Media Theories

Helen Powell says that “every day of our lives we experience the inevitable progression towards our own mortality, evidenced by the processes of ageing whereby time consumes us, leaving its visual markers and embodying its progress” (2012:87). Ageing is one of the most significant signs of time passing by and Michael Haneke’s movie Amour deals with the time in everyone’s life when ageing becomes dying. In dealing with Alzheimer, Haneke targets the power of memories and the importance of the past when the present is degrading.

In Amour both of the main characters lose track of time. For Anne this could be understandable because of her sickness but for Georges it is more surprising. Anne getting sick seems to be the point when time stops, for one from sickness and for the other from seeing her loved one perish and unconsciously following her footsteps. They are tied to the present by their memories.

For Damian Sutton and David Martin-Jones, memory is “the creation of a gap” producing simultaneous reactions of “will and sensation, spontaneity and receptivity, memory and habit” (2010:95). Throughout Amour, memories are discussed, they even allow characters to re-discover themselves (and therefore their present) when Georges talks about memories never mentioned before.

Bergson asserts that “we only perceive the past” and that memory is an automatic “habit”. However he differentiates another type of memory, one “in which the past ‘survives’ in independent remembrances”, a sort of “intellectual recognition” that “’exists’ in time” (Lazzarato 2007:101). This second type of memory predominates in Amour although the characters collect memories and remember them as a habit. The story itself is a flashback as the start of the movie happens after the story we are told all the way through. During the movie flashbacks are more like illusions, an enactment of memories of routines and a wish that it belonged to the present.

Husserl differentiates inauthentic from authentic time. The first is our everyday experience of “time as a succession or regular, discrete units” and the last is the lack of fixation on the present and the “priority of the futural mode” (Mitchell, Hansen 2010:108). As Anne gets sick, her experience of time becomes authentic. She refuses to acknowledge the present and prefers focusing on past memories or what is ahead for her entourage. Meanwhile, Georges’ experience of time becomes inauthentic, his days are rhythmed by repetitively taking care of his wife. Their experience of time is not dictated by the “time of the world”, invented by humans and constantly measured as they live in their own time bubble (Mitchell, Hansen 2010:110).

Deleuze explains that “certain films are able to render visual the passing of time of duration”, he names those “time-images” (89). In Amour, time is conveyed through filming, editing, repetitive actions and character’s macabre development. Time is also conveyed through sound; in long scenes there is not necessarily music to fill the silence when there is no dialogue. The rhythm is smooth, the editing is continuous and the shots are often long.

As Powell finds when analyzing Fred Zinnermann’s High Noon (1952), we can determine that Amour is a movie “based on tension, on the anxiety of waiting” although Amour is more about a detachment from time and most of all from the present (2012:24).

Bibliography:

Mitchell, W.J.T. and Hansen M.B.N. (2010) Critical Terms for Media Studies. The University of Chicago Press

Sutton, D. and Martin-Jones, D. (2010) Deleuze reframed: a guide for the arts student. I.B. Tauris

Lazzarato, M. (2007) “Machines to Crystallize Time: Bergson” in Theory, Culture & Society. Sage Publications, Inc.

Powell, H. (2012) Stop the Clocks: Time and Narrative in Cinema. I.B. Tauris

Filmography:

Steven Reiss and Neil Feineman explain that “knowing that their videos are meant to be seen repeatedly, most [music] video directors therefore prefer a denser, more abstract style to telling a simple, literal story”. This leads to an “emphasis on emotion, rather than on analytical character development or ideas” (2000:13). However, Michael Jackson is known to be an engaged artist and in Earth Song the video reflects the song and tries to pass messages and impact the viewer.

The first step for that is to take the audience to “a liminal place [...] not bound by time and space, where problems can be transcended” as Christopher Lynch explains (2001:115). In Earth Song, characters are in the desert and time is only defined by the contemporary problems that the song deals with.

In his analysis of another Jackson video, Dangerous, Lynch studies the fact that “music can lift the audience to a state of emotional intensity through its use of repetitive form” (2001:115). In Earth Song this repetitive form is heard as well as seen. The first verse depicts people suffering, the chorus depicts hope through flashbacks of what life used to be. The second verse and next chorus follow the exact same musical as well as visual pattern.

