Posted 8:33 AM by *cnn
Last night at the cinematheque in Nazareth, the documentary film al-Sabar (The Cactus) was shown to a packed audience, including the filmmaker and the main subject of the film.
The film charted two main storylines, interweaving them until they were indistinguishable. The first was a woman's quest to mount a photographic exhibition in a refugee camp in Lebanon of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. The second thread was a homage to a Swiss doctor and his wife, who had dedicated their life's work to the people of Nazareth.
You'll have to excuse me for not remembering the people's names, generic descriptions will have to suffice.

When the Photographer took the Doctor and his Wife to the Allenby Bridge soldiers kindly informed them that no filming would be permitted. Further along the border with Jordan, the Wife indignantly told the camera about their work here in '48, giving health checks to people fleeing the coming Israeli Army. Forms were given out at this time, in Hebrew, which effectively signed over all property left behind to Israel, and made those fleeing promise not to try to return. When the Wife protested that these people could not understand what they were signing, a soldier convinced her that a loudspeaker was explaining the implications. When she asked to see the loudspeaker another soldier said (in Hebrew), "there is no loudspeaker". After the Wife had said here piece, the Doctor quietly but audibly said to her, "We shouldn't talk about these things". She looked sheepishly back at the camera, but seemed genuinely relieved to have gotten it out of her.

The Photographer's daughter (acclaimed singer Rim Banna) held a concert in Hebron, singing modern variations on traditional songs. The crowd at the open air concert truly appreciated the need to keep such songs alive for the new generations. As babes slept in their parents arms, teenagers sang along and cheered.

By the end of the film, through trials and tribulations, arguments with residents of Ein Hod (onc e the Arab village of Ayn Hawd), and numerous other setbacks, the exhibition goes ahead in Ain el-Hilne, Lebanon. Refugees there, young and old, were able to see their villages and land, some for the first time in more than 50 years, some for the first time ever. The doctor, it turns out, was himself an amateur photographer with an excellent collection of photographs that documented the modern history of Palestine.

Afterward the film, a large chunk of the audience gravitated to the Ba'ita Phalestina (Palestinian House) in the Old City to discuss the film, chat to its creators and subjects, and enjoy the ambience of the traditional Palestinian architecture.

I hope that al-Sabar will get a larger release, perhaps even into the cinemas most frequented by the Israeli mainstream, or (heaven forbid) the Knesset.

Posted 2:36 PM by *cnn
Dogville
Danish director Lars Von Trier's much awaited new project Dogville arrived in front of me last week, just four days after its Australia-wide release. As reliable sources have told me, the movie has suffered in the initial box office receipts for failing to be 'sneaked' to the public before opening. The process of 'sneaking' a film entails telling everyone that it will open on Boxing Day [for example] and then going around to the dens of arts journalists, aspiring writers, student union hangouts and the like, and handing out free or discounted tickets to those 'in the know'. All this is in the hope that these people will create a buzz to envelope the film in a sort of 'oh my god, you haven't seen _____ yet? It's amazing', so that when the gates are opened the masses will swarm in, desperately eager to catch up to an imagined cultural elite. Like 'Lost in Translation', an excellent film no doubt, but one that opened on Boxing Day after already being projected onto screens approximately 200 times.

But Dogville, no 'sneaks', no brown nosing nor gimmick pulling, and the crowds don't want it...apparently. Maybe by not creating a buzz the film will slow boil, as people see it of their own volition and judge it accordingly.

Dogville is an interesting film to say the least. The action never leaves the small town of Dogville, which fugitive Grace (Nicole Kidman in her best performance yet, in my opinion) comes to, obstensibly seeking protection from gangsters. She immediately convinces Thomas Edison, a morally upright young philosopher, to bring her into the community to shelter her from danger. In return for this protection however, the quiet, law-abiding citizens of Dogville insist on a number of measures, meant to ensure she is symbolically 'paying her way'. An escalation of these dues makes for a peculiar tension, as it seems the town can have its way with her. I can say no more.

Playing out on a mostly bare stage, what is necessary to represent has been drawn onto the black floor in white chalk.

The details are filled in by a Dickens-esque narration that never slips from simply telling a story.

While not quite a Dogme 95 film, Dogville uses its limitations as a distinct selling point, a method by which to literally peel back the layers that hide our true identity, illuminating the facades individuals and communities hide behind.

One of my favourite films of 2003.

Posted 7:41 PM by *cnn
Iranian Balloons: Panahi and the West

The ‘discovery’ of Iranian cinema in Western festival circles over the last ten or so years has made almost household names of directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, while many (nay, most) Iranian filmmakers remain unknown and impoverished, refused classification by strict censorship regulations that have been in place, more or less consistently, since cinema’s entrance into Iran in the earliest years of the twentieth century.

Azadeh Farahmand materially relates Iran’s internationally cinematic presence with the economic crisis embattling that nation when he says, “international markets have become viable arenas for increasing film revenue and supplementing the likelihood of future production.” But he qualifies his analysis by noting that the state apparatus has realized this potentiality and utilized the cinema to “renegotiate the imagery of the nation”.

The existence of such a strictly controlled internal market makes the international festival circuit a realistic avenue to ensure widespread exposure for the recent Iranian cinematic product. In turn this implies that the Iranian films shown around the world are in some aspect actually created for such an audience, and as such do not represent truly local culture , but instead an amalgam of (a) what some Iranians believe Americans, Europeans and even Australians want to believe (be told) about their current national climate and historical viewpoint and (b) what the clerics in Tehran edify as worthy of export from the Islamic Republic.

Festival audiences have been taught a ‘way’ of reading ‘world cinema’ that is often simplistic and sometimes completely ignorant of the influence of global economic and political realities. In the case of Iran, the fact of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the situation of women within this society colours the vision that Western eyes see. Films that are screened in festivals are praised as beacons of hope for the artistic viability of the Iranian people, while ‘good’ representations of women are lauded as an aberration of systemic abuse.

As Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi puts it,

“Iranian cinema took the world by surprise simply because the world got a glimpse of our cinema only after it had decided the character of our culture through the prism of the Islamic Revolution. These disabling circumstances and our liberating vision did not quite add up.”
The White Balloon (1996) was Jafar Panahi’s directorial debut, after working with the revered Kiarostami on Through the Olive Trees (1994). It tells a simple story of a young girl who loses the last money her mother has on the way to buy a fish. While this film is the focus of the following essay, I would like to first visit a few of the loci that we will use to analyse the film, including a brief history of Iran’s political and cultural development through the twentieth century, and a critique of ‘orientalism’, the study of non-Western cultural forms and the particularly imperial mindset it inherits.
Melbourne film critic Adrian Martin rightly criticizes the West’s propensity for unifying ‘outsider’ culture when in fact, much like the West, the Other is a multifarious and heterogeneous entity. Of the ‘recent Iranian cinema’ Martin describes it thus;
“Of course, this is not the entirety of Iranian cinema. And this small movement – if that's not too grand a term for it – tends to be, really, a kind of spontaneous school or family happening around one person, a key figure in Iranian cinema. This figure is [Abbas] Kiarostami [who is already] a formidable, almost mythical figure to many hardcore cinephiles and critics”
But I’m rushing ahead of myself here. For now I want to talk about the author of the quote that is my guideline, and his theories of cultural hegemony.

The Orient
“Abstractions from the Orient…are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities.”

While it may seem archaic to discuss Western reception to non-Western film through the prism of imperialism, it is necessary to insist, as Edward Said did in the landmark book Orientalism, that the cultural heritage of imperialism remains.

Orientalism opened a fissure within Western cultural discourse that is still being explored today. Said defines the Orient as a European invention present since antiquity as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”

The importance of the Orient to the Western European imagination cannot be underestimated.
“The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”.

The Orient’s position as Other reflects the self-image of Western Europe, and the attitudes that developed, particularly in Britain and France, allowed for the moral superiority that validated imperial conquest.

