I love OldBoy

I fuckin' love it. Lovelovelovelovelovelove LOVE that movie.



So with everyone talking about TV in that film, I thought I should mention that more but what I find more interesting for myself (and in the future when we watch The Conversation) is that idea of surveillance, private/public, and emasculation not just through gazing on the television but through being gazed at by the mechanical apparatus.

Let's start with the hotel room. So here is a place where light is paradoxically both denied and allowed. Keenan talked about the Panopticon imprisoning through an excess of light, which is what occurs in a certain sense for Oh Daesuh's 15 year home; he's under constant surveillance, constant watch, and we see later the man at the desk having a television monitor peering into every room. Also, although he lacks literal windows his room contains one very important window which everyone is talking about, the TV, the window into the public world. That TV informs OhDaesu of everything he learns, but the TV in the film also shows us the spectator moments of Korean/International history happening over those 15 years (death of Princess Di, the scandal of Korean presidents, etc). So just as much as it's a nurterer, emasculator, and companion, it is also "light" bleeding from the outside to the inside, serving to make his prison public and private. So just as his entire life in the prison is public, his companion in a sense is the public conscious, Korean TV. What does Korean TV do? As everyone said before me more or less, it emasculates/hypermasculates him.

Now his life is a "larger prison". He is still watched, there is an excess of light (and color) in his new prison, his private actions are recorded, gazed at, in a sense public. He is still under panoptic gaze, still subjectified. Just as he is being followed by the diegetic gaze of the photographic camera and the recording device. But at a meta level, the film camera is also following his movements, he may or may not be on display but cannot escape our gaze, the camera gaze. At the same time, he has to enact punishment, sexuality, etc. on the female; throughout his relationship with MiDo he almost rapes her, ties her up and distrusts her, and alternates between punishing and loving her until the sexual act is commited between the two (but even then she is still punished, locked up 'for her own safety'). But those actions turn to punish HIM in turn, that those vouyeristic pleasures/fetishizations and classic hollywood romances serve as his ultimate punishment, where we finally watch the long drawn out process of the male being punished. And as we reassure that the female is castrated in classic cinema, we see OhDaesu "castrated" as he cuts out his tongue on screen. And just as the older brother in The Aimless Bullet turns away, so do we all cringe at the cutting of the tongue, perhaps the most intense moment of the film. But then what I'm not sure about is this: does Oh Daesuh enact a 'reverse' oedipal fear? Or perhaps he is afraid of MiDo realizing she's enacted some transgressive Oedipal process, that she has not followed the 'proper' Fruedian process? Or made love to an emasculated man (is somehow a deviant sexuality, not just in incest but also a homosexual)? Perhaps then his castration means less if he is already monstrous, like the crippled men of The Aimless Bullet.

See, this is just coming off the top of my head. If I sat down for like, half an hour longer I could have 15 more pages of crap to say about this movie.

In conclusion, I love OldBoy. But perhaps not as much as Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.
Good Stuff.

Sexism in Media

After reading Katie's entry, I started thinking of what she wrote.
"To me, it seems very complicated and ironic that the consumption of a classic Hollywood film depends upon that film's ability to appear masculine, to provide the male spectator with a male character, with whom to identify, and a female character to be an object? "

I had certain video in mind shown during TWTP. This video analyzed an ad for woman. It said something along the lines of " Do you often feel your breasts are too small, too big, too flabby, too pointy... Well don't worry atleast your make up will always look great. " The person presenting explained that it seems that society would however not approve of a similar ad for men. "Do you often feel your penis is too small, too big, too flabby, too pointy... " I couldn't find the video, but did randomly encounter a video analyzing how female characters are merely seen as objects in Disney movies. It's an interesting video to watch if you have the time.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CWMCt35oFY

Even More on Oldboy and TV

Looking down on what other people have written, I noticed like everyone wrote on this...but, I'll try to bring something new to the table.

Oh Dae-Su embodies in a literal way one of the principles that Joyrich talked about: his reaction to the emasculating influence of TV (and also of being held captive--not even able to decide when he would sleep, as they gassed him) is the hypermasculinity he exhibits through the rest of the film.  However, the situation is complicated by the fact that the TV not only plays an emasculating role, offering visions of mundane situations and consumerism, but also plays a role in his training, which greatly aids in his later masculinity: there is an image of a boxing match for example, and later he is shown dodging punches and throwing them himself very much in the style of a boxer at times.  So it seems the TV plays an odd dual role, both acting as tranquilizing agent of emasculation, and hypermasculine fighting instructor.

Oldboy and Hypermasculinity

One thing that really struck me about Oldboy as being hypermasculine was the way in which it granted male characters with multiple sources of sexual power. Though we commonly associate male sexuality with the penis, in Oldboy the tongue takes on a distinctly male sexual connotation. Woo-jin tells Oh Dae-su something to the effect that it was "Oh Dae-su's tongue and not Woo-jin's dick" that impregnated his sister. In this sense, when Dae-su cuts off his own tongue as an act of submission and repentance, he effectively castrates himself. This link between the penis and the tongue seems to grant males with greater sources of power - both sexual and non-sexual - with which to act upon the female. It is then easier for the male to render the female a victim.

