Storytelling

Above, three images from the film we screen this week, Todd Solondz's Storytelling, including one featuring The Red Box.

I want to point out a few things for students to watch for and think about: the film's bifurcated structure and, of course, the infamous Red Box.

Storytelling is a diptych of sorts: it consists of two separate films, one titled "Fiction," and the other titled "Nonfiction." While the two sections share some implicit themes (like the in/interdeterminacy of the supposedly opposite categories of "fact" and "fiction") on the surface they seem unrelated and could stand alone as independent narratives. "Fiction" is the story of young student enrolled in a creative writing seminar, and "Nonfiction" relates the story of a would-be documentary filmmaker. Each of the main characters is in some sense committed to telling "the truth," but that turns out to be a less straightforward proposition than often assumed. Of interest to our class is how the film takes up autobiography and documentary in its double structure.

"The Red Box" is how director Solondz handled the problem of ratings and censorship, a problem specific to the United States but not elsewhere on the planet except, as he points out, "in places like Iraq and Iran." In the United States in order for films to get wide distribution they must be "voluntarily" submitted to the MPAA for a rating (voluntary in name only because of studio/distributor pressure to comply). Ratings have a direct effect on box office and thus on whether or not your film will ever get seen. The criteria used to determine ratings are obscure, arbitrary and often contradictory. The bottom line? Studios and distributors want to avoid a rating of "NC-17," which in 1990 replaced the "X," but still carries a stigma. (For a history of MPAA ratings and the struggles waged by various filmmakers, this wikipedia entry is a good place to start.)

When Solondz first presented Storytelling to the MPAA, he was told he would have to remove a sex scene between a white female and a black male in order to earn an R rating. But Solondz had covered himself in his contract as explained in this interview: "I had it in my contract that I had the ability to put boxes and beeps wherever necessary in order to procure the "R" rating; I feel the audience is entitled to know what they're not allowed to see. The alternative is to remove the shot, and this is something I found unacceptable. You only get the opportunity to see the red box in this country...I chose red because I didn't want it to be subtle...I needed a very strong color to pop out so there would be no ambiguity. It's not a mistake; it's right in your face: You're not allowed to see this in our country."

In a gesture worthy of Hester Prynne, Solondz not only chose the colour scarlet , but also made sure his signifier of sexual repression was obnoxiously large: The Red Box, as you can see above, stamps out more than just an actor's "naughty bits," it interrupts the narrative itself.

Hypertext

One of the written texts you might be using for your second essay is a hypertext work: Shelley Jackson's "My Body: A Wunderkammer." So this post is to help familiarize you a bit with some of the history of this digital format and its use as a creative medium.

Hypertext, the ability of html code to render online text with embedded links to other texts, images, or other kinds of data files, is ubiquitous throughout the internet. I don't know where you could look online and not be looking at some use of it. I'm sure everyone in class is by now used to seeing words and phrases highlighted in different colours that you "click" on to take you to somewhere else: a different web page, a definition of a term, an email address, and so on. Its pretty much what the internet was set up to do.

Hypertext was invented as a means to provide an easy interface for information retrieval, a way to organize and cross-reference both the knowledge of the past and the vast amounts of data being generated by digital technology itself. In short, a solution to the 20th Century problem of information overload. Any history of hypertext usually begins with reference to Vannevar Bush's prescient essay, "As We May Think," published in 1945. In it he imagines an electronic device he calls a "Memex." This "mechanized file and library" would be produced for individual use and take the form of a screen-topped desk and keyboard. Though Bush's "Memex" is not exactly like a PC hooked up to the internet, the basic idea---a means for individuals to have virtual access to a meta-archive---is there. That's why Bush's essay was the inspiration for the men generally credited with hypertext's invention, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart.

What is interesting about Bush's predictions for later creative and artistic uses of hypertext and hypermedia are these comments that follow his criticism of the conventional ways information is indexed:

"The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Mankind cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but ... [t]he first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage."