The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said well understands and articulates the practical effects of such an all-encompassing image. He sees that relationship between the Occident (his term for the normalized Christian, European culture) and the Orient as “a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” When a viewer from the West chooses to absorb an abstracted idea about ‘the Orient’ he is already logged into a totalizing discourse that places him superior to that Other.

The case of assumed identity surrounding Iran and its cinematic presence in the West can be explained, at least partially through this prism.

“…the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections.”

I would love to now investigate Gramsci’s theories of cultural hegemony but I will stay on track and instead return to Iran.

A very brief history of Iranian cinema
On 18 August 1900, an Iranian looked at the world through a camera for the first time. This same year a moviehouse opened in Iran. Yet it was not until 1948 that the first Persian language film was made in Iran (The Tempest of Life by Esma’il Kushan). Since then, the Iranian cinema has developed in coincidence with the extending arm of colonialism, while always entwined in Persian and Arabic cultural forms that date back millennia.

From 1906 to 1911 Iran was rocked by the Constitutional revolution, which disposed of a medieval absolutist monarchy and replaced it with a constitutional government; all the while colonial forces competed for Iranian markets and resources. In terms of material conditions, Iran was exposed to modernity through its colonial agency. Oil was discovered 1908. By 1912 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company is producing and exporting petroleum. Hamid Dabashi infers that, “as far as its cultural conditions permitted, [Iran] could not but face that modernity with medieval morality” In art, however, he believes there was (and is) an uncontainable energy.

The constitution stipulated to limit the power of the monarch, establish a parliament with sole power to legislate, enable the formation of political parties, put a prime minister in charge of the administrative apparatus of the state, and create an autonomous judicial system.

By 1914 the world is at war, and the Allied forces occupy Iran, with Russia controlling the north and the British claiming the south. The ideals of the Constitutional revolution are all but forgotten, as the weak Qajar dynasty is being overrun by colonial superpowers. By 1921 the Iranian Communist (Tudeh) Party has been founded and after a coup a young colonel Reza Khan is made minister of war. Also at this time there was a flowering of artistic life, with a great number of modernist poems and stories marking an aesthetic space beyond “the colonially conditioned modernity and clerically militated anti-modernity” But as yet there is little film.

In 1926 Reza Shah is crowned shah and begins to instigate a massive program of modernization, in the process creating a commercial film industry. Almost simultaneous with the release of The Lor Girl (Ardeshir Irani, 1936) the Shah banned the wearing of the chador by women. The coincidence marked the parallel fate of modernity and Iranian cinema. The unveiling of women became a major feature of the infant art form, a positive step towards emancipation from patriarchally mandated seclusion.

When Allied forces again occupied Iran in 1941, the Shah abdicated and handed power to his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, who would reign from 1941 until his downfall in the course of the Islamic Revolution.

In 1951 Mohammed Mosaddiq became Prime Minister, and with the support of parliament attempted to nationalize the oil industry as well as insisting on parliamentary reforms that would limit the Shah’s power, forcing him to leave the country. A CIA-engineered coup toppled Mosaddiq’s government and returned the Shah to power (in 1953) beginning a sustained period of American involvement in domestic Iranian politics. Hamid Dabashi curtly summarises the effects, “with the Shah back in power with full American support, Iran is entirely at the service of US imperialism.”

The 1950’s see a rise in the number of cinemas in Iran and in the number of Iranian productions per year, yet it is a purely commercial project, with many Hollywood westerns and Indian musicals more popular than the Filmfarsi, the native melodramatic film product. .

Taking advantage of political uncertainty, Ayatollah Khomeini led a mass uprising in June 1963. It was crushed and he was exiled first to Turkey, then Iraq. The Shah instigated a ‘cosmetic modernity’, including a nationwide attempt to make the rural masses literate.

The 1970’s brought the promise of political and cultural possibility. Tehran University in particular became the scene of numerous confrontations between students and the police. In the realm of cinema there was movement. Sohrab Shahid Sales’ Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh (One Simple Incident, 1973) and Tabi’at-e Bijan (Still Life, 1975) with their passive documentation of reality and lucid narration would have an enduring effect on much of Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf’s oeuvres in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Early in 1979 the Shah fled, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned and took power. In November of that year the American Embassy was seized by a group of radical Muslim students and the diplomatic staff were taken hostage. This lasted for 444 days and resulted in all US-Iranian diplomatic ties being severed. This relationship is only now being slowly developed through student exchange programs and film festivals.

The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1996)
The White Balloon is the first Iranian film to get an art-house cinema release in Australia, which is some kind of milestone. It is a neo-realist glimpse of modern Tehran life as seen through a child's eyes, a favoured starting point for many of Kiarostami’s narratives.
In these particular Iranian films, adults tend to be seen by children as fuzzy, fascinating creatures; they're frightening strangers one moment, tender angels the next. This random procession of adults brings in to the child's fragile circle of experience traces of a mysterious social order, of law and prohibitions, games and seductions, war and romance. It also lets in the traces of a modern and multi-cultural society, as for instance here with the intriguing figure of a young Afghan street seller.

As the opening credits roll, the sounds of the street can be heard. A minute later we are on the street, and being introduced to the characters that will flit in and out of the story; an army jeep drops off the soldier, the Afghani balloon seller is plying his trade. The radio counts down the hours until New Year, a clever temporal reference that is used throughout the film. Eventually we get to the mother, who is searching the market for her daughter, Razieh (Aida Mohammadkhani). As they walk home the girl is distracted by the snake charmers but her mother command her home. It is the girl’s dream to buy a new goldfish from the market for New Year. She is not satisfied with the fish in her family’s pond. Her desire can be read as a movement away from community values to a more commercial imperative. But it can also be interpreted as a simple narrative ploy that validates the entire film.

The representations of adults are illuminating. The father is visually absent from the entire film. The snake charmers take her money from the glass bowl, but eventually one decides to return it to her after he sees her distress. The goldfish seller decides the fish she wants is 200 tomans, not the 100 tomans he originally quoted. A woman in the shop takes it upon herself to help the child, and then leaves her suddenly once she has found the money (still under a grate). The army man returns and strikes up a conversation with the girl, then also leaves suddenly. Finally the balloon seller comes along with the stick that will be their savior. When the money is found the film is finished. As the balloon seller watches the children leave, the snake charmers walk by and give a man a match, the singing bicyclist (“The sea is rough, my brother”) rides past, and the film finishes on a freeze frame as the boy with the white balloon looks off screen right and makes to leave off screen left.
The White Balloon seems to hide something, referring to a secret, some possibly overlooked dimension in the story that we have followed in its unfolding. In this story, the white balloon has nothing to do with the little girl and her goldfish. Its presence near the end of the tale, finally frozen in the very last frame, points to another story of the everyday, a story with a perhaps even harsher pathos than that of the girl.

Conclusion
Adrian Martin seems to pin down festival fascination with Iranian cinema with his own strand of Orientalist analysis, the effect of “a certain plaintive note of romance...the romanticisation of national cinemas and film styles that are tacitly assumed to be simple, primitive, peasant-like, pre-modern or pre-industrial, pre-high technology at any rate.”

He also points towards the possibility that “the members of the Kiarostami 'family' sometimes create or encourage this primitivist impression. It's an impression that can be easily packaged off and sold to film cultures like our own as some quaint novelty from an exotic world.”

Jafar Panahi, director of The White Balloon, and lately The Circle neatly sums up the philosophy that motivates his character portrayals, as well as the economic realities of our global economy, which inevitably deals in culture as well as more basic commodities.

“In my view, everyone in the world lives within a circle, either due to economic, political, cultural, or family problems or traditions. The radius of the circle can be smaller or larger. Regardless of the geographic location, they live within a circle. I hope that if this film [The Circle] has any kind of effect on anyone, it would be to make them try to expand the size of the radius.”

