of bad ones, and that is good. But one could say that he still has not solved the deeper question of his existence.

The radical truth is that in a world without a God that stands as an ultimate source of meaning then any decision made by Clayton does not really have any meaning. His final decision, though it may resonate powerfully within us the viewers, doesn’t really matter, no matter how personally, existentially transforming it may be for him. At best one can say he made his decision, so what. Any decision would have had the same value. But, of course, we know deep down that can’t be true. We live knowing there is right and wrong, and what we believe we believe to be true.

Crimes and Misdemeanors
Consider the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen’s brilliant 1989 film about morality, choice, and justice. In this film Allen explores how morality flows from where one begins, that is, from the set of presuppositions one claims about God, the universe, our existence, meaning, etc. He also seriously toys with our expectations (our need) for justice to win out.

The film is also very much about the existence, or non-existence, of God, and what that means. I love this quote from Judah Rosenthal:

I remember my father telling me, “The eyes of God are on us always.” The eyes of God. What a phrase to a young boy. What were God’s eyes like? Unimaginably penetrating, intense eyes, I assumed. And I wonder if it was just a coincidence I made my specialty ophthalmology.

There is something both sinister and humorous about it. It also represents our modern tendency to analyze ourselves and mistrust our motives.

But there is so much more to consider in this quote and in this film. The following two part video analysis is an excellent overview of the film’s themes:

When I first saw Crimes and Misdemeanors I was both stunned and thrilled. At the end I thought “perfect”, that’s how it should end, with him getting away with murder, not because I wanted him to, but because I so expected him to get caught and I liked the irony. Allen turns everything on it head and gets us to think. Thinking is a good thing, especially about truth and morality.

Our view of God has a great deal to do with how we understand and appreciate Crimes and Misdemeanors. If there is no God are the characters and their actions meaningless? Is our desire for justice merely a temporary chemical reaction to a situation that emerged from the chance combination of sub-atomic particles? Or do we live as though our desire comes from someplace more profound?

[Side note: In Star Wars, when the Death Star blows up the planet Alderaan, do we merely observe the rearranging of material particles (something of ultimate inconsequence), or do we assume that blowing up a planet and its inhabitants is an act of evil? Get over it old man Kenobi, you moralist! That was no tremor in the force. Probably just gas.]

Finally
I am inclined to think there is no such thing as a narrative without some moral content.Either a series of events are purely a-moral, an arbitrary grouping of cause and effect acts without meaning, or they are, in some way, the result of decisions. If decisions are involved then those actions have meaning and therefore have a moral dimension. I see narrative as being fundamentally the result of decisionsand therefore fundamentally moral.

But as soon as well make a moral claim we assume an absolute. We might say our claim is purely cultural or situational or merely a personal decision, but we don’t really live that way. When we say war is wrong, or rape is wrong, or Nazi death camps are wrong, we assume a universal. And if we claim universals then what is our foundation? This is the very point at which our belief or non-belief in God, god, or gods, has the most gravity.

Woody Allen leaves the question open in Crimes and Misdemeanors, but he is relying on the fact that we cannot. He creates in us a tension, and something to talk about. Michael Clayton leaves us somewhat satisfied, yet under its surface there is no final meaning, its only opinion. What is great about both of these films is how they tap into the very human predicament of having to sort out the deep questions of how we are to live our lives and upon what are we going to base our choices.

I can be in awe of an artist even though our beliefs about God may differ. What we have is a common humanity, which is a truly profound connection. Even so, it is worth calling out our differences as well, not for the sake of creating divisions, but of understanding each other and seeking the truth. For we are, by nature, truth seekers. But then that’s another universal I am claiming.

The River

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“…that’s the well that doesn’t dry up, is the Renoir cinema.”

~ Martin Scorsese

Jean Renoir is my favorite filmmaker. I say that knowing my preferences could change, and I also have deep currents of love for the work of several other filmmakers, but each time I watch a Renoir film I am reminded why I like his work so much. There are so many obvious qualities to his films, but with Renoir there are also qualities that seem impossible to define and yet you know they are there; something in your heart or gut tells you so. I think this is because his filmmaking is rooted first and foremost in his interest for humanity over and above filmmaking. Filmmaking is Renoir’s tool, but humanity is his subject.


Renoir on the set of The River

In 1951 Renoir shot his first color film, The River. The story is set in India and is based on an autobiographical novel (and screenplay) by Rumer Godden. The story is a coming of age tale about three young women as told by one. It is also a tale of life in India as told by the child of a British colonialist family. And it is a moral tale of priorities, of a tragedy when infatuation trumps love.