Yes, that's right. The non-linear associative function of memory is here imagined as the ultimate organizing methodology for categorizing everything. This should give pause to those readers who still find the nonlinear "confusing," "annoying," or "stupid."

Because hypertext is a way of organizing material that attempts to overcome the inherent limitations of the linearity of traditional text its easy to see why it would be a medium that invited creative uses. As Heather pointed out in class, it changes things on a very fundamental level. The narrative experience, no matter what the structure or medium, has always been an experience of finite duration. The final page is turned, or the credits roll and the lights go up, and its over. Heather's very good question was, "How do you know when to stop?"

Camera Eye: This American Life Clip

This is the animated short I mentioned in class last night. It's a segment from the new This American Life series on Showtime. I titled it "Camera Eye;" I don't know what it will be called when its broadcast.

It follows the typical format of a piece on the NPR radio program, This American Life: someone telling a "true story." In this case, the show's host, Ira Glass, is interviewing someone (Jeff) about a playground craze they remember from grade school. Their conversation is paired with an animation by the artist Chris Ware.

I thought it might have relevance for our class for several reasons. The story is about memory. The story is autobiographical and presented within the frame of a program that itself is a kind of documentary/autobiography hybrid. And, the story is about the mediation of "real life" by the camera: something with consequences even when the camera isn't real.

I'm also interested in the way that the audio narrative is supplemented with visual images too. The Showtime series marks the negotiation of This American Life between different media. Formerly, the fact that it was a radio program, a purely aural experience, was essential to the nature of the program. It was a narrative form grounded in talking and listening, not looking. How will the addition of visual elements change this?

In this segment we see one approach, one that doesn't pair the audio with filmed footage of the incident, but with an obviously artificial illustration---a cartoon drawn in simple geometric shapes.

Special Sneak Preview

I'll hand this out in Tuesday's class and we'll discuss it there, but here it is now as a kind of "advance screening."

The first paper was a mostly descriptive exercise which asked students to pay attention to elements of film that they might usually overlook. Some were elements common to all narrative whatever medium: things like narrative structure, issues of closure, and point of view in general. Others were specific to film as a medium: things like editing, camera shots, visual construction of the character’s and viewer’s POV.

The point of the paper was to begin to see. Or perhaps to see differently by paying attention to something other than plot. To put it yet another way, to begin to see films as something constructed in particular ways and for particular reasons, rather than as slick finished products quickly consumed and quickly forgotten. That’s why I chose films that I hoped would stick in your throat, films that might not pass as easily through your brain as a cotton candy does through your digestive tract.

As several of you have pointed out in your logs, the four films that we’ve screened in class, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices/Still Lives, Chris Marker’s la Jetee and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation all share a concern with the relation between identity and memory. It is this theme that is the focus of the second assignment, which also asks you to pair a film narrative with a written narrative in your analysis. You can choose to work on either of these pairs:

Memento, Christoper Nolan
"Memento Mori," Jonathan Nolan

or

Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette
"My Body: A Wonderkammer," Shelley Jackson

The first pair are two different treatments in two different media of the same plot "seed." The second pair are two autobiographies which stretch the boundaries of that form.

In this assignment you are basically working on the relation between form (which includes narrative structure, use of genre conventions, and specific medium) and content. Discuss the relation between each text's use of narrative/genre conventions and how it conceptualizes memory and identity. Also address the differences that the medium (film or written narrative) makes. What are some of the specific restrictions or advantages of each for dealing with issues of memory and identity?

Please remember to title and staple your paper.

Length: 5-6 pages, typed, double-spaced.
Due: Tuesday, April 10

Genre Part Three: Autobiography

Above, portraits of some of the writers discussed below: Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Frederick Douglass, William Wordsworth, Shelley Jackson.

The autobiography as we know it is a relatively recent literary invention. Although human beings have probably always recorded accounts of their lives---cave painting hand outlines could be read as primal form of autobiography---the term autobiography, as well as the idea of telling the story of your life for no other reason than to "express yourself," only appears in the Western tradition in the 18thC. And the main reason for this is that the modern idea of "the self" is a pretty modern concept, too.

