Cigarette Smoke

A Single Man can be described by one simple word: beautiful. We discussed this in class more than once, specifically that the frames are almost too beautiful. For me there is no argument on this point. This movie focused on making even the slightest of aspects within the frame so aesthetically pleasing that your eyes were more entranced by the images than the story. Moreover, each singular figure seemed to carry a weight that could not be thoroughly expressed in words. Although there was a million and one little details to chose from which your eyes can be captured, I found myself extremely drawn to something that wouldn’t necessarily be most people these days would consider disgusting: the cigarettes.

I am still not completely sure why I was drawn to them, or even why they carry much importance. However, the use of cigarettes by Tom Ford did not just seem like a choice to place the characters within a time period, but something more. When I first saw them, the act of lighting and inhaling is slowed down to give it a connection more so to the lips than the actual cigarette itself. Although we see many of the characters smoking through the entirety of the movie, we are never shown them actually finishing one. Instead they are thrown aside almost as quickly as they are lit. Being a former smoker of cigarettes myself, I know that this, at least nowadays, would seem like an extreme waste. Maybe it with the change in time, there has been a change in perspective of the actual smoker. However, it still just didn’t feel right.

As I realized this upon further inquiry, I took this use of cigarettes a step further. This whole movie is based on the ephemeral moments of life, capturing them rather than throwing them away. In a way these cigarettes are a physical representation of an fleeting moment. Not one regard is made when lighting a cigarette and almost immediately discarding it, much like the moments that George had taken for granted until that day in the movie. For me, the slowing down of the lighting and inhaling of the cigarette was done for the same reason that George began to take notice of small moments in life: because they are fleeting. The cigarette embodied these moments within the diegesis. Once I came to this conclusion I began to consider that not only is their physical nature a representation of the small moments, but it is also a representation of death more commonly. Through this line of thought, I came across to my own conclusion that the cigarette represents the short moment at which both Jim and George die, which is beautifully short, yet tragic. Also because their deaths are aestheticized, so is the cigarette throughout the movie.

The Emotion of the Cinema

To this day, I can remember the first time my parents took me to the movies. The actual film escapes me, but the experience will last with me forever. I sat down in larger than life arena, at least that from a child’s eyes. The lights dimmed, the sounds quieted, and the movie began. As a child this new experience would have normally scared me, because like most children I was afraid of the dark. However before I had the chance to fear anything, the wall came alive with images and music, transporting me from that movie theater to a world that from then would hold my attention. For me, the cinema wasn’t so much the film themselves but the experience and emotions that it had drawn from me.

Melancholia began as exactly that for me, an experience. The revealing of the plot and artistic portrayal of the characters within the first five minutes played on my emotions, dropping me into an empathetic depression, which I felt from then on. However, there was a serene moment within the film proper that caused me to question my sadness, and my connection with Claire’s panic of inevitable doom. Claire is standing on her front porch, isolated from the world, except for the white light of the moon and the haunting blue of Melancholia. The sundial garden lays in front of her, shadows of the cone-shaped trees spread symmetrical on the soft green floor. She stands there, holding herself just watching as the two shining orbs hang in the air. They are like eyes in the night sky looking back into Claire, looking back at us. For just a moment my depression is lifted, with no sound reason.

This serene moment cast me to think about the cinema as a whole. The melancholy of the movie can be seen as an end to the cinema as we know it, as Susan Sontag or Geoffrey Chesire saw it. Although these critics may see this as a negative, I heavily disagree and this movie reminded me why. My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues, some of which are artists, is that art at its basis is the evocation of emotion, regardless of what that emotion may be. Throughout the entirety of Melancholia I felt a deep overwhelming depression, which could easily be explained by the inevitable doom of the planet. But it was when I felt this serene moment of both subtle beauty and quiet sound. This is where cinema as an art is headed. It is not the depressing doom of what we have lived with and known our whole lives. Rather, the cinema is the subtle change of emotion within the viewer that can find no rhyme or reason. Claire’s represents our fear of what is coming, our fear of this change. She holds herself, looking out at the supposed destruction of all she knows. However, even her overwhelming panic seems calm at this moment. For that is the power of cinema, especially the nowadays. The power to make us feel, see, and hear things we could never otherwise know. Yes, we can argue that the movies have always done this, and to some it was better with Classic Hollywood. However, newer cinema uses these same techniques, even with newer technology, to evoke emotion within an even more vast community.

