Cinema Dialogics
Three Short Essays
ABOUT THE WRITER
Alden Nagel is the founder and editor of Nut Hole Publishing. You can find him on Instagram. He has an upcoming novella entitled Salination Mountains, and a paired novel entitled The Desalinated Exosphere.
Globalectics and Soleil O
In Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes:
“…the oral and the written are not and have never been real antagonists. Certainly, the powers of their products, orature and literature, will continually be harnessed to enrich creativity in the age of internet and cyberspace. The problem has not been the fact of the oral or the written, but their placement in a hierarchy. Network, not hierarchy, will free the richness of the aesthetic, oral or literary.”
Here, Thiong’o touches upon something that we have already experienced. The viewing of Med Hondo’s 1970 film Soleil O, through the network of the internet, happens most frequently in our own homes. Our ability to have seen the film via the internet acts out this very idea by decentralizing the film from the confines of a necessity to view it strictly in a theater, or another institutional means. To be even able to experience the film from its grounded mediation (aesthetic, filmic, and historical) we are able to better contextualize it in our own, individual terms, taking the experience of watching it out of the hierarchical context that film institutions impose. As all-too-often seen through their monetary and sociocultural reliance on Western media, the canon of “classic” films, and other reliance on systematic forms of validation for viewing insinuate themselves this way. We are reminded that the idea of watching a film is itself a tiered illusion.
It can be further understood that the experience of watching a film at home through these networks not only free the material of the media itself, but the consumer as well. Through the psychologically situationist model, people can in this way better intake media, allowing them to reexamine a film such as Soleil O by actively modulating the filmic experience (reversing or fast-forwarding) so as to better understand it, rather than the temporally unchangeable experience of watching it in a theater, or through another restrictively institutional viewing experience.
Reverse Engineering Good Night, And Good Luck
The 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck as directed George Clooney, is a film in which the infamously dark and corrupting time of Mccarthyism is at the forefront of it all. On the surface, it is the story of the journalist Edward Murrow’s fighting back against Senator Joseph Mccarthy’s anti-communist sanctions starting in the early 1950s. The ability to combat this rhetoric was not the only time this had been utilized in contemporary United States history; journalists were very well aware of issues relating to the truth of the press, and how the government’s relationship to journalism and public media itself had been an ethical issue before. Elmer Davis, the director of the United States Office of War Information was once quoted having said the following:
“The motion picture is the most powerful instrument of propaganda in the world. The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do realize that they are being propagandized.”
The film certainly highlights this manifestation of the danger of collective paranoia, domineering sociopolitical engineering (the reverse engineering of humanist forces) from powerful figures, as well as the Machiavellian tactic of taking advantage of one’s government and its non-government citizens by manipulating the nature of group heuristics and other analogical forces. However, they not only show this throughout the tribulations of Edward Murrow’s journey, but it also highlights the danger of controlling a conversation through these very psycho-political tactics. The noise outside, and those attempting to find the truth behind what is created through them remain.
Temporality within Still Life, Young Mister Lincoln and Vagabond
At the very beginning of Jia Zhangke’s 2006 film Still Life, after a few moments of rolling opening credits, there is a single uninterrupted shot moving horizontally across the screen, visually sweeping the entire top floor of a boat that is transporting a sizable group of people. They are playing cards, drinking, betting and smoking as they go from unnamed one place to another, also yet to be named. There is no dialogue during this—it is purely observational, allowing us to see contemporary Chinese life at rest. It’s a mundane scene, and one that appears dreary, and cramped. Yet, the folks onboard appear to be having a great time simply being alive together. Being, and stillness.
Whether it is of the protagonists searching for their estranged family in the region they have come to visit, or whether it is the much slower, gradual demolition of various structures and buildings in the region. This tectonic shift of movement is, conversely, hinting at a kind of life both in flux and exponentially embodying a kind of silent nothingness. These vessels act for life to exist through.
There are numerous shots in Still Life where we are looking at an image that is indicative of realist, habituating edge. I’m reminded of two shots the films Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985) and Young Mister Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). In the first, there is a shot soon before the protagonist Mona’s death which is shown at the very beginning of the film; she falls into an earthen ditch, and lays there momentarily being weak, before resigning herself to rest, closing her eyes, allowing the spirit of death and its penchant.
In Young Mister Lincoln, there is a shot of Abraham Lincoln himself standing solemnly still in a cemetery, meditating on a tombstone of someone close to him. The camera stands focused on him for quite some time, the only differentiating factor between this instance being the river running directly barely noticeable behind him. An instance of symbolic connection can therefore be made between rivers, depth and death itself as transcending more than an ending in any literal form. The region explored by our protagonists in Still Life is disintegrating slowly, an inevitable factor, seemingly as slowly as the time of their own lives. This slowness of the deconstruction of death, and of symbols, remains present in our understanding of all three of these films.