TOWARDS A THIRD CINEMA” BY FERNANDO SOLANAS AND OCTAVIO

GETINO

In this article, the authors begin by stating that films dealt with effect, not cause. There was a
belief that revolutionary cinema cannot exist before revolution. With this in mind, the authors
set out to establish third cinema, which aimed to break from these norms and transform the
masses into a revolutionary group of people.Before divulging into the goals of third cinema,
the authors give a brief overview of what came before it. The type of films described above fall
under first cinema, which predominately came out of Hollywood. These films sought to
generate ideologies such as neocolonialism and capitalism. The viewer of these films is a
passive consumer. Second cinema was in reaction to this first cinema. From what the authors
wrote, I gathered that second cinema was “art-house-esque,” in that they were attempts at
independent film. However, second cinema was generally devoid of politics. Second cinema
also operated within the System’s (meaning capitalists) distribution chains, causing it to fail as
a movement. Third cinema (or cinema of liberation/guerilla cinema) arose when artists and
revolutionaries began working together. Their meeting ground of the political and artistic
vanguards was the struggle to seize power from the enemy.Oftentimes in first cinema,
imperialists and capitalists sought to create images of reality. These images, according to the
authors, rarely reflected the actual reality. Instead these images created inaccurate stereotypes
of those oppressed in order to justify oppression. Third cinema sought to deconstruct these
images of reality and construct narratives that were actually true. Documentary, the authors
declared, was the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking, and thus an intrinsic genre in third
cinema. In order to be successful, filmmakers needed to establish their own voice that sought
to create a transformative worldview. In the middle of page 931, the authors include a quote
from Marx which reads: “it is not sufficient to interpret the world; it is now a question of
transforming it.” By creating their own distinctive revolutionary voices, filmmakers could do
just that.

At the bottom of 931, the authors include a quote that I feel best summarizes the goals of third
cinema. It reads: “The effectiveness of the best films of militant cinema show that social layers
considered backward are able to capture the exact meaning of an association of images, an
effect of staging, and any linguistic experimentation placed within the context of a given idea.
Furthermore, revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or
passively establishes a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element
providing thrust or rectification To put it another way, it provides discovery through
transformation.”

The authors then divulge into the roles that one has within third cinema. As a filmmaking
process, third cinema democratizes it. Thus, everyone is expected to be familiar with all
equipment. The continuity of making third cinema rests on an underground base structure with
a loyal audience. Without an audience, third cinema loses its purpose. Furthermore, unlike first
cinema, the audience of third cinema films is expected to be active. They are no longer
spectators, but rather actors. Those who watch third cinema films are transformed into
revolutionaries.
The end of the third to last paragraph of page 939 best summarizes the power of third cinema.
It reads: “The filmmaker feels for the first time. He discovers that, within the System, nothing
fits, while outside of and against the System, everything fits, because everything remains to be
done. What appeared yesterday as a preposterous adventure, as we said at the beginning, is
posed today as an inescapable need and possibility.”
I will also post my discussion question that I thought of for this article. It is: Based on my
reading of the piece, third cinema sought to mobilize the masses to enact change that would
alter their lives completely (i.e.: no longer operating under neocolonialism and thus no longer
subjected to U.S. bourgeoisie capitalism)Until recently, film had been synonymous with
spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good. As a rule, films only
dealt with effect, never with cause; it was cinema of mystification or anti-historicism. films,
the most valuable tool of communication of our times, were destined to satisfy only the
ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world
film market, the great majority of whom were from the United States. A reformist policy, as
manifested in dialogue with the adversary, in coexistence, and in the relegation of national
contradictions to those between two supposedly unique blocs - the USSR and the USA - was
and is unable to produce anything but a cinema within the System itself.

But the questions that were recently raised appeared promising; they arose from a new
historical situation to which the film-maker, as is often the case with the educated strata of our
countries, was rather a latecomer: ten years of the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese struggle,
and the development of a worldwide liberation movement whose moving force is to be found
in the Third World countries. ( how world politics paved the way for third cinema movement:
especially the anti war movement ) The question of whether or not militant cinema was possible
before the revolution began to be replaced, at least within small groups, by the question of
whether or not such a cinema was necessary to contribute to the possibility of revolution. (
cinema is imagined as a tool to make the revolution possible ) A profound debate on the role
of intellectuals and artists before liberation is today enriching the perspectives of intellectual
work all over the world. However, this debate oscillates between two poles: one which
proposes to relegate all intellectual work capacity to a specifically political or political military
function, denying perspectives to all artistic activity with the idea that such activity must
ineluctably be absorbed by the System, and the other which maintains an inner duality of the
intellectual: on the one hand, the 'work of art', ,the privilege of beauty', an art and a beauty
which are not necessarily bound to the needs of the revolutionary political process, and, on the
other, a political commitment which generally consists in signing certain anti imperialist
manifestos. In practice, this point of view means the separation of politics and art. ( about the
role of the intellectuals and artists) there exist our culture and their culture, our cinema and
their cinema. Because our culture is an impulse towards emancipation, it will remain in
existence until emancipation is a reality: a culture of subversion which will carry with it an art,
a science, and a cinema of subversion. , all of these specialities are equally employed to satisfy
the needs of imperialism. ( everyone, right from scientists to artists are employed to serve
imperialism) The revolutionary organisations lack specialised fronts not only in their medicine,
engineering, psychology, and art - but also in our own revolutionary engineering, psychology,
art, and cinema

The intellectual must find through his action the field in which he can rationally perform the
most efficient work. (The intellectual and artist have a responsibility to serve the cause of
revolution ) It is in this harsh and dramatic daily search that a culture of the revolution will be
able to emerge, the basis which will nurture, beginning right now, the new man exemplified by
Che - not man in the abstract, not the 'liberation of man', but another man, capable of arising
from the ashes of the old, alienated man that we are and which the new man will destroy by
starting to stoke the fire today.

The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside
the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in
our opinion, the cinema that recognises in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific,
and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated
personality with each people as the starting point - in a word, the decolonisation of culture. (
this paragraph is important ) Just as they are not masters of the land upon which they walk, the
neocolonialised people are not masters of the ideas that envelop them. The middle sectors were
and are the best recipients of cultural neocolonialism. Their ambivalent class condition, their
buffer position between social polarities, and their broader possibilities of access to civilisation
offer imperialism a base of social support which has attained considerable importance in some
Latin American countries. ( how the aspiring middle class function as the base of neo-colonial
forces) If in an openly colonial situation cultural penetration is the complement of a foreign
army of occupation, during certain stages this penetration assumes major priority. In this way
educational colonisation is an effective substitute for the colonial police.(4) Mass
communications tend to complete the destruction of a national awareness and of a collective
subjectivity on the way to enlightenment, a destruction which begins as soon as the child has
access to these media, the education and culture of the ruling classes. In Argentina, 26
television channels; one million television sets; more than 50 radio stations; hundreds of
newspapers, periodicals, and magazines; and thousands of records, films, etc., join their
acculturating role of the colonialisation of taste and consciousness to the process of neocolonial
education which begins in the university. 'Mass communications are more effective for
neocolonialism than napalm. What is real, true, and rational is to be found on the margin of the
law, just as are the people. Violence, crime, and destruction come to be Peace, Order, and
Normality.'(5) Truth, then, amounts to subversion. Any form of expression or communication
that tries to show national reality is subversion.

Cultural penetration, educational colonisation, an mass communications all join forces today
in a desperate attempt to absorb, neutralise, or eliminate any expression that responds to an
attempt at decolonisation. Neocolonialism makes a serious attempt to castrate, to digest, the
cultural forms that arise beyond the bounds of its own aims. Attempts are made to remove from
them precisely what makes them effective and dangerous; in short, it tries to depoliticise them.
Or, to put it another way, to separate the cultural manifestation from the fight for national
independence.

