Veronika's Section Week 9 Reading

The article "Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic" describes how filmmakers are able to toy reflexively with differant elements within a film including sound, music, image, color, and movement. The article focuses on the more psychological aspects of these elements, specifically montage for movement and music for sound, and how becasue they are psycological, they allow the spectator to become more "drawn into" the film. The reflexive filmaker, with emphasis on Goddard, is able to force these different elements into conflict and allow a sense of illusionism as the viewer is not able to be "drawn into" the film, but rather is made to view the film objectively. It seems as if "any Goddard film will turn up innumerable violations of conventional continuity. Sound was classicaly meant to be synchronous with the film, the dialogue matching the lips, music that would normally exist in an environment to be there, but as one example of the violations of conventional continuity, the refelxive filmmaker will add in ambient sounds where they do not belong, as well as silence, which generates "holes" in the continuity of the sound and makes the film become more like a comic strip rather than an environment. Just as equally so, montage can be just as powerful as music in development of the psycological environment of a film. Montage can direct the flow of movement and control the narrative in a first person point of view allowing the viewer to be "drawn in" such as in the "Rear Window" in which Hitchcock starts the film with the camera being trapped within the room as the protagonist, but as soon as the blinds are opened, the camera flows freely outside the window but cuts back into the apartment later making it appear as if the camera were independant and causing the viewer to be a part of the film. What Goddard does in specific is to make multiple elements of the film be in conflict all at the same time. The sound telling one story when the movement tells another and even within these two overall themes, the music, dialogue, noise, montage, optical movement, and physical movement all being in conflict at once is very common for reflexive filmmakers. It forces the spectator to watch the film multiple times focussing on specific elements in order to get the whole story presented by each part. By generating these conflicting elements, again, the spectator remains just that, a spectator. This essence of illusionism exists simply in the presentation of anti-realism. Becasue realism is driven from the "drawing in" process mentioned earlier, by doing the opposite and "violating the conventional continuity" is to transitively be creating illusionism. Thus reflexive filmmakers are able to express themselves the best through the use of illusionism in each differant element of filmmaking. By juxtaposing the conflicting elements of illusionism the spectator is made to see the film as what it is, instead of trying to involved within it. It seems as if one cannot be reflexive in their filmmaking without having elements of illusionism, that in fact "violating the conventional continuity" is an essential part of reflexivity, specifically in cinema. ~Gen

In “Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic” article, the author first talks about the different reflexive strategies of cinema. Where he gave examples of how Godard uses a flat image, and set his actors to a blank wall to force the audience to contemplate about the image instead of entering the image. This reminds about what we saw in class. In “2 or 3 things I know about her”, I think this method worked well, from the very beginning of the film, the actress was just standing on top of a building, there was nothing special about it, and we were forced to think about who is she, why is she there, and what is the narrator talking about, instead of purely listening and watching what happens on the screen. Similarly, camera action can also be used for reflexive purposes. As pointed out by the author, when the camera does not follow the action of the character, but rather follows its own set of movement, it creates tension between the audience and the character and we are made to reflex on what is really happening. It seems to me that anything that’s out of sync and out of order can serve as reflexive purposes, if there were vivid colors at night, or strange sounds at a peaceful church, the audience will generally be be motivated to think about what is going on, instead of only taking in what the image or sound is telling them, they have more freedom to imagine. It was very interesting for me to find that Godard have been working with varies of discontinuity, and there is discontinuity of in so many forms. The example of different cloth by the same character within a short period of time, the idea of spatial and temporal discontinuity can really give the audience something to think about. It was also interesting to find that Godard have been playing with unmatching music, and unmatching sound effect in a scene. These techniques can now be often found in films such as pulp fiction, kill bill, and many many more. A peaceful music in a chase or fight scene gives the whole scene a different feel, and as stated by the author, the women can tell her lover she no longer loves him, while the music says she still loves him, it gives illusions and makes the film more ambiguous, and gives the audience more freedom to imagine. I believe music score in a film can be the driving force of it, and knowing that Godard stops the music, and jumps between what we seem to be comfortable with to motivate us, to force us into seeing or thinking about what he want us to was phenomenon. This would mean that instead of conveying an idea by simply showing, it’s conveying an idea by guiding and pointing. Finally, this article really praises Godard on his revolutionary ways of film making, it states Godard is like Picasso in painting and Schoenberg in music, making me believe that his influence is far and wide. I, personally, have not watched that many Goddard, and I should definitely netflix some his works.-p

