Film Cool: Towards a New Film Aesthetic

221 Pages·2006·2.43 MB·English

Film Cool:
Towards a New Film Aesthetic

Bruce Isaacs

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
University of Sydney.
2006.
© Copyright by Bruce Isaacs, 2006. All rights reserved.

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Acknowledgements.

This thesis was undertaken as a defence of a love of film.

The indulgence of completing this work was supported by my excellent supervisor, Axel
Kruse. I’ve heard that a PhD candidature can be arduous, even a trial. Axel ensured that mine
was always a pleasure. Miraculously, and in spite of the freedom Axel afforded me at every
stage of this project, it’s actually come to an end.

For encouragement and support throughout my life, I thank my family. I thank my twin
brother, Herschel Isaacs, in particular, for shared interests and understanding beyond
reckoning.

I don’t know how to thank Rebecca Goldsworthy, my partner, for what she has brought to
this work, and to my life. So I’ll leave it at that.

For companionship during a crucial seven week writing period in 2005, I thank Nordberg.
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Abstract

The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the
intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff.
This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It
is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy
task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and
that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act
of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind,
film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom
they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way?
My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of
film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is
inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia).
Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or
The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic
impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an
abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract
and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s
brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological
fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do)
but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of
recuperating affect.
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Contents

1. A Notion of Film Aesthetics 7
1.1 Engaging the Aesthetic Impulse 8
1.2 Realism: Foundations 15
1.3 Bazin and the Myth of Total Cinema 23
1.4 Depth of Field and Focus 27
1.5 Citizen Kane: A Cinematographic Revolution? 31
1.6 A Note on the Mechanics of Style 33
1.7 Auteurism and the Artifice of the Cinematic Image 35
1.8 Focus and Signification 42
1.9 A Brief Defence of Bazin 45
1.10 The Transcendence of the Image 46
1.11 53

2. Towards a Theory of Popular Culture 54
2.1 Culture as Functionality 55
2.2 Culture as Commodity 64
2.3 Culture as Industry 73
2.4 Authenticity and Spectacle 90

3. Text and Spectacle in The Matrix Franchise 98
3.1 99
3.2 Further Musings on Authenticity and the Spectacle 100
3.3 A Brief Note on (Mis)Reading Cinema 105
3.4 Spectacle and Technology 106
3.5 The Matrix Phenomenon 108
3.6 Towards a Notion of Textual Discursivity 110
3.7 Intertextuality and Discursivity 113
3.8 Myth and Text in The Matrix Franchise: Gorging on the Sacred Past 122
3.9 Cinema and the Contemporary Mythology 124
3.10 Conceptualising the Hypermyth 129
3.11 Baudrillard and a Simulated Mythology 130
3.12 Screening the Hypermyth 135
3.13 The Discursivity of the One 137
3.14 The Visibility of Style: Image Strategies in Contemporary Cinema 142
3.15 24: Real-Time Narrative 148
3.16 The Ontology of Bullet-Time 151

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4. The Cinematic Real: Image, Text, Culture 156
4.1 The Spectacle Aesthetic, Or the Cinematic Real 157
4.2 The Metacinematic Lens 159
4.3 Character Acting 160
4.4 Foregrounding Genericity: the Limitations of Classical Film Genre 166
4.5 Genre and Contemporary Cinematic Forms 171
4.6 Genericity: Beyond Genre 179
4.7 Performing Genericity 181
4.8 The Metacinematic Aesthetic: Tarantino – Leone – Eastwood 186
4.9 Metacinema and Postmodern Narrative: The New Auteurism 191
4.10 Conclusion 196

Bibliography 198

Filmography 213
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1. A Notion of Film Aesthetics
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1.1 Engaging the Aesthetic Impulse

Contemporary cultural formations have been theorised through postmodern ideas of
fragmentation, distillation, and a ‘politics of difference’ which has questioned fixed notions
of identity and subjectivity. How do we begin to understand and account for the popularity,
the desires and pleasures of contemporary cinema outside of these notions?1

It is important to acknowledge that a shift has occurred – at least within an important
swathe of contemporary visual culture – towards an aesthetic that foregrounds the
dimension of appearance, form and sensation. And we must take this shift seriously at the
aesthetic level… A rush into interpretation before the aesthetic has been more clearly
apprehended may follow an all too easy dismissal of such a spectacle aesthetic on grounds
that it is facile, already transparent or really about something else.2

Post-media aesthetics needs categories that can describe how a cultural object organizes
data and structures users’ experiences of this data.3

The notion of an ‘aesthetics of sensation,’ which seems to have fallen out of favour with
literary and cultural theorists, is necessary to make sense of the myriad of ways in which a
contemporary popular culture interacts with cinema. According to Barbara Kennedy, one of
the shortcomings of film theory is a failure to engage with what might be called an ‘aesthetic
impulse.’ And while such an impulse celebrates affectivity, or what Andrew Darley calls
“questions of a sensual and perceptual character,”4 it does not compromise the analysis of
film as ideological or cultural artefact. I do not wish to disengage with the seemingly
inexhaustible body of critical theory that privileges the structural or psychoanalytic approach
to cinema, or the broadly Marxist project that charts in painstaking detail the formation of
selves and others in a discursive system of studios, cultures, subcultures and artistic
commodities. Yet this body of work cannot account for what I perceive to be the
contemporary obsession with film as an affective medium, nor the cinematic text as an
aesthetically engaged product operating within a Western, or as some theorists have argued,
global marketplace.5 The nearest critical theory comes to this phenomenon is the relatively