The festival enterprise is both a result of western media fascination with ‘emerging’ cinemas (or cultures generally) and a concerted effort by Iranian filmmakers to get their product shown to a receptive audience. Though this product is invariably altered in the process of global transaction, the ultimate aim of producing and receiving a ‘modern Oriental reality’ should be kept at the forefront of critique and reception.


Annotated bibliography
Dabashi, H., Close Up Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future, Verso, London and New York, 2001.
An excellent reference for anyone with an interest in Iranian cinema, Close up charts the life of cinema in Iran from its inception (in 1933) through the turbulent decades both before and after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. It includes a complete chapter dedicated to Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who is, along with Abbas Kiarostami, one of the defining figures of the Iranian national cinema. I am hugely indebted to this book for its historical and cultural critique of Iran pre- and post-Revolution.

Issari, M. Ali. Cinema in Iran, 1900-1979, Scarecrow Press, London, 1989.

Farahmand, A., ‘Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema’, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper, London and New York, I.B. Taurus, 2002, pp86-108.
The required reading for the Iranian component of our cinema course, this article explores the relationships between economy, politics and history.

MacKenzie, J.M., Orientalism: History, theory and the arts, Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 1995.
Although a little too historical for practical use on this essay MacKenzie’s book offers a wealth of information regarding representation of the Orient in art, architecture, design, music and the theatre. Sadly, film does not get a separate chapter.

Said, E.W., Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1995 (first published by Routledge in 1978).
The book that invigorated debate regarding Western attitudes to the Other, questioning the validity of an authorial voice embedded in a position of power in discourse. Most of the academic discuse on the Orient since 1978 has referenced this seminal text, often with partial qualifiers the only addition.

Said, E.W., Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994.
Following on from the success of Orientalism, Said took 16 years to update. The result, Culture and Imperialism, is an encyclopedic study of imperialism and imperial culture, taking stock off all major loci of

Said, E.W., ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, The Nation, October 22 2001, pp11-13.
A response to Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ published just after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, this article argues against Huntington’s main thesis that conflict in the ‘new world’ will be defined along cultural, rather than ideological or economic, lines.

Spurr, D., The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing and imperial administration, Duke UP, Durham and London, 1993.
David Spurr aims to investigate the methods, conscious or not, of Western writers on the Orient and other ‘exotic’ locales and peoples. By reexamining the history, politics, psychology and language of colonization after the fact of its huge influence Spurr endeavors to understand how nonfiction narratives are shaped by, and shape, the colonial imagination.

Web-bases Sources
Interviews with Jafar Pahani, director of The White Balloon, on the UK’s Independent website (http://enjotment.independent.co.uk/low_resw/story.jsp?story=441440&host=5&dir=213) and the World Socialist Web Site (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/pan-o02.shtml) were of invaluable help in accessing the author.

Senses of cinema website, http://www.sensesofcinema.com, is an exceptional reference point for studies of the cinema. For this essay I am indebted in particular to Adrian Martin’s article ‘The White Balloon and Iranian Cinema’ (www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/panahi_balloon.html), as well as Ben Zipper’s overview of local festival attention on Iranian films, ‘Iranian cinema at MIFF 2000’ (www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/9/iranian.html)

Posted 10:15 AM by *cnn
Get lost, Bitch; Australian anxieties and cinematic representations

Along with the Ocker, the Battler, the Pioneer and the Anzac, the image of the lost child, and in particular that of the lost girl/s, has been a constant reference point for the stories told in the Australian national cinema. The distinctive imagery of the Australian bush is often juxtaposed with the innocence and naïveté of children, eventuating in a timeless battle between the most vulnerable members of our self-proclaimed Culture and a seemingly limitless, often indifferent Nature. At its very simplest, this story speaks of the strangeness of the land we inhabit, and the toil that is white Australia’s survival. It follows from this that the story of Australian cinematic identity has always been a masculinist one. It is the story of tough men surviving the Outback, battling the elements; sometimes winning, but usually calling a wary armistice with his surroundings. Into this schema the Lost Girl Story has transpired, showing up Man’s inability to protect his progeny.

Since the very first Europeans arrived in Australia, the experience of the hostility of the terrain has morphed into a grand myth of human perseverance. The story is generally not one of conquering the environment, unlike the American Wild West myth. The best that white (colonial and post-colonial) Australians can hope for is an uneasy truce with the landscape they encounter. The implied danger of the Outback continues to haunt the Australian psyche, even as we grow in understanding, experience and respect for it. As Peter Pierce asserts in The Country of Lost Children; An Australian Anxiety, the lost (European) child remains an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia, providing a repository of cultural knowledge that filmmakers (as well as writers, painters, tourism companies) continue to tap to this day.

Although in the beginning most lost children were ‘taken’ by their surroundings, as the country grew a new disappearance anxiety surfaced. Now we must also fear our children coming to harm at the hands of people, either known or unknown to them. The countless true stories of children lost touch a nerve in the collective Australian consciousness. The mystery of Jaidyn Leskie’s 1997 disappearance and death is but one case in point. In 1993, 32 year-old Paul Aiton was convicted of killing his de facto’s son, Daniel Valerio. Before that the whole country wondered (still wonder, killed by human or animal agency?) just what happened to Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru in August 1980. The Beaumont children vanished from Glenelg Beach on Australia Day 1966 and have not been seen since.

These and many more non-fiction narratives provide fodder for the film industry to feed off, as Fred Schepsi’s Evil Angels (1988) demonstrates. These filmic representations can be seen as the continuation of earlier painting, poetry and theatre that mused on adult guilt in failing to protect the vulnerable.

The Aboriginal stolen generations offer a collective ‘lost children’ narrative that white Australia is still trying to navigate. Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002), One Night the Moon (Perkins, 2001) and Beneath Clouds (Sen, 2002) show that finally this history is being allowed a filmic space. Walkabout (Roeg, 1970) is a notable early exception, although this was a film made by an Englishman with a lost white girl as chief protagonist. But more about these films later.

In the introduction to Critical Business, Sandra Hall sums up the ‘Australian dilemma’ – that of “a Peter Pan country committed in theory to all the responsibilities of worldliness, even as it draws back for fear of being exploited by the larger and the more powerful.” Coupling this fear of exploitation with wariness towards our own landscape (or our place in that landscape) makes for a climate of cultural unease.

The specificity of Australian lost girls is that they are habitually lost in that Aussie icon, the Outback. This is a landscape most Australians have not actually experienced, yet through constant representation on the big screen can instantly identify. This landscape is often a potent character, which encloses, isolates, dominates and inspires.

The Australian film industry has, on the whole, adopted the classical narrative structure used so successfully by Hollywood. It has only needed to tweak the formula to local tastes and imagery to be successful. The threat to innocence is a basic device used by melodrama to generate audience involvement, and in its Australian incarnation it incorporates the cultural baggage that comes from being a young, pioneering country, its peoples out of place and isolated from what they know, often not here by choice.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) was one of the first Australian films to achieve commercial success, both here and overseas, while eschewing classical Hollywood melodrama in favour of a more European, art-house sentiment.

Based on a book of the same name (Joan Lindsay, 1967) it opens on St Valentine Day, 1900, with a school party that sets out to picnic at the picturesque and geographically isolated Hanging Rock. They eat, drowse, gossip and four of them go off to explore. They go to sleep on the rock and later wake. Three move further up the rock in a trance and the fourth panics and calls them back. They ignore her and she runs back to the group, passing the maths mistress on the way, who is also heading towards the rock. Weir follows the book meticulously, surrendering to a mystification of the landscape that “invests it with a power to enchant and lure that is deliciously fatal”.

