More on Children of Men

Media Mindfulness has a little piece on Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. AV and I saw the film a couple of Saturdays ago and were blown away at it on a variety of levels. I'm particularly interested in the notions of realism that the film embodies (as realism in film is oddly turning into my pet project -- and probably thesis focus), and I appreciate the article's discussion of that idea -- as well as the quotation from Zizek that explodes the idea little more. He says, "The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here."

Part of what makes it credible, I think, is the film's direct, but not brow-beating reliance on familiar themes and images -- the war on terror taken to a horrific (but logical) extension. It doesn't take much for the viewer to build credible inferences between the world around us and the world on screen. This is why I think it is so much more effective as a morality play and a science fiction nightmare than Blade Runner. I suppose this inference goes without saying, but I want to argue that w/r/t Children of Men and elsewhere, our ability to build inferences between the real world and the world we see is what makes film so powerful and effective as a genre of moral texts. Hmm.

Read Manolha Dargis's review.

Virtual Images, Actual Reality, Ways of Seeing

This post (and the comments) over at the Constructive Curmudgeon taps into an idea I've been stewing about for awhile. It links up with a question fundamental to my current way of thinking: do digitally-created images have moral consequences?

If images have moral consequences, then it seems that there needs to be an acknowledgement of the kind of ontological reality of these images. It's fairly uncontroversial from a philosophical angle to argue that digital torture is problematic because it still resembles something in the non-virtual (real) world. This correspondence view of matching images to their referents seems to make sense. A kind of realism is necessary in order to draw meaningful (i.e., non-relative) moral conclusions. If we adopt the correspondence view, then it is equally uncontroversial to make a moral judgment about digitally-generated child pornography.

But what I want to point out is that outside of philosophical circles, realism and correspondence are not necessarily the primary ways of reading images. In fact, positing a correspondence between images and referents is viewed as relying on a parochial way of "seeing" the image--in particular, from a white, male, western perspective. Even if we acknowledge the limitations of correspondence views, saying "Yes, I am aware that the tradition locates correspondence as priveliged, but I'm going to use it anyway," can we transcend the limitations?

My film theory professor posed this problem to me in her comments on my term paper. If we emphasize a visual-epistemological system that holds to correspondence first and gender or culture second, are we limiting (or worse, ignoring) the insights of feminist or anti-colonialist film theory? How do we integrate these ideas to build a full-orbed interpretive framework?

All this (rambling?) points to the issues of (a) resuscitating a correspondence view as a meaningful way of seeing the world--a position which in fact may not need resuscitating, and (b) developing a correspondence view that translates to adequately accomodate more than it's often given credit for.

Helpful discussions of the relationship between digital images and correspondence (or "perceptual realism") are by Stephen Prince. See especially his "True Lies: Digital Images, Perceptual Realism, and Film Theory," and "Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator" in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

movies seen since late August

AV here...

I 'm responding to a challenge issued by the administrator of this blog. I've been keeping a simple list of films I've seen this year using a format from "The Academic Hack," Michael Sicinski." He runs a great website, linked above and is way out of my league.

(- seen on video; / repeat viewing; [v] video piece; [p] paracinema (installation, etc.); [s] short, under 30 minutes; * grade changed upon repeat viewing)

December
Thank You for Smoking (Jason? Reitman, 2005) [4]
The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006) [4]
- /The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) [9*]
- Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) [6]
- The Weather Man (Gore Verbinski, 2006) [5]
- The Constant Gardner (Fernando Meirelles, 2005) [4]
- Days of Heaven (Terence Malick, 1978) [9]
- Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2003) [7]

November
Old Well (Wu Tian Ming, 1986) [7]
The King of Masks (Wu Tian Ming, 1996) [8]
George Kuchar @DIFF
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006) [7]
Suzan Pitt: Persistence of Vision (1979-2006) [6]
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk and Cohn, 2006) [7]
- Koko: A Talking Gorilla (Barbet Schroeder. 1978) [6]
EMPz 4 Life (Allan King, 2006) [7]
Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006) [8]
Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, 2006) [8]
Invisible Wave (Pen Ek Ratanruang, 2006) [7]
Steve Anker @FPC w/ films from CalArts
- Pandora's Box (GW Pabst, 1929) [8]
- The Double Life of Veronique (Krzystof Kieslowski, 1991) [7]
- The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2006) [8]

October
Nathaniel Dorsky @FPC
Song and Solitude "[Song and Solitude's] balance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, than an exploration of the external visual world as such." 16mm, 2005-06, 21 min
Threnody "Threnody is the second of two devotional songs the first being The Visitation. It is an offering to a friend who died." 16mm, 2003-04, 20 min
The Visitation "... an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one's psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts." 16mm, 2002, 18 min
- Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Ken Burns, 2004) [6]
The Departed (Martin Scorcese, 2006) [6]
- Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) [4]
49Up (Michael Apted, 2005) [9]
Julie Murray @ FPC:
If You Stand (16mm, sound, 1997, 17 min),
I Began to Wish (16mm, silent, 2003, 5 min),
Untitled (light) (16mm, sound, 2002, 5 min),
Detroit Park (Digital video, 2005, 8 min),
Orchard (16mm, sound, 2004, 9 min),
Deliquium (16mm, sound, 2004, 15 min)
TIE Festival (notes Oct. 11-15) - link is to pdf, I saw most everything...
Jean-Pierre Gorin @FPC with Poto and Cabengo (1976?) [8]
- Enthuziam: Sinfonija Dombassa (Dziga Vertov, 1930 and re-synced Peter Kubelka, 1972) [8]
- Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 1999) [6]
- The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) [7]
- Alexandra's Project (Rolf de Heer, 2004?) [6]
- The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, 1974) [8]
- Bartleby (Jonathan Parker, 2005) [3]

September
-Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2005) [7]
Brakhage: Wonder Ring (1955), Fire of Waters (1965), First Hymn to the Night - Novalis (1994), Weir-Falcon Saga (1970), The Wold Shadow (1972), Pasht (1965), Occam's Thread (2001)
-Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) [8]
-The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977) [8]
-The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002) [8]
- Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) [8]
- Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) [6]
- Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) [8]
- The Charcoal People (Nigel Noble, 1999) [6] - written by Jose Padhilla
- The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg. 1976) [7]

August
-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) [6]
-Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) [7]
Drawing Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney, 2005) [8]