Ideas such as 'Beauty in itself is revolutionary' and 'All new cinema is revolutionary' are
idealistic aspirations that do not touch the neocolonial condition, since they continue to
conceive of cinema, art, and beauty as universal abstractions and not as an integral part of the
national processes of decolonisation. Virulence, nonconformism, plain rebelliousness, and
discontent are just so many more products on the capitalist market; they are consumer goods.(
how the ruling class appropriates sites of resistance) permitted protest of the System they do
not realise that even anti-System art can be absorbed and utilised by the System, as both a brake
and a necessary self-correction.(7) Insert the work as an original fact in the process of
liberation, place it first at the service of life itself, ahead of art; dissolve aesthetics in the life of
society: only in this way, as Fanon said, can decolonisation become possible and culture,
cinema, and beauty - at least, what is of greatest importance to us - become our culture, our
films, and our sense of beauty. The historical perspectives of Latin America and of the majority
of the countries under imperialist domination are headed not towards a lessening of repression
but towards an increase. We are heading not for bourgeois-democratic regimes but for
dictatorial forms of government. The struggles for democratic freedoms, instead of seizing
concessions from the System, move it to cut down on them, given its narrow margin for
manoeuvring. At this time in Latin America there is room for neither passivity nor innocence.
The intellectual's commitment is measured in terms of risks as well as words and ideas; what
he does to further the cause of liberation is what counts. The worker who goes on strike and
thus risks losing his job or even his life, the student who jeopardises his career, the militant
who keeps silent under torture: each by his or her action commits us to something much more
important than a vague gesture of solidarity. (9) the intellectual, who is one more worker,
functioning on a cultural front, must become increasingly radicalised to avoid denial of self
and to carry out what is expected of him in our times. While, during the early history (or the
prehistory) of the cinema, it was possible to speak of a German, an Italian, or a Swedish cinema
clearly differentiated and corresponding to specific national characteristics, today such
differences have disappeared. The borders were wiped out along with the expansion of US
imperialism and the film model that is imposed: Hollywood movies. In our times it is hard to
find a film within the field of commercial cinema, including what is known as 'author's cinema,'
in both the capitalist and socialist countries, that manages to avoid the models of Hollywood
pictures. The latter have such a fast hold that monumental works such as Bondarchuk's War
and Peace from the USSR are also monumental examples of the submission to all propositions
imposed by the US movie industry (structure, language, etc.) and, consequently, to its
concepts.( end of national cinema due to the influence of Hollywood. Conceptual dependency)

The placing of the cinema within US models, even in the formal aspect, in language, leads to
the adoption of the ideological forms that gave rise to precisely that language and no other.
Even the appropriation of models which appear to be only technical, industrial, scientific, etc.,
leads to a conceptual dependency, due to the fact that the cinema is an industry, but differs
from other industries in that it has been created and organised in order to generate certain
ideologies. The 35mm camera, 24 frames per second, arc lights, and a commercial place of
exhibition for audiences were conceived not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to
satisfy, in the first place, the cultural and surplus value needs of a specific ideology, of a specific
world-view: that of US finance capital. ( How cinema functions as an instrument to serve US
capital) The first alternative to this type of cinema, which we could call the first cinema, arose
with the so-called 'author's cinema,' 'expression cinema,' 'nouvelle vague,' 'cinema novo,' or,
conventionally, the second cinema.

Real alternatives differing from those offered by the System are only possible if one of two
requirements is fulfilled: making films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign
to its needs, or making films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System. Neither of
these requirements fits within the alternatives that are still offered by the second cinema, but
they can be found in the revolutionary opening towards a cinema outside and against the
System, in a cinema of liberation: the third cinema. But the new political positions of some
film-makers and the subsequent appearance of films useful for liberation have permitted certain
political vanguards to discover the importance of movies.. ( Intellectuals and artists should join
the revolution- movies have great potential to carry out revolution) For the first time in Latin
America, organisations are ready and willing to employ films for political-cultural ends:
Moreover, OSPAAAL (Organisation of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia and Latin
America) is participating in the production and distribution of films that contribute to the anti-
imperialist struggle Some of the circumstances that delayed the use of films as a revolutionary
tool until a short time ago were lack of equipment, technical difficulties, the compulsory
specialisation of each phase of work, and high costs. The advances that have taken place within
each specialisation; the simplification of movie cameras and tape recorders; improvements in
the medium itself, such as rapid film that can be shot in normal light; automatic light meters;
improved audiovisual synchronisation; and the spread of know-how by means of specialised
magazines with large circulations and even through nonspecialised media, have helped to
demystify film-making and divest it of that almost magic aura that made it seem that films were
only within the reach of 'artists', 'geniuses', and 'the privileged'. Filmmaking is increasingly
within the reach of larger social layers. Chris Marker experimented in France with groups of
workers whom he provided with 8mm equipment and some basic instruction in its handling.
The goal was to have the worker film his way of looking at the world, just as if he were writing
it. This has opened up unheard-of prospects for the cinema; above all, a new conception of
film-making and the significance of art in our times.

Imperialism and capitalism, whether in the consumer society or in the neocolonialised country,
veil everything behind a screen of images and appearances. The image of reality is more
important than reality itself. ( in a capitalistic consumer society reality is hidden behind
fantasies. Third cinema doesn’t depend of fantasies. Reality is portrayed as such ) I make the
revolution; therefore I exist. This is the starting point for the disappearance of fantasy and
phantom to make way for living human beings. The cinema of the revolution is at the same
time one of destruction and construction: destruction of the image that neocolonialism has
created of itself and of us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth
in any of its expressions. The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the
concept has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact or a historical event,
is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary film-making. ( documentary as the main basis of
third cinema ) Pamphlet films, didactic films, report films, essay films, witness-bearing films -
any militant form of expression is valid, and it would be absurd to lay down a set of aesthetic
work norms. Be receptive to all that the people have to offer, and offer them the best; or, as
Che put it, respect the people by giving them quality. Furthermore, revolutionary cinema is not
fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation: rather, it
attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification. To put it
another way, it provides discovery through transformation. The model of the perfect work of
art, the fully rounded film structured according to the metrics imposed by bourgeois culture,
its theoreticians and critics, has served to inhibit the film-maker in the dependent countries,
especially when he has attempted to erect similar models in a reality which offered him neither
the culture, the techniques, nor the most primary elements for success. The culture of the
metropolis kept the age-old secrets that had given life to its models; the transposition of the
latter to the neocolonial reality was always a mechanism of alienation, since it was not possible
for the artist of the dependent country to absorb, in a few years, the secrets of a culture and
society elaborated through the centuries in completely different historical circumstances. The
attempt in the sphere of filmmaking to match the pictures of the ruling countries generally ends
in failure, given the existence of two disparate historical realities. And such unsuccessful
attempts lead to feelings of frustration and inferiority

The existence of a revolutionary cinema is inconceivable without the constant and methodical
exercise of practice, search, and experimentation. . The possibility of discovering and inventing
film forms and structures that serve a more profound vision of our reality resides in the ability
to place oneself on the outside limits of the familiar, to make one's way amid constant dangers.
. A revolutionary film group is in the same situation as a guerrilla unit: it cannot grow strong
without military structures and command concepts. Guerrilla film-making proletarianises the
film worker and breaks down the intellectual aristocracy that the bourgeoisie grants to its
followers. In a word, it democratises. ( revolutionary cinema and guerrilla film making:
important ideas with regards to third cinema ) The film-maker's tie with reality makes him
more a part of his people. Each member of the group should be familiar, at least in a general
way, with the equipment being used: he must be prepared to replace another in any of the
phases of production. The myth of irreplaceable technicians must be exploded.( hierarchies in
the tradition film making are broken in third cinema) Group-level co-operation between
different countries can serve to assure the completion of a film or the execution of certain
phases of work that may not be possible in the country of origin. To this should be added the
need for a filing centre for materials to be used by the different groups and the perspective of
coordination, on a continent-wide or even worldwide scale, of the continuity of work in each
country: periodic regional or international gatherings to exchange experience, contributions,
joint planning of work, etc. At least in the earliest stages the revolutionary film-maker and the
work groups will be the sole producers of their films. They must bear the responsibility of
finding ways to facilitate the continuity of work. Guerrilla cinema still doesn't have enough
experience to set down standards in this area; what experience there is has shown, above all,
the ability to make use of the concrete situation of each country. But, regardless of what these
situations may be, the preparation of a film cannot be undertaken without a parallel study of its
future audience and, consequently, a plan to recover the financial investment. Here, once again,
the need arises for closer ties between political and artistic vanguards, since this also serves for
the joint study of forms of production, exhibition, and continuity. A guerrilla film can be aimed
only at the distribution mechanisms provided by the revolutionary organisations, including
those invented or discovered by the film-maker themselves. ( filmmaking is a collective effort)