I don’t write film reviews, and I am not a critic in any formal sense. I do, however, want to draw some attention to a scene that is so perfectly Renoir in its timing, tone, and love for his characters.

One can argue that the scene is the climactic scene of the the film, although it is not the only climax. The scene consists of a series of vignettes of the family and its servants asleep in the heat of midday. In each shot the camera either dollies in or out (so the screengrabs don’t do them justice), giving each shot a kind of dreamy movement concomitant with the subject, which includes both the individuals sleeping and a picture of a particular kind of life.

Here we have the pregnant mother:

Doesn’t that image, the way she is posed, the book dropped to the floor but still in her hand, the warm colors, evoke the kinds of images Renoir’s father used to paint?

The rest of the vignettes are similar.

Each of these vignettes has the camera moving in and through the image, composing as it goes, drawing our attention more deeply into the world of the characters. The stringing together of these shots also sets up a kind of emotional pacing that then “pays off” when a horrible tragedy is discovered, a tragedy that was set up earlier in the film and then reinforced just before this series of shots. [I would say more, but I don’t want to spoil the film, even though great films truly cannot be spoiled.]

There is something marvelous in the way Renoir sets up the tragedy. One could say that death comes because others are not paying attention, that they are thinking of themselves. And that is true. But Renoir never finds too much fault in his characters. Renoir’s humanism is one of subtlety and mercy. He finds both righteousness and sinfulness in all his characters. I wrote some about this in my post on Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning.

Renoir was a master filmmaker. His two touted masterpieces, The Rules of the Game (1939) and The Grand Illusion (1937), show him at a summit of sorts. And yet, take a look at his other films, The Golden Coach (1953) for example, or French Cancan (1954), or films such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), and one finds additional riches from a great cinematic story teller. There is so much in the Renoir vault. Renoir is truly a well that doesn’t dry up.

>grab the details

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>For some time now my credit union has been running an add for free tunes when one signs up for their free checking. The campaign, I believe, is targeted toward college students. I mean, who else would want free tunes, or think that’s a good enough incentive to open their first checking account after moving out of mom and dad’s place?

I have to say, however, that I am curious about the visuals.

This image has been popping up on the credit union’s web site for about a year now, and it kinda disturbs me (in a humorous way, I must say). What is going on here? Along with the text I see two young hip college students apparently very happy about the free tunes with the free checking. They look like they are dancing.

Obviously their visual relationship is a construction, they are not in the same space in reality but have been manually juxtaposed by the graphic designer. So the image is a manipulation. They form a kind of visual unit that has been constructed to create a particular effect, whether conscious or subconscious. What that effect is remains to be seen.

The man stands, leaning back, pelvic forward, right arm extended outward and slightly up. His legs are spread, and he has a kind of hip college confidence. The woman also standing leaning back, also pelvic forward, her arms at her sides. She appears to be standing between the legs of the man. There is a kind of forced intimacy, forced in that the arrangement is arbitrary. The look on her face, with her mouth wide open, is one of delight, as though she is exclaiming something joyous, or maybe she is ready to take a bite of something.

In effect, without appearing to acknowledge each other’s presence, these two seem to be presenting their clothed bodies to each other.

And notice the angles. Her body position, and especially her left arm, makes a definite line angling downward to the right. That line seems to end, it would seem, at the man’s crotch. The man’s body angles up to the right. His arm and his gaze angle up to the left. If we were to draws lines to represent these visual vector forces, they might look like this below:

A triangle of vector lines is the most common of visual constructions. It mentally ties together visual elements, creating visual relationships that weave connotations for the mind to land upon.

So what does this mean? Honestly, I can’t say for sure. If I had to come up with something I would say the man is represented as being strong, masculine, and erect (symbolically emphasized by his arm thrusting outward). The woman is represented as being more diminutive than the man, not merely because she is smaller, but because she is placed in a lower position than the man. She seems to be focused on the man’s crotch, with a look of extreme delight. I don’t mean to be crude. I am just stating the obvious.

Finally, on the left-hand side of the image there is the phrase “Grab the details.” The clickable triangle/arrow that goes with the phrase is on the same visual plane, and pointing in the same direction, as the woman’s hand and the man’s crotch. Is she the one who is going to grab the details? One wonders. Again, I don’t mean to be crude.

I don’t think this image needs my interpretation or evaluation. One can make of it what one wills. But it reminds me of the advertising I studied at university in media studies. And I find it funny to see it on my credit union’s web site. I also find it rather peculiar. Why does a credit union have to use such advertising, whether stupid or sexual or both, to sell checking? It’s just checking. But, then I don’t work in advertising.