Before you can imagine the autobiography, a certain idea of the self has to be in place: "self" as an independent entity important for its own sake. Thus, not only are the lives of the Famous and Powerful (biography) worth recording and reading, but anyone's life has the potential to disclose something worthwhile and meaningful to others. Broadly speaking, this only happens in Western European history with the birth of modern secular society. Liberating the self from a position of subordinance under God, Priests, the King, and so on, the modern notion of the self defines "the human" as something naturally free, autonomous, independent, governed by reason, and possessing a universal worth or dignity.

While some earlier written forms seem to correspond to the autobiography, works like Saint Augustine's Confessions (397) were created for other purposes than only to relate the details of a particular man's life. While Augustine does write a great deal about his circumstances, the point of his book is his eventual conversion to Christianity and its true subject is man's relation to God, not man himself.

One of the first "true" autobiographies is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1782). His use of a title with religious associations was meant to signal a new form of "confession:" not a recital of spiritual sins but an examination of human subjectivity, an exegesis on how the self develops. In the Age of Enlightenment, the autobiography came to stand as the human document par excellance, the literary form which most celebrated that which was human and explained why such concepts as "human rights" and "human worth" should be at the center of political, philosophical and moral inquiry.

Its easy to see why the autobiography came to play such an important role in the 19thC struggle against slavery. In his famous work The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), former slave Douglass dares to stake his, and by extension all slaves, claim to humanity upon the very literary ground which was understood to define "the human." The very act of writing his autobiography demonstrated his possession of an independent and rational self with as much claim to human rights as any other.

One of the essential "human" elements of the autobiographical form is its close correspondence to the act of remembering---it is, after all nothing more than a collection of memories. The relationship between autobiography and memory is often part of the story told itself. William Wordsworth's long autobiographical poem, The Prelude (which he worked on for most of his adult life and was only published in 1850 after his death) is devoted to a series of ever deepening explorations of what he called "spots of time," moments that first appear to have no great significance but are in fact touchstones for intense memories:

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating Virtue, whence,
... our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
...Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood.
(Book XII, 208-225)

Wordsworth's "spots of time" are individual past experiences through which he can later discern his development as both a poet and a man, moments which come to have new and deeper meanings as he returns to them years later in memory (much like Terence Davies in Distant Voices/Still Lives).

While autobiography is conventionally thought of as a nonfiction literary form, as a narrative it betrays its status as something consciously crafted, designed and made. It is not synonymous with a person's actual life, it is an edited version of it. And since autobiographies are the stories of people's lives, they include the fictions that are part of those lives: dreams, memories, fears and beliefs.

An interesting autobiography to take a look at in relation to Tarnation might by the hypertext "My Body: A Wunderkammer," by Shelley Jackson. Digital hypertext is make up out of textual fragments or lexia that can be accessed by readers in various and random order. Hypertext's potential for expanding narrative modalities---exploding linearity----has made it an interesting medium for contemporary writers like Jackson who often make the material textuality of their work a significant factor in it (see for example, her ongoing project Skin, subtitled "a mortal work of art," which is a narrative being published one word at a time on the skin of 2095 volunteers, of which I am one).

Genre Part Two: Documentary

Above are some images from the films, Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1969), Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976) , The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) and the television program Trauma: Life in the ER (TLC 2006).

Documentary film refers in general to all nonfiction film practices, all attempts to visually record, or "document" reality. The conventional assumption is that documentary is "objective," devoid of any subjective bias of the filmmaker and merely a faithful reflection of the "truth" of reality. However, throughout its history, the question of how any form of representation necessarily shapes, rather than simply records, reality has been at the center of all documentary work.

Narrative is selection after all, editing is fundamental to the work of both filmmakers and writers. One of my favorite television programs is the "reality" show Trauma: Life in the ER on the The Learning Channel. A friend of mine works on it: she's a documentary film maker who supports herself as a freelance editor. When I told her how much I liked it, she scoffed, "I hate it! We have to sort through around 5000 hours of film every week and shape it into two or three story lines. By the time I get done its total fiction!"