Production, distribution, and economic possibilities for survival must form part of a single
strategy. The solution of the problems faced in each of these areas will encourage other people
to join in the work of guerrilla film-making, which will enlarge its ranks and thus make it less
vulnerable. The Without revolutionary films and a public that asks for them, any attempt to
open up new ways of distribution would be doomed to failure. The ideal goal to be achieved
would be producing and distributing guerrilla films with funds obtained from expropriations
from the bourgeoisie - that is, the bourgeoisie would be financing guerrilla cinema with a bit
of the surplus value that it gets from the people. But, as long as the goal is no more than a
middle- or long-range aspiration, the alternatives open to revolutionary cinema to recover
production and distribution costs are to some extent similar to those obtained for conventional
cinema: every spectator should pay the same amount as he pays to see System cinema.A
Guerrilla Films International.We thus discovered a new facet of cinema: the participation of
people who, until then, were considered spectators. ( People are part of third cinema ) . We
realised that we had at hand three very valuable factors: 1) The participant comrade, the man-
actor-accomplice who responded to the summons; 2) The free space where that man expressed
his concerns and ideas, became politicised, and started to free himself; and 3) The film,
important only as a detonator or pretext.In this way the idea began to grow of structuring what
we decided to call the film act, the film action, one of the forms which we believe assumes
great importance in affirming the line of a third cinema. (film as an action)

Comrades [we said at the start of 'Acto para la liberacion'], this is not just a film showing, nor
is it a show; rather, it is, above all A MEETING - an act of anti-imperialist unity; this is a place
only for those who feel identified with this struggle, because here there is no room for
spectators or for accomplices of the enemy; here there is room only for the authors and
protagonists of the process which the film attempts to bear witness to and to deepen. ( film
shows are MEETINGS- an anti imperialist unity) The film is the pretext for dialogue, for the
seeking and finding of wills. It is a report that we place before you for your consideration, to
be debated after the showing. The conclusions [we said at another point in the second part] at
which you may arrive as the real authors and protagonists of this history are importantThe film
act means an open-ended film; it is essentially a way of learning. The first step in the process
of knowledge is the first contact with the things of the outside world, the stage of sensations
[in a film the living fresco of image and sound]. The second step is the synthesising of the data
provided by the sensations; their ordering and elaboration; the stage of concepts, judgements,
opinions, and deductions [in the film the announcer, the reportings, the didactics, or the narrator
who leads the projection act]. And then comes the third stage, that of knowledge. The active
role of knowledge is expressed not only in the active leap from sensory to rational knowledge,
but, and what is even more important, in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary
practice . . . The practice of the transformation of the world ... This, in general terms, is the
dialectical materialist theory of the unity of knowledge and action(17) [in the projection of the
film act, the participation of the comrades, the action proposals that arise, and the actions
themselves that will take place later]. Moreover, each projection of a film act presupposes a
different setting, since the space where it takes place, the materials that go to make it up (actors-
participants), and the historic time in which it takes place are never the same. This means that
the result of each projection act will depend on those who organise it, on those who participate
in it, and on the time and place; the possibility of introducing variations, additions, and changes
is unlimited. The screening of a film act will always express in one way or another the historical
situation in which it takes place; its perspectives are not exhausted in the struggle for power
but will instead continue after the taking of power to strengthen the revolution.

The man of the third cinema, be it guerrilla cinema or a film act, with the infinite categories
that they contain (film letter, film poem, film essay, film pamphlet, film report, etc.), above all
counters the film industry of a cinema of characters with one of themes, that of individuals with
that of masses, that of the author with that of the operative group, one of neocolonial
misinformation with one of information, one of escape with one that recaptures the truth, that
of passivity with that of aggressions. To an institutionalised cinema, it counterposes a guerrilla
cinema; to movies as shows, it opposes a film act or action; to a cinema of destruction, one that
is both destructive and constructive; to a cinema made for the old kind of human being, for
them, it opposes a cinema fit for a new kind of human being,for what each one of us has the
possibility of becoming. The decolonisation of the film-maker and of films will be
simultaneous acts to the extent that each contributes to collective decolonisation. The battle
begins without, against the enemy who attacks us, but also within, against the ideas and models
of the enemy to be found inside each one of us. Destruction and construction. Decolonising
action rescues with its practice the purest and most vital impulses. It opposes to the
colonialisation of minds the revolution of consciousness. The world is scrutinised, unravelled,
rediscovered. People are witness to a constant astonishment, a kind of second birth. They
recover their early simplicity, their capacity for adventure; their lethargic capacity for
indignation comes to life. Freeing a forbidden truth means setting free the possibility of
indignation and subversion. Our truth, that of the new man who builds himself by getting rid
of all the defects that still weigh him down, is a bomb of inexhaustible power and, at the same
time, the only real possibility of life. Within this attempt, the revolutionary film-maker ventures
with his subversive observation, sensibility, imagination, and realisation.

The great themes - the history of the country, love and unlove between combatants, the efforts
of a people who are awakening - all this is reborn before the lens of the decolonised camera.(
The idea of decolonization is the key here. Cinema should be free from the colonial hungover
)
Jean-Louis Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus”

Combined influence of Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and
Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage and the role it plays in identity formation.
Birth of Western science results in the development of the telescope, which has a consequence
“the decentering of the human universe” (286) through the end of the belief in geocentrism. A
new mode of representation, made possible by the technology of the camera obscura,
paradoxically sets up the subject as “the active center and origin of meaning.”

Baudry states that critics of the ideological effects of film have focused on the effects that such
film have as finished products (as we see with Adorno and Horkeimer), but the “technical bases
on which these effects depend” has been ignored. “Between ‘objective reality’ and the camera,
site of inscription, and between inscription and the projection are situated certain operations, a
work which has as a result a finished product.” The problem is that this product, the film, hides
the work that creates this transformation.

The film goes through transformations, from decoupage, the shot breakdown before shooting,
to montage. Between these phases of production a “mutation of signifying material takes
place…precisely in the place occupied by the camera” (287). That is, the decoupage, which
operates as language, is transformed (but not translated or transcripted, because that is not
possible) through the apparatus of the camera into image, or exposed film, which is then
transformed again, through the apparatuses that make editing possible, into a finished product.

Another operation effected through instruments takes place when the finished product of the
film, which is a commodity that possesses exchange value, is transformed through the
apparatuses of the projector and the screen to become the filmic event which can then be
consumed, which is a product with use value.The finished film restores the movement of the
“objective reality” that the camera has filmed, but it does so by creating the illusion of
movement through a succession of separate, static images. The fact that this transformation,
and the instruments that enact it, is concealed from the viewer, is inherently ideological.HOW
do filmic instruments produce specific ideological effects, and are these effects themselves
determined by the dominant ideology?