>the long axis & the interpretive camera

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>Alexander Mackendrick was a noted filmmaker and an influential teacher. Below are a couple of clips that focus on his teaching and some of his ideas.

“If a film works it is never simply because it followed the rules. If it fails, however, it is almost certainly that the breaking of one or more rules is the root cause.”

~Alexander Mackendrick

I am only now learning about Mackendrick. These clips, however, remind me so much of my days at university. I love this stuff.

>Wrong Move & our institution of high art

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>This post can be considered a contribution to the contemplative cinema blogathon over at Unspoken Cinema.

I am convinced that the existence of the contemplative in cinema gains or loses its power from the historical and cultural contexts in which it plays. In other words, one person’s contemplative moment is another person’s boring-art-film moment is another person’s slice of reality. And that those cinematic moments shift over time, for example traveling from a formerly populist cultural object used for “mere” entertainment to an archaeological/social artifact used for contemplation by a cultural elite. Take for example the two scenes in Wim Wenders’ Wrong Move (1975) in which the five central characters proceed on extended walks while talking, observing, and not talking.

Wrong Move is not a contemplative film the way a Tarkovsky or Tarr film might be, but it uses some contemplative devices. The plot is apparently thin, the motivations of characters are somewhat obscure, and the focus is on the character’s trying to solve the question of their existence and understand themselves. I do not imagine Wrong Move was a particularly popular film in its day. I know that no one would bother watching it today except for those who have an interest in such films. Regardless, it is a very good film.

In many films walking, like car chases, is a time filler. A director can lengthen or shorten such scenes to fit the desired length for the film. Ellipses exist, in part, to do away with obvious time-wasters as extended walking scenes. That is why we see a character leave an apartment and then see her driving her car; we just assume the action between leaving and driving took place and we do not care to see it anyway.

In Wrong Move Wenders uses ellipses when it is appropriate to telling the story. But then, twice, he creates scenes in which characters just walk, amble really, through a city first, and then through the countryside. In both cases the walking takes up minutes of screen time. And in both cases there are significant pauses in the conversations, which, other than the walking, is also the only “action” going on.

In the first walking scene the characters walk along side streets and back alleys, mostly in silence, observing the world around them.

Several times they stop and observer and listen to the sights and sounds of the city and its inhabitants. In one instance a man and woman are fighting and the man begins beating the woman. The walkers turn and keep walking. Another time a man yells out of his upstairs window about his extreme suffering. They stop, listen, and keep walking.

In the second sequence the characters walk up a long road in the country until they are high above the valley and the river below.

At moments they pair up and then switch pairings in a natural way that amblers do.

Along the way they talk of various things such as art and politics and history.

Overall, neither of these walks advances the plot with any kind of action. These walks are almost like detours from the story. That’s one way of looking at them. Another way of looking at them is that these walks are central to the story and that the plot revolves, in a sense, around these moments. In fact, these walking scenes are key contemplative moments that both draw us into the characters as human beings who think, rather than merely act, and foreground the film as a film, thus substantiating our own ambling.

By having the characters walk for such extended screen time one is faced with non-normative cinematic conventions. By having the characters talk one is drawn into their thinking. In both instances one is faced with either turning away or contemplating the film and one’s own thoughts. The fact that a film would ask the viewer to participate in contemplation places that film outside the assumptions underlying more popular films. Wrong Move, though it is built with a populist technology, nonetheless resides outside populist conventions, even if its themes are universal.

This “foregrounding” is a common contemplative process. By deviating from classical cinematic narrative norms, in this case by just having the characters walk for minutes of screen time, the viewer is made more aware of being a viewer, and of the film being a film. In this sense the contemplative aspects include not only what is happening on the screen, but the act of viewing, including one’s relationship to the film as film.

A note on contemplative cinema: We live at a time in which the discussion of art often assumes one underlying purpose of art, that is, art is for perceptual contemplation, and more specifically, for aesthetic contemplation. But art is also for many things, not least of which includes religious rites, or telling stories, or public ceremonies. We can also assume that art can roughly be categorized as works of high art, works of popular art, and works of the tribe. In all these distinction there is great cross-over and cross-pollinating, so much so that clear divisions are often impossible to maintain.

I want to point this out because when we talk of contemplative cinema we are typically referring to basic assumptions of our institution of high art. First, to borrow from Nicholas Wolterstorff, a society’s institution of art can be summed as

[T]he characteristic arrangements and patterns of action whereby works of art are produced in that society, whereby they are made available for the use of members of that society, and whereby members of that society are enabled to make use of them.