The fact/fiction barrier is, I hope you are learning, a highly permeable membrane. I think that's one of the points of the short story, "We Kill What We Love," which the fire drill prevented us from talking about in our last discussion session, but which maybe we can remember to talk about in this Tuesday's class. The images above this post are taken from films which illustrate the range of documentary practices throughout film history.

The earliest moving pictures shown to public audiences were by default documentaries. They were single-shot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking, an airplane taking off, or mundane scenes of daily life. They were devoted to the sheer novelty of showing moving images of an event. Travelogues, scarcely edited footage of travel to "exotic" locations were probably the next film "form" to emerge: again the emphasis was on the novelty of the technology and the novelty of the experience it could provide an audience.

Shaping film into a narrative, a fictional narrative, followed soon after and early fiction films themselves followed established narrative forms: filmed versions of Great Literature or film scripts which mimicked the narrative structure of plays and novels. That film might have its own narrative language, that as a medium it might offer a different narrative modality are the motivations behind the first real cinematic experimentors, working interestingly enough, on the documentary and nonfiction side of things.

Dziga Vertov, working in the Soviet Union in the 20's and 30's believed the camera, with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion, could render reality more accurately than the human eye and thus produced documentaries that exploit cinematic technique. His films are quite different than the static "aim the camera at the world and walk away" style that is now conventionally associated with documentary film. They transcend the notion that the camera should be limited to merely reproducing the human line of vision (which still dominates all filmmaking, fiction and nonfiction, today) and instead try to capture a "reality" more truthful in its visual representation of multiple images and multiple points of view. For Vertov, the films of people like D. W. Griffith were merely "cliches, copies of copies, films overly indebted to novels and theatrical conventions." Instead, cinema must have " its own rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things."

Filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman and Barbara Kopple represent another strand in the tradition: the documentary as visual journalism. Both filmmakers immersed themselves in the culture of the events they filmed. Kopple and her crew spent years with the families of the Kentucky miners whose struggles she filmed in Harlan County U.S.A. In making Titicut Follies, Wiseman spent years fighting powerful institutional and governmental restrictions: not only to get into the Bridgewater State Hospital to film the inmates in the first place, but then to be able to even show his film once it was finished.

These documentaries aim to take viewers as completely as possible into situations outside of the safety of mainstream middle america to reveal the (often government-sanctioned) violence and abuse that is also a part of american society (the shot from Harlan County USA is Kopple and her crew being shot---literally). The visual and narrative style of these documentaries favor the immediacy of the hand held moving camera, following the drama of a situation as it unfolds and historical back story told by utilizing images of newspaper clippings and other archival forms of research.

Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line is interesting for the way that it combines interviewed testimony with clips of news media coverage and re-enactments of essential plot moments. It explores the true story of the arrest and convinction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman in 1976 and the evidence and argument that it makes eventually led to the overturning of Adam's sentence and his release from prison. In many ways Morris pioneered what has become the dominant look and feel of nonfiction filmmaking, something we see in countless "reality" television programs and recent documentaries like those of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

I think one way to begin to think about Tarnation is in light of the entire tradition of documentary, one in which the mediated, or consciously crafted status of the image has long been under consideration.

(for some clips from some of the things discussed here, check my Vox blog Extra Things.)

We might also think about autobiography itself as a genre, but my thoughts on that will have to come in a separate post.

Some mp3's from Tarnation

I set up a Vox blog in order to have a place to post audio bits for students in this class. Right now I'm working my way through the Tarnation soundtrack and posting the mp3's as I find them (I thought I had all my Low CDs loaded into iTunes, but they aren't so I've got to houseclean to turn them up).

Later, I may use it as a space to post other film music and soundtrack audio files as we discuss them in class.

Here's a link to my Vox blog, Extra Things.