THE CAMERA reproduces the effect of Renaissance perspective, which is described as “a

conception of space formed by the relation between all elements which are equally near and
distant from ‘the source of all life’” (289). The center of this space corresponds with the eye,
which corresponds with the subject. Unlike Chinese and Japanese painting, Western easel
painting presents “a motionless an continuous whole, elaborates a total vision which
corresponds to the idealist conception of the fullness and homogenity of ‘being”’ (289).
Idealism, transcendence.
PROJECTION creates the illusion of movement from a succession of static images, each of
which is almost identical to the one before it, but with small differences that create the illusion
of continuous change. However, projection works by effacing these differences. Baudry says
that projection is “difference denied,” stating that “the mechanical apparatus both selects the
minimal difference and represses it in projection, so that meaning can be constituted, it is at
once direction, continuity, movement” (291).

The camera, aligned with the eye (and hence, the subject in the tradition of Western art),
produces a “transcendental subject” (292) who is granted movement and meaning. The eye is
given a false sense of complete freedom of movement. “The image seems to reflect the world
but solely in the naïve inversion of a founding hierarchy: ‘The domain of natural existence thus
has only an authority of the second order, and always presupposes the domain of the
transcendental’” (292). Continuity is an attribute of the subject. The ideological operations at
stake here: “it is a question of preserving at any cost the synthetic unity of the locus where
meaning originates [the subject]– the constituting transcendental function to which narrative
continuity points back as its natural secretion” (293).

The THEATER: the setting in which the film is exibited, with its dark room and straight-
forward gaze, (Baudry describes the viewer in the theater as “chained, captured, or captivated”
(294), reproduces the mirror stage in which secondary identification occurs, allowing for the
illusory constitution of the subject. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage describes the formation
of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with one’s
own specular image. The mirror stage is also where the subject becomes alienated from itself,
and thus is introduced into the Imaginary order. Baudry explains how the spectator identifies
with the film at two levels: with the character onscreen, but moreso with “the transcendental
subject whose place is taken by the camera” (similar to what is elsewhere, in theories of filmic
suture, called The Absent One). The spectator identifies less with what is represented than with
“what stages the spectacle…obliging him to see what it sees” (295). Disturbing elements
distance the spectator from the film, allowing her to apprehend its ideological processes (?):
“Both specular tranquility and the assurance of one’s own identity collapse simultaneously with
the revealing of the mechanism, that is of the inscription of the film work” (296).

To summaraize: the role of film is to reproduce, through its technological bases, an ideology
of idealism, an illusory sensation that what we see is indeed “objective reality” and is so
because we believe we are the eye that calls it into being. The entire function of the filmic
apparatus is to make us forget the filmic apparatus–we are only made aware of the apparatus
when it breaks.

Some of the same problems as many theories of film and culture of the postwar era (including
Adorno and Horkeimer and many of the psychoanalytic theories of the 70s that were concerned
with the way that cinematic isntitutions influence spectators to seek out viewing pleasures in
ways that reflect dominant ideology), namely in that it poses a one-way relationship between
the viewer and the filmic text. the supposition that film viewers are inactive victims who are
subjected to the ideology of the ruling class and cannot differentiate between illusion and
reality. I’d ask the question, then, of what happens when the viewer fails to identify, or the
question of reading against the text. There’s also the question of the change in reception of
films: the conditions of viewing in the era of video, and then of digital media technologies. Is
the experience of watching a film in your living room while making fun of it with your friends,
or watching it on your iPhone on the bus, conducive to the same ideological operations.

Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus

“In such a way, the cinematic apparatus conceals its work and imposes an idealist ideology,
rather than producing critical awareness in a spectator.”

Baudry sets up the questions he will answer throughout the rest of the text:

• How the “subject” is the active center of meaning.

• How the cinematic apparatus is actually more important for transcendentalism in the subject
than the film itself.
• The hidden “work” of the cinematic apparatus, that is, the progression from the “objective
reality” (what is filmed), through the intermediary (the camera), to the finished product (a
reconstructed, but false, “objective reality”, not the “objective reality” itself, but instead a
representation of it)

Baudry then discusses this “work”. This, he claims, is what distinguishes cinema as an art form.
This process of transformation from “objective reality” to finished product. He asks, in this
finished product is the “work” made evident, does viewing the final product bring about a
“knowledge effect”, or in other words, a recognition of the apparatus, or is the “work”
concealed?He finishes the section by stating, “concealment of the technical base will also bring
about a specific ideological effect. Its inscription, its manifestation as such, on the other hand,
would produce a knowledge effect, as actualization of the work process, as denunciation of
ideology, and as a critique of idealism.”It’s important to stop here and question what Baudry
means by “idealism”?Sociologically, idealism emphasizes how human ideas – especially
beliefs and values – shape society. Philosophically it asserts that reality, or reality as we can
know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.

The Eye of the Subject

Baudry discusses the viewpoint of the “subject” in both Greek and Renaissance art histories.
While both static, the Greeks “subject” is based on a “multiplicity of points of view” while the
Renaissance paintings utilize a “centered space”. “The center of this space coincides with the
eye…so justly called the “subject”.Baudry then continues and discusses the camera’s vision,
which he calls Monocular. “Based on the principle of a fixed point by reference to which the
visualized objects are organized, it specifies in return the position of the “subject” the very spot
it must necessarily occupy. What Baudry has done here is created the “subject” for the finished
product, the entity into which the exterior world will attempt to intrude and create
meaning.Question – If the subject is a “fixed point”, then does one’s positioning in a theater
affect the ability for meaning to be created? Is the “mirror” as affective?Baudry then discusses
the necessity of transcendence which he will touch upon more later in his essay. Briefly
however, the ideal vision of the “virtual image” with its hallucinatory reality, creates a total
vision which to Baudry, “contributes…to the ideological function of art, which is to provide
the tangible representation of metaphysics.”

Projection: The Difference Negated

Baudry discusses the paradox between the projected film. It consists of individual frames,
separate, however minutely, from each other in image. However, when projected the frames
create meaning, through the relationship between them, creating a juxtapositioning and a
continuity. As Baudry states, “These separate frames have between them differences that are
indispensable for the creation of an illusion of continuity, of a continuous passage (movement,
time). But only on one condition can these differences create this illusion: they must be effaced
as differences.” This is a critical notion as we will see in just a moment.
We should remember, moreoever, the disturbing effects which result during a projection from
breakdowns in the recreation of movement, when the spectator is brought abruptly back to
discontinuity, that is, to the body, to the technical apparatus which he or she had forgotten.
When such discontinuity is made apparent then to Baudry both transcendence, meaning in the
subject, and ideology can be impossible.

So what is the importance of this effacement of discontinuity in frames. Baudry states, “We
might not be far from seeing what is in play on this material basis, if we recall that the
“language” of the unconscious, as it is found in dreams, slips of the tongue, or hysterical
symptoms, manifests itself as continuity destroyed, broken, and as the unexpected surging forth
of a marked difference.” We must note the similarities between Baudry’s Freudian idea of the
unconscious and of the language of the cinematic apparatus. Both, fool the subject (the viewer
and the self) into believing in a continuity, while both occasionally providing glimpses of the
actual discontinuity present in the construction. Thus a relation is established between the
unconscious of the “subject” and what is being presented on screen. Or as Baudry puts
it….“Thus one may assume that what was already at work as the originating basid of the
persepective image, namely the eye, the “subject”, is put forth, liberated by the operation which
transforms successive, discrete images (as isolated images they have, strictly speaking, no
meaning, or at least no unity of meaning) into continuity, movement, meaning; with continuity
restored both meaning and consciousness are restored.”