In Joyrich's article, I had difficulty grasping this relation between consumerism and femininity. She distinguishes between the role of a producer and the role of a consumer, identifying the former as typically male and the latter as typically female. While I understand that television is more consumer-based than cinema - given commercials and the lack of commitment to a linear narrative - I had a hard time grasping cinema as something other than a product to be consumed. While Third Cinema is a clear exception, isn't classic Hollywood cinema produced primarily for the sake of consumption? Isn't commercial success a huge factor with film production and distribution? To me, it seems very complicated and ironic that the consumption of a classic Hollywood film depends upon that film's ability to appear masculine, to provide the male spectator with a male character, with whom to identify, and a female character to be an object? This seems somewhat contradictory.

Oldboy

In regard to Oh Dae-Su and the effect of the television, his relationship to it can be looked at in a number of ways. In Lynne Joyrich's article, she describes the television itself as female, with its "gaping wound" that "tapes are thrust into." Under this interpretation, the television can be seen as Dae-Su's female companion during his imprisonment, allowing him to hold on to his sense of masculinity. However, Joyrich also writes about how the television spectator is thought of as female, because of the lack of distance between the spectator and the television. The look is feminine because it "is too close to the object to maintain the gap essential to desire and full subjectivity. This way of thinking would suggest that the constant watching of televesion feminized Dae-Su, which he combated by training himself physically and becoming hyper-masculine. His desire for hyper-masculinity is also driven by the emasculation that he feels because he is so hopeless and at the mercy of his captors. This leads to his need for revenge, and the violent avenger is an archetypal masculine character. Dae-Su attempts to prove his masculinity throughout the rest of the film through extreme violence and sexual conquest. However, it is revealed at the end that ll of Dae-Su' hyper-masculinity was in fact part of Woo-Jin's plan to manipulate him. Dae-Su is again hopeless and at the mercy of Woo-Jin, begging at his feet and cutting out his own tongue. This is a particularly emasculating encounter, and the ambiguous ending leaves it unclear whether Dae-Su has regained his masculinity in the end. If the monster is truly gone, perhaps the hyper-masculine side of him is gone also.

The Stray Bullet: Spectatorial Desire for the "Other"

I find the portrayal of masculinity and of the post-colonial nation in The Stray Bullet very intriguing - a hybrid of South Korean aesthetics and Euro- American influence. Apart from the incorporation of cinematic techniques (detournement, film - noir, hollywood melodramatic tropes), the film is heavily inundated with signifiers and imageries that allude to the increasing presence of "the other" in the post-colonial era. "The other," in this case, refers to Hollywood cinema and the US - on a much broader scale than specific artistic techniques. This influence seems to play a significant role in numerous themes/ imagery choices of the film. (For example, the idea of masculinity in threat in relation to the nation in damage during post-war period.)  The notion of "spectatorial desire for the 'other' within a postcolonial setting" adds to the complexity of the national and cultural formation in the period of growing globalization. Consider the following passage by Hye Seung Chung. 

" ...not only the cross-cultural translation and adaptation of particular scenes and star-imges but also Korean audiences' unique cinephilic fixation on often overlooked Hollywood films. Korean audiences' infatuation and identification with Hollywood cinema should be historicized in the postwar cultural context rather than being simply frowned upon as a symptom of US cultural imperialism. The post- korean war generation's intense nostalgia for sentimental Hollywood melodrama is a significant indicator of the cultural displacement that occurs when spectatorial desire for the "other" operates within a postcolonial setting." 

The film, with a number of Euro- American signifiers and imageries, portrays the incoming western influence in the postcolonial setting. However, the frequency of the appearance of these imageries in the scenes particularly near the end of the film seems to suggest something more. For example, the name of the dental clinic that the protagonist helplessly sought out for - "International Dental Clinic," a place named "Bar - New York," and many other signs of stores/ restaurants in the street that indicated western identification (in korean letters). What does the director suggest through these imageries? While following the western manner of film production (techniques, scenes, etc.), the director, aware and acknowledging the korean audience's "nostalgia for sentimental hollywood melodrama," seems to lament upon this cultural displacement, the spectatorial desire for the other. In a way, the image of the protagonist rejecting the script/ actor position in opposition to the actress and the director (pipe- smoking in a rather pompous manner) seems familiar - perhaps how the director himself would appear to be at the time: as a director producing a work through an artistic medium that is primarily western- origined, facing the cultural scene of the moment - the desire of the mass for the other over the national identity/ cultural values. As a producer of this time period, it is necessary for him to accept the reality of having to follow certain conditions in order to remain being engaged in the field of cinema. Apart from the projected ideas of gender divisions, national crisis, societal issues - how do we perceive this position of the director - as an artist in struggle against the societal/ artistic expectations? (consider the history of the film - having undergone censorship by the government.) 

Shemen and Mangirls...interesting

Playing off of elizabeth's idea in Oldboy, the TV is in fact Oh Dae-Su's only companion. Though it also becomes his source of visual and sexual pleasure which intimates the TV as a purely feminine outlet of his masculine needs. The TV also in a sense becomes his mother, it nurtures him, educates him and yet he takes on a hypermasculine persona due to his building rage and aggression(could show content play a role in his development?). 

Another concept that popped into my mind was the gradual rise of big screen TV's. In our society we tend to refer to machines, such as nice cars, as being "she," due to what I assume to be their delicate nature and artistic beauty, a purely objectifying notion. This combined with our, or male obsession with big things because they are deemed as masculine and the petite as feminine creates an interesting idea: the rising popularity of big screen TVs to perhaps compensate for this concept of femininity? 

I digress...

There was a quote from Joyrich, "As dialectics collapse, the oppositions which maintain sexual difference and the stability of the sexed gaze seem to shift, if not fully disappear"(159).