The music of Tarnation

We've been starting to talk about music and soundtrack issues in film narratives (one of the elements which distinguishes them from written narratives). Because Tarnation makes such an extensive use of music, I thought I'd list all the songs here so you can think about them ahead of time. Unfortunately, Blogger, unlike Vox, doesn't let me embed mp3's or I'd set it up so you could actually hear them. There may be links I can put in later---I'll investigate over the weekend what the possibilities are, but for now here's a list of the songs and music used in the film.

(While Tarnation cost only slightly over $200 to make, being able to release it commercially brought a lot of extra expense. Caouette showed his first cut at Sundance and other "indie" film festivals where he attracted the patronage of Gus Van Sant and Jonathan Cameron Mitchell who helped him raise the money necessary to transfer his work to film and obtain music rights for the songs used, which, you won't be surprised to hear was the biggest expense of all. Even with around $400,000 spent obtaining song permissions and another couple thousand for film transfer, Tarnation still came in well under the catering budget of most Hollywood films.)

Low - "Laserbeam"
Iron and Wine - "Naked As We Came"
Glen Campbell - "Wichita Lineman"
Lisa Germano - "Reptile"
Cocteau Twins - "Ice Pulse"
from the musical Hair - "Frank Mills"
from the musical Hair - "Walking In Space"
Marianne Faithful - "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan"
HEX - "Diviner"
Low - "Embrace"
Angelo Badalamenti (Blue Velvet soundtrack) - "Mysteries of Love"
The Chocolate Watchband - "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"
The Magnetic Fields - "Strange Powers"
Jean Wells - "After Loving You"
Dolly Parton - "A lil' Ole Pissant Country Place"
The Red House Painters - "Around and Around"
Low - "Back Home Again"
Mavis Staples - "How Many Times"
The Red House Painters - "Around and Around"
Hopewell - "Safe as Milk" (used in the film's trailer)

An original score and other incidental music was compsed by Max Avery Lichtenstein and John Califra.

Tarnation = $218.32

Almost the first thing anyone hears about Jonathan Caouette's film Tarnation, is that he made it on his Mac with pre-bundled iMovie software for a total cost of $218.32. That factoid alone speaks volumes about the potential future of "filmmaking" in an era of easily accessible, easy-to-use digital technology. As director Gus Van Sant remarked apropo Tarnation, “There are no longer home movies, but movies of the home.”

This future, of course, is only a possible one because perhaps even more than having access to material resources, people need to also have access to conceptual ones. Which means that as important as widely available, inexpensive image-capture and editing software is, it means nothing unless one can think beyond the conventions of bloated budget Hollywood blockbuster entertainment, a paradigm in which digital technology is equated only with SFX.

Tarnation is a kind of documentary. It is also a kind of autobiography, about Caouette's childhood, teenage years, and current life, and a kind of biography---about Caouette's mother Renee, a woman whose fragmented mental condition and shattered life was quite possibly caused by the psychiatric treatment she was given after a bad accident. Caouette's treatment of this standard "nonfiction" material, however, is strikingly original. He combines home movies, photographs, student films, video diaries, recreated scenes, and film and television clips with pop songs, incidental recordings like answering machine messages and title cards. In its use of image and sound collage, multiple image tracks, overlapping and fragmented visuals and sound, Tarnation could be said to have a "music video" aesthetic.

Narrative Conventions: Genre (film noir)

Another set of conventions that shape reader response is genre. You're probably familiar with many traditional ways of classifying both written and visual narratives: bookstores and video/DVD rental outlets often group their wares in loosely genre-defined sections. And too, you're probably aware of many of the conventions that structure specific genres when you stop and think about them. When you see a sci-fi film, or read a detective novel, or watch a horror movie, you know that there are certain situations, characters, themes, visual imagery and soundtrack styles that you expect to encounter.

Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's narratives reference and riff on the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story and its cinema counterpart, film noir. The wikipedia entry on noir is quite a good and extensive look at the genre's origin, history and major exemplars like Out of the Past (from which the screenshots above are taken). The conventions of film noir are not only thematic, but also visual.