Appleyard College is a sort of temple to innocence, a “place of sunlight and sentimental friendships”. Conversely, the Rock can be read as representing what is sinister in Nature. The girls set out from their cultivated place of education, on an excursion in the wilderness that ultimately (and mysteriously) becomes their demise. Picnic is set in the border territory between civilization and its absence; a tea-tent sits beside the river, but the guests must pick their way through overgrown grass. Stylistically obtuse, it expresses a suspicion that Europeans do not belong in this country; that all would be better if they went back to England, or to another time, or simply vanished completely.

Reading further into the film, a tension exists between sexual repression and liberation. It implies a link between the behaviour of the girls on the Rock and a general notion of sexual repression within the school. What compelled the girls further and further into the wilderness that eventually swallowed them up? Could it have been the persuasive, natural sensuality of the location; the phallic Rock?

Another film that follows ‘girls’ to a Rock is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994). This film is a variation on many themes. It as a dressing-up of the road movie and of the buddy flick, while also offering a new take on the ‘lost girls in Australian Outback’ theme. Their journey is known; by choice they hop on a lavender-painted bus to go west from Sydney to a cabaret assignment in the middle of the desert. These ‘girls’ are only, from a socially accepted viewpoint, sexually and culturally lost. The film plays on this notion by showing their journey as a search for identity. Needless to say the bus breaks down and they are forced to interact with the locals; their planned excursion becomes an epic journey of self-discovery.

At one point in the film (after Felicia is saved from a beating by Bernadette) the three; father and drag queen Mitzy, loud-mouthed Felicia and transvestite Bernadette, agree that the boundaries of Sydney “keep us safe”, something that the Outback does not promise.

The film is built around the incongruity between the outback and its citizens and the drag queens that travel through the landscape. Along the way they come across all manner of Australian oddities; they witness the sex tricks of a Filipino bride, convince a Aboriginal man to don a frock, and parade along the main street of Cooper Pedy in outrageous costumes, much to the amusement of the townsfolk. Yet when one digs below the colour and sequins, the self-deprecating humour and the lip-synced Abba hits, Priscilla remains a story of survival, using the expanse of Australia’s interior as a metaphor for the inhospitality of societal attitudes. The mean-spirited moments are beset by an overarching sentimentality and vision of a tolerant world that only rejects the unfamiliar.

The film was a mammoth hit both in Australia and in international markets, winning an Oscar for best costume design and voted most popular film at Cannes in 1994.

Now I would like to backtrack and sidestep slightly. It is the early 1970’s, and the government is beginning its program of intensified funding for film production (also known as ‘the Revival’). The industry is moribund, relying on Hollywood and to a lesser extent Europe for its cultural and aesthetic direction.
Film writer and director Justine Kelly speaks of growing up in rural Australia in this period.
“Where I come from, in the ‘70s, national pride remained something unspoken of. What made rural Australians special was the land we lived on and its rugged beauty rather than our history or our culture…we always felt very small in comparison to the land. We also felt small, young and in the shadow of other cultures. We spoke about our inadequacies in comparison to Europe or America. And the cinema was essentially Hollywood: glamorous and familiar characters in neat, familiar situations. They seemed too exciting for Australians to compete with. I adored old Hollywood movies as a kid and grew up on English comedy. We were taught to look abroad for culture. At that time, I didn’t even know Australian film existed.”
But there were a small number of films being produced within Australia, with Australian money and talent. One of them was Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1970), a film that now seems well ahead of its time. It told the story of a sister (Jenny Agutter) of about 16 years of age and brother (Lucien John) about 5, who survive the suicide of their father and are left to their own devices in the middle of the desert. They befriend a young Aborigine on walkabout, and he eventually (for time in the Western sense is suspended) leads them to the edge of Western civilization.
Walkabout is perhaps one of the only films prior to the late nineties that elevated indigenous viewpoints to an equal footing with white perspectives. For the most part, indigenous characters have been portrayed as not much more than a natural addition to the landscape. This began to change with the increased opportunities for Aboriginal filmmakers to tell their own stories. Ivan Sen’s second film Beneath Clouds tells the story of two lost children in contemporary rural Australia. One is a full-bloodied Aboriginal boy who escapes from a juvenile detention centre to be at his (father’s) funeral, the other is a half-caste girl who has run away from home. The film portrays their respective journeys and how they must intertwine. The Tracker (de Heer, 2002) tells of the search for an Aboriginal who broke the white man’s law. David Gullipil reprises his role as the black tracker attached to a search party, but adds an extra dimension to the time-honored characterization by eventually turning on the sadistic Fanatic (Gary Sweet) while still ensuring tribal justice is done.
Whereas in One Night the Moon (Perkins, 2001) the white settler (Paul Kelly) denies the help of a tracker Albert, ultimately resulting in the death of his young daughter. His reasons for rejecting Albert’s help bind neatly into the current debate surrounding reconciliation and land ownership. As Fiona Probyn and Catherine Simpson posit, “the settler's racist rejection of the black tracker is underscored by a fear that the black tracker’s knowledge of the land casts doubt over the settler's rightful ownership of it.”
The scene where Albert is banned from joining the search brilliantly depicts the multi-levelled nature of settler anxiety. The whites here (police and settlers) simultaneously know and refuse this knowledge of Albert's relationship to the land. Here we confront an uneasy admission of prior ownership in a debate that is still simmering.
But by far the most popular of the recent indigenous-themed films of the last five years is Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002). The film (like so many Australian films) was based on a book, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of Molly.

In 1931, Molly and her younger cousins, Gracie and Daisy, three half-caste children from Western Australia, were taken from their parents under government edict and sent to an institution; taught to forget their families, their culture, and re-invent themselves as members of "white" Australian society. The three girls navigate their way home by following the fence that has been build across the nation to stem an over-population of rabbits.
The story was internationally popular, no doubt due in no small part to the universality of the plot. But for Australian audiences the film offered something more; a filmic representation of an oft-ignored history.

As Robert Manne explains it Rabbit-Proof Fence is a window to the racial and genocidal thoughts of Australia. The ‘lost girls’ here are important for the role they play in representing actual history, especially as the ‘stolen generations’ remains an ideologically sensitive issue for non/indigenous relations.

Through the lost girl trope Australian cinema has been able to visualize many of the underlying tensions present in the national identity. From Picnic to Rabbit one can discern a working-through and a development of issues pertinent to our specific position as a European-derived, diasporic society that is still struggling with the idea of multiculturalism.

The role of the landscape in filmic representations of Australia has not been underplayed in criticism, but for good reason. The landscape has been used as an index on nationality since the Revival. As a menacing wilderness, a site of racial conflict, an allegorical mirror to personal and societal turmoil, the landscape remains a theatre in flux; it is still a contested site, still the grounds on which notions of national identity are played out.


Bibliography

Hall, Sandra. Critical Business: The New Australian Cinema in Review, Rigby Publishers, Australia, 1985.
Hall, Sandra. ‘A vivid contrast in styles’, The Bulletin, 30 August 1975, p27.
Hall Sandra. ‘Picnic cuts mustard’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 December 1999, p16.
Laurie, Victoria. ‘“We must go on weeding out the light-coloured children”.’ Weekend Australian Magazine, 5-6 January 2002, p20-21.
McFarlane, Brian & Mayer, Geoff. New Australian Cinema: Sources and Parallels in American and British Film, Cambridge UP, Cambridge and New York, 1992.
Manne, Robert. ‘Bleeding colour’, The Age Insight, 23 February 2002, p4-5.
O’Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.
Pierce, P., The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Cambridge UP, Cambridge and Melbourne, 1999.
Quinn, K., ‘Drag, Dags and the Suburban Surreal.’ Metro 100, pp23-26.
Rayner, J., Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 2000.
Senses of Cinema website, www.sensesofcinema.com, various articles accessed on October 23, 2003, including “This Land is Mine/ This Land is Me”: Reconciling Harmonies in One Night the Moon, by Fiona Probyn and Catherine Simpson, and an essay on Walkabout by Justine Kelly.