The Transcendental Subject

Baudry begins by describing how when a camera follows a trajectory, it becomes trajectory,
seizes a moment, becomes a moment. It’s a little clunky but what I believe he is saying is this.
As the camera follows the arc of a ball flying through the air, the frame itself mimics this arc,
becomes an arc itself. And if we believe that the consciousness of the individual is projected
upon the screen then as Baudry puts it, “in this way the eye-subject, the invisible base of
artificial perspective (which in fact only represents a larger effot to produce an ordering,
regulated trascnedence) becomes absorbed in, “elevated” to a vaster function”.“The world will
not only be constituted by this eye but for it. The movability of the camera seems to fulfill the
most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the “transcendental subject”.Baudry moves
on to how he believes the subject is so able to become consciously enmeshed in the film. “There
is both fantasmatization of an objective reality (image, sounds, color) and of an objective reality
which, limiting its power of constraint, seems equally to augment the possibilities of the
subject.” It is the belief in the omnipotence of thought and viewpoint. The subject sees all, he
or she ascends to a nobler status, a god perhaps, he or she sees all of the world that is presented
before them, the visual image is the world, and the subject sees all. Add to this that the ego
believes that what is shown is shown for a reason, that whatever it sees has purpose, has
meaning. And you have a subject who is given great power and a world in which he or she is
entitled to meaning.

Film derives meaning from the subject.

The importance of narrative continuity as well, “The search for such narrative continuity, so
difficult to obtain from the material base, can only be explained by an essential ideological
stake projected in this point: it is a question of preserving at any cost the synthetic unity of the
locus where meaning originates [the subject] – the constituting transcendental function to
which narrative continuity points back as its natural secretion.”

The Screen-Mirror: Specularization and Double Identification

The physical confinements and atmosphere of the theater help in the immersion of the subject.
Indeed Baudry notes that the atmosphere mimics not only Plato’s analogy of the cave but also
Lacan’s formation of the imaginary self.
“This psychological phase, which occurs between six and eighteen months of age, generates
via the mirror image of a unified body the constitution or at least the first sketches of the “I” as
an imaginary function.Lacan is so abstruse its as if he’s using a different language, but here’s
what I can gather. The child upon seeing his or herself in the mirror for the first time, is hitherto,
a fragmented conscious and unconscious, his or her recognition of his or herself in a mirror
creates an imaginary “I”, imaginary in the sense that 1. The “I” is a organic, singular unit,
which contradicts the idea that the being is actually a fragmented entity, also paralleling the
concept of the “continuous image” upon the screen, and 2. The child takes the mirrored image
and makes it an “ideal self”. This is problematic for two reasons, 1. The mirrored image is not
the child itself but instead a reflected image, and 2. The reflected is image presents a whole,
something the child will continually strive for but never reach. It is a continually unfulfilled
desire, an empty signifier. Note the similarity between this and the constructed image on
screen.The screen as a “mirror” but not one that reflects an objective reality but one instead
one that reflects images.“Thus the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the
spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging him to see what it
sees; this is exactly the function taken over by the camera as a sort of relay.” And this is
because..“Just as a mirror assembles the fragmented body in a sort of imaginary integration of
the self, the transcendental self unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena, of lived
experience, into unifying meaning. Through it each fragment assumes meaning by being
integrated into an “organic” unity. Between the imaginary gathering of the fragmented body
into a unity and the transcendentality of the self, giver of unifying meaning, the current is
indefinitely reversible.The relationship between the camera and the subject. The camera needs
to seize the subject in a mode of specular reflection. The forms of narrative adopted, the
contents, are of little importance so long as identification remains possible.“Everything
happens as if, the subject himself, unable to account for his own situation, it was necessary to
substitute secondary organs, grafted on to replace his own defective ones, instruments or
ideological formations capable of filling his function as subject.” The image replaces the
subjects own image as if it is now the mirror.

“The cinema can thus appear as a sort of psychic apparatus of substitution, corresponding to
the model defined by the dominant ideology.”

Think of it this way, the consciousness of the individual, the subject, becomes projected upon
the film, as both the consciousness and the cinematic apparatus work in similar ways. This
allows the exterior world, the “objective reality”, to create interior meaning within the subject.
The success or failure of a film is therefore its ability to hold this consciousness through a
perpetual continuity of the visual image and the effacement of the means of production,
therefore allowing the subject a “transcendental experience”.

“Film functions more as a metaphysiological “mirror” that fulfills the spectator’s wish for
fullness, transcendental unity, and meaning.”

Battleship Potemkin
Battleship Potemkin, released at the end of 1925 as only Sergei Eisenstein’s second full-length
film, was an elaboration on the real-life mutiny which took place on the battleship Potemkin in
June 1905. The ship had been built for the Imperial Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet; and at the
time, many of its senior officers were away, engaged in the ongoing Russo-Japanese War.
From the beginning of the year, social unrest had swept throughout the Russian Empire, in
what became known as the Revolution of 1905, and resulted in a series of political reforms
including the establishment of the State Duma.

Born in Riga in 1898, Eisenstein served in the Red Army, and began his career in the
theatre before turning to film. Though his works have been variously interpreted – and his
final film, the second part of Ivan the Terrible, so incensed Stalin that it would not be released
until 1958, ten years after Eisenstein’s death – he remains most associated with his early
propaganda efforts, and with his influential theories of montage. Eisenstein was not unique in
the Soviet cinema of the 1920s in developing montage – the technique was also utilised by
Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and Boris Barnet – but along with Lev Kuleshov, who he
briefly studied under, he was its foremost theorist.Drawing crucially from the theatre of
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Eisenstein believed that the rapid and jolting juxtaposition of images was
the best way to manipulate the emotional response of an audience. Soviet filmmakers of the
period became obsessed with the power of editing, and their films tended to feature many more
shots than those of their Hollywood counterparts. Eisenstein’s early career was also marked by
a focus on decisive crowd sequences, and by the use of untrained actors.

Battleship Potemkin is split into five parts, each clearly stated with its own title card.
Part one is ‘The Men and the Maggots’. Eisenstein opens his film moving between shots of
violently breaking waves; then cuts to a title showing a quote from Lenin attributed to the year
1905: ‘Revolution is war. Of all the wars known in history it is the only lawful, rightful, just,
and truly great war…in Russia this war has been declared and begun’. Lenin wrote these
sentences at the end of January 1905, in an article ‘The Plan of the St. Petersburg
Battle’.Though the film is often stated to eschew the individual in favour of the mass, still the
collected sailors on the Potemkin have a figurehead: Vakulinchuk, who takes one of his
comrades aside up above the deck, and asserts that the sailors must support the workers, acting
in the vanguard of the revolution. Now Eisenstein takes us below deck, to the sailors sleeping
in their bunks. The influence of Battleship Potemkin on the art of Francis Bacon is often cited:
Bacon apparently first saw the film in 1935, and the image of the screaming nurse from the
‘Odessa Steps’ sequence was a prominent influence upon the variations of Velázquez’s Portrait
of Pope Innocent X which he undertook through the 1950s and early 1960s. But here too, the
angled hammocks and overlapping bodies of the sailors resemble Bacon’s paintings of hanging
meat.

An officer prowls the sailors’ quarters, and when he stumbles, in irritation he lashes
one of the sailors on the back. Eisenstein’s title cards don’t only provide dialogue or narrative
exposition: they also serve an overt didactic purpose, and a title here suggests ‘easy to vent
one’s rage on a recruit’. Vakulinchuk gives a rousing speech, asking ‘What are we waiting for?
All of Russia has risen’.The next day, when the sailors argue that the rotten meat which they
are to be served is covered in worms, their complaints are dismissed by the ship’s doctor.
However, they refuse to eat the borscht prepared with the meat. As several sailors do the
washing up, their physical labour and repetitive motion is juxtaposed with the still, shimmering
silver of the cutlery. The same soldier who was lashed the night before notices a line on one of
the plates he is washing: it is from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. In
anger and frustration he smashes the plate.