This reminded me very much of Professor Chun's analysis of the shot of the "good brother" who is now a broken man, he is feminized by his emasculating situation. The shot of his legs up to his torso, a traditionally feminine shot is applied to this man along with a very depressing overture that leads to his tooth extraction and the extraction of his last shred of masculinity as well.

I'll leave you with this last image...

I was home this weekend and went to the mall with my mother and two sisters. They had a gift certificate to the GAP and I had one for Abercrombie & Fitch, both were stores we rarely shop at due to their incredibly high pricage. We parted ways and I proceeded to walk into Abercrombie. Initially, I walked in and proceeded into the female section because I honestly could not differentiate the two sides. The music was very loud and disorienting at first with various remixes and club beats that I noticed were fairly feminine. I was later redirected to the appropriate side by a female employee wearing a loose rugby shirt...I proceeded to the male side where the male employees had very tight and accentuating shirts, which felt a little awkward...especially when they started dancing to the music...after a brief period of looking I realized the most practical thing I could buy was cologne and I proceeded to smell a bottle with a half naked woman on it...I was notified that this was perfume and was directed to the cologne which depicted a half naked man on it and I felt that this was not quite right...and very confusing advertising.....I purchased the cologne and proceeded back to the gap where I waited for the females to finish picking goods....I couldn't help but notice that the female mannequin's were dressed very boyishly, and I initially took them to be men's clothing....

This all to say, do you think that TV and general consumerism utilizes feminization for economic gain...does hypermasculinity perhaps attribute to this feminization by being something accepted but unattainable for real men? Cuz I definately do....

As much as I'd love to write about the incest in Oldboy...I think my blog is long enough already

Old Boy

Throughout the film 'Old Boy', it is difficult to discern who has control over the characters. During his fifteen year incarceration, our protagonist finds himself close to the television. He finds that the television is his only real friend. The television, however, puts one in a very vulnerable position. One is distracted and separated from the outside world. It is a powerless, feminine way of looking. This seems to be a metaphor for the violent response to becoming the object of gaze, instead of the spectator who holds power. Then, our protagonist becomes a hyper-masculine character-- training and becoming almost a monster. Even though he tries to hold power... he is constantly followed and spied on upon release from his prison. Does he ever truly regain his power--masculinity-- ability to objectify rather than to be objectified?

In The Aimless Bullet, women seem less helpless than men.

I found Eunsun Cho’s argument about the crisis of Korean masculinity in The Stray Bullet to be extremely persuasive. The objectification of the wounded veteran’s bodies and the loss of the voyeuristic gaze to the American G.I.’s were both made very clear in the film.

But I thought it was interesting that in light of this crisis of masculinity, the article did not spend more time looking at the women in the film. Because while almost all of the men are depicted as overburdened and powerless (Chor-Ho), despairing (Kyong-Sik), frustrated (Yong Ho), or crazy (the poet), the young women, with the exception of Chor Ho’s wife who dies in childbirth, seem to be somewhat self-sufficient. Sor-Hui, one of Yong-Ho’s two love interests, is able to keep herself in school and pay the rent on a room because she has a job, while Yong-Ho, who was released from the army two years ago, is unable to find work. She also seems capable of wielding a gun, which is traditionally thought of as a man’s job. Myong-Suk’s prostitution, though motivated by nothing short of financial crisis, is nevertheless an independent source of income, and even without the respect of the Korean men and a marriage to her fiancé, she is, in the end, the only adult member of the family who is not dead, arrested, crazy, or passed out, bleeding, in the back of a taxi cab, which does suggest a certain strength of character and self-reliance. And Miri, Yong-Ho’s other love interest, not only has a successful career for herself, but even goes so far as to try and get Yong-Ho a job.

I wonder how this feminine self-reliance plays into the larger theme of Korean crisis of identity and occupation, and if it further affects the symbolic emasculation of the men in the film.

The Gaze in Oldboy

In viewing Oldboy I found myself drawn to the idea of self-viewing. This image reappears throughout the film: Oh Dae-Su’s hypnotism at the end of the film, his ‘watching’ his own memory self run around the campus of his school, even the motif of incest plays to this concept to some extent (who is more like the self than a relative?).
The biggest question, to me, is how does one gender self-viewing? Can one self be male, and the other female, as seems to be implied at the end of Oldboy? Is self-viewing scopophilic? Voyeuristic? Fetishistic? Narcissistic? One can read self-viewing in so many ways, that it can’t help but brings the very concept of how we analyze the gaze into question.

Television as Feminine

I'm interested in the gendering of Television as feminine discussed in Joyrich's article.  The argument she explores seems to go like this:

Women are too close to the television image (which is inextricably linked with consumerism) to assume a subjective position.  On page 158 in her discussion of McLuhan's piece, Joyrich writes, "the 'irrational' media of the electric age, particularly television, return us to the mythical form of the icon in which distance--the distance between subjects as well as distance between sign and referent--is abolished."  This sort of primitvism aligns the televisual form with the feminine.

I don't necessarily find this gendering compelling.  Certainly there have to be ways in which Television is masculine.  Gaze aside, perhaps TV can be seen as an imposition into the household, implanting images from the outside into the domestic sphere.  There's something phallic there, right?  Maybe?

This gendering is also complicated by the existence of Spike TV and Lifetime Television for Women.  BET, for example, emerged with the assumption that television was inherently white, so if television is inherently anything with regard to gender, why does a market exist for both special men's and women's programming.