Okay I had trouble downloading the reading, for some reason my computer refused to support it. Apparently Godard is largely noticed for his controversial use of the conventions of depth, color, sound, movement, and music. Of the techniques mentioned prior, just a few have been discussed in class. Godard’s film “Une femme est une Femme” flattens the normal viewing space acquainting us with the lack of dimension cinema really offers us. The characters are often framed without foreground, background, vanishing point, or focus. Granted the last term is a loose phrase, since he arguably offers many foci, but none which bare any visual relevance to other without competition. The following passage in sent to us, regarding reflexive filmmakers explains how they choose to execute movements within a shot. Camera movement, and movement by montage he controls your ability to extract emotions from the scenes by stealing your depth of image. Godard arranges colors in blocks allowing your eye to move around the frame as the camera moves. Godard destroys continuity editing and draws attention to the holes he’s create in both plot and story. The story develops as much visually as it does in auditory. This also makes each individual frame important. This also reveals his editing assemblage of different takes of the same action. The second section of the article discusses the importance of sound in film. Sound plays a greater role completing the three dimensions It incorporated the importance of zoom, and it’s role in conveying the flatness of space, and distance, the all important distance of characters. I remember that in our previous critique zoom was brought into great question over and over. Apparently it was just an avante garde bit of knowledge. Godard uses sound to distort the messages with lack of synchronization and diegetic sound. Many early films composers filled films with orchestral scoring that soon became repetitive. Music in film originated as a way to cover the loud noise of the projector and to guide the reflextive. --A. Peltier

This relatively-easy-to-digest article is a comprehensive explanation of the very basic methods inherent in post modern, or “reflexive” cinema. I really feel that this article was effective in explaining the reflexive techniques of successful and influential filmmakers. It is clear that the filmmakers described here have impacted contemporary film to such an extent that their methodology has become, to a certain extent, a standard and familiar facet of present day cinema. Also, as a student of both literature and media I especially appreciated the connection made between literary and cinematic techniques. I believe, however, that the author could have elaborated further on several key points. For example, in literature, especially experimental and post-modern literature, attention is increasingly drawn to the structure of the novel. Whereas modernists attempted to create pieces which could transcend time, carrying, in a sense, immortal messages for future generations, the post-modern novel emphasizes aspects of pop culture and contemporary motifs. Contemporary authors want the readers to be fully aware that they are reading text. Emphasis is placed upon chronological discontinuity, for example, in order to keep the reader in constant awareness of the intrinsically literary techniques at work. This is highly reminiscent of the ways in which reflexive filmmakers such as Godard utilize “specifically cinematic” techniques to achieve textual awareness. Some of these methods expounded include detached movement, psychologically compelling montage, de-synchronized sound and noises, the utilization of music in contrast with images, and finally various ways of creating the effect of 2-dimensionality. I feel that we have covered many of these points in class in our discussion of Godard and his film “2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle,” though it was refreshing to hear of other filmmakers who have utilized similar devices in their films, such as Chris Marker and Michael Snow. Among the techniques that the author mentions I found particularly relevant his explanation of camera movement as it pertains to the filmmaker’s detachment from textual references. When the camera focuses upon non-descriptive images there is a strong sense of the director’s intention to imply meaning rather than overtly state or show it. As such, films have become a kind of complicated and fascinating multi-faceted puzzle, where each piece, (camera movement, music, sound etc), forms meaning implicatively. I find it slightly ironic that, while cinematic reflexivity seeks to create meaning through indirect methods, the author of this piece has found it necessary to boil all the aspects of this movement into thier most primitive and fundamental forms. To my mind, this leaves very little room for growth and movement. Reflexivity, by nature, must be more expansive and flexible, allowing for an ever-growing repetoire of methods, each director building upon the successes and failures of the past. While I have found this article to be a thorough and relatively detailed summary of these cinematic tools, I can’t help but feel that the vast majority of these points are widely self-evident. As such, though I by no means intend to diminish their importance, I feel that the author has not only neglected various more diverse and obscure references, but has also unintentionally limited the scope of reflexive cinema in his summary of it.

“Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic” has many elements and strategies that I have seen on “Two or Three Things I Know About Her.” I found that this time, the reading was little bit complicated for me to understand the definition of terms completely. In “Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic,” it mentions about the “Flatten” images. Godard formed no depth of field and he filmed without foreground, background and vanishing point. I agree with the author about not only flatten images but also the colors and sounds. Actually while I was watching the “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” I barely catch the visual characteristic other than the colors. Godard used primary colors and the remarkable thing is that he used red, white and blue to reflect either American or French. I think sound was playing an important role in the film. The voice over was whispering, it was kind of interesting that it made the audience to feel like they are listening a secret story. Other than whispers and silence, sounds are loud or unique. The actors are interesting element on sound because they have dialog but also monolog through out the film. The music also the important portion, it creates the mood of the scene. Sometimes the music covers the noise. It represents the feeling instead of using the verbal, literal language. That is normal in other films or videos. In Godard’s film, the he often uses the classical repertoire and also the music in his work against the images. Therefore, the music and the emotional tones are clash in his work. Color and sound are the elements I could recall the film while I was reading, and there was one more element that I could nod my head after reading the article. It was the “movement.” Movements are also an important element in film. When I thought of the word “movement” the first thing comes up in my mind is camera movement. I did not know what optical camera movement, but now I realize what it is and also it was also the one kind of movement I usually think when I watch film or video. These two movements are familiar to me because I have used these techniques already in my previous projects consciously. But I never thought about the “movement evoked by editing,” I did not know that editing could make a movement. Now I think I can understand what the author tries to explain, and I’m sure that the reading really helped me to understand not only about the reflexive strategies but also Godard’s work.

In discussion class, we discussed the work by Godard called “Two or Three things I know about her,” and in this film the film was meant to portray a certain way of Paris through the actions of the camera, frames, actors, etc. In the appendix, “Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic,” it helps to further explain how Godard works. In this appendix it helps to explain why Godard puts in text in between the different shots in order to get his point across. In the appendix, they explain that “the mere fact of a text being read by an audience of spectator-readers, furthermore, changes the quality of the experience, and in the cinema, the ‘readers,’ at least in the conventional viewing experience, cannot personally vary the time of their reading.” In the film “Two or Three things I know about her,” inserted much like titles in between frames does change the way that the scenes proceeding these title screens are being portrayed in that the audience is looking for some type of correlation between the title and the shots, it stresses the audience to find that match much like a topic sentence would be the driving force for that section of a essay. The next section of the appendix actually talks about Godard and how he is able to bring to the audience the specific textual process or code. It says, “Rather than compose in depth, Godard ‘flattens’ the image, arranging his profilmic subjects in a single spatial plane, without foreground or background or vanishing point to reinforce the impression of relief.” This technique helps to give the image a two dimensional look. Now more in dept of how Godard is able to bring the code to the audience in the film of “Two or Three things I know about her,” is through the use of other techniques e.g. sound, colors, music, and montage. All these forms are repeated in this film in order to make this code evident to the audience so much that if a specific section was to be spliced independently of the film, that certain splice would show all the element necessary to show the code to the audience. The first one would be color. Filmmakers like Godard can either flatten and image or make it known instantly through the use of colors. Godard as we discussed in class, likes to stay with primary colors. In this film, Godard uses the colors Blue, Red and White. This could be symbolically for nationalism of the French culture or the assimilation of this culture into the American culture thereby becoming Americanized. Either way, “Godard insisted on the two-dimensionality of the screen surface through the compositional use of color…that the contrasting color