Art in Action, 1980

Thus, the institution of high art consists of those patterns and arrangements that create, support, and suite the needs and desires of those who would “use” works of high art. That art is for aesthetic contemplation is probably the single most assumed characteristic of this institution.

I recognize the term “high art” can be somewhat pejorative, but I do not intend it so, for it is not necessarily a question of valuation. But it might be a question of social class – an unwelcome and unrecognized term in the U.S.

One can observe that in our society there is a cultural elite: a group that is both open (anyone can join) and is closely tied to our intellectual elite (which also anyone can join). Lest we chafe at such notions, we should keep in mind that a very small percentage of people in our society will ever step into an art gallery or concert hall, and very few people will ever watch a Tarkovsky or Tarr film, or a Wenders film from the 1970s, or even a great Hollywood studio era film outside a handful of titles. And certainly even fewer individuals will read works of film theory or film history, or bother to write down their own thoughts on the subject.

We should also believe, however, that this cultural elite consists of individuals fundamentally no different than anyone else. The term is largely a technical one. I like to think that our cultural elite behaves as it does for much the same reasons, as described by Pauline Kael, that educated audiences see “art” films:

I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses “art” films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood “product,” finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.

from Fantasies of the Art-House Audience, in I Lost It at the Movies (1965)

Contemplative cinema is more than a category of cinematic effects or a collection of stylistic characteristics. It is also a social term, and maybe even a political term. To speak of contemplative cinema is to draw connections with our institution of high art with all of its assumptions, expectations, and motivations.

Irma Vep | Avatar | Maggie Cheung

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In Olivier Assayas’ 1996 film Irma Vep, Hong Kong film and television actress Maggie Cheung plays the Hong Kong film and television actress known as Maggie Cheung – what some would call “playing herself.”

The story revolves around a film crew on a production that is spinning out of control as its director has a nervous breakdown and the production staff fight amongst themselves. The film they are trying to create is a remake of the classic Les Vampires, a French serial from 1915. Maggie Cheung is cast in the role of the central character, Irma Vep, originally played by Musidora.

During the shooting Cheung is told by the director René Vidal (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) that she needs to become the character more, to dive in and exude the role, to be Irma Vep – a rather typical bit of advice given by directors, especially from those who have grown unsure of their own talents. With this critique Cheung feels the pressure to jump more fully into the character, and this pressure underlies my favorite scene in the film.

Later that evening, when she is alone in her hotel room, Cheung wears her costume and roams around her room. She struggles to find the right emotion and truly sense Vep. At one point she seems like she might lose her mind.

Then she quickly exits into the hallway and begins to prowl. She acts out the role of Irma Vep, sneaking around, avoiding others and doing a bit of spying. She eventually notices a maid carrying some food to a room. After the maid enters, Cheung slips in quietly. The maid leaves and Cheung is hiding in the room watching and listening a woman talk on the phone.

Cheung then notices some costume jewelry lying on a counter.

She takes the jewels and sneaks out of the apartment. At several moments she is nearly seen.

Then, to avoid bumping into some others, she exits out onto the roof, which produces these wonderful images.

After a few moments of contemplation Cheung holds the jewels over the edge of the building and then lets them drop.

The jewels fall, disappearing into the rain.

What I find so fun about this scene is how the character Cheung crosses over into an approximate real-life version of Vep in order to better understand Vep and then, possibly, play Vep better in the film. But it is also a moment in which we get to really see Vep for the first time. And it is also a scene in which the vicarious and transcendent aspects of viewing movies get played out as action itself. When Cheung leaves her room and begins to be Vep she acts out visually/physically the mental condition of that viewers go through as they “play” the characters on the screen in their own fantasies. In other words, she acts the avatar we aspire to in our waking dreams, whether that avatar is Vep or any other character we love, hate, or fetishize.

postmodern notebook

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We have learned to trust the photographic image. Can we trust the electronic image? With painting everything was simple. The original was the original, and each copy was a copy – a forgery. With photography and then film that began to get complicated. The original was a negative. Without a print, it did not exist. Just the opposite, each copy was the original. But now with the electronic, and soon the digital, there is no more negative and no more positive. The very notion of the original is obsolete. Everything is a copy. All distinctions have become arbitrary. No wonder the idea of identity finds itself in such a feeble state. Identity is out of fashion.

~Wim Wenders, 1989

The following screengrabs are from Wenders’ film Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989). They are all of images within images, and represent/re-present places within places and ideas within ideas.