All that said, if I had to choose a gender for Television, it would likely be feminine.  But, as Joyrich says, "while such tropes of analysis are seductive, they are also potentially dangerous."  I think we need to continue to question whether television is feminine before we start operating under that assumption.

Macho Man

It seems that through out both films, the characters are trying to prove their masculinity.


Take for example Yong-ho's acting audition where he is enraged at the director using his wounds to sell the movie. Since actors are clearly used to sell a movie, we know the reason Yong-ho is mad is not the one he claims. Instead he is mad at being the object looked upon. In allowing people to see him wounded, or in Cho's words, in allowing "a mark of his impaired masculinity, to be spectacularized on the screen." Then Yong-ho tries to regain his masculinity by robbing a bank thus trying to become an outlaw hero, a very manly image.

There are other areas where there is gender role reversal, and the man are in a position usually occupied by the female. Ch'or-ho constantly suffering from family crisis or his rotten tooth, Yong-ho being the object of gaze, and even Myong-suk's fiancee losing his leg.

It seems that the character's delay into regaining their masculinity brings about trouble. Mi-ri, for example, cannot see Yong-ho until he has obtained a job. Ch'or-ho's trouble also seem to end once his impairment, his tooth, is fixed.

What I'm trying to say is that masculinity seems necessary for things to go right and the characters fantasize in obtaining this by imitating Western/Hollywood stereotypes.
I think Cho summarizes it best in the following:

" The Yong-ho plot is therefore , the representation of the fantasy of a South Korean man who dreams of regaining his lost masculinity by identifying himself with a male figure modeled on Hollywood iconography. [...] The colonized male who is feminized and disempowered by the colonizer fantasizes his empowerement through mimicry of the image of the colonizer, believing that he can recuperate his masculinity through irritation."

It seems this is necessary in cinema and perhaps society too. Alot of people seem to look at Hollywood for an adequate standard. In one of Luis Urrea's books, Across the Wire, Urrea speaks of orphan children living in "dompes" or landfills in Tijuana, Mexico. To help these kids Urrea and friends got a company to donate shoes. Unfortunately none of these shoes matched so Von, one of Urrea's friends, devised a plan to get the boys to wear the shoes. Since mismatched shoes seemed to hurt the boys' masculinity, they told the boys that mismatched shoes was a trend in Hollywood and that all the actors were wearing them. Urrea and friends also started wearing mismatched shoes.

In this situation, the male ego is impaired (the kids have no shoes), and the problem seems to be fixed when they start imitating what they believe is the Hollywood standard.

Psychoanalysis in Cinema, Art, and Society

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper 1942

"(...the function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido...) 

Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealization. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagized, eroticized concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity." 

On Psychoanalysis, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey

I find the psychoanalytic theory - phallocentrism in the patriarchal society - so very critical in coming to understand not only the cinema but also arts and society. It is quite fascinating to examine its significance; the idea of phallocentrism serves as an essence that underlies as well as connects two separate films (for example Rear Window and King Kong), various different genres of cinema (Ceddo of the Third Cinema and mainstream films), a vast range of arts (cinema and visual art - painting, sculpture, and music - salsa), and disparate aspects of society. 

While the cinematic theories and examinations are intriguing (voyeurism - fetishism, optical colonialism, three looks, etc.), the underlying fundamental - psychoanalysis - serves as an origin from and to which one comes back to understand the audience's perspective, the director's choice of the camera's views and of the characters' actions. For me, when I tried to decode the metaphors and suggested meanings of the props used in the Rear Window (for example, paintings on the wall, broken camera) or of the angles of the shots, characters' manners and presentation (Jeff versus Lisa), I rather stepped back and tried looking at the bigger picture and what may lie in the foundation - the concept of sexual instincts and ego libido. 

I would like to suggest - regard the painting Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942. (Rear Window was produced in 1955) Obviously there are certain magics, wonders, and depth that only cinema could achieve as argued by many. However, I think it's worth viewing this particular piece in relation to Rear Window; many of the ideas discussed for the film are resonant in the piece such as voyeurism, interaction between opposite sex, situation in urban setting, the female character's unequivocally distracting presence (or outstanding?), solitude ("lonely hearts" of Rear Window), the role of lights, and not to mention, windows. Also note that the "three looks" discussed in Mulvey's article can be also applied to this piece as well: the look of a viewer (audience), the frame shot as if it is a moment stopped or captured in continuous flow of events (camera), and an artist who chooses the manner in which the actions are carried, the ambience is created - sexuality, politics, society-, and message is delivered (director). 

Gazes in Rear Window

In Mulvey's analysis of gazes in film, she says that in classic Hollywood women are the objects of gazes rather than simply the subjects, and that the viewer engages in scopophilia when viewing women on film. She looks for ways that the pleasure of scopophilia in viewing film can be destroyed. Rear Window presents a possibility of achieving this that is similar to Roland Barthes' suggestion on how to destroy myth. Barthes says that the only way to destroy a myth is to mythify it, that is, to use it as the signifier for a higher level myth. In the transformation of Lisa from the object of the gaze in Rear Window to one of the gazers, something similar is accomplished.

When Lisa first arrives in Rear Window, she is basically the center of attention. Jeffries has his neighbors to look at, but at this point their actions are generally mundane and uninteresting. Both the viewer and the camera would prefer to focus on Lisa rather than anything else. This is then a scopophilic gaze where Lisa is the object. In relation to myth, the camera, Jeffries and the viewer are one side and Lisa is the other, forming a gaze.