More interestingly is how the song’s rhythm is reflected visually. New sentences are often followed by new shots. As the rhythm becomes marked by drums the editing follows; each knock by the instrument is seeable in editing by a flash and/or a change of plan contrasting with the previous smooth editing and music.

Jackson’s behavior allows to transmit affect through the process of affection. Eric Shouse explains that “facial expressions, respiration, tone of voice, and posture” are expressions of intensity and that they can “transmit affect” (Feeling, Emotion, Affect: online). Jackson’s angriness and revolt is transmitted to the viewer through his screaming, foot tapping and more.

When the song goes violent, it follows visually. There are no long shots anymore, people are facing a huge storm shot with a shaky camera so the audience feels in it. In Dangerous, Lynch points at the “rapid pace and quick editing that build intensity” and the fact that “the music and images convey an energized mission” (2001:114). It is seeable here in the music as well as in the video that build this intensity to “explode” as Jackson screams and the Earth revolts.

Steven Shaviro also notes the affective impact of Jackson’s image as he explains that “pop culture figure are vicariously alluring, and this is why they are so affectively charged” (2010:9). Jackson in the video is in between almost every shot, he is physically (and visually) incarnating the music. His authority is also asserted with the below shots, making him look superior and therefore worth listening for the viewer.

Apart from the relation with the music, the chosen images impact the viewer as they reflect the lyrics, although in a more shocking than poetic way: Jackson talks about men destroying the world and we see a poached elephant, he talks about war and we see families suffering after bombings. Nick Brandt, the director also uses documentaries footage that are even more shocking because real. The viewer suffers from seeing all this suffering.

Bibliography:

Reiss, S. and Feineman, N. (2000) Thirty Frames Per Second The Visionary Art of the Music Video. Harry N. Abrams

Lynch, C. (2001) “Ritual Transformation through Michael Jackson’s Music Video” in Journal of Communication Inquiry 25:2. Sage Publications, Inc.

Shaviro, S. (2010) Post Cinematic Affect. O Books

Filmography:

Earth Song (1995) N. Brandt. USA: Epic Records

Webography:

For Lynda Nead, discourse is “a particular form of language with its own rules and conventions” (Gillian, 2001:136). According to Rose Gillian, discourse works to persuade through a “regime of truth” usually established by institutions to confirm the veracity of their discourse via techniques such as “scientific certainty, or the natural way of things” (2001:154). In the Western world, power held by institutions gave rise to the creation of a white discourse that points every person that is not white-skinned as ‘Other’. Richard Dyer explains that “white people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s” (1996:12). This discourse is transposed in Hollywood, an institution still ruled by a white elite. For example Freedom Writers, a movie dealing with issues of race and ethnicity carries a white discourse.

In her analysis of the opening sequence of Freedom Writers, Anne H. Petersen points at the “white gaze” presented through the aerial shots of the chaos of the streets (2009:34). These shots resonate with documentaries where animals need to be filmed from a distance because they are dangerous; ‘Others’ are positioned in the first minutes of the movie as dangerous, almost not-human individuals. Teacher Erin Gruwell comes in this environment like a savior, a Hollywood phenomenon that Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon qualify as the “messiah”, a recurring concept that uses a “white figure that saves [people of color] from misfortune” (2003:IX). Gruwell represents all the good American values –equality, fair-treatment, acceptance, and more– while at the same time showing “evidence [of] her [white] privilege” through her looks, especially compared to people around her. (Petersen 2006:36).

The movie seems to try to go over whiteness discourse; in a scene quiet student Eva raises her voice to speak for the ‘Others’: “You don’t know nothing […] white people always wanting their respect like they deserve it for free”. When Gruwell responds “I am a teacher, it doesn’t matter what color I am”, she is a pure allegory of the white principles that America is built upon. She represents the “myth of sameness” that white politicians try to apply without realizing that there is no such thing as “sameness” since the whole system is built for whites, by whites with white ideals (Dyer, 1996:11). Interestingly, as Eva continues to explain that white people act like they are above anyone and anything, Gruwell is not surprised and she does not try to directly confront her students. She will spend the rest of the movie proving that she is more than a color and that she can help them solve their issues. It makes the script critically “white” because in the end, the white teacher (a figure of authority confirmed by the State) was able to “cleanse them of their deviance and difference” (Petersen, 2009:37).