In part two, ‘Drama on the Deck’, the men who refused the borscht are charged with
insubordination. Informed that they ought to be strung from the ship’s yard, one elderly sailor
looks up and envisions the hanging corpses. The offending sailors are covered with a tarpaulin,
and the firing squad is brought out – as the ship’s priest looks on approvingly, proclaiming
‘Bring the unruly to reason, O Lord!’. But Vakulinchuk cries out in protest and causes the firing
squad to hesitate, and the sailors take the opportunity to mutiny. They triumph over the officers
– while the priest feigns unconsciousness, the doctor is thrown overboard – but Vakulinchuk
is shot and killed.

In ‘A Dead Man Calls for Justice’, the sailors reach the port of Odessa as free men.
Vakulinchuk’s body is placed in a tent, with a sign stating ‘Dead for a spoonful of soup’, as
crowds from the city flock past in support. When one aristocrat attempts to turn the people of
Odessa towards other ends, encouraging amidst the rally ‘Kill the Jews!’, he is rounded on by
furious onlookers.‘The Odessa Steps’ is the best-known sequence of Eisenstein’s career, and
the epitome of the montage technique. Odessa joyously sees the sailors off, with baskets of
fruit, much waving, the fluttering of eyelashes, and the twirling of umbrellas. Amidst the
throng, Eisenstein highlight a young man, happily cheering, who has lost both legs. Then
‘Suddenly…’, there is the first close-up of a shrieking woman’s face; the legless youth scurries
down the vast stairway; and everyone is on the move. A mass of marching gunmen emerge
over one of the stairway’s landings, and bodies begin to drop.

This stairway – extending 142 metres, constructed by 1841, and today known as the
Potemkin Stairs – stands as the main entrance from the port into the city of Odessa. It was built
so that one looking down the stairway sees only the landings, and none of the steps. Eisenstein
uses this aspect in his film: from below, we see the people scuttling down the many stairs in
panic, but shot from above, beyond the corner of a statue, we see the Imperial soldiers moving
against a blank surface, steady and austere.A child is shot in the back and his mother grieves
in slow-motion; people are trampled underfoot; and as the soldiers steadily descend from
above, mounted Cossacks arrive with guns at the bottom of the stairway to continue the assault.
Finally an infant’s pram teeters down the stairs and, as it is about to tumble, the sequence ends
with the famous shot of the nurse, open-mouthed, bloody, and with broken glasses. These
images have been echoed and parodied across all of cinema, but perhaps most notably in the
round of assassinations which mark the climax of The Godfather.

The Potemkin‘s guns fire off in response to the massacre, but meanwhile the sailors
receive news that a squadron sent from the Tsar is on its way to take care of their revolt. The
sailors determine to meet this squadron, and the fifth and final act of Battleship Potemkin –
variously rendered ‘The Meeting with the Squadron’ and ‘One Against All’ – concerns the
nature of this meeting.

"The Battleship Potemkin” has been so famous for so long that it is almost impossible to come
to it with a fresh eye. It is one of the fundamental landmarks of cinema. Its famous massacre
on the Odessa Steps has been quoted so many times in other films (notably in “The
Untouchables”) that it's likely many viewers will have seen the parody before they see the
original. The film once had such power that it was banned in many nations, including its native
Soviet Union. Governments actually believed it could incite audiences to action. If today it
seems more like a technically brilliant but simplistic “cartoon” (Pauline Kael's description in a
favorable review), that may be because it has worn out its element of surprise--that, like the
23rd Psalm or Beethoven's Fifth, it has become so familiar we cannot perceive it for what it is.
The movie was ordered up by the Russian revolutionary leadership for the 20th anniversary of
the Potemkin uprising, which Lenin had hailed as the first proof that troops could be counted
on to join the proletariat in overthrowing the old order.
As sketched by Eisenstein's film, the crew members of the battleship, cruising the Black Sea
after returning from the war with Japan, are mutinous because of poor rations. There is a famous
closeup of their breakfast meat, crawling with maggots. After officers throw a tarpaulin over
the rebellious ones and order them to be shot, a firebrand named Vakulinchuk cries out,
“Brothers! Who are you shooting at?” The firing squad lowers its guns, and when an officer
unwisely tries to enforce his command, full-blown mutiny takes over the ship.
Onshore, news of the uprising reaches citizens who have long suffered under czarist repression.
They send food and water out to the battleship in a flotilla of skiffs. Then, in one of the most
famous sequences ever put on film, czarist troops march down a long flight of steps, firing on
the citizens who flee before them in a terrified tide. Countless innocents are killed, and the
massacre is summed up in the image of a woman shot dead trying to protect her baby in a
carriage--which then bounces down the steps, out of control.That there was, in fact, no czarist
massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops
shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and
finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so
well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.
News of the uprising reaches the Russian fleet, which speeds toward Odessa to put it down.
The Potemkin and a destroyer, also commanded by revolutionaries, steam out to meet them.
Eisenstein creates tension by cutting between the approach fleet, the brave Potemkin, and
details of the onboard preparation. At the last moment, the men of the Potemkin signal their
comrades in the fleet to join them--and the Potemkin steams among the oncoming ships without
a shot being fired at it.“The Battleship Potemkin” is conceived as class-conscious revolutionary
propaganda, and Eisenstein deliberately avoids creating any three-dimensional individuals
(even Vakulinchuk is seen largely as a symbol). Instead, masses of men move in unison, as in
the many shots looking down at Potemkin's foredeck. The people of Odessa, too, are seen as a
mass made up of many briefly glimpsed but starkly seen faces. The dialogue (in title cards) is
limited mostly to outrage and exhortation. There is no personal drama to counterbalance the
larger political drama.
Ingmar Bergman: Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries (1957), which is scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life
that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity. At its centre is
76-year-old Professor Isak Borg, a distinguished medical scientist who travels from Stockholm
to Lund with his daughter-in-law to receive an honorary doctorate. On the 400-mile car journey
the old man remembers his past - the girl he loved who married his brother instead, and his
own bitterly unsuccessful marriage. Despite his benevolent exterior, to which everyone pays
tribute, he recognises in himself something arid and distant.
The film opens with a dream sequence that has been stolen from ever since. Borg arrives at a
house with boarded up windows in the old quarter of Stockholm. He sees a clock with no hands
and an old hearse approaching. One of its wheels gets caught up on a lamppost and a coffin
falls out. The outstretched hand of the corpse within tries to pull Borg inside.
There are other Expressionist and certainly Freudian dream sequences in the picture, almost
always with the old man appearing in them as his present self. And some of these, largely
because so many have badly copied, now look a little self-conscious- arty even. But the film's
ability to engage the emotions makes it notable for more than just technique.
One of the prime reasons is what can only be described as the transcendent performance of
Victor Sjostrom as Professor Borg. Sjostrom was the great Swedish silent-era director, who
died aged 80, not long after the film was completed and whose The Phantom Carriage had so
influenced Bergman. It was he who made the final scene one of the most serene of all
Bergman's endings. "Sjostrom's face shone", said the director. "It emanated light - a reflection
of a different reality, hitherto absent. His whole appearance was soft and gentle, his glance
joyful and tender. It was like a miracle".
Later, Bergman admitted that the character of Borg was an attempt to justify himself to his own
parents, but that Sjostrom had taken his text, made it his own and invested it with Sjostrom's
often painful experiences. It is still, however, chiefly concerned with forgiveness between
parents and children and the lost possibilities of youth.
The other often neglected aspect of Wild Strawberries is that most of it was shot deep in the
Swedish countryside so that its characters pass through a natural world that seems at odds with
their own impermanence but whose beauty also seems somehow to instruct them.
If the theme of Wild Strawberries is how life can become atrophied and sterile - often repeated
from generation to generation - Bergman's working out of his argument is extraordinarily
detailed, since almost all those in the film to whom this applies have no idea what is happening
to them.
Isak's admired and respected mother, for instance, is slowly revealed as hard and mean-spirited,
though not to herself. And it is only when his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) speaks
honestly to him in the car that Isak begins his journey of self-recognition.
What makes the film great is its nearness to each of us. And its almost Christian insistence on
the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.The film famously begins with a dream
sequence as unsettling as that of any horror movie, but it shows a gentler (if still introspective)
side of the chilly Swede overall. His work could sometimes suffer from meaningful imagery
overload, but “Wild Strawberries” balances it with its modesty. Bergman and Sjöström work
to make Borg more than just an average curmudgeon, by turns cold and argumentative or joyful
and bittersweet. The story now sounds like fodder for a rote “old codger learns to like people”
narrative, but “Wild Strawberries” is more about a man’s gradual coming to terms with who
he was, who he is, and what he’s leaving behind.
Early on in Wild Strawberries, the ailing professor Isak Borg (played by pioneering
Swedish actor, director, and screenwriter Victor Sjöström—an early hero of Bergman’s and no
doubt someone with whom Bergman identified) lies down to go to bed. A spotlight, slightly
too theatrical, illuminates his face. He’s asleep, but distressed. He’s having a nightmare, “a
weird and very unpleasant dream.”
This first nightmare sequence balances a classicism rooted in silent Swedish cinema and the
sensibilities of an emerging European arthouse, one that Bergman, in large part, would come
to define. Aside from an early voiceover, the sequence is almost entirely silent; it impresses
stillness, emptiness. The image appears to flicker, slightly stutter, an imitation of cinema’s
earliest roots. Borg wanders a deserted city street, the buildings like preserved ruins, windows
and doors boarded up. Bergman frames his dreamer against buildings, under an alcove, a distant
figure consumed by the coldness of the vacant city facades. Without anyone around, no one
can see Borg. But, a pair of eyes hangs from a clock without hands. It’s a cheeky Magritte-like
surrealism that plays on the anthropomorphizing name for the markers of time—the clock has
no hands but it has eyes. Then Bergman frames Borg against a void, total blackness encasing
the dreamer. Borg turns around, and he is suddenly not alone. A man in a suit stands at a
distance, his back to Borg. Borg tries to get his attention, the man turns and his face is uncannily
human, squeezed together and smushed down, each feature distorted and wrong, a practical
effect as jarring and disturbing as any computerized creation of contemporary horror cinema.
The soundtrack comes up, the sound of the man shuffling down to the ground, a stilted and
improbable fall. Then the man disappears, only his dark clothes remain as an inky substance
drains from the collar of the jacket. A carriage and its trotting horses can be heard in the
distance. Borg looks down the narrow street and the horses turn the corner with the old carriage
thundering behind. The carriage crashes into a light post, a wheel breaks from the cart and rolls
into a wall, almost hitting Borg who watches the scene with a bemused unease. A coffin sits in
the back of the carriage and as the horses tear away from the post, setting the carriage free, the
tomb slides off the back and cracks open, exposing the hand of the corpse inside. Borg is drawn
toward the hand, bending over to peer inside the casket. Then the hand moves, the arm reaches
for Borg, pulling him into the coffin. A figure emerges and it’s Borg himself (the first of several
doppelgängers in the film), dragging the dreamer down into darkness, the corpse stone-faced
and the dreamer petrified, barely able to resist the phantom. This is a not-at-all subtle reference
to Sjöström’s own 1921 silent Dickensian ghost story The Phantom Carriage, a moral tale of
an abusive alcoholic who must confront his guilt when he meets an image of death, a cloaked
figure with sickle in hand, the “strict master” that was also the starting point for Bergman’s
death character in The Seventh Seal. The carriage in Borg’s dream is the carriage of Bergman’s
originating fascination with cinema (he first saw Sjöström’s film when he was 15 years old and
he would rewatch it every year for the rest of his life). It’s the carriage of Sjöström’s film,
carrying all of its meaning from its original context, and standing as the vehicle of the seminal
work of Sjöström’s influence as the “father of Swedish cinema.” And the carriage is breaking
down, falling apart and its coffin, which holds an undead corpse, becomes the site of Bergman’s
character’s fear, the character played by a now elderly Sjöström. The directions of meaning
and the valence of feeling are complex but concrete, and it, apart from its totality of horrified
revelation, represents much of the project of Wild Strawberries and Bergman’s later work,
always looking back so as to look forward, taking as a starting point, and not superficially, our
memories of the past and the dreams that reveal our inner selves. After waking from his
nightmare, Borg will depart on a road trip through the Swedish countryside in order to receive
an honorary award for his lifelong academic achievements. He considers the ceremony an
obligatory but otherwise meaningless ritual and the award itself a mere trinket. In his ailing
health, the learned man of books is troubled by regrets, guilt, and the creeping fear of mortality.
His son and his daughter-in-law will join him on the trip and they will meet a group of young
students. In each case, Borg’s interactions with others become the catalyst for a series of
recollections and dreams that make clear the unresolved matters of the past that trouble the
professor’s sleep, memories of his childhood, of failed romance, that overwhelming fear of
death, and the impelling question of whether any of it matters at all.