Eventually, Jeffries convinces Lisa that something fishy is going on with his neighbor, and they decied to investigate it together. At this point Lisa changes from being the object of the gaze, to, along with Jefferies and the viewer, being the gazer of something more important. Like a higher level myth, all the participants of the first gaze become simply the viewers in a higher gaze, in which the mysterious and bizarre actions of Thorwald are the new images to be viewed. In this way, Lisa has escaped from being the object of the gaze, just as one myth can lose its history by becoming the signifier in a higher myth. This suggests that a spectacle or something out of the ordinary can destroy the scopophilic gaze of the viewer by offering a gaze of a higher level.

Private Optical Colonialism

Something that really interested me with Rear Window was a tension between the public and the private, or perhaps more accurately, a tension between what we perceive as public and what we perceive as private. Doyle accosts Jeff for his voyeurism:

“That’s a secret and private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn’t explain in public.”

When Doyle delivered this line, all I could think of was the stipulation in the Fourth Amendment about objects in plain view, and my high school government teacher’s subsequent (and slightly sarcastic) warning against any attempt to grow marijuana in our backyards if we had low fences.

Rear Window seems to explore the possibilities of what happens when a variety of seemingly private actions occur in plain view; does plain view constitute as public? Either way, this ambiguity seems of particular relevance to documentary film, television news and photography in general, if we are reading Jeff’s voyeurism as Hitchcock’s commentary on the nature of cinema itself. In documentaries, news, and images of people rather than images of characters, what is being preyed on and peered into is reality itself. What are the boundaries of a camera’s freedom? The camera has the ability to capture images and events that transcend its own physical presence - in that a lens can capture and reveal very distant places and things - and to reveal these images and events to individuals who were elsewhere. The camera transforms the voyeurism of one into the voyeurism of a thousand, well, more than a thousand, but I don't know the exact number of spectators in the world.

The phrase “optical colonialism” from Sneads’ article is of particular relevance. As spectators, we follow the camera’s venturing to and from distant lands and relish in the foreign visual souvenirs it has collected. To what extent should the camera enter private lands, however? Doyle would undoubtedly say to no extent whatsoever. But the law, while not condoning trespassing, would probably support the documentation of whatever is in plain view. A camera allows us to trespass without ourselves physically trespassing; it essentially allows us to legally trespass. When a scandal occurs, we tend to think and question less of how the news came to be and more of the news or the scandal itself.

As a completely different topic, the concreteness and absolute terms got me searching for a contradiction. I was thinking of Ceddo in particular; how do you think Mulvey would perceive Dior? She belongs to a patriarchal society, she more or less effectively castrates a man (by killing him). I'm not quite sure I understand where she fits into Mulvey's theories.

Looking at Anne

Throughout King Kong, the portrayal of Anne as a helpless, sub-human character really disturbed me. Anne is nothing more than a pretty girl. Her beauty is essential to the story, yes, but her mind is essentially non-existent. Anne, it seems, has no capability to speak for herself, or even to simply stand up and run when Kong is pulling her near. During her first encounter with Jack, she does not find his immediate slap in the face at all perturbing. She laughs it off and says something cute, for fear of breaking the to-be-looked-at-ness that is so essential to her character.

After watching the movie, I was comforted by a few things. Firstly, King Kong is an old movie, released in 1933. This was a very long time ago... perhaps this caricature is not still applicaple... secondly, it is only a movie-- and Anne was, like I said, a caricature. Anne's lack of identity--her unability to express herself in any way-- is necessary to juxtapose with Kongs forceful, larger-than-life-like presence.

However, this to-be-looked-at-ness still exsists, and is in full-force today in modern cinema. We are often told that "sex sells", and this seems to be true. The public is often unwilling to participate in a viewing if they do not have something beautiful to look at. I wonder if the camera as a window helps to create this iconic relationship between beauty and helplessness. I also wonder if we are anywhere closer to abolishing this strict to-be-looked-at-ness-- that strips the woman down and objectifies her-- than we were in the first half of the 20th century.

Grace Kelly is To-Be-Looked-At.

Charlotte’s post mentioned some confusion about how and why Lisa became a subject only after appearing in the neighbor's window, when the separation of the window turned all of the neighbors into objects. I had some difficulty with the subjective/objective thing myself, but interpreted the Lisa issue as follows: when Lisa was behaving like his girlfriend, showing up at his apartment in pretty dresses, he was unable to identify with her. She was only something perfect to look at—perfect not only in physical appearance, but in social appearance as well, because she is successful, well-liked, well-mannered, and she always seems to know how to create the perfect evening. He sees her only as an object, and not really as a person.

It was not just the act of appearing in the window that granted Lisa subjectivity—she was behaving as the protagonist, the (usually male) hero of the film that was being acted out in the window before Jeff’s eyes. He himself was immobilized and could not investigate the salesman’s apartment. So Lisa did it for him. Much in the same way as when we watch a traditional detective film, we ourselves cannot leave our seats in the auditorium to investigate the scene of the crime, so we identify with the detective as he does it for us. By assuming this (traditionally male) role of detective, Lisa became a subject to Jeff.