Let us not forget that this story is based on real-life events and that the outcome is very positive as everyone lives in harmony and succeeds. However if the movie could be read as the success of American ideology and integration, it also seems that making this movie is a way for white people to show how good they can be.

 Bibliography:

Vera, H. and Gordon, A.M. (2003) Screen Saviors, Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Dyer, R. (1996) White: essays on race and culture. Routledge

Gillian, R. (2001) Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. Sage

Petersen, A.H. (2009) "Their Words, Our Story: Freedom Writers as Scenario of Pedagogical Reform", in Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, Volume 39.1. Center for the Study of Film and History

  Filmography:

Romantic comedies or dramas are often pointed as feminine genres, questionably designated as “guilty pleasures” (McDonald, 2007:7). Jackie Stacey explains that the pleasure found by women in romantic texts (most notably soap operas) is a result of a “match between the forms of feminine cultural competence and the thematic focus on interpersonal relationships” (1994:43). This match can be found in Before Sunrise, a movie in which two strangers are going to discover each other and ultimately fall in love for a night only. Like most movies, the viewer’s pleasure in Before Sunrise comes from scopophilia and the play out of fantasies. However we could wonder if feminine audiences react differently than men while watching such a movie.

As in any other Hollywood movie, the film is dominated by a male-phallocentric gaze. The woman (here, Céline) represents castration and the man (here, Jesse) escapes this fear by “investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery” (Mulvey, 1975:13). Jesse is inexplicably attracted to Céline and leads most of the action, starting by proposing her to get off the train. Céline’s desire “only appears on the screen to be punished and controlled by assimilation to the desire of the male character” as we can see each time she gives in to Jesse she realizes that she is to be more and more heartbroken by their forthcoming separation (Stacey 1994:24). Robin Wood claims that when both of the characters hug at the end, her expression indicates that “she will be the one who suffers the more” (1998:334). Could we attribute that guess to a male reading of the film or to a male “phantasy” acted out on screen by the director/camera gaze? Probably both.

However, Before Sunrise interestingly appears to possess a different reading.  Stacey quotes Doane, explaining that when looking at a movie the female spectator should act “as if she were a man with the phallic power of the gaze, [looking] at a woman who would attract that gaze, in order to be that woman”(1994:27). It is true that in Before Sunrise there is a fascination around Céline that the female spectator tries to understand through the male gaze, meanwhile trying to become Céline in order to satisfy the same gaze. But as Wood, indicated, Céline is “more educated, more aware, more intellectual, […] more stable” (1998:334). Could the movie then challenge the patriarchal Hollywood-narrative construction of the passive female? Only partly because even though Céline could be designated as being spiritually superior to Jesse, she is still fetishized as an object of fascination for whomever gazes at her and becomes active only after a push from Jesse.

Leger Grindon claims that by the mid-80s, romantic comedies started portraying “the social developments experienced by women since the 1960s” (2011:60). Before Sunrise displays a new type of fascination for a women as “experienced professionals whose economic independence allows for autonomy from men that exceeds the social circumstances of most women” (Grindon, 2011:60). This helps giving pleasure to audiences by inscribing the movie into a “specific viewing context” (Stacey, 1994:46) and using important societal themes and developments. Illustrating women’s evolution in society probably emphasizes the film’s power on feminine audiences by affirming their independence from men, something they already seek for when engaging with a text (Stacey, 1994:40).

  Bibliography :

Grindon, L. (2011) The Hollywood romantic comedy: conventions, history, controversies.

Wiley-Blackwell

McDonald, T.J. (2007) Romantic comedy, Boy meets girl meets genre. Wallflower

Mulvey, L. (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Screen Vol. 16, no.3

Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. Routledge

Wood, R. (1998) Sexual Politics & Narrative Film, Hollywood and Beyond. Columbia University Press

  Filmography: