The Books of My Life: Mise-en-Scène

As I have mentioned before I am and have long been a cinephiliac. I grew up watching, along with my sister, film after film in the afternoons and evenings on the television, something that was easy to do back in the "good old days" when you could watch film after film on network era television. Eventually my film watching morphed into reading about films. I got Leonard Maltin's film guide when it first came out and when I found Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films in a used bookstore I bought it, read it, and was blown away by it. I still am.

When I went away to college my film watching and film education continued. Bloomington, home of Indiana University, was a cinephile's paradise when I was a student there. One could watch classic Hollywood films on the big screen at the Union, Hollywood and foreign films at the Monroe County Library where the Bloomington Film Society set up shop, and mostly foreign films at the various locations around Bloomington where the Ryder held film court. I also occasionally went to the night time showings of films for the many film classes at IU. I was in heaven. I had achieved nirvana.

Though I didn't major in Film I did take the occasional film class with Harry Geduld, Peter Bondanella, and James Naremore. I have very fond memories of studying with all three and of Naremore taking me and a few other classmates upstairs in Ballantine Hall to view Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo frame-by-frame. Like so many during the era I, though I was brought up on the auteurist and Movie approaches to film analysis and film criticism, fell in with the semiotics crowd, something easy to do as IU was one of the centres for the study of semiotics and semiology in the world at the time, and I took a graduate seminar with Naremore on the semiology of film. I never forgot my love of the Movie approach to film criticism, however, and it is not surprising that late in life I find myself returning to it.

John Gibbs, a third generation Movieite, in his Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (New York: Wallflower, Short Cuts series, 2002), argues that it is mise-en-scène, film style, that defines a film's meaning, and that a close study of film style, regardless of the type of film--commercial or artistic--is essential if critics and film goers are to fully understand a film and fully understand how meaning is constructed and works in films. We can't tell anyone what a film is trying to say to us, writes Gibbs, if we do not comprehend what a film is trying to say to us through its mise-en-scène.

Gibbs's book tries to provide film critics and film goers with a method by which they can understand what a film is trying to say. In Chapter One Gibbs offers a definition of mise-en-scène, anything in the frame and the way what is in the frame is organised. In Chapter Two Gibbs explores the interaction between mise-en-scène and other elements of a film such as narrative and editing. In Chapter Three Gibbs argues that the interaction between all the elements of a film creates, a la V.F. Perkins, in good films, coherence. In Chapter Four Gibbs explores the relationship between mise-en-scène and film authorship, arguing, like other Movieites before him, that a directors signature in Hollywood commercial films can sometimes be discerned in how a director organises the elements of a film, particularly in how he or she organises his or her mise-en-scène. This claim that Hollywood had director auteurs, by the way, was something that was controversial in the 1960s and 1970s given that many critics assumed  that Hollywood produced commercial and that such popular entertainments were not authored. In Chapter Five Gibbs explores the important role mise-en-scène plays in melodramas, particularly the domestic melodramas of Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, and Nicholas Ray, types of films that often emphasise mise-en-scène adding, in the process, complexity to the meaning or meanings of a film. In Chapter Six Gibbs brings all of the above to bear on an analysis of a scene in Douglas Sirk's famous melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), and its meanings. In an appendix Gibbs provides readers with a brief annotated history of mise-en-scène criticism.

Gibbs's Mise-en-Scène should be required reading for anyone interested in film and in film meanings. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in culture, criticism, film in general, and Hollywood films of the classic era in particular. That said, not everyone will find all of Gibb's arguments compelling. Some will, for example, wonder about the validity of the assertion that meaning can be discerned and explored in films without an understanding of a films broader social and cultural contexts.

The Books of My Life: Film as Film

V.F Perkins's Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Boston: Da Capo, 1993 [1972] is one of the most interesting books on the nature of film that I have ever read. Perkins, who was long associated with the influential and sadly understudied film journal Movie, takes, as the subtitle of the book indicates, both a descriptive and a normative or aesthetic approach to cinema in this enlightening book.

In Film as Film Perkins challenges both the image oriented and realist oriented approaches to cinema that dominated film theory between the 1920s and early 1970s. Perkins instead argues that, descriptively speaking, films are both grounded in the realism of the camera eye and the magic of film images. In chapters three though eight Perkins notes that film is a technological phenomenon, an economic phenomenon, and a meaning generating phenomenon that works or functions on both the narrative, photographic, and image levels. Perkins also explores how, in the films produced during the Hollywood studio era, it was the director who bought together the various contributions of narrative, image, sound, music, set design, and lighting and the important roles spectators play in the filmmaking process and the film interpretation process.

Perkins, as I noted, is not only interested in understanding films but in judging them. Perkins argues that good films must be credible, coherent, and balanced and that they must fuse narrative, concept, and emotion. For Perkins, the critic analysing Hollywood studio films--as Perkins notes this approach cannot be applied to many of Jean-Luc Godard's films which don't strive for credibility--can judge individual films and the films of certain directors on the basis of how credible they are, how coherent they are, how balanced the various elements that go in to the making of films are, and how more or less they integrate narrative, concept, and emotion.

I very much liked Perkins's approach of grounding an analysis of film value in an understanding of the nature of Hollywood films. That said, I am a bit more skeptical than Perkins of the ability to judge the quality of films given that value is in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder. Perkins, however, allayed some of my concerns my noting that a film criticism grounded in empirical phenomena still remains an open ended enterprise.

Anyone and everyone interested in the contextual nature of film and how films create meaning should read Perkins's groundbreaking and well written Film as Film. Additionally, those critical of auteurist approaches to Hollywood cinema should take note of Perkins's contextualised and nuanced approach to the issue of authorship in Hollywood cinema. I doubt that they will, however, given that contemporary critics of auteurism seem to prefer their auteurists to be romantic straw men or caricatures and stereotypes rather than real flesh and bone auteurists.

The Books of My Life: Mormonism

If Terryl Givens is the new face of contemporary Mormon academic apologetics and polemics, Richard Bushman is the, somewhat ironically, older face of Mormon academic apologetics and polemics. Bushman, author of the standard apologetic and polemical work on Mormon prophet and revelator Joseph Smith, has, over the course of his academic and apologetic and polemical career, straddled the divide between the new faithful Mormon Studies and the new critical Mormon Studies. Bushman's work has been praised and published both by FARMS, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, a kind of Mormon variant of the Roland Harrison and F.F. Bruce style of apologetics and polemics, an apologetics and polemics that adopted and adapted higher Biblical criticism to true believer apologetics and polemics, and the new critical Mormon Studies rebels, who borrowed heavily from the methods of post-1960s social and cultural history and sociology and the academic presses, most prominently the University of Illinois Press, which initially published much of the work of the new critically oriented Mormon Studies. As a result Bushman doesn't seem to have suffered as much criticism and in some cases invective from true believers of all strips as his cousins in the New critical Mormon Studies have.

Bushman's Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) concisely explores, in 130 pages, Mormon history, Mormon culture, and Mormon political forms. As Bushman notes, Mormon culture was, at its heart, a Jewish form of Christian restorationism that was biblical, prophetic, apostolic, and apocalyptic in orientation. Its power structure was and is patriarchal, centred, as it is around the male priesthood, and it is a religion that is, like Judaism, Anabaptism, and Quakerism, both a religious faith and an identity marker for its adherents. As Bushman notes, the central symbol of Mormonism, the eternal plan of salvation, is important in that, thanks to its linking of Mormon identity to the Mormon life cycle from pre-existence to post-existence, a very effective means of creating and recreating a sense of being Mormon in some way, shape, and form.

Bushman takes a largely functionalist and consensus approach to Mormon history and Mormon culture. While Bushman, for instance, sees continuity, if somewhat contradictorily, between primitive Mormonism, the Mormonism of Joseph Smith, 19th century post-Joseph Mormonism, and post-manifesto Mormonism, those of a more conflict bent see significant cultural change between 19th century and post-manifesto Mormon culture thanks to the demise of polygamy and theocratism, two things at the heart of Mormon culture and the plan of salvation, brought about, in part, because of WASP dominance and activism and American governmental intervention. Mormons, White outsiders in 19th and pre-World War II WASP America became, over the course of the mid and late 20th century, closer to the establishment mainstream as Whiteness broadened out in 20th century America to include Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Mormons, to chose four examples of groups made White in 20th century America. In the process, as conflict theorists note, Mormons became more American than their former American critics. Where Bushman sees Mormonism as a kind of prophetic hierarchical democracy, others, of a more conflict Weberian bent, see a bureaucracy that is both hierarchical and spherarchical and dominated, if not entirely, by the male powers that be in Salt Lake City. Mormonism, in this theoretical frame, is seen as more autocratic than "democratic", whatever that means, is seen as an autocracy that, like all autocracies, is characterised by varying degrees of mainstream conformity and, at the same time, by varying forms of outside the mainstream dissent.

If you are looking for a good apologetic and polemical oriented brief introduction to Mormonism, and yet another entry in the Mormon apologetics and polemics sweepstakes by the OUP, by a cosmopolitan believer, Bushman is your man, particularly if you are already a believer. If, however, you are looking for a more critical introduction to Mormonism, you might want to look elsewhere. I have long been fond of "gentile" Jan Shipp's Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, which focuses on pre-manifesto Mormonism.



 

Musings on Concon "Criticism": The Case of Les Misérables...

I have been watching Andrew Davies's and the BBC's adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables over the last several weeks. While recognsing that beauty and value are in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder, I have found Davies's adaptation of Hugo's massive classic a superb adaptation of the book, an adaptation that draws the viewer deeply into the drama and deeply into the realities of inequality that typified 19th century France.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show to me has been the response it has drawn from some viewers. Given the presence of Anglo-Black actors like David Oyelowo in the cast of Davies's Les Misérables the issue of "race" has reared its inevitable ugly head at sites like Amazon if among, at least at present, a minority of posters (this last may be a function of who does and who doesn't watch Masterpiece Theatre). Some are complaining and docking points from their reviews of Les Misérables not for aesthetic reasons, which are always in the social and cultural eyes of beholders anyway as I noted, but because of the presence of Anglo-Blacks in the cast. Others are complaining and docking review points arguing that the presence of Anglo-Black actors in the cast is ahistorical forgetting that Les Misérables is a work of fiction, that history is always about change and dynamic stasis, and that the demographics of the acting profession in the UK have been one of the things that has changed. In the final analysis, and somewhat ironically, the real people playing the race card are those who see the race of an actor first and foremost rather than seeing an actor as an actor regardless of his or her race. Such "reviewers" are not colour blind. They see race everywhere, in other words, including in Les Misérables.

I suspect that those making such "criticisms of Les Misérables are concons. So what do concon reviews tell us about the way a concon or flim flam conservative mind works? What does it tell us about the function of political and ideological correctness among concons? It clearly shows us that concons, though they decry others playing the race card, play the race card themselves and play it often. They, for instance, see an Anglo-Black in Les Misérables where a colour blind person would see an actor. They deduct aesthetic points from Les Misérables because they see Anglo-Blacks in Davies's and the BBC's Les Misérables. That is, as is quite evident from their posts, their only justification whatsoever for deducting points from their "reviews" of the series. It is not, by the way, the quality of the acting that is at the heart of their aesthetics, which these posts, as a general rule, fail to mention entirely. It is the race of the actor. This, of course, is patented political and ideological correctness. By the way, it is quite clear from watching this adaptation of Les Misérables that the acting because the acting in this adaptation has been of the highest quality making it difficult if not impossible for concons to play the they can't act card.

There are, by the way, two types of concons: conscious con cons and bot concons. Conscious concons claim that no one should see race while seeing race everywhere around them including in TV shows and movies. These concons are, in other words, inherently contradictory. Conscious concons manipulate rhetoric or discourse in order to manipulate the masses for their own political, economic, and cultural gain. They are, in sum, gobshites. Bot concons simply parrot or ditto the bullshite rhetoric of conscious concons. They are the manipulated masses.

The Books of My Life: David Lynch

I have never really been a fan of the art of David Lynch. After all, I am a 64 year old who has been watching films and television shows since I was in my early teens and I have seen much of the schtick of Lynch before. So why am a reading a book on someone I am not much of a fan of? The answer, deer reader, is simple. It was there, in my library.

Unlike me, Kenneth Kaleta, the author of David Lynch (David Lynch, Twayne Filmmakers Series, New York: Twayne, 1993) is a fan, if a sometimes critical one, of David Lynch's films, TV shows, and art. As Max Weber noted years ago we think about and write about that which we value for whatever reason. Kaleta's book confirms once again, the value of Weber's contention.

Kaleta's excellent and informative monograph puts Lynch's work in its broader intellectual contexts. Kaleta notes that Lynch’s work is of a piece with or directly influenced by the work of William Blake, surrealism, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, John Waters, Oscar Kokoschka, Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Henri, and Billy Wilder, particularly Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. He explores Lynch’s emphasis on the aural and the visual, something befitting an artist and photographer.

Kaleta's book also puts Lynch and his work into its broader fin de siècle contexts. In Kaleta's book Lynch comes off as the ultimate postmodernist artist. There is, as Kaleta notes, Lynch's postmodernist fin de siècle genre blending of noir, comedy, horror, drama, and melodrama. There is his blending of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and wonder and terror. There is his blending of tone, of black comedy, satire, parody, brutality, the disgusting, the disturbing, the absurd, and the grotesque. There is Lynch's celebrity, whose fifteen minutes of fame seems to ebb and flow with the release of each new Lynch film, each new Lynch TV show, or each new Lynch art exhibit, though it seems to me to be more of the ebbing variety as I type.

Kaleta’s book does have several problems, at least in my mind. Like any book on a filmmaker who is still making movies, Kaleta's work is limited by the fact that it was published in 1992. Lynch has made four more films since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which Kaleta only briefly touches on. Additionally, I was mystified by the fact that Kaleta didn’t explore the similarities and possible influence of filmmaker Dušan Makavejev and his films WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), with their collage techniques, their mixture of genre, tone, and theme, on Lynch. It is because I saw Makavejev's films almost forty years ago, which are similar in may ways to those of Lynch, that I never, I think, really "got into" Lynch. WR, in fact, remains one of my favourite films along with Celine et Julie vont en bateau and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It is a pity that Makavejev remains far too little known compared to Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard because I find his work far more interesting, far more seriously funny, far less voyeuristically distant than Lynch's (or Kubrick's for that matter), and far more politically radical than Lynch's and Godard's.

Recommended.

The Books of My Life: The Book of Mormon

As I have mentioned on several occasions, I have had a thirty year interest in Mormonism, something that surprises some since I am not now and have never been a Mormon. Given this intellectual interest it is not surprising that at some point I would get around to reading Terryl Givens's The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Givens is probably the leading believing Mormon polemicist and apologist of the new generation in early 21st century America. As historian Daniel Walker Howe notes in the blurb on the back of this 140 page book, Givens's very brief introduction to the Book of Mormon is a "reverent" one. Givens's short book is a "reverent" or apologetic and polemical exploration of the origins, structure, themes, tales, characters, teachings, use by the Mormon faith community, and controversies associated with the Book of Mormon since it was first published in 1830.

One has to wonder who the target audience of Givens's very short introduction is. I can't imagine many non-Mormons picking it up to read given its apologetic and polemical character and tone. It is far too brief for academics and academics interested in Mormonism who are more likely to turn to Givens's equally apologetic and polemical but fuller introduction to the apologetics and polemics associated with the Book of Mormon,  By the Hand of Mormon (2002). Believing Mormons and perhaps introductory classes in Book of Mormon Studies at one of the church owned colleges and believing Mormons who see an acknowledgement of their faith in Oxford University Press publishing a book on the Book of Mormon, seem more likely target markets to me.  For these last, it seems to me, a good if too brief state of the Mormon intellectual apologetic and polemical art to the Book of Mormon that can be read very quickly.