The other thing that struck me about Lisa (I mean, the other academic thing, because mostly what struck me about Lisa was that she looked fantastic in every scene, which, I suppose, is a point in and of itself) was that she very literally interrupts the narrative with her to-be-looked-at-ness. On the evening when the dog dies, Jeff has spent almost all of their evening together staring out the window, and nothing she says can distract him. Until she comes out dressed in her nightgown. That one moment in which he is distracted by her beauty is precisely the moment when the woman across the way screams because her dog has been killed. Lisa distracted the eyes of both Jeff and the audience from an important development in the plot.

Jeff's Massive Camera is Sketchy

Along the lines of what Jason said, I noticed too that Jeff's switch to a camera view was rather awkward, but in line with Mulvey's theories it's kind of hilarious. If you think about the castration complex, Jeff, in a sense, becomes symbolically castrated by his encasement. Throughout the film it is this sense of vision, seeing without being seen, that becomes power and dominance...and what else can Jeff do but whip out his massive camera and put it on his crotch to compensate for loss of phallocentricity...

I wish, too that we had compared Rear Window with Keeney's readings only because the correlations are so obvious, but the panopticon image again popped into my head, I think I had mentioned my theory of the reverse panopticon in which the jailer himself could be locked in and therefore be in the same situation as the prisoners...I think Jeff's predicament is the prime example of this because he himself has all the power but at the same time is incapable of wielding it.

But more to the topic, the women in the films fit Mulvey's theories perfectly. Though Jeff is emasculated and imobile, Stella is in a state of servitude, she is an object, a tool for the recovery of Jeff, a tool of investigation, and in a literal sense a comedic tool. Lisa, too is an object though in a more concealed sense. She is a model, her profession is to be looked at, to be beautiful and ultimately be an object to the world, whereas in direct contrast, Jeff is a photographer, his job is to objectify subjects. And the showcase of Torso is rather obvious. Hitchcock uses Jeff's condition to switch gender roles, Lisa becomes the hero when she gets the balls to go into the salesman's apartment and gather the evidence inflamed by her love for Jeff and thus earning his love in the end(totally reversed right?), she becomes "uncastrated" in a sense? In this way it is not her being seen that makes her subjective but her switching from the scopophilic object to the (typically male) ego.

In King Kong, women are gifts to what can easily be interpreted as the greatest symbol, the mirror, of masculinity and Anne becomes his one and only weakness, she metaphorically strips him of his power and he dies due to his obsession with the castrated, guilty object(who constantly needs saving because of her beauty). King Kong is the embodiment of male ego and Anne is the Scopophilis object (this changes only once in the film, when they show him at the theatre, but switches back when he escapes), this is especially obvious when Kong de-clothes her suddenly for no reason what so ever which directly supports Mulvey's statement:

"The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation"(203).

 Anne is only a device for the pleasure of the audience, and that Kong dies because of her almost indicate that women are the inevitable destruction of male ego and should be treated as such...

So I guess my question why is it that in all types of cinema, woman is an image and man is always the bearer of the look with extremely small exceptions? 

I agree with Jason that Rear Window is significantly more interesting when approached from a theoretical standpoint rather than from a passive one.  This is probably because it is so reflexive, being largely a film about film, and if you aren't reading it in that way, there is not much going on.  I do not think the vignettes which Jeff looks at are particularly interesting in and of themselves, not even the salesman/wife killer story.  The problem with the scenes in the apartments is that the residents lack subjectivity, as they are mere spectacles for Jeff and for us, the audience.  We do not identify with them, even if we sympathize.

This question of subjectivity vs. objectivity was confusing to me in Jeff's relationship with Lisa. The problem in their relationship is that she is an object to Jeff, who appears perfect and therefore somewhat undesirable and uninteresting.  How is it that when she is seen through the window, she acquires subjectivity, even though no one else as seen through the window does?

Bringing in the castration complex now, is it possible that Lisa possessed a kind of subjectivity within Jeff's apartment that threatened him and made him not want to marry her, but through the window she was merely an object, over whom Jeff had power and would thus not feel threatened by?

I guess I have two questions: 1) why does being looked at grant Lisa subjectivity, and 2) how does this supposed possession of subjectivity make her more attractive and LESS threatening to Jeff?

King Kong

Reading Snead's article about King Kong, I was struck by a few things.  His article made many assumptions, one of which I find to be particularly important because I feel that most of the articles on film we have read so far rely on this assumption: that of a viewer who enjoys and is engaged in the film, but who does not watch it critically.  In the instance of King Kong, Snead makes many arguments that rest on this assumption--such as his assertion that we identify with Denham despite his negative qualities, and are thus implicated in his optical colonialism (and later, his abduction of Kong).  Watching the movie, I did not feel an ounce of sympathy or identification with Denham--I found him to be a rather unlikeable person, and one who I very much did despise.  

In addition, another problem I have with Snead's argument is that he does not address the fact that the white male characters in the movies, and not just the "others" he speaks of, are complete stereotypes.  Denham is the embodiment of capitalistic greed, and a desire for adventure.  Driscoll is the archetypal man, heroic and brave, but emotionally immature and rather sexist.  While the stereotypes of the black tribespeople, Ann, and Charlie are more apparent because they are so blatantly offensive and negative in nature, in reality, the white characters in the movie are no less stereotypes--they just happen to be positive, or at least not negative, stereotypes.  

These two ideas are rather connected: the reason Snead does not recognize characters such as Denham or Driscoll as being stereotypes is because he assumes a viewer who has internalized the mainstream myths.  If the viewer indeed does identify with these archetypal roles, then these characters will not seem like one-dimensional stereotypes, but rather as the embodiment of the "hero."  I guess the problem I had in general was that Snead made an implicit assumption that the viewer agrees with the standard social myths--and while that may be true in many cases, it is not necessarily, and I feel like Snead ignores that fact.  Granted, he does mention that a black viewer would probably be more inclined to identify with Kong--however, in that statement, I feel he was making the same error he accused the movie of making: he is making an assumption about black viewers.  Now, that assumption does make a lot of sense, as it would be far more likely for a black viewer to notice the racism and hypocrisy of the movie.  However, it is not the person's race that determined their negative reaction to the movie, but rather their lack of acceptance of the standardized societal myths.  Black people, being an "other" in our society, often find that these standardized myths are detrimental to them, and are therefore far more likely to reject them.  The fact they black people are more likely to identify with Kong is a larger result of the fact that they have rejected the social norms, not of their blackness itself .  Thus, it could be said that any viewer who is critical and does not necessarily accept social norms will identify with Kong more than say Driscoll--a fact which Snead ignores.

Spectators

"Oh dear, we've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes, sir. How's that for a bit of home-spun philosophy?"--Stella in Rear Window

I must begin by saying that this week's screenings were very enjoyable. (Despite the fact that I completely forgot two movies meant almost four hours). My favorite connection among them was the character's prying curiosity mixed with the need for visual pleasure. As Cowie says, “[it] invokes the specifically sexual pleasure of looking that is identified as exemplary of classical Hollywood." (492)

It's true we love watching other people and sometimes for no good reason. Jeff had been sitting in his apartment for six weeks and considering that he nicknamed all his neighbors, he must have done nothing but look out that window. Looking gave him a pleasure that hypnotized him one way or another.

"Rear Window explores the limitations such voyeurism produces in our relations to others. Instead, it demands that we recognize our implication, and pleasure, in voyeuristic looking and what this makes us blind to." (492)

This visual pleasure does blind us to our surroundings. Take for example the scene where King Kong is being photographed by reporters. The audience just loved looking at the drama and did not become aware of the danger they were in.* Or just Carl’s curiosity about King Kong, and how that led to him capturing King Kong, despite the fact that King Kong had killed half the crew.

Which this all just leads my mind to Third Cinema. If we weren’t yearning for more drama then maybe we’d realized that those stories are based on real facts that need to be solved.




*(Did King Kong's rage at being photograph not remind anyone of Britney Spears and her umbrella?)

Panoptic Neighborhoods

So I haven't gotten to the response readings yet, but I want to talk about a few thoughts on my mind coming from tonight's screening. I'm going to mostly focus on Rear Window, but I've got a few things to say about King Kong too (outside of smarmy humorous remarks).

I'm wondering why we didn't screen Rear Window against Keenan's article, except that it's extremely relevant to Mulvey's work too (but than again, what movie isn't?). The window in Rear Window sets up various displays, frames, narratives; the lives of the people inside are given narratives by their framing, a sort of cinematic Mulveyian display. The people become a sort of language, their actions carrying meaning to the spying LB. Barthes talked about how images signify on the level of connotation; in Rear Window the lives of LB's neighbors become images to be seen and received as language. That image only exists if light passes from within the window to the outside (the darkened window or room carries no meaning, a projector that is not turned on). That language of window images transmit troubling information, and if anything Rear Window demonstrates a panopticon where it's inhabitants do not realize that they are being watched.

Honestly the first time I saw Rear Window it bored me out of my mind. Now, I still enjoy all the other Hitchcock films I've seen so far more (doesn't mean they are better), but Rear Window is much more interesting to me now, just because of my theoretical background maybe. Perhaps what is exciting to most people who see the film didn't excite me, which is watching an audience construct a narrative out of performances happening outside their own encapsulated private world. It was only when LB's world transgressed upon the private home of another, and when the Salesman transgressed onto LB's home was a really interested the first time I saw the film. And any sort of transgression or travel outside of LB's home is done by females. The first time I saw LB pull out his camera lens I couldn't help but notice how he lay it right down on his crotch. Rear Window is almost (or perhaps just outright is) parodying the way phallus is tied to vouyerism, yet it is female bodies that must perform actions for the male. Although this includes making him a sandwich in the kitchen, this also includes investigating, bringing about justice, and doing things that LB is powerless to do. In a sense, he is emasculated. After all, with that huge cast covering his crotch I imagine sex is very hard to do.

These are my scattered thoughts about the film (it's almost 3AM so perhaps I'm not in the best of shape to be replying currently) but I want to see what people think. The fun thing about King Kong was that at the time it was a film of technical brilliance, and the fun of the film was to try and almost figure out the apparatus behind the picture, to see how it was made. Now it's quite obvious how that works, but it removes a level of reading that can be made, which is when we realize that the actors really are "standing in front of and watching a screen" during sequences where stop-motion occurs in the background and live action in the foreground. Again, windows stare out at King Kong, and King Kong has the power to break past those windows and reach into the private domain for his woman. In short, the questions I want to ask are these: In what ways does this film support or deny Keenan's thesis? To what extent is the window also a cinematic screen - in both Rear Window and King Kong? At first in King Kong, we objectify the women, tribals, and monsters but is there a moment perhaps where we empathize with each of them, or resist the classic notions of cinema? In Rear Window, the woman is clearly in the position of the to-be-gazed according to Mulvey's theories, but at the same time that awareness is made clear through the woman inserting herself into the narratives behind the windows LB watches, and also as a sort of physical extension of the man (just as the camera lens, wheelchair, flash bulb, and binoculars become mechanical/cyborg extensions of LB). Does Rear Window somehow resist classic cinema portrayals or reinscribe them in a new way?