rise to the screen surface as abstract patterns.” This right here is evident in the movie because of the odd, yet nationalistic juxtaposition of red, white, and blue. Another thing that reflexive filmmakers can do is use all the different camera and film movements/ angles to their advantage. One technique that Godard does is creating contrasts in his film, that object that you see on film is not attached to their background, taking away from the depth of the background. The next technique is montage. Any of Godard’s films will have something that is opposite of the conventional continuiuty, and it is through this unorthodox discontinuity that Godard is able to “emphasize the individual frame.” It gives meaning to frames that would otherwise seem unimportant e.g. because of his emphasis on the coffee cup to resemble the universe, the audience realizes this frames importance and adds to the overall montage of the piece. Lastly, are sound and music, for Godard, music and sounds “struggle against the mage and against a simplistic response.” This refers to the fact that the sounds that should be matched with the image, but isn’t. Godard uses silence as well to throw the audience off from the conventional path. The music is sporadiacally placed throughout the entirety of the film almost as it would for a play transitioning from one act to another. The appendix best sums up Godard when it says, “ image, dialogue, noise, music, writing – goes in a different direction. The film is dissociated into its separate matters of expression. The image tells one story; the dialogue another; the noise another; and the music still another. Godard uses all the elements in a concerted attack on the sensibility of the spectator and the conventions of illusionism.” The film on multiple levels is unable to be comprehended totally by just watching it once therefore it is up to the audience to interpret it the way they see fit according to the way Godard presentes the code to them. Godard is anything but the conventional filmmaker.- Garrett Chow

In “Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic”, the writer states that the reflexive strategies appear in both literature and cinema. Making a film is just like writing a novel since a film literalizes the ideas of film text. He writes about the cinematic dimension of reflexivity and gives out a lot of example of Godard. Gordard does not focus on the depth of images, so he does not use many foreground or background to create the depth of the scenes. He chooses to “flatten” the images by arranging his subject in a single spatial plane. As for “flatten”, I think it is the process of making the audience sees the screen as a two-dimensional surface just like a painting. Michael Snow makes the filmic illusion and depth in Wavelength through changing the normal-lens to telephoto view. Starting with the scene that contains the foreground, middleground and background, the film switches to the scene that contains two-dimensional images and flatness. The process of changing depth to flatness (empty out) develops and the film illusion and it can be used in sound as well. Wavelength starts with the loudly street noise and loft activities (deep sound), then switches to sine-wave sound (flatten sound). It is interesting that flatness works within depth and depth works within flatness in a film. Snow flattens the images and makes the audiences focus on the artificial color of the screen by placing some filters in front of the lens. Narrative movement created by montage is the most important movement in a film when comparing to movement in the shot, camera movement and optically produced movement. A film can communicate with the audience through montage. Montage does not only crate movement through angle and perspectives, it can persuade the audiences psychological and create realism for the film. The audiences think that they are participating in the story of the film because of the narrative movement. Sound also is a significant factor of a film. For illusionist film, sound works with the images. It furthers the meaning of the images and makes the images seem more realistic. Sound can increase the depth of the film images. For traditional reflexive filmmakers, sound counterpoints the images but not underlines it. Hollis Frampton is not the traditional one; he develops the interplay of sound and image. The sound in Frampton’s film is not applied to the image that the audience is seeing, but the images the audience is about to see. He makes the audiences feel confused and wonder they should believe their eyes or ears. Music is always classified as an antinaturalistic feature of a film and it directs viewers’ feeling. Another key point is that music makes the narrative continuity moves smoother. Reflexive filmmakers like to play music against the image. For example, Godard usually uses the classical repertoire in his film, but he threats the music modernly. Music in Godard’s film not only guides the audiences’ emotion, but struggles against the images. The emotional music, images and dialogues work together to direct the viewers’ mood.