Bergman uses the dual modes of flashback (a vision of the past as real or a subjective
remembering) and dream sequence (a vision of inner self and desublimated worries, Freudian
condensation and displacement) to study his characters. For Bergman, remembering was as
vivid as the movies; in interviews he frequently remarked on how clearly he could recall his
childhood, how each item was real to his mind’s eye as if it were in front of him at just that
moment. This was true of even mundane scenes of adolescence, such as rummaging through
his grandmother’s dresser drawer belongings or playing outside in the yard. This immediacy
and its emergent details have always played a role in Bergman’s cinema, from films
like Summer with Monica, with its strong nostalgic overtones, to the through-the-eyes-of-a-
child masterwork Fanny and Alexander, where Alexander stands in for the director’s own
childhood experience. Dreams, a sort of strange cousin to remembering, have taken up much
space in Bergman’s oeuvre. From the vampiric nightmares of Hour of the Wolf to the whole
of Persona, the broken logic of the dream world, its secrets of self, and the cinema’s unique
ability to recreate the dream have each figured prominently in Bergman’s work. In Wild
Strawberries, dreams and memory play together but are contrasted by the humanist dramaturgy
of its waking moments. It’s hard to resist not thinking about the relationship between
remembering, dreams, and the cinema, as Bergman puts them to use so liberally and with such
confidence in form and realization. But the film keeps bringing us back to its human problems,
the quiet crisis at the end of the professor’s life, all the people who he encounters on his trip
and all the people he has ever known. By the end, when Borg lies down again to go to sleep,
the dreams and the remembrances mean something else, something apart from their Freudian
clichés or their singular tragedy, something newly grounded in tangible human relationships
and with a great force of feeling. Unlike the empty streets of Borg’s first nightmare, Bergman
offers us hope through a world full of people.