My mind wanders over these images and then wanders beyond them, both outside their frames and to my own presuppositions and fetishes, and I think of Baudrillard’s quote:

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

-from Photography, or the Writing of Light (2000)

Of course Baudrillard is wrong if we take him literally. Reality has not disappeared. But Baudrillard is right, as all postmodernists are, that the way we understand reality is heavily mediated for us (and by us) to the effect that reality, or “reality”, would seem to be an image created for us, is an image presented to us, is an image we carry with us, is an image we remember, and is an image we create. And, as an image is worth a thousand words, or a million, and therefore images are stories, fragmented or otherwise, connected and intersecting with other stories, stories referencing other stories, images referencing other images, we can apparently say all is reference. With Wenders we have the added question of the ever changing and never original (or always original) electronic image coupled with the question of what is fashion.

I suppose this blog plays a part in how I mediate the world for myself. I write for an audience, largely imaginary, but I also write for myself. Subconsciously, and maybe sometimes consciously, I write so that I can understand the world and my place in it. In this sense I can say that I have my take on reality. But the question is, are all distinctions truly arbitrary? And can this notion apply beyond the world of images to the rest of life?

So some degree Wender’s position hearkens back to his explorations in such films as Paris Texas and Wings of Desire. In those films we see characters struggling to communicate across great barriers (physical, psychological, spiritual) with those whom they love, or believe they love. In Wings of Desire the barrier is the difference between the world of human beings and the world of angels. The film’s story revolves around the idea that to become fully human one has to give up being merely an observer and enter in, that is, to immerse oneself in the tangible messy world we humans call reality. To cross that chasm is to take a leap of faith.

But is faith a leap? In the so-called Western/Christian tradition the word faith has a lot of gravity. Faith is one of those words, like love and happiness, whose meaning we all know and yet can never seem to finally pin down. For many the word has precisely to do with some kind of existential or spiritual leap. And for some that leap is a leap into the unknown or the unsure, or even the absurd. Interestingly, when we read the word faith used by the early Christian writers, such as the Apostles Paul or Peter or John, it is, in fact, the ordinary Greek word for belief. It does not appear that the Apostle’s intentions were to convey any idea of a leap of faith, or of faith being a kind of spiritual ecstasy. For what I can tell they were merely telling others to continue to believe what they have heard about Jesus because it is true, and that they can know it is true because the Apostles were eye witnesses.

Which brings us back to Notebook on Cities and Clothes and the idea of mediation and its relationship to truth. The fact is we are immersed in a world of images, and we seem to understand our world more and more in terms of those images rather than words, and those images are increasingly potentially untrustworthy. We are also in a world in which, while many of the barriers between people and cultures still remain, we are intersecting more and more with an increasingly broader scope of people(s) and a multiplicity of voices. Which means that we live in a world of references, that is, a world in which everything begins to reference something else and is built upon other references.

Maybe no other living filmmaker has more fun with playing with references than Quentin Tarantino. Part one of Death Proof immerses the viewer in a 1970s pastiche, full of faux antiquing of the film, samples from 1970s films, and stylistic choices right out of now classic B-movie road and slasher films. The film is designed to draw attention to itself. Tarantino winks at the audience and the audience winks back, along with the occasional high-five and an “oh yeah!” If a drinking game were devised for Death Proof, where viewers had to down a shot for every meant-to-be-obvious filmic reference, players would die of alcohol poisoning after ten minutes.

Examples include this appropriated “restricted” card from the early days of the MPAA rating system:

And this created title that looks like it came directly out of an early 1970s Disney film starring you know who:

Other examples include faux scratches and dust on the film and numerous jump-cuts that simulate a worn out film jumping in the projector gate because of splices and damaged sprocket holes.

But what is so fascinating is that Tarantino is not making a 70s film. He is making modern film. Consider that while the characters seem to live and play in a archetypal film of a previous era, and while the film makes a point of looking aged and worn out, characters still drive modern cars and use cell phones – like Jungle Julia below.

And yet, I doubt many viewers found this disconcerting, or even noticed, because there are no longer any meaningful distinctions (apparently). For a director like Tarantino there are no boundaries between films or genres or eras, there is only the magnificent cloth of cinema where every film participates in the weave, connecting and intersecting in the psychic playground cinephilia. For Tarantino, I would argue, faith is not a belief in what is true, but in what is cool and can be appropriated. And cool is another word for fashion.

In such a world where does one find one’s identity? Might one say that we are all only references built up from other references? That is the postmodern perspective, and it is the current version of “God is dead.” But is it true? I would say no. Ultimately there is no such world of only references, and we do not live our lives as though such a world were true. Wisdom would say one should always recognize the potential fallibility of our sacred ideas, but we are all creatures of faith, and faith knows there is a final reality that, at least, haunts us. Maybe, as we are immersed more and more in images, so increases the haunting.