1 Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000), 4.
2 Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London:
Routledge, 2000), 6.
3 Lev Manovich, “Post-media Aesthetics.” In (dis)locations (DVD ROM) (Karlsruhe: ZKM Centre for Art and
Media, 2001), 2.
4 Darley, 6.
5 For an analysis of the interconnectedness of various national cinemas, see Tom O’ Reagan, “A National
Cinema.” In The Film Cultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner (London: Routledge, 2002), 141.
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recent interest in fandom,6 and even this field seems unfortunately to privilege the ‘cult’ text
or ‘alternative’ voice, and is thus destined to repeat the exclusion of a text based on its
popularity, or rather, the absence of a requisite degree of alterity. It is unfortunate precisely
because film franchises such as The Matrix and Star Wars draw the crowds at the box office
that an engagement with this art is so necessary. Film writing (scholarly and other modes) has
always been suspicious of the blockbuster, distinguishing between an art cinema that
functions as an autonomous creative work, and the pop culture entertainment spectacle that
services a capitalist market ethos and the wish-fulfilment fantasies of a majority of the film-
going populace. In this way, the film theorist is able to differentiate between, for example,
Antonioni’s Blow-Up and L’Avventura (The Adventure), and Spielberg’s Jaws and Raiders of
the Lost Ark. Antonioni requires a spectator actively engaged in making meaning of the
narrative, and indeed, the visual contours of the shot (L’Avventura’s striking use of deep
focus in almost every shot is an example of the unconventional visuality of the art film
aesthetic). Both L’Avventura and Blow-Up present metaphysical conundrums that challenge
the conventional separation of truth and deception, or orthodox narrative continuity and a
jarring discontinuity. Spielberg’s output in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is a self-
acknowledged sequence of ‘high concepts’ structured into cinematic spectacles: a twenty-five
words or less pitch of the kind satirised in Robert Altman’s The Player.7 The high concept
entertainment spectacle is a business enterprise; the art film is an artistic endeavour founded
upon a singularly creative impulse.
In spite of the token disclaimer that high and low culture distinctions have been
effaced in the postmodern milieu (apparently opening popular cinema to a veritable
smorgasbord of analytic processes), film theory has in the main recuperated the distinction.
While undertaking analyses of contemporary popular cinema (The Matrix, Star Wars, Back to
the Future, Jaws, The Lord of the Rings, The Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump and Scream
have each received a significant amount of attention from film and cultural theorists), theory
relegates an examination of popular cinema as far from a conventional aesthetic approach to
art as it possibly can. The Silence of the Lambs is less an aesthetic work than a system of

6 For an analysis of fandom and its complex textual and cultural strategies, see Will Brooker, “Internet Fandom
and the Continuing Narratives of Star Wars, Blade Runner and Alien.” In Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science
Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 50-72.
7 For an example of an influential exponent of this form of criticism, see David Thomson, The Whole Equation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 339-343.
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ideological significations charting late capitalist, feminist or queer subjectivity.8 The Matrix
services an examination of race and/or gender issues in contemporary America.9 Jaws enacts
a liminal space in which deviant female sexuality is imagined as an unrelenting predator.10
The Star Wars franchise instantiates a return to the Manichean opposition of good and evil
and allegorises a neo-imperialistic ideological bent in late capitalist Western societies.11
This kind of analysis, which has provided film theory with its remarkable
advancements into the academy between the 1970s and the late 1990s, is not confined to the
blockbuster or popular film. Work on film noir undertakes a similar task, with often striking
and provocative conclusions. Examinations of the horror and slasher genre that burgeoned
with the low budget independents of the 1970s (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974),
Halloween, The Howling) service a similar analytical bent. Laura Mulvey’s landmark turn to
film theory with “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is, as she states at the opening of
the piece, to appropriate “Psychoanalytic theory…as a political weapon, demonstrating the
way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.”12 Equally, the aesthetic
of the film (Mulvey’s analysis implies that visual narrative is founded in its entirety on the
patriarchal prejudices of society) is appropriated and reconfigured as structural or
instrumental analysis of subjectivity and social conditioning. The image of Woman in
Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo is “as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of
man [which] takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a
further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its
favourite cinematic form – illusionistic narrative form.”13 Illusion masks only patriarchal
hegemonic practices and chained female subjectivities. I do not wish to take issue with
Mulvey’s seminal analysis except to suggest that illusion in cinematic spectacle (and

8 See, for example, Annalee Newitz, “Serial Killers, True Crime, and Economic Performance Anxiety.” In
Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharrett (Michigan: Wayne State University
Press, 1999), 66.
9 See C. Richard King and David J. Leonard, “Is Neo White? Reading Race, Watching the Trilogy.” In Jacking
in to The Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation, ed. Matthew Kapell and William G. Doty
(New York: Continuum, 2004), 32-47.
10 Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (New York: Anchor Press/Double Day,
1977), 148-164.
11 For the most lucid account of this widely held view, see Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away.”
Jump Cut 41 (1997). See also Koenraad Kuiper, “Star Wars: An Imperial Myth.” Journal of Popular Culture 21,
no. 4 (1988), 77-86.
12 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality,
ed. Screen (London: Routledge, 1992), 22.
13 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 32.
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