In “Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic,” we are given the chance to understand how Goddard utilizes visual language in order to create depth in his films. According to Goddard, there are several strategies that can be used when turning flat, one-dimensional images into multifaceted realities. What I find most interesting about this article is how the strategies he points out are described as seemingly cutting-edge or not-so-obvious, and yet, these are reflexive techniques that we see in almost all movies today. Perhaps for the time in which this article was written or when his films were released, the use of these cinematic techniques were not so apparent or commonly performed. Juxtaposition is used widely in almost all types of films. Whether it is juxtaposition between the personalities of characters within a film (hero versus villain/ protagonist versus antagonist), or the contrast between primary and secondary colors, this technique can elicit a number of responses from the audience. These responses can range from comedic feelings to dramatic revelations. In “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” the director consistently uses a series of flat/still images and vibrant primary colors (almost pastel-like). Ironically, while all these images and colors are presented to the audience, the narrated content or intended messages are rather dark or ominous in themselves. By contrasting the mood or preconceived notions of the visual aspects with those of the spoken (heard) features, the director allows the unstated messages to, in a sense, come to life. Often times, it is said that “actions speak louder than words” or “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Likewise, a single color or image can represent an array of thoughts and opinions that no mere words can easily describe. In my opinion, it seems that Goddard’s technique of contrasting still images/colors with dynamic realities allows the audience to create life/motion within their own minds. Due to humans’ persistence of vision, we almost have an innate tendency to “fill in the gaps,” whether this be for a series of images, or a collection of thoughts. The article then goes on to describing how specific narrative movements and parameters of sound can be used to evoke certain responses from the audience. One of the narrative movements that I believe we can all easily associate ourselves with is the montage. In almost all movies today, montages are used for a number of reasons (to show time elapse in quick manner, to intensify emotions or character development, for reminiscent purposes, etc.). I agree that montages should be used for more than just providing a sense of spatial and temporal depth. Rather, they should be used to reach the audience on a psychological level. Take for example the “Rocky” movies from the late 1970s and 1980s. The defining characteristic of these movies are the upbeat, catchy training/workout montages that show Sylvester Stallone working out in different situations. Rather than show “spatial depth,” these montages are effective because they allow the audience to witness several images all at once. Instead of overwhelming us, the montages reach us at a personal level and educe an emotional reaction. Likewise, in “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” the montage of black and white images of war and death cause the audience to really take notice of something that almost doesn’t “fit” in the movie. The magnitude of the images allows the director to place emphasis on a particular aspect in a compressed amount of time. By using montages and juxtaposition in accompany to music, the director can “speak” to the audience through what is visually presented. Music does not necessarily need to be used for aesthetic purposes or as a means to guide the audience thru a film. Rather, as Goddard believes, music is used to accent desired images, feelings, or thoughts. By playing off people’s preconceived notions and stereotypical associations of sounds to images, a director can manipulate what people will think by either matching an image to its respective sound or by again, contrasting an image with a somewhat incompatible sound. The beauty of visual language is that directors are free to leave their work open-ended. Sometimes, being less specific or less detailed can result in a greater emotional response.