Noir's signature dark and moody mise en scene is paired with stories of crime which unfold in a thoroughly corrupt world. Fatalistically doomed characters enact violent and brutal dramas of betrayal and double crossing. A lone hero confronts a world where nothing and no one can be trusted, where identity itself is the most unstable element of all. The world of noir is also a world of sexual menace where the threat posed by the femme fatale---a beautiful and sexually powerful woman---often turns out to be more dangerous than any fist fight, gun fire or master-minded conspiracy. Film noir is also characterized by its particular use of narrative structure: a first-person POV (often cemented with a voice-over narration), multiple flashbacks and plot twists, and other complications feed into the overall suspense of the plot.

Here is a short description and discussion of Out of the Past, as I said before, one of the classic examples of the genre. Think about what Memento may have in common with this film, and also where it breaks with or subverts genre convention:

(Also note that we will be seeing a film by Jacques Tourneur later in the semester, his noir-ish horror film, Cat People.)

"Out of the Past (1947) is one of the greatest, multi-layered film noirs of all time. The downbeat screenplay was based on Geoffrey Homes' 1946 novel Build My Gallows High, a book that consciously imitated Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1941). (An uncredited James M. Cain wrote some of the script.)

Director Jacques Tourneur, who collaborated with legendary producer Val Lewton, was well-known for his subtle horror films, including Cat People (1942) and I Walked With A Zombie (1943). (And this film marked the third and final time that Tourneur worked with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca.) His masterful ability to create a doom-laden, dark, shadowy mood of terror, assisted by black and white cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, is perfectly blended into this tragic film noir classic.

The quintessential classic film noir masterpiece from RKO, a definitive flashback film of melodramatic doom, contains all the elements of the genre. First and foremost, there is an irresistible but deadly, chameleon-like femme fatale (Greer) who is the object of romantic fascination for both a detective Mitchum) and a gangster (Douglas). Themes of betrayal, passion, and a cynical, perverse, and a morally ambiguous atmosphere are all interwoven and entangled together in a confusing and convoluted dark plot (mixing narrative flashback with linear narrative) with both double- and triple-crosses. Eventually, all three individuals meet their inescapable, tragic ends typical of a Shakespearean-level tragedy." Tim Dirks, from filmsite.org.

Soundtrack of our Lives

Perhaps we should do more work on the importance of music in film narratives. Anthony commented in his log this week that upon re-viewing The Inner Life of a Cell, the importance of musical cues was made more than obvious to him.

I just downloaded one of my favorite soundtracks to my iPod: Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Day the Earth Stood Still was the first science fiction film I ever saw and I can't emphasize enough what an impression it made on me at a very young age---and most of that impression was via the soundtrack. To say those sounds haunted me is not even close to the effect they had.

Herrmann is one of the classic soundtrack composers, forming in my mind a trinity with George Delarue and Peer Raben. (While I respect Herrmann's overall achievements, my heart is more truly given to Raben and Delarue. Raben for his entire work with Fassbinder and Delarue for the single most important cinema music in my life: the score to Godard's le Mepris. Two stills from it have pride of place on the right hand side of this blog, followed by several images from Fassbinder's work).

Anyway, walking around Nassau today with everything scored to the anxiety-producing theremin tones of Herrmann's score was quite an otherworldly experience.

And in some ways very fitting.

Blog as Narrative

This week we will be looking at a film which is partially structured as a reverse linear narrative. I wonder if any of you have thought about the reverse chronology of the blog format as a narrative form?

The traditional blog format is a rolling log (no pun intended): a dated space to list information where the newest entry pushes the older entries down the list. When you read a blog, you either read through it as it is formatted: from most recent to least, or you scroll down to find the post you last read and then read from "bottom to top" so you can preserve chronology or see any cause and effect (sometimes important if one post is a commentary on a previous one).

Blogs are such a ubiquitous form on the internet (note the 60 million in the wikipedia article in the screenshot above) that I wonder if reverse chronology is becoming the new linearity.

Any thoughts?

Memento Mori as emblem and concept

Above are some images of the memento mori, a visual trope in Western European art and culture alluded to in the title of Jonathan Nolan's short story. You can see both early renditions (including Hans Holbein's famous and famously bizarre memento mori from his painting titled, The Ambassadors. The original painting can be seen here, and the resolution of the anamorphism here) as well as a contemporary version as self portrait by Sarah Lucas.