Posted 11:30 PM by *cnn
Romancing the Feminists: Or how Romance might be understood as postfeminist counter-cinema
*
My definition of counter-cinema I take from Annette Kuhn; “Cinema which operates against, questions, and subverts the dominant cinema…” (Kuhn, p157)
My definition of postfeminist I take from the Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary; “of, or relating to the ideas, attitudes, etc., which ignore or reject feminist ideas of the 1960’s and subsequent decades.” (p1048)
I acknowledge and designate Toril Moi’s crucial definitions of feminist, female and feminine. The first is ‘a political position’, the second ‘a matter of biology’, and the third ‘a set of culturally defined characteristics’. (Barry, p122)
All unreferenced quotes are taken from the film.
*
So, (alors!) where to start? At the beginning? No, impossible for a film that while structurally linear is thematically circular. “Romance is about female desire, not male fantasy,” says director Catherine Breillat. If only that could be the end of it, the answer complete and resolute. Instead this sentence, these eight words, ruptures much of what has been assumed not only in cinematic discourse, but also in patriarchal society at large.

As I will seek to demonstrate, Marie (Caroline Ducey) represents a post-feminist inversion of the Hero archetype, written into a plot line that mimics the classical narrative pilgrimage to make explicit its debilitating phallocentrism. Moreover, that Breillat’s oeuvre constitutes a counter-cinema as it challenges a fixed view of sexuality by writing a ‘Language of Desire’ that speaks of a female sexuality outside of the naturalized masculinist narrative and world-view. The enormity of this task (refuting Freud et al without resorting to reactive gynocentric feminism) is almost inconceivable. I’ll try to explain.

In ‘The Second Sex’, the landmark feminist text so crucial to first-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir admits the existence and essential nature of Self and Other, but questions the naturalizing of Woman as Other. “The Other is as primordial as consciousness itself...Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.” (de Beauvoir, p16-17) She continues by quite rightly questioning why “...reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness?”(p18)

Cinema has perpetuated this idea of the female as the essential(ist) Other through the structuring of its ‘gaze(s)’. As feminist critic Laura Mulvey illustrates, the conventions of visual pleasure in narrative cinema have long subjected women’s desire to an image “as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.” (Mulvey, p7) This account is a throwback to Freud’s conception of femininity that sees little girls as little men with three possible outcomes for a girl’s sexuality in relation to realisation of phallic lack and the effects of the castration complex. One is a ‘normal’ femininity. The other two are implied failures for Freud; sexual inhibition or neurosis, and masculinity complex. (McNeill & Feldman, p324-325) But for Breillat these ‘failures’ represent fissures in patriarchy just waiting to be investigated.

The pleasures conventionally read into cinema are visual. There are three interrelated ‘gazes’ working to imbue the ‘bearer of the look’ with a (very particular, and also socially constructed) masculinity. The first is the camera that records the pro-filmic event, traditionally held by a man and held up by man’s economy. The second look is intra-filmic, and is articulated by the male protagonist in relation to the female Other who invites his ‘look’; in-itself a manifestation of the assumed active/male passive/female dichotomy. The third ‘gaze’ is that of the audience, which is split into two pleasurable schema; the scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and the identification with an ego libido (an extension of the idolised mirror-image and his gaze). As both engaged viewer and distanced voyeur, the spectator position contains an inherent tension, a balancing act between Lacanian identification with the (self)image provided for him and the tendency to revel in the pleasures of scopophilia available only through voyeuristic distancing. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey expertly sums up the distancing effect of mainstream cinema thus,

“What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy” (Mulvey, p9)

What Mulvey in the 1970s and most feminist critics since have called for is an escape from such phallocentrism, in particular its coding of “the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order”(p8) that in effect disallows alternate notions of gender, desire and representation.

However some feminists, most notably Frenchwomen Hélène Cixous and Luge Irigaray, have gone beyond traditional feminist goals of equality and parity with man to seek out alternate routes to female pleasure. That is to say, they aim to not only displace the dominant phallogocentric logic, but to “split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality.” (Moi, 1985, p.108)

Romance inverts each of cinema’s gazes; the camera is held by a woman realising her own script; the protagonist is a female who (for the most part) refuses objectification; the male gaze is rendered unworkable – he can neither identify with his ego-ideal, nor does he have anyone to objectify. Erstwhile the film’s form mirrors and parodies classical narrative structure, to draw attention to, but also to strike up a conversation, a dialogue, with patriarchy. To emphasize the continuation of a faux-classical narrative in Breillat’s work I draw your attention to a description given by Kathleen Murphy that keenly parallels Mulvey’s analysis of mainstream cinema. According to Murphy,

“[Breillat’s] passion plays unfold in emotional bell jars almost entirely insulated from the concerns of the mundane world. In the hermetic atmosphere of these movies, both lovers and those of us marking time in the dark lose sight of any horizon but that of the flesh.” (Murphy in Wilson, p147)

The defining difference lies in the end result. As Wilson sums up, by disrupting the assumption that men will look and women will be looked at Romance de-erotisizes desire by ‘keeping men out as beholders of the gaze’. (p147)

In Romance (Breillat, 1999) Paul’s inability to desire Marie (Caroline Ducey) tempts her out of her compartmentalized neuroses into the actualization of her sexual fantasies. Breillat’s masochist Marie attempts to desire, to fantasize, and to interpellate herself into an ideology independent of masculine influence. In aid of this aim Breillat gives to her the ‘gaze of the camera’. In its very first instance, Romance shows us Paul’s face in extreme close-up, having make-up powder applied to it. The camera pans out to reveal him in the costume of a matador. This image of man is then cut to a point of view shot behind Marie as she watches the spectacle. The scene continues, with Paul’s exaggerated and artificial masculinity being constructed beside a fraudulent, submissive femininity. As the photographer explains “a matador understands death. On three look at me, it’s all in the look”. Indeed.

In the first section of the film (conspicuous for its stark white mise-en-scene that denotes a sense of innocence) Marie is convinced that “a man honours a woman by fucking her”. She is in love with some part of Paul, and believes in a love/desire that is both intellectual and physical. Claiming he loves her, Paul cannot however validate her thoughts/feelings with reciprocal physical desire, and in desperation she seeks out his antithesis and alter ego, Paulo. Hers is a pilgrimage masterfully set up by Breillat to mimic heroic, masculine ideals.

By casting well-known porn star Rocco Siffredi as Paulo Breillat indulges in a direct discourse between established notions of male virility as expressed in the porn industry and Marie’s own faltering, but infinitely more stimulating steps towards a formation of sexual identity. Breillat appropriates the vocabulary of porn to serve the didactic ends of the film and her own politic.

Marie sees sex with a stranger as an exclamation of pure, childish desires and dons at coquettish mask to entice Paolo. To herself, in voiceover, she observes her bodily acquiescence as somehow removed from her intellectual control, “I watch myself yielding as if it is not me”. Later on in bed Paolo looks on, uncomprehending, as Marie muses on sexual difference, before asking her “so do you want it in the ass?” Where Pauls lacks in libido, Paulo lacks in intellect and so her journey continues. Her flight from Paul and experience with Rocco/Paulo elicits one further musing that remains unresolved by film’s end; the impossibility of union between her body and mind. As she declares, “I don’t care who fills my cunt but I can’t kiss someone I don’t love.”

The teacher/father figure of Robert attempts to bridge the aforementioned chasm separating mind and body in Marie’s psyche. He seduces her mind as well as her body. At Marie’s entrance into Robert’s home the viewer is inundated with the colour code of experience – dark, brooding reds that juxtapose the white purity that hitherto dominated the misé-en-scene.
His red shirt serves as flagship to his claim to have “had 10,000 women”. Amongst his various musings Robert differentiates women by their genitalia, incorporating female difference with their individual physicality. When she breaks down during her bondage, he is concerned and tender. He asks politely, “you like the gag?” and Marie replies, “I don’t like having to say things.” She has found in Paul a lover that does not need to have desire explained to him, who in fact forcibly silences her via the gag.