If I have any responses to the readings I will post those also.

Mandabi by Ousmane Sembène, 1968

For any of you who is interested in Sembène's works, Mandabi is a good film to try - perhaps a bit more accessible and relatable, in my opinion. Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker who passed away just an year ago, is often said to be "the father of African cinema." He was a significant figure not only in post-colonial cultural awakening, but also in the Négritude as a radical, uncompromising critic. (*a literary and political movement developed among the Francophone African world to promote black heritage against French intellectual domination.) I watched this film for a french literature course last year titled The Francophone World; the film, compared to Ceddo, is a bit more modest in delivering its narrative and in addressing issues that may be slightly more relevant to the general audience. (largely in regarding social injustice, post-colonial political issues, gender issues, etc.) 

Mandabi ("Money Order") 1968

Quite humorous, powerful and effective in its message and aesthetics. Enjoy!

"A Filmmaker Who Found Africa's Voice"

The New York Times article on Ousmane Sembène, June 12 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/movies/12semb.html

3rd Audience

I professed last week (when I mixed up sections) that I am a Barthes fanboy, and this week I want to expand on that claim a little bit by tying in some of the ideas of the participatory and interactive media from lecture today with the discussion of Barthes and Benjamin these past two weeks. I remember distinctly in Walter Benjamin's essay that he claimed that eventually through the media of mechanical reproduction would allow the audience to take the role of producer: "Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into writer" (232). Barthes also would become an advocate of the reader's ability to "write" text, and although we covered his pre-Death of the Author writings last week, his own method of disassembling and reassembling myth (the process of connotation) involves some level of reader creativity instead of absorbent passivity. Thus, it piqued me in today's lecture to hear Philip Rosen discuss how 3rd Cinema was an active event, something made "from the bottom" that got people potentially arrested and involved...well, involvement from the viewer. This is much different than Benjamin's discussion of the bored passivity of the public in his assessment of the film, but I think both Solanas/Getino and Benjamin are concerned with the possible participatory and revolutionary potentials of cinema. Are the writers of 3rd Cinema trying to respond to the commodification of film (the reinscription of aura into the film) by talking about this revolutionary cinema as a possible solution to the failures of Benjamin's visions for machine reproduced film? Is 3rd cinema created by a rebellious audience that refuses to consume 1st and 2nd cinema? Where does that line between producer and audience lie for something like 3rd cinema? Finally, looking at today's YouTube, DIY Video, grassroot media, and other participatory free exchange/information media groups that exist, where does their cinema fall?

Media: Windows To Another World

The subject that struck me most throughout the assigned articles is how different media presents images of war. In the aspect of mass media, Keenan illustrates Instant Media and News to be this powerful body which through interpreting images of war can effectively initiate humanitarian effort by causing emotional uprising in individuals and somehow bypass law and government and rationality. Keenan then goes on to say that this body tends to overexert itself with image to the point where its movements become so predictable that it can be manipulated into doing the exact opposite of its goals:

"images...can shame governments into action, armies will undertake humanitarian rescue missions for the publicity value alone, and publicity can bring the missions to an end" (108)

Keenan's argument about how the predictability of the media and its power lulls the audience into a state of comatose maybe because they believe that obviously something is being done already, that I myself need not take action, image overload overwhelms and desensitizes because of the displacement of reality film inherently possesses. Keenan's Panopticon popped into my head, the prisoner who guards themselves by constructing an inner prison. A thought: Is a person who watches One Tree Hill guarding themselves by indulging in a completely false reality (looking through a one way window) as opposed to a person who watches CNN who is watching interpreted images that represent a true reality, a still filtered reality (essentially a two way window)? Or are they both the trapped in the panopticon cell because light can only come through the TV as manipulated, filtered, images? Keenan argues that the interpreted image will always have more power than the uninterpreted image and this is where I disagree with Keenan, I believe the uninterpreted image is the key to reality and freedom, though definitions of "power" and "interpretation" come into discussion.

This is where Third Cinema and Ceddo come into play because Keenan's Media ascribes to the laws of First Cinema and Western aesthetics. When we watch the news we see professional, unnaturally good looking, unnaturally well spoken people (thats why its fun when they mess up their cues) with colorful banners and music, like its a movie in itself. Professionalism seems to detract from reality and this is what makes Third Cinema and Ceddo so incredibly powerful. Ceddo is full of unknown and not great actors, bad edits, in and out sound, slow subtitles, an at times incomprehensible plot, and cultural references to which I was certainly oblivious...and because of this I loved it. It was so cultural, so unorthodox, and so goofy that the message was emboldened. Its unprofessionalism  added a sense of rawness and reality to Ceddo for me. Again the image of war appears with the two nobles who attempt to kill the rebel Ceddo, they are images of war in a traditional (aesthetic?) sense with their traditional war attitudes, colors, and jewelry (Big Budgets?) including the mirror, which is slightly blingish though meant to blind the enemy...when put into practice all these aesthetic qualities are meaningless (First Cinema?), they are dominated by experience and a reality of the situation (Third Cinema?), although the end of the film promotes a return to tradition...

What is so revolutionary about the "True" unbiased Documentary is that it is designed to be a clear window to the outside your self prison of manipulated beliefs. Third Cinema is also designed to be a clear window, the director wants you to look out of yourself so that you may see the true cell which encloses you.