The Latin term, memento mori, translated literally as "remembrance of mortality," or more colloquially as "remember you will die," linked with an ensemble of shorthand images for death, has been a leit motif in Western European religious art and tombstone design since medieval times. Examples of this tradition can still be seen in many graveyards, where older tombstones combine phrases like memento mori and hora fugit ("time flies") with images of hourglasses, skulls, and bones. Thus, passersby are asked to remember not only the deceased but their own mortality as well.

The emblem of the memento mori entered Western European religious art sometime after 1300. Not only did it make use of the pairing of the skull with some image of life (a flower, etc.) but was expanded into narrative forms as well. The common motif of "the Dance of Death" often featured skeletal figures leading people of every social class in a conga line of mortality. Other narrative paintings depicted a typical everyday routine interrupted by some striking reminder of the Big Narrative Closure---Death.

Coupled with religious sermons, the images have a clear meaning: life is short, you can't take it with you, so make sure you are living a good (Christian) life so you avoid hell and enjoy heaven. However, when memento mori images appear apart from explanatory sermons and verses, their signification can become ambiguous. Being reminded of one's mortality can lead in directions that Christian religious authorities would not approve: memento mori can easily become carpe diem. Because life is short, we should enjoy its pleasures while they last.

Christopher Nolan and Memento

Another thing that students can do before we watch Memento this coming Tuesday is read through some material on the director and his film. The wikipedia entry on Nolan is good, and here are two good interviews with him: one with the BBC, and one found on the Indiewire website. In the latter, Nolan discusses the generation of the "seed story" used by both him and his brother for narratives in different media:

"...my brother told me the concept when he was writing the story. He told it to me while we were driving from Chicago to LA, across country. And I was like great, can I go and write a screenplay for this while you write the story? Because he'd been doing draft after draft and in fact it took him another two years. As we were finishing the film, he was finishing his final draft of the short story.

We had decided that in our own ways we were going to try and tell the story in the first person. Me in film and him in a short story. We're both trying to escape the boundaries of the particular medium that we're choosing to tell, because we really want to create an experience that doesn't feed into your head, that bleeds around the edges. I was going for something that lived in its own shape, that was slightly built from that standard linear experience. My brother in the same way, in writing the story, had wanted to randomize it somehow. Like he's done the web site, [www.ontnemem.com] and that's in an electronic form."

Of interest here is Nolan's assertion that both he and his brother originally wanted to tell their stories in first person---of course, what they both eventually ended up with is something significantly more than a simple first person narrative...

Students should also check out this article by Andy Klein from Salon.com. Klein does a good job describing, as opposed to analyzing, the film's narrative structure. He has a good grasp of how the film is doing more than just using a reverse linear narrative. However, I think he gets horribly bungled up when he confronts the issue of "closure." Klein wants it all to "make sense" according to an internal logic, which in large part, both Klein and I agree it does. Where we part is over the idea that there is a single answer:

"Is there an answer? I don't know. Christopher Nolan claims there is one. In an article in New Times Los Angeles on March 15, Scott Timberg writes: "Nolan, for his part, won't tell. When asked about the film's outcome, he goes on about ambiguity and subjectivity, but insists he knows the movie's Truth -- who's good, who's bad, who can be trusted and who can't -- and insists that close viewing will reveal all."

But, at this point, I no longer believe him."

I think Klein for all his sensitivity to the layers of non-linearity in the film is still limited by the assumption that there is to be discovered some final perspective from which every contradictory detail makes sense. He doesn't seem to be able to think in different conceptual terms: that the film may be encoded with some puzzles that it does eventually offer solutions for and yet still resist a final authoritative Truth seems incomprehensible to him. Perhaps he is misled by what also seems to me a simplistic analysis in the New Times Los Angeles. I don't think Nolan would ever claim the film endorses the idea of a singular, capital T, authoritative truth. I suspect journalist Scott Timberg has also misunderstood whatever it was Nolan told him.

otnemem

One of the things students should do in preparation to this week's screening of Christopher Nolan's film, Memento, is look at the website Otnemem created by Jonathan Nolan. Ostensibly a website devoted to the film's original opening in 2001, it actually gives us a third rendition, in hypertext form, of the seed story: one that differs from both Christopher Nolan's film, and Jonathan Nolan's short story, "Memento Mori."

