Category: Psychology

>What some voters believe (and the Penguin)

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>I love elections, and I can’t stand them. Elections bring out the best and worst in us. They also stir the pot, which often brings to the surface what isn’t that far below.

I know there are people who don’t believe Obama’s confession of faith is genuine and that McCain’s is. Personally I have the opposite perspective. This does not mean I agree with everything Obama says or promotes, but then I have many disagreements with lots of people who call themselves Christians. C’est la vie. What I am surprised by, however, is the obviously outrageous beliefs about Obama that people hold in all sincerity. I guess that’s just life too. Regardless, I was struck by this news clip:

Elections teach us a lot about ourselves and our neighbors.

And then there’s the debates, which I enjoy. I doubt the debates really have much affect on which way people vote. Of course, what we have seen in the recent debates (and campaign speeches) is not unprecedented. I wonder which team has taken its cues from the Penguin:

Beautiful.

>kids outdoors

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>I am blessed with two beautiful daughters. They both love the outdoors. I find myself increasingly interested in understanding the relationship between kids and nature, that is, how nature plays a role in how kids grow and develop.

Recently I took my eldest daughter on a backpacking trip. Although the “work” of hiking and carrying a pack was not something she loved doing, I did see her come alive at every moment she was able to play and explore. This makes sense to me, and it makes sense when I look at my own life. I am reading a book called Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv.

The basic premise of the book is that in our present age children are not getting into direct contact with nature the way children have for all of history up till now. Nature has been pushed aside because of distractions like video games and computers, by time pressures, and by fear. This lack of nature in kids lives is having a profoundly negative impact on children and our society.

Below are a couple of videos that look at this topic.

When I look at my own life I know that I also suffer from nature deficit disorder. I spend too much time at the computer, on-line, in a cubicle, in front of the television, etc. It’s not just kids that are suffering, it’s all of us who live too much indoors and on-line.

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.

Rear Window Sandwich

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The other day my daughter Lily asked to see Rear Window again and I was happy to oblige. In fact I was thrilled. I’ve seen the film many times. She had only seen it once before (she’s not yet eight, there’s plenty of time).

I haven’t thought much about Rear Window, or read much about it either. I just love it and watch it periodically. This time something caught my eye that I hadn’t really thought of before: The analogy between L. B. Jefferies’ consuming fascination with what is happening outside his rear window and his biological need for food.

Here is the scene that caught my eye:

In the half light of evening we see an image of a half of a sandwich, a glass of milk, and a 35mm SLR camera with a large telephoto lens.

Then we see Jefferies’ hand reach for the sandwich.

From the context we know that Jefferies is sitting in his wheelchair, looking out the window, and looking at his neighbors.

We cut to Jefferies eating.

Interestingly, he holds his sandwich much like we’ve seen him hold his binoculars.

Of course this won’t last for long. He switches out his sandwich for his camera and telephoto lens.

I’m sure someone has written in depth about this already, but anyhow as I see it, Jefferies, being human, of course needs food to sustain him physically, but in the same way, he needs to spy on his neighbors for another kind of sustenance. His obsession with his neighbors, and in particular Thorwald and Thorwald’s wife, provide mental nourishment while he is couped up in his apartment with his broken leg. In this sense his voyeurism, and ours by implication, is really no more unusual than his hunger for a sandwich. It is basic to his nature, almost as though it is biological and involuntary.

But is Hitchcock right to make this connection? Is voyeurism merely biological and involuntary? Or is it a moral issue? Or is it both?

“Art-Cinema” Narration: Part Three

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This is the last part of a three-part posting taken (reworked) from a brief lecture I gave during a film class years ago.

The other posts are Part One and Part Two. The main purpose of these posts is so that I can clarify some of my thinking on cinema – I’m sure my posts will shorten over time. I imagine that most of those blogging on film these days will find this rather pedantic and abecedarian. And I will also make a disclaimer that virtually all of “my” ideas come from other sources, not least of which are the writings of David Bordwell, esp. Narration in the Fiction Film. My lack of proper citations is due my having lost my notes from that class.

I must say that the ideas in these three posts provide some foundation for the concept of “contemplative cinema” which is the subject of an upcoming blogathon at Unspoken Cinema here: Unspoken Cinema: BLOGATHON. I plan on putting together my own specific thoughts for the blogathon, but I think this post may stand as my entryway into the subject, even if only obliquely.

Art-Cinema Narration and its goals.

Compared to Classical Hollywood Narration, the goals of Art-Cinema Narration are quite different.

Just a few distinctives:
Characters focus on the existential choice:

  • That choice which is about one’s very existence and very reason for existence.
  • Character(s) struggle at the crux between meaning and meaninglessness.
  • Or between expectations imposed externally (society, religion, school, etc.) and one’s desires.
  • These struggles are very much within the struggles of the 20th and 21st Century’s individual as described in the previous posts.

Focus on the interior life of the character:

  • The mental world trumps the mere overcoming of external obstacles. This is often played out narrationally as “psychological effects in search of their causes”
  • A searching for answers to one’s mental state, etc., but of course they might be presented in a very subtle way; it is hard to show what is interior.
  • Often the littlest, most insignificant things can be what triggers a wholesale reexamination of one’s life.

Redefinition of “Reality” and “Truth”:

  • Acceptance of coincidence, randomness, “and plausible improbabilities” as the ground of daily life.
  • The anomaly is normal, the clear causal chain of events something to question.
  • Characters search for truth while believing there is no such thing.
  • “[T]he world’s laws may not be knowable, personal psychology may be indeterminate.”
  • Foregrounding the problem of subjectivity: both within the story being told (subjectivity of the characters) and the very process of telling that story (subjectivity of the filmmakers).

And, as you can imagine, compared to Classical Hollywood Narration, the cinematic results are going to be different. One could argue that Art-Cinema Narration is really just a way of making films that remain “true” to the modernist mindset.

Some observations on how these goals are played out:

  • Often “looser” more ambiguous plot constructions.
  • Plots are less “neat”, less clearly motivated. Classical Holly Narration usually has characters who know what the problem is – the building is going to blow, the terrorists are going to do something bad, the mystery needs to be solved, the misunderstanding needs to be resolved, etc. Art-Cinema Narration may not have such clear-cut problems and therefore may have rather diffused goals – such as fighting boredom, or finding oneself, or finding meaning, or just existing.
  • Plots are not always logical or fulfilling of viewer’s expectations. Asks the viewer to do more. May be subject to question: “are we seeing the truth?” What is the truth?
  • Characters are often less clearly defined Ambiguous, may not fit into traditional stereotypes, inner turmoil, may change.
  • Self-conscious narration: The film “knows” it is a film and is not afraid to let you know that it knows. This can be done numerous ways, for example: characters talking to the camera, overt narration, breaking film “rules” etc. The film may even “show its cards”; may reveal the camera in a mirror, etc.

I must stress, however, that even with the seriousness the many of the ideas underlying art-cinema narration, many so-called art films are no more profound than any classical narrative films. And art films can fall prey to the same shallowness and overt “posing” that affects much of the art world as a whole.

One of the more interesting things, in my mind, about the history of cinema is the existence of both kinds of narration – Classical Hollywood and Art-Cinema – side be side throughout most of the last one hundred years. And certainly they have had influence upon each other.

As for contemplative cinema…
According tot he folks at Unspoken Cinema, contemplative cinema is the kind “that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and star system.” It seems clear to me that contemplative cinema then may be considered a sub-set of Art-Cinema Narration.