>elements and links

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>I have been hunting through some old film theory books I have sitting on my shelves. One topic that always fascinates me is the question of what makes a film a film? Related is what makes a film cinematic? Other questions arise: What are the fundamental elements of cinema? or, What are those salient characteristics that make a film distinct from a non-film? I’ve dealt with some of these questions in my post on Jeff Wall. And somewhat less in my post on Cindy Sherman. Both of which deal with non-cinema art that has (debatedly so) cinematic qualities. Some other interesting comments and debate related to the topic are at Girish’s blog on the work of Michael Snow. In this spirit, and tangentially related, here is an interesting quote from one of those old film theory books:

But a problem surfaces at once regarding film. What are the elements? Most film aestheticians seem to think they have to start by identifying unique elements of film, thus defining cinematic specificity in terms of attributes and capacities of the medium or of what is urged as the viewer’s properly cinematic experience. Thus we have Rudolf Arnheim’s “distortions” or “restrictions” “of the images we receive of the physical world,” which properly exploit the “peculiar possibilities of cinematographic technique”; Eisenstein’s “shot and montage, [which] are the basic elements of cinema”; F. E. Sparshott’s “technologically determined” “alienated vision” of dreamlike film space and time; Bazin’s “filtered” imprintings, which are “fragments of imaged reality”; V. F. Perkin’s “opportunities of the medium,” which amount to the discipline implied by cinema’s recording/realistic and creating/illusionistic aspects in narrative mainstream films; Siegfied Kracauer’s “basic” and “technical” properties of the medium; and such precise specification of the cinematic elements as Christian Metz’s “audio-visual, moving, multiple, mechanical, iconic images.”

We agree on the importance of all of these aspects of film. Analyzing them, we can say much about what makes films filmic. But it seems to us that they are not minimal, but emerge from elements. What elements? Areas for the visual aspects of film design, sounds for the auditory, words for the verbal. We don’t think we need define special elements of film, though it is quite natural to use terms like those above in a very different context from determination of the elements of film. To use them is to discuss film history, to consider and report on what has been, is, or could be most characteristic of films. The terms are for what Christian Metz calls the “language” that has developed from film’s “fine stories,” a language of connotations deposited with the knowledgeable film viewer like Bazin’s “fine carpet of silt and gold dust,” as a set of special expectations of film experience.

-from Film Criticism: A Counter Theory, by William Cadbury & Leland Poague, (1982), p. 5

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Some links for the curious:

Spark – according to the site: Spark is your guide to the Next Big Thing. On-air and online, join Nora Young for a surprising and irreverent look at tech, trends, and fresh ideas.

Photography of the Unexpected and Neglected Architecture – a fascinating photographic collection of old and abandoned buildings and structures. Each one could be the location for a film, or scene within a film.

Mars Hill Audio bonus interviews – great, thought provoking discussions on just about anything to do with the arts, culture, society, and faith.

Some stunning film miniatures by artist Sheri Wills.

An interesting tidbit on the scale & potential of solar power.

Some uplifting news from Reuters. It’s nice to know that someone is covering the important stuff in the midst of all the fluff.

I hope the food is as good as the view, or as valuable as one’s life.


Some of the blogs I’m reading:

The Amateur Gourmet is a witty, insightful, and refreshingly fun food blog. You will find restaurant reviews, recipes, personal anecdotes, and lots of observations on the world of food.

I just discovered Thompson on Hollywood. Anne Thompson is deputy editor at Variety. This is her personal blog where she can let loose a bit from all that professional industry insider writing she’s does at her day job.

Another great food blog, The Girl Who Ate Everything is full of excellent photos and fun stories.

musings on Jeff Wall and the "cinematic" label

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I am always a little curious about non-cinema art that gets labeled “cinematic.” A while ago I posted some thoughts on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still series. Lately I have been thinking about the staged photographs of Jeff Wall. And I have to say my thoughts are all a’flux.

If you are unfamiliar with Jeff Wall, one of the best overviews of Wall’s work is in this article.

Wall is one of the looming names in contemporary art, and like many artistic luminaries, one either likes his work or doesn’t. I happen to like his work quite a lot, but more from an intellectual curiosity and from being impressed with his virtuosity rather than from emotional engagement. In many ways his photographs seem to be either exercises in meticulous stagecraft or in meticulous banality. One label that has been tossed at Wall’s work is “cinematic” or “movie like.”

One article says the qualities of Wall’s photographs are such “…that the pictures glow like a movie screen.” The article goes on to say that Wall’s images are deeply indebted to cinema, which IS true, especially given that Wall wanted to be a filmmaker at one time. But is his work cinematic? [Other articles that mention the cinematic quality of Wall’s work: here, here, here, here, and here.]