First essay assignment

Topic: Narrative Conventions

Using one of the two films we’ve seen in class (la Jetee, Distant Voices, Still Lives) write a brief discussion of how the film both makes use of and subverts basic narrative conventions.

We have talked in class about some conventions common to all narratives, both visual and written: narrative structure (how events are ordered), closure, mode of address, hierarchy of characters and point of view. We’ve also spoken about some conventions unique to film: the use of incidental sound, music, and editing. You do not have to discuss every one of this elements in your paper---pick the ones you find more most important or interesting in the film you are analyzing.

The basic point of this paper is to descriptively observe these features and begin to think about their effects. Think about how the use of these conventions position the viewer: to see some things, and not others, to pay close attention to some things, and less attention to others, to sympathize with a character, or not, to accept or agree with a particular way of looking at the world, etc. In other words, devote some time to reflecting on your own practices as a film viewer/reader: how they have been formed and how the film you are writing about may challenge them.

In order to make your points you may wish to make quick reference to other texts we’ve looked at in this class, such as the short story, “We Kill What We Love,” (for non-linear narrative), or maybe the animated video, The Inner Life of a Cell (for how music cues viewer perception) or even some of the work by Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries (for differences between film and literature if you get that ambitious). You may also want to quickly describe a scene in a mainstream hollywood film as a point of comparison and contrast, too. These are all fine. But remember, for this paper you don’t have to do and “extra” research.

This assignment should be very simple on one level and very challenging on another. Although you are just looking and describing, you’re also looking at things that may have previously been invisible to you and describing things in a way that may be unfamiliar. Think of this first paper as a trial run: a place to “try out” some of the ideas we’ve been talking about in class, a place to “try out” your “new” observational skills.

Don’t forget to title your essay. A title is one of the elements which distinguishes a piece of formal writing from an informal series of notes. Your title should reflect something pertinent to your discussion. "Paper One," "Essay," "Film Paper," and the like are not adequate essay titles. Neither is the title of the film you are writing about.

Length: 3 1/2 to 4 typewritten double-spaced pages.
All papers must be stapled or they will not be accepted.
Due: March 6

Brown Skin Girl

This is mostly for Tommy, but others in class were interested in the Calypso song so seemingly incongrously sung in Distant Voices/Still Lives.

While I have been unable to find a source for the version of the lyrics in the film, I did find this interesting bit of information on the song and the "Calypso Fever" of the mid-50's:

"Brown Skin Girl" was composed by Trinidadian calypsonian King Radio in 1946, in response to the presence of American servicemen in Trinidad during World War II. The calypso commented on the practice of soldiers and sailors fathering babies and then returning to the United States. In the song's chorus, a serviceman tells his paramour:

I'm going away, in a sailing boat
And if I don't come back, stay home and mind baby.

While its social commentary was typical of calypso, the song undoubtedly became a favorite with audiences because of its infectious melody. Caribbean-American singer Harry Belafonte popularized the calypso in his smash-hit album titled Calypso (1956). Since then it has remained a standard part of the repertoire of Caribbean hotel entertainers. Meanwhile, jazz versions of "Brown Skin Girl" have appeared on recordings by Sonny Rollins and Roy Haynes."

I would think that it would be the Belafonte version that the characters in the film were acquainted with, but somewhere along the way a variation on the lyrics was produced. I'm still interested in tracking this down because I'd like to see the connection between the King Radio version and the one we hear in the film: has it become a song about a woman murdering her GI husband?

(I grabbed the above material from the Historical Museum of Southern Florida's "Calypso: a World of Music" entry on their website)