The first part of the article, Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic, probes into Godard’s filmic usage of the visual language. The technique of flattening the image presented on the screen by not giving the image foreground or background, gives the viewers an opportunity to place their own meaning or message in the image offered. Holding the viewer at a distance and not drawing them in with long vanishing points and detailed backgrounds emphasize the screen as a two-dimensional surface. Godard also uses color to stress the artificial structure of film. Focus is drawn on primary colors by arranging them in blocks, or in contrast to each other, to remind the viewer of the synthetic world film resides in. Advertising draws on these techniques as well in an attempt to subtly influence consumers with simplicity that can be recalled easily. Film movement can be shown in six seconds of length in a shot, camera movement, or montage. The camera movement does not always have to be guided by human movement, but can also help create tension between the camera and the character’s mobility. However, montage creates a sense of emotional motion between specific shots and sequences. This was designed in the classic days of filmmaking in an attempt to show the story develop throughout a given period of time. Godard throws out the conventional rules of continuity, and draw attention to the holes he has created. By calling attention to the breaks in continuity, Godard draws attention to the individual frames and makes them all equally important. This also reveals the mystique behind editing and the assemblage of different takes of the same action. The second section of the article discusses the importance of sound in film. Sound plays an important role in filling the “third dimension lacking in silent film.” Reflexive filmmakers use sound in unorthodox ways of juxtaposing it with the image instead of simply using sound to smooth out visual inaccuracies. Typically sound is used to reinforce the visual presentation, but Godard uses ambient noise, lack of sound synchronization and thematic relevance to confuse the audience and distort the messages he is presenting. Music in film originated as a way to cover the loud noise of the projector and to guide the audience’s emotional response. Many early film composers filled films with orchestral scoring that soon became repetitive and boring because they continued to displayed the same emotions that the action was trying to portray. Reflexive filmmakers like Godard find ways of making the audio work against the visuals. He still draws on the classical styles presented in the films before him, but by organizing them into sound blocks he allows them to stand out in contrast to each other. Sound and music are structured in the same manner that the colors are in an attempt to draw attention to the design. Instead of being guided on a journey through formal structuring, Godard wants his audience to be aware of the elements of montage, sound, and music so that they can decipher a new meaning. Josh Krohn

It is interesting how we’re starting to take filmmaking into a scientific realm, specifically into the area where the ideas being presented on the screen are being analyzed in the way they sociologically affect the audience. Of course, from the perspective of the filmmaker, his field of influence is, normally, limited to what he shows the audience, but the filmmaker also realizes the sociological connotations which come with these images. In terms of form, this is based on our preconceived notions of what to expect from film: for images we expect the subjects to be actors, depending on the context of the film we either expect them to talk or do certain actions, and for sound we usually depend on them talking, regardless of the context (hence the reference to “talkies”). But this is only what’s obviously carried over from our notions of film. There many other subtleties and subconscious notions we have about what we watch, especially through an immersive artistic medium like film. Many exclaim Godard is a master experimenter when it comes to cinematic form, but these praises are misplaced. This is not to say that Godard isn’t a master of form: his manipulation of cinematic presentation is brilliant. However, he doesn’t exactly experiment with the elements of film, since the techniques he uses have been done many times before, albeit more on accident than with purpose. What he does is embrace different, previously shunned, techniques and use them to manipulate the way the audience feels instead of going for the cinematic norm. “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” is an excellent example of this. Using stagnated flat images and an overuse of primary colors and poppy aesthetic references, he structures the whole film like it was an advertisement, that carrying with the political notions of capitalism and a consumerist culture. The implementation of strange types of framing, extreme long-shots juxtaposed with extreme close-ups, and juxtaposition of quiet ambience with loud ambience gives the film an overall awkward feel, making it so that the audience is never quite sure what the intentionality of the film is, and the form necessitates that the content of these shots be accommodated to fit together with the overall meaning the manipulation of form develops. This manipulation of the form then seeps into the content itself: the whispering voice-overs, the women’s monologues directly at the audience as though it were a stream of consciousness segment within a play, and the constant reminders of the presence of the camera keep you wondering about what Godard wants you to think about the film, keeping you in and out of the immersion. Unfortunately, many of these, so-called, filmic formal experiments have been misinterpreted and their legacy to modern film art has been diminished. While there have been some filmmakers, such as David Lynch, who have used Godard’s ideas and incorporated them to add formal meaning to films (Lynch’s “The Alphabet” and “Grandmother”), these examples have been mostly misinterpreted into techniques simply to be used for aesthetic quality, the most common example of which can be seen in horror movies. - Marvin Choi