I am inclined to think the label is being misused, but not intentionally so.

Consider the following four Jeff Wall images*:


Insomnia, (date ?)


Volunteer, (1996)


A View From An Apartment, (2004-2005)


Rear, 304 E. 20th Ave., May, (1997)

Each of these pictures are obviously staged and photographed with a great deal of control and specificity applied by the artist. And like any photograph with human beings in the frame, there is some sense of narrative. But can we call them cinematic? Is that fair? Is it because the pictures are of people in some kind of “life world” context? That is, do the images seem as though there is some preceding event(s) to the frozen moment, and that that frozen moment will be followed by another?

I do not think this is a strong enough argument for the cinematic label. But even if it is, aren’t there many more photographic examples that have richer narrative possibilities? Such as these two, apparently unstaged, photographs from Cartier-Bresson (I don’t have the titles or dates, unfortunately):



We could say much the same thing about a lot of painting. Consider this paining by Edgar Degas, which has a kind of in media res quality, as well as a sense of the banal.


Place de la Concorde, (1875), oil on canvas

Should we consider this Degas to be somewhat cinematic too? If so, then I find Degas to be at least as cinematic as Wall, and maybe more so, which is ironic given that the photographic apparatus is closer to that of cinema.

Maybe, instead, we should consider the typical way Wall’s images are presented to the viewer. Wall’s images are oversized (comparatively) cibachrome enlargements that are placed in lightboxes mounted on the wall. Thus, when one sees a Jeff Wall image in its native setting, one sees a very large photograph that is lit from behind, and therefore glows like a television screen, or, more appropriately, an advertisement light box. In this way Wall’s images have the immensity of a medium-large painting, but with the technical aura and aesthetic more closely aligned with mechanical presentation, i.e. television and cinema. Does that still qualify his work as cinematic? When one sees a lightbox advertisement at a bus stop or a store window does one think “cinematic?” Somehow I doubt it.

This video (below) of the Jeff Wall retrospective at MoMA will give some idea of how the images are presented.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

Maybe it’s just the size of Wall’s work. Of course, great big narrative paintings have been around for a long time too. Maybe this painting at the Louvre is somewhat cinematic.


Note: I grabbed this image off the Internets. I don’t know the title or artist of the painting, and I don’t know who took the photo, but I’m sure it’s from someone’s vacation.

It certainly is huge and, although I don’t know its date, it must pre-date the invention of cinema. Does that mean it anticipates the coming of cinema in some way? Maybe, but not likely. Just because a work of art is big and appears to have a story embedded in it doesn’t automatically make it cinematic, seems to me. And, of course, the painting does not glow with its own light source. And yet, maybe it is cinema that is more like oversized genre paintings of the past and not the other way around. Should we label all instances of cinema as cinematic?(!).

Maybe what is most fascinating about Jeff Wall’s work on an immediate level at least, is just how stagey they are. In the history of photography the staged photo has held a lesser place, reserved primarily for advertising, because staging an image apparently undercuts the great achievement of photography: capturing life in a moment, as it is (or was) with no barrier except for the lens and the technical processes. Wall, on the other hand, hires actors, carefully plans and sets up his shots, and probably takes numerous tries to get it just right. Then, of course, he digitally alters them as needed to get what he envisions.

Consider this image:


Mimic, (1982)

Here Wall has staged his re-imagined version of a real event which he saw. What hits the viewer, along with the obvious content of the subject, is the fact that this apparent “snapshot” could only exist if it was staged. It’s perfection, its clarity (only achieved with a not-very-portable large format camera sitting on a trip), its careful composition all point to a set-up rather than a lucky shot.

Maybe that staginess is what encourages the cinematic label. But that level of craft and arrangement is not unique to cinema. In most other arts the carefully arranged composition is standard fare. Just consider the genre paintings of Jan Steen:


The Artist’s Family, (c. 1663) Oil on canvas, Mauritshuis, The Hague

In this sense Wall’s work is something more akin to the history of art in general than to photography. The camera is his tool but he is not beholden to the “moment.”

Of course the staging of actors before the lens so that the camera can capture a scene, as it were, is nothing new. Although such staging has played a lesser role in the history of photography, as far as what is considered art is concerned, is has always been present, and maybe more prevalent in the past.