Alone again in her bleached cocoon Marie masturbates, while in voiceover she surrenders her body to the anonymous, lamenting Paul’s distaste or indifference, “he could have reconciled me with my body, but he didn’t want to.” Before Paul returns she leaves, looking in on him at a local hangout where he reads Bukowski, epitomising his intellectual aversion to physical love.

She encounters a vagrant who propositions her. She admits (again in voiceover), “that’s my dream, to know for some guy I’m just a pussy he wants to stuff”. Abandoning all hope of romantic love she sits on stairs with the man’s head between her splayed legs. However the contradiction between what Marie elucidates via voiceover and what she experiences onscreen is palpable.

She returns to Robert wearing a red dress, having moved closer to an identification with desire experienced simultaneously in the body and the psyche. After the bondage session Robert takes her out, they laugh and talk, eat caviar and drink vodka; she is content.

When she returns to Paul he is aroused and asks for gratification. Still wearing her red dress she saddles him, reversing gender roles. “Now you be me, you be the woman, I’ll be your guy, I’ll screw you.” He throws her to the floor, too late. Marie has fallen pregnant.

Throughout the film Marie has been framed and reflected in mirrors; firstly a fractured image in the apartment, later shown her abject body by Robert. By constantly referencing Lacan’s locus of identity Marie perpetually re-evaluates herself, erstwhile pontificating on her mind/body conundrum. This identity crisis is most literally played out in the brothel/hospital fantasy that immediately follows a hospital examination scene where Marie’s reflected examination of her vagina and face confirms to her that “You can’t love a face when a cunt tags along”. Marie’s fantasy shows her lower half, in a red dress “with those silly trappings that turn men on”, being serviced by lecherous, anonymous men while she and Paul, her supposed Love-object, share an intimate moment in a hospital strangely reminiscent of their clinical home space. Taking the metaphor to its logical outcome she concludes that “love between man and woman is impossible [because] if she gets you hard you want to screw her, which is to despise her.” The notion that sent her out at the beginning of the film has been revised. This is the circular thematic alluded to in my introduction.

Ultimately, the film charts a progress from innocence to experience resulting in death and rebirth. It is a tale redolent with essentialist angst, which is resolved in the destruction of Love and the conception of a baby boy. It is unfortunate that Breillat’s Marie must remain confined by Freudian oppression when it states, “the feminine situation is only established [...] if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby” (Freud in McNeill, 326)

Paul’s tragedy is that has not understood either desire or death, retaining an innocence illusion of masculinity the entire film. Conversely, Marie’s triumph is her arrival through the pilgrimage at a partial resolution, hindered as is it by a phallic order that can not be completely usurped. She remains Marie, not woman as spectacle or object, but (revolutionarily) woman as woman.

A key to Breillat’s films is their resistance to simple, limiting character comprehension. A crowbar to jimmy the window to get in is the attempt to undermine and discomfort assumptions apropos gender, desire, representation and the ‘gaze’ (it’s such a passive sounding word, don’t you think?). Anyhow, I’ll bookend my thoughts and analyses with a final word from Breillat, just in case it wasn’t clear. “There is no masculine psychology in my cinema. There is only the resentments and desires of women. A man should not attempt to recognize himself in my male characters. On the other hand, he can find [in the films] a better understanding of women. And knowledge of the other is the highest goal.”

FIN

Works Cited

Barry, P. ‘Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory’. Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 1995.
Cowie, Elizabeth. ‘Representing the Women: Cinema and Psychoanalysis’. Macmillan, New York, 1997.
Dollimore, J. ‘Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture’. Routledge, New York, 1998.
Haskell, M. ‘From reverence to rape: the treatment of women in the movies’. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Canada, 1974.
Kaplan, E. Ann. ‘Women and Film: Both sides of the camera’. Methuen, New York, 1983.
Kay, K. and Peary, G. (eds) ‘Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology’. Dutton, New York, 1977.
Kuhn, A. ‘Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema’. Routledge and Kegan, Paul, 1982
Martin, A. ‘X Marks the Spot: Classifying Romance’ from Senses of Cinema website, www.sensesofcinema.com/00/4/romance.html accesses 11th March 2003.
McNay, L. ‘Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self’. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992.
McNeill, W. and Feldman, K. (eds.) ‘Continental Philosophy: An Anthology’. DePaul University, Blackwell Publishers, Chicago, 1998.
Moi, T. (ed.) ‘The Kristeva Reader’. Blackwell, London, 1986.
Moi, T. ‘Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory’. Methuen, London, 1985.
Mulvey, L. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol.16, no.3, Autumn 1995, pp.6-18.
Price, B. ‘Catherine Breillat’ from Senses of Cinema website. www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/breillat/html accessed 11th March 2003.
Whitfield, M. (ed.) ‘An Irigaray Reader’. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991.
Wilson, E. ‘Deforming Femininity: Catherine Breillat’s Romance’ from ‘France on Film’. pp. 145-157.

Filmography

Une vraie jeune fille (1975)
Tapage nocturne (1979)
36 Fillette (1988)
Sale comme un ange (1991)
A propos de Nice, las suite (1995: segment of Aux Nicois qui mal y pensant)
Parfait amour (1996)
Romance (1999)
A ma soeur (2001)
Breve traversee (2001: for television)
Sex is Comedy (2002)

Other relevant films

Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, 1959)
Belle de jour (Bunuel, 1967)
Salo (Pasolini, 1975)
Ai no corrida (Oshima, 1976)
L’argent (Bresson, 1983)
The Piano (Campion, 1993)
Portrait of a Lady (Campion, 1996)
An angel at my table (Campion, 1990)
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
Baise-Moi (Despentes, 2000)
Irreversible (Noe, 2002)

Posted 7:54 PM by *cnn
Image, Desire and Reality in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull

The Scorsese hero, who would be better termed his “lone, mad, usually masculine” anti-hero, is a man content with delusion. He is not a dreamer per se, but an illusionist of the highest order, living Scorsese’s own impossible dream of personal identity, thrust into and becoming his own fantasy image.

Scorsese’s films – and specifically the one this essay will be looking at in some depth; Raging Bull (1980) - step unannounced into a heightened fantasy realm in which all the characters’ profound desires are completely invested, and into which his audience must also delve.

These neurotic characters, struggling constantly with their reflection, seek to control their mirror image. As Adrian Martin points out in his essay ‘Martin Scorsese’s Indirect Aim’,

“The Scorsese hero always lives with an image of himself. He cannot bear to be himself, just a man among other men. He hates to be reminded that he even looks like himself, and thus like everyone else. He hates to be a type, and especially hates being typed by others in society.”

Railing against an uncaring and filthy world these protagonists request only our empathy, and their director flawlessly combines violence and desire in their pathos to just that effect.

The Scorsese hero desires, and then imagines, a world fitting his image of it. The tragic effect this delusion has on our hero is realised only when that world is shown to be false and his world no longer exists, driving him into oblivion. The disintegration that ensues is an epitaph to Desire considered without thought to Reality. When the Scorsese hero inevitably falls out of his dream he has been fundamentally changed. He has been elevated, transfigured by his liminal awareness, an act Scorsese deems absolutely necessary for his troubled illusionists.

Of all his films, Raging Bull (1980) is unquestionably Martin Scorsese’s most agonised and soulful masterpiece about a transfigured male hero. Scorsese describes Raging Bull as being “about a man who loses everything, and then regains it spiritually.” While the author’s opinion is not necessarily comprehensive his identification of a redemptive aspect to La Motta’s decline and fall requires further enquiry. For what has Jake La Motta learnt since dancing gladiator-like through the opening credits?

Resisting simplistic narrative closure, Scorsese’s film leaves open the question of Jake’s redemption. The director himself insists however that La Motta has redeemed himself; that downfall involves loss, and that that loss is mourned . For La Motta develops as a ‘victim-hero’, caught between his desire to change the conditions of his existence by becoming a champion boxer and his powerlessness in the face of those who control those conditions. Jake is coerced into taking a fall for mobster Tommy, the man he most jealously guards his wife Vickie from, to ensure a shot at the title. In an utter betrayal of his body La Motta loses, still standing, to Billy Fox, a most unworthy opponent. He now desires contrition for his perceived sin, and immolating himself against Robinson may be La Motta’s way of atoning for disgracing himself against Fox.

As his punishment is meted out the ringside commentator cries that “no man should endure this kind of punishment” but for La Motta this would be only the beginning of his descent. At this point he still manages to display his injured masculine pride, reminding his nemesis Sugar Ray Robinson that “you never got me down”.

Jake’s violence and animal energy are the source of both his drive for success and his resistance to exploitation, and as such they are validated. On this level violence is celebrated as an addendum to the desire for glory.

Yet as Pam Cook points out the “tragic scenario of Raging Bull demands that the hero be shown to be the guilty victim of his transgressive desires: his violence is so excessive, so self-destructive that it has to be condemned.”

The palpable violence that foreshadows La Motta’s every appearance in frame and lingers in his absence is testament to his primitive poise. In-the-ring scenes echo his state of mind, even establishing the mise-en-scene, according to editor Thelma Schooner (who was awarded an OscarTM for the film, along with De Niro’s for best actor. Meanwhile Scorsese has not won an OscarTM.). A wide, open ring is used in La Motta’s first fight against Sugar Ray, yet by their third encounter flames were kept below the camera to blur the action and represent a mirage-like personal hell . Allowing La Motta (and De Niro) to ‘control’ the ring scenario implicates him in the making of the film, and permitting De Niro’s gaze to linger while the camera slows on his discovery of Vickie at the pool furthers this subjective atmosphere. De Niro takes up a role as surrogate director, which forces the audience to experience ‘his film’.

Scorsese would maintain his obsessive fixation on the relationship between reality and artifice in all his major films, displacing the real story behind a world of subjectivity. By utilising objective camera angles, multi-character narration and permeable ‘dream sequences’, as in The Age of Innocence, where Newland Archer imagines an ideal Ellen Olenska submitting to his desires. By the end of that film Archer refuses to see Olenska, literally erasing her physical presence and replacing it with his more pleasing ideal.

In many ways every scene with Jake in it is a ‘boxing’ scene, for Jake lives to fight (unlike standard Hollywood heroes who only fight for their lives), and he can only relate to the outside world through physical violence. His is a physical rather than moral code, and in his world he cannot differentiate between behaviour ritualised as legitimate inside the ring and coded transgressive outside of it.

Yet by the last scene, as the bloated Jake La Motta confronts his own image in a dressing room mirror, his defences are down and the anger is gone. Having lost the title, his body, his wife Vickie and finally his belt, the world that La Motta built lies in tatters. He is the embodiment of the fatally wounded bull, now looking only for forgiveness. Observing the Christian tradition of the tragic hero suffering in our place, we’re asked to take pity on this man who has lost the attributes necessary to masculinity. Punishment and suffering are built into the structure of tragedy: the hero batters against his fate until finally redeeming himself by accepting it. But pity (that is if you grant it) does not equate to deliverance, and La Motta can either hope for further purgation or come to accept his own flawed image. As the film closes Jake resolves his relationship with a reluctant Joey – who eventually accepts his brother’s embrace in an inversion of the classical Hollywood clinch climax - moments before implicitly blaming him for his demise. Following this with the biblical sentiment that “Once I was blind but now I see” ends the film ambiguously asking, and suggesting the potential, for apprehension and acceptance of Jake’s lot.

Although awarded the honour of best film of the 1980s by the American Critics Association, Raging Bull continues to garner a mixed critical response. Indeed some feminists have condemned the camera’s collusion in Jake’s objectifying gaze towards Vickie. Whereas others assert that Scorsese’s work (and Raging Bull in particular) is a radical critique of patriarchal masculinity, praising the film as an exposure of the violence inherent in a masculinity that must viciously repress all signs of femininity and/or homosexuality.

An overwrought tension exists in Scorsese’s work between his level of personal identification with his protagonist – consistently played by Robert De Niro – and his repulsion from these characters. This tension attests to the ambivalence Scorsese feels toward his subject, ambiguously positing the director halfway between acquiescence and repudiation, and giving his oeuvre a uniquely disturbing quality.

Scorsese’s work involves a sweeping re-evaluation of Hollywood genres, either combining them in such a way as to foreground their contradictions (western and horror in Taxi Driver) or disconcertingly reversing the expectations they traditionally arouse (the boxing movie and ‘biopic’ in Raging Bull). Hollywood films are not meant to be innovative, difficult or challenging, hence explaining Scorsese’s limited commercial success. Scorsese is not a Hollywood director but an in-spite-of-Hollywood filmmaker. He persistently makes each of his films follow their subject (the loner male anti-hero) remorselessly through to the point where the film reveals and dramatizes the fundamental ideological and sociocultural tensions of our time. In Taxi Driver it was the isolation and subsequent rage able to fester in a modern metropolis. In Raging Bull it was the tension between acceptable violence between consenting men and unacceptable social violence perpetrated against women by familiar men.

Why is there a need on Scorsese’s part to so violently disfigure the rules and codes of narration and representation? Partly it is because his films have always been concerned to impart a moral lesson; the necessity of escaping from convention and type in order to be truly free.

Scorsese in the 70s began what Fight Club finished: a documentation of masculinity threatened (to the core of its existence) by the effects of feminism. Delving into the pathos and personal politics of Scorsese’s protagonists sheds light on the reaches to which mankind will go to move within the ‘world of his desire’, and how desperate he can become convincing the world that his idea is the world. It speaks volumes also of Scorsese the auteur’s intense relationship to the texts he designs. But perhaps more subliminally his work comes off because Scorsese’s own creative character, and his own ideal masculine self, is bound up with a dream as mad and absurd as any that occupy and consume his heroes.

-
References and bibliography

Wood, Robin ‘St James Film Directors Encyclopaedia’. Andrew Sarris (ed.) Visible Ink Press, Detroit, 1998.
Cook, Pam. ‘Masculinity in Crisis?’, Screen, vol23, nos. 3-4, September-October, 1982
Friedman, Lawrence. ‘The Cinema of Martin Scorsese’ Continuum, New York, 1998.
Kolker. ‘A Cinema of Loneliness’
Martin, Adrian. ‘Martin Scorsese’s Indirect Aim’, Phantasms. McPhee Gribble, 1994.
Melbourne Cinematheque website, www.sensesofcinema.com
‘The Bronx Bull: An Introduction to Raging Bull’. (doc)

Did you know? The best man at La Motta’s most recent marriage (of 10 years) was none other than Sugar Ray Robinson!

Posted 12:44 AM by *cnn
SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS: A CRITIQUE OF THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION AND STYLE OF OPENING & CLOSING SCENES

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) USA 91 mins.
Source: CAC/NLA Prod Co: Paramount Prod: Paul Jones
Dir, Scr: Preston Sturges Ph: John F. Seitz
Ed: Stuart Gilmore Art Dir: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick
Cost: Edith Head Mus: Leo Shuken, Charles Bradshaw
Cast: Joel McCrae, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall

* * *

Sullivan’s Travels opens abruptly on a fatalistic struggle between a young vagrant and a railroad yard boss on a boxcar roof as the train roars through the night. The two men fall off the train into a river in a fatalistic embrace. Through the rushing water The End slowly dissolves into view with a swelling musical finale. At that point the audience is made aware of the ‘film-in-film’ that had hitherto been concealed. The credits roll and Sullivan explains/sells to his producers the moral significance of the film; Capital and Labour killed by their mutual antagonism. He states his intention to make a more socially responsible film, “a true canvas of the suffering of humanity”. In this opening scene the overall narrative purpose has been created. As Sullivan declares, “I’m going down to the wardrobe and get some old clothes, some old shoes and I’m gonna start out with ten cents in my pocket. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m not coming back till I know what trouble is.”

Sullivan’s Travels is to be the story of a director’s quest, and this initial scene will only have resolution when it is mirrored by the closing scene, the montage of an old cartoon [Playful Pluto (1934) one of the last black and white cartoons Disney made] and prisoners laughing. But this opening scene also sets up a meta-narrational story of the director (Sturges, that is) and his quest to satirise, document and romanticize his industry and their relationship both to the particular American society of WWII era, to the Depression era he recounts, and to wider notions of America’s neurotic fixation on success, and their dichotomised fear of failure. Or as Manny Farber and W.S. Poster put it, the conception that America is “haunted by the spectres of…the living incarnations of the great American nightmare that some monstrous error can drive individuals clean out of society into a forlorn no-man’s land of scorn, derision and self-humiliation.”
But before the film can reveal the ‘final effect of the initial cause ’, it explores a series of ‘mini-quests’, of four voyages, which seek to demonstrate Sullivan’s descent in to hopelessness and his ultimate realisation that humorous movies (like religion, to which it is closely linked in the closing scene) are the therapeutic solution to the pain of poverty. This realisation thus decides his return to making entertaining comedies. In this manner his travels take him from a resolved push for a more socially realistic cinema to a reaffirmation of classical Hollywood motifs and messages.

So to the mini-voyages, a technique not uncommon in the “Hollywood fabula…[which is] the product of a series of particular schemata, hypotheses, and inferences.” Each voyage continues a causal chain of linearity begun in the ‘Capital v Labour film’ and finished in ‘Playful Pluto’.

The first sees Sullivan walking down a country road into the home of two peculiarly overbearing middle-aged woman. He escapes, not before ripping his pants and falling into a barrel filled with water, and hitches a ride. The next morning he awakes to find himself back in Hollywood, apparently destitute and hungry. He enters a roadside diner, where he meets a nameless starlet, The Girl, who from that point on will be his companion and eventually love interest.

The second voyage sees Sullivan and the Girl (who now realises he is not a vagrant) depart from a freight yard to discover the underbelly of America. They last a night, as they jump off the train at a small town to find the land yacht full of studio-types, who insist he recuperate (the rough night gave him ‘hog fever’) for three days as they travel to Las Vegas. Again aggravated for being returned to ‘Hollywood’ (in the mindset sense), Sullivan reflects about how he is repeatedly trapped in Hollywood and the movies (his first two voyages have portrayed varying film genres: one comical, one melodramatic).
"It's a funny thing how everything keeps shoving me back to Hollywood or Beverly Hills, or this monstrosity we're riding in. Almost like, like gravity, as if some force were saying, 'Get back where you belong. You don't belong out here in real life, you phony you!'...Maybe there's a universal law that says, 'Stay put. As you are, so shall you remain.' Maybe that's why tramps are always in trouble. They don't vote. They don't pay taxes. They violate the law of nature”
Sullivan’s dissertation on the nature of a tramp suggests a newfound comprehension of his superior station and the implausibility of any real contact with the downtrodden.

In the third voyage, without dialogue and with the pathos of a silent film, the couple stay at a flophouse, where they sleep on the floor with dozens of other down-and-outers and in the morning Sullivan realizes that one of the hobos has stolen his shoes (the ones with his identification card sewed into the sole, thus motioning a major effect in the syuzhet pattern). This event compels Sullivan and the Girl to work to survive, a situation the famous director presumably had never encountered.
Sullivan takes a job wearing a messaged sandwich board that advertises: "Why look like a tramp? MOE'S - Slightly Damaged Misfits - AT YOUR OWN TERMS." Following close behind is the Girl - whose sign reads: "MOE UNFAIR TO UNION PANTS MAKERS". The signs contest each other - they are the Capital and Labour characters within the film in the opening scene. Interestingly, Sullivan is unable to escape the assessment of himself as Capital, seemingly his intent at the outset.

In the fourth voyage Sullivan returns to the streets to hand out bills to the vagrants, a simplistic change of tack. If he cannot put himself in a bum’s shoes (although figuratively he did) he will instead shower them with money from on high. By coincidence (that sly Hollywood construct), the bum who stole Sullivan’s shoes sees him handing out money and knocks him out, robs him, and drags him onto a train. The bum flees, but drops money and is killed by a train as he tries to retrieve it. Because he is wearing Sullivan’s shoes it is assumed by Hollywood that Sullivan is dead. However Sullivan awakes when the train stops, groggy, and reacts badly to the hounding of the railroad yard boss. So badly in fact that he ends up in jail, completely bereft of his identity and freedom. He no longer has the safety harness of his Hollywood world, for they believe him dead. While in prison, he comes to be transformed and illuminated by a religiously over-toned revelation. He is show a movie, and a Disney cartoon at that, as part of the convict crowd invited into a small Negro church.
After they are seated, the lights are dimmed and a creaky old projector begins showing a Walt Disney cartoon - Playful Pluto. The convicts and churchgoers immediately begin laughing, guffawing, and smiling at the ridiculous simplicity of the frantic cartoon. Sullivan sits glumly at first, but then looks around with amazement at the uproarious laughter from the audience. Soon, he is laughing too, realizing the therapeutic properties of comedies, that, like religion, help people temporarily forget their troubles, release their suffering and escape from the hardships of the world.

The ending is possible the only plausible conclusion a Hollywood film could make, no matter how radical the director. Nevertheless, the holistic integrity of Sullivan’s travels and the difficult subject matter are undermined by such a placatory conclusion.

According to Dan Harper , the movie fails to realise its value as documentation of Depression-era America, and further, that Sturges:

“only uses it to reinforce his laboured point – that none of this matters…that we want to be entertained (his emphasis) by something so richly superfluous, so magisterially superficial that we are taken, with our hearty consent, to a place so beautiful or ridiculous that life itself – our life – becomes a distant murmur, a bothersome echo outside the tender confines of the theatre”

What most be given at least some trifling attention is the variable link between what the protagonist (in this case Sullivan, the director) concludes, and what the auteur (in this case Sturges, both screenwriter and director) concludes. It can be hoped, but not investigated here, that Sturges might have made his protagonist follow an anti-communist rationale to prove some other point.

That other point? Oh, I don’t know, possibly the overwhelming influence of Hollywood as a machine of American cultural hegemony?

By opening Sullivan’s Travels with a screening of film-in-film, and closing it with a montage of laughing faces and a Disney cartoon Sturges exploits specific aspects of narration, particularly structural considerations. The self-reflexiveness of this technique opens up the process of narration, making the act of presenting the story to the audience a tangible, obvious construction. The film is peppered with tongue-in-cheek pokes at Hollywood and the Hollywood stereotypes, even, in the end, the ‘director with a message’.

Police Sergeant: How does the girl fit in this picture?
Sullivan: There's always a Girl in the picture. Haven't you ever been to the movies?

Sullivan’s Travels was made in 1942, and when taken in historical context the ultimate moral reasoning of the film can be seen to imply a reactionary, anti-communist sentiment of ‘Capital knows best’, while ‘Labour’ merely needs some idle entertainment, as Sullivan so reassuringly excuses himself from the abandonment of his aim at the end of the film:

“There's a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!”

Bibliography

Bordwell, David. “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 17-34.

Curtis, James. Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges. New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Farber, Manny and W.S. Poster. “Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies.” Film Culture, 26 (Winter 1962): 9-16

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