No longer does one have to go to the movie theater to experience the cinema, although I will be the first to admit that everyone should still go when they get the chance. Instead, you can watch a movie wherever one finds themselves, with people watching more movies than they have ever done before. And with that cinema has had to evolve, capturing our attention in seconds by the most trivial things, whether they be a repetitive sequence of sounds, flashing images, or impossible setting. Even we as a society have become more visual, wanting, wishing, waiting for something we haven’t seen, yet the whole time worrying if it will live up to how we once saw things. Newness has always been confused with destruction, and like Claire, we panic and fear what we see as an impending doom of what we believed as the best. But it is at these moments when we stop and look out at what is to come, that we can see that the new does not have to be feared. These emotions are still conveyed, however in more rapid and extremes. And that is what cinema will always be, an emotion and an experience. That will never change.

The Debate Goes On: Form vs Ideal

Argument
-Although both Formalist Film Criticism and Ideological Film Theory derive from the same point of origin, they hold a much different amount of importance as to their effectiveness. Formalist Film Criticism holds the more clout, in my opinion, because it is the only one that can read the structures and intricacies of the film proper making it come alive in meaning; whereas, Ideological theory fails to separate the medium from its literary counterpart, the novel.

Claim One
>Both Formalist Criticism and Ideological theory come from the same way of thinking about film that came before it, including preceding theories such as: Marxist and Auteur Theory.
-Support One
>Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"
-what is cinema?
>what is Theory of film?

Claim Two
>Formalist Criticism allows the person viewing to delve into the film's world and use the pieces that are given only through the film to express the true meaning behind it, unlike Ideological theory.
-Support Two
>Robin Wood's "Psycho" vs Laura Mulvey Death 24x a Second(excerpt)

Claim Three
>A perfect example of how effective Formalist criticism can be is through the analysis of Hitchcock's Psycho.
-Support Three
>Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
>Robin Wood's "Psycho"
-the meaning of objects and eyes.

Paintings, Perceptions, and Paris

Midnight in Paris.
It sounds like a straight to DVD romantic comedy just by name alone. The film’s name draws upon the heavy clichés of Paris being the center of romance and culture of the world, and the film itself doesn’t fall too short of this initial premise. I couldn’t look past the fact that this all seemed a little too intentional, especially for a Woody Allen film. This stereotypical Hollywood film coming from this man begs that there must be something more than just a story about a man wanting the cultural and romantic freedom that the city of Paris can only provide, or in easier terms, a story about a man falling in love with Paris. In my opinion, Woody Allen creates the illusory world of the Hollywood interpretation of a romance in Paris not to just create a film that the populace would enjoy, but also to bring attention to itself as an illusion rather than a reality.

There is a moment in this film that seems to encapsulate this idea I presented. In the movie, Gil, his fiancé, and Paul are in a museum, where Paul goes on one of his long, pompous spiels about a Picasso painting that just so happened to be the same one that Gil had seen being discussed when he traveled back to 1920’s Paris. Soon Gil interrupts Paul with a version of the painting that came directly from his encounter with Pablo Picasso himself.

Within this moment the audience is shown how there are two differentiating opinions on the same painting. Where one seemed a little too high cultured and overly pseudo-intellectual, the opinion of Paul; the other came off more down to earth and driven by human desires and forces. This seems too deliberate of a choice in the film to be just a way to crack a joke at Paul’s expense. In a way, Woody Allen seems to be expressing a few different ways to look at a film after a first glance. For example, Midnight in Paris seems like a very superficial Hollywood movie at first glance, but as we have discussed, it seems too superficial to be such. Like the painting we have to see it a few different ways with various opinions even though many would disagree and say it is cemented in one way. Like Gil, we have to challenge the established ideas about that painting, or in a broader sense about film in general.