One connection with staging is the idea of the tableau vivant or living picture. Here we have the tableau vivant of Wall’s Dead Troops Talk:


Dead Troops Talk, (1992)

One of the comic ironies of this image is that we have those who are dead animating a tableau vivant. Now here we have an advertisement which appeared in the September 2000 issue of Harper’s Bazaar:



Here we have a tableau vivant from 1910 with actors portraying a scene from the story of Joan of Arc:



And here we have the photographer Hippolyte Bayard circa 1840 playing himself as a drowned man in a very early tableau vivant of sorts:



I find these kinds of connections fascinating, but nothing here suggests that Wall’s work is cinematic. In fact, the tableau vivant is more of a theater convention than that of cinema. Certainly Wall’s images have ties to photography, painting and theater that are at least as strong, and probably more so, than to cinema.

One thing to ponder is that some films do use tableaus to create their meanings. In other words, it is not uncommon for filmmakers to stage relatively static mise en scène for effect, rather than exploit the more cinematic capabilities of the technology. For example, consider these two images from Godard’s Weekend (1967):



Although the burning wrecks are dramatic, and the flames do move, the scenes are obviously carefully constructed piles of autos set aflame and presented to the viewer as a kind of emotional tableau on modernism – even humorous if one can see Godard winking.

Or consider these two images from Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and Her Lover (1989):

What makes tableau’s work in a cinema context is the fact that they are not cinematic in their qualities. There is something particularly “wrong” with them in the context that then draws our attention to their existence and therefore to our viewing.

And yet, though maybe not examples of the “cinematic,” what makes these images from Weekend and The Cook (et al) cinema is that, regardless of their tableau qualities, they exist in time and they have motion, and they are part of wholes that exist in time and have motion. Unlike the Jeff Wall images, these screengrabs are false images in a way, for the originals (and original intentions) are not of static moments, rather they move: the flames ascend, the steam rises, the camera pans and trucks.

And movement is the one thing photography lacks. But photography can suggest movement by capturing a thing in motion and presenting it as such. For example, this image:


Milk, (1984)

Here Wall has created a particularly enigmatic image of a man crouching on a sidewalk or path with milk shooting out of the bottle for some mysterious reason. At least one thing that makes this image interesting is the fact that the milk is in an impossible position. Liquid does not hang suspended in the air like that. Photography provides a unique ability to capture such images

But Wall also works on a grander scale with imaging movement. Consider this image:


A Sudden Gust of Wind, (1993)

I would consider A Sudden Gust of Wind to look the most like a still from some film, maybe an Eastern European film. But of course this image is not the progeny of cinema. It is a re-imaging of a famous Japanese print:


This print is from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Hokusai lived from 1760 to 1849, before the invention of cinema.

So even when we get close to something that might be cinematic there are specific non-cinema connection that pull us back. What then is cinematic? What are its qualities?

I am going to say that cinematic is a feeling more than a set of specific characteristics. The reason being that cinema has so many characteristics that a mere listing, and then tagging, would be an almost endless task. But feelings come from somewhere, are grounded in something, and I believe to feel that a work of non-cinema is cinematic must be based in some sense of what makes a movie a movie and not something else.

Cinema’s greatest strength lies with its unique abilities to manipulate the image in time and space. But it is important to realize that there are so many connections with other arts and with the varieties of human expertise that strict demarcations are impossible. Regardless, the cinematic image is an image that moves and that exists in time. One could add montage to the list, but one can find montage in all the arts – even Eisenstein argued for that. There is great power in the combination of film images, but “[t]he dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame.” – Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 113.

But it is important to make a distinction. The time within the image is not the same as the time of the viewer even if they both tic off the same number of seconds. An artist creates a world and presents it to the viewer or reader. To receive the work is to enter into that world. With cinema one enters the image, as it were, and into the time of the story – into the world of the work. Cinema, unlike photography, can carry one along inside the image, inside the created world. The static photographic image, regardless of its qualities, can only go so far in this regard.

All arts create their worlds. What makes cinema cinematic is the ability to do so with greater power than other visual artforms, and in particular photography. Which brings us back to Jeff Wall.

There are aspects of Wall’s photographs that have kinship to cinema. But there is also a pushing back. The careful and obvious staginess, the frozen moment, the artificiality at times seem to undercut the cinematic label, even deny it. One may chaff at the mystery and long for more of a story, but Wall’s images, in that sense, are dead ends. Very quickly one realizes there really isn’t a story in the images because they are purely fabricated moments. They are not part of a rhythm. And thus, I see Wall’s works to be humorous in this regard: They draw one into an expectation of the cinematic but deliver something else. That something else is a mystery of Jeff Wall’s.
_____________________________________
*I have “screen grabbed” Jeff Wall’s images, except one, from the Jeff Wall Online Exhibition at the MoMA web site. Needless to say, the images here are not quite as good as they are on the MoMA site, and nothing compared to the real thing.