Bergman begins with Sjöström’s early cinema work but he also wants to upend and so
humanize that legacy, and to show its inevitable winding down. He wants to have his character
stand in for himself, for Sjöström, and for no one at all. The carriage stands for all the things
I’ve mentioned earlier, for Swedish history, for Bergman’s early love of the movies, for the
spectre of death, but it’s also the carriage of Borg’s dream, which stands for Borg’s own
personal fear. However, it must also be reconciled with itself: as merely a carriage. The
interplay of symbol, allegory, and drama is pronounced but never so muddled, so mixed up
with one or another that something should falter in the presence of the next thing. A clock with
no hands no doubts stands for something, but its power is as much a facet of the strength of its
mere presence as it is the suggestion of its meaning. With Bergman, just as it’s true of our
capacity to dream and our compulsion to remember, we feel the symbols before we
intellectualize them.
Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho has been commended for forming the archetypical basis of
all horror films that followed its 1960 release. The mass appeal that Psycho has maintained for
over three decades can undoubtedly be attributed to its universality.In Psycho, Hitchcock
allows the audience to become a subjective character within the plot to enhance the film’s
psychological effects for an audience that is forced to recognize its own neurosis and
psychological inadequacies as it is compelled to identify, for varying lengths of time, with the
contrasting personalities of the film’s main characters.Hitchcock conveys an intensifying
theme in Psycho, that bases itself on the unending subconscious battle between good and evil
that exists in everyone through the audience’s subjective participation and implicit character
parallels.
Psycho begins with a view of a city that is arbitrarily identified along with an exact date
and time. The camera, seemingly at random, chooses first one of the many buildings and then
one of the many windows to explore before the audience is introduced to Marion and
Sam.Hitchcock’s use of random selection creates a sense of normalcy for the audience. The
fact that the city and room were arbitrarily identified impresses upon the audience that their
own lives could randomly be applied to the events that are about to follow.In the opening
sequence of Psycho, Hitchcock succeeds in capturing the audience’s initial senses of awareness
and suspicion while allowing it to identify with Marion’s helpless situation. The audience’s
sympathy toward Marion is heightened with the introduction of Cassidy whose crude boasting
encourages the audience’s dislike of his character.
Cassidy’s blatant statement that all unhappiness can be bought away with money, provokes the
audience to form a justification for Marion’s theft of his forty thousand dollars. As Marion
begins her journey, the audience is drawn farther into the depths of what is disturbingly
abnormal behavior although it is compelled to identify and sympathize with her actions.It is
with Marion’s character that Hitchcock first introduces the notion of a split personality to the
audience. Throughout the first part of the film, Marion’s reflection is often noted in several
mirrors and windows. Hitchcock is, therefore, able to create a voyeuristic sensation within the
audience as it can visualize the effects of any situation through Marion’s conscious mind.
In the car dealership, for example, Marion enters the secluded bathroom in order to have
privacy while counting her money. Hitchcock, however, with upper camera angles and the
convenient placing of a mirror is able to convey the sense of an ever lingering conscious mind
that makes privacy impossible. Hitchcock brings the audience into the bathroom with Marion
and allows it to struggle with its own values and beliefs while Marion makes her own decision
and continues with her journey.
The split personality motif reaches the height of its foreshadowing power as Marion battles
both sides of her conscience while driving on an ominous and seemingly endless road toward
the Bates Motel. Marion wrestles with the voices of those that her crime and disappearance
have affected while the audience is compelled to recognize why it can so easily identify with
Marion despite her wrongful actions.As Marion’s journey comes to an end at the Bates Motel,
Hitchcock has successfully made the audience a direct participant within the plot. The
suspicion and animosity that Marion feels while at the motel are felt by the audience. As Marion
shudders while hearing Norman’s mother yell at him, the audience’s suspicions are heightened
as Hitchcock has, at this point, made Marion the vital link between the audience and the plot.
The initial confrontation between Marion and Norman Bates is used by Hitchcock to subtly
and slowly sway the audience’s sympathy from Marion to Norman. Hitchcock compels the
audience to identify with the quiet and shy character whose devotion to his invalid mother has
cost him his own identity.
After Marion and Norman finish dining, Hitchcock has secured the audience’s empathy for
Norman and the audience is made to question its previous relationship with Marion whose
criminal behavior does not compare to Norman’s seemingly honest and respectable lifestyle.
The audience is reassured, however, when Marion, upon returning to her room, decides to
return the money and face the consequences of her actions. Upon the introduction of Norman,
Hitchcock introduces the first of several character parallels within Psycho. The clash between
Marion and Norman, although not apparent to the audience until the end of the film, is one of
neurosis versus psychosis.
The compulsive and obsessive actions that drove Marion to steal the money are recognizable,
albeit unusual behaviour, that the audience embraces as its sympathy is primarily directed
towards her character. The terror that Hitchcock conveys to the audience manifests itself once
the audience learns that it empathized with a psychotic person to a greater extent than with a
rational one when its sympathy is shifted to Norman.
The shift from the normal to the abnormal is not apparent to the audience in the parlor scene
but the audience is later forced to disturbingly reexamine its own conscience and character
judgment abilities to discover why Norman’s predicament seemed more worthy of its sympathy
than Marion’s.
audience is later forced to disturbingly reexamine its own conscience and character judgment
abilities to discover why Norman’s predicament seemed more worthy of its sympathy than
Marion’s.
During the infamous shower scene, Hitchcock conveys a sense of cleansing for the audience.
Hitchcock has reassured the audience of Marion’s credibility and introduced Norman as a
wholesome character. The audience’s newly discovered security is destroyed when Marion is
murdered.
Even more disturbing for the audience, however, is that the scene is shot not through Marion’s
eyes, but those of the killer. The audience, now in a vulnerable state looks to Norman to replace
Marion as the main focus in its subjective role.
After Marion’s murder, the audience’s role in the film takes a different approach. Hitchcock
provokes the audience to utilize the film’s other characters in order to solve the mystery of
Marion’s death yet he still successfully maintains the sympathetic bond between Norman and
the audience. Interestingly, Hitchcock plays on the audience’s obsession with the stolen money
as the audience knows that it had been sunk yet clings to the fact that Marion’s death may have
been a result of her crime with the introduction of Sam, Lila, and Arbogast.
Hitchcock uses Arbogast’s character to arouse suspicion within the audience. Arbogast’s
murder is not as intense as Marion’s because the audience had not developed any type of
subjective bond with his character. Arbogast’s primary motivation, however, was to recover
the stolen money which similarly compels the audience to take an interest in his quest. Despite
the fact that Arbogast interrupts Norman’s seemingly innocent existence the audience does not
perceive him as an annoyance as they had the interrogative policeman who had hindered
Marion’s journey. When Sam and Lila venture to the Bates Motel to investigate both Marion’s
and Arbogast’s disappearances, Hitchcock presents the audience with more character parallels.
As Lila begins to explore Norman’s home, Hitchcock conveniently places Sam and Norman in
the parlor where Marion had dined with Norman before she had been murdered.
As the two men face each other, the audience is able to see their contrasting personalities in
relation to Marion. Sam, who had legitimately gained Marion’s affection is poised and
respectable in comparison to Norman, whose timid nature and sexual repression are reflected
in the scenes of Lila’s exploration of his bedroom. The conflict that arises between Sam and
Norman reflects the fact that Sam had what Norman wanted but was unable to attain due to his
psychotic nature.Psycho concludes by providing a blatant explanation for Norman’s psychotic
tendencies. The audience, although it had received a valid explanation for Norman’s actions,
is left terrified and confused by the last scene of Norman and the manifestation of his split
personality. Faced with this spectacle, Hitchcock forces the audience to examine its conscious
self in relation to the events that it had just subjectively played a role in.
The fear that Psycho creates for the audience does not arise from the brutality of the murders
but from the subconscious identification with the film’s characters who all reflect one side of
a collective character. Hitchcock enforces the idea that all the basic emotions and sentiments
derived from the film can be felt by anyone as the unending battle between good and evil exists
in all aspects of life.The effective use of character parallels and the creation of the audience’s
subjective role in the plot allows Hitchcock to entice terror and convey a lingering sense of
anxiety within the audience through a progressively intensifying theme. Hitchcock’s brilliance
as a director has consolidated Psycho’s place among the most reputable and profound horror
films ever made.“Psycho,” the 1960 horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was considered
to be both a classic and first modern horror film opening the viewers of cinema to the “slasher”
genre.The “slasher” or “psycho” is Norman Bates, and he takes on a complex role in the film,
seen in the duality between him and Marion — the initial protagonist who he murdered.
Hitchcock skillfully portrays this idea in solo scenes as Marion driving to Bates Motel and the
final scene as Norman sits in the police station, not as separate ideas, but rather a call and
response to Marion’s pursuit for respectability.Although their duality might be obscured by
having opposing roles in the plot, Hitchcock relies on film techniques and symbolism to portray
the doubling of Marion and Norman Bates to voice his opinion against a repressive
society. This repression in the ’60s was a historically relevant factor in the acceptance of
identity and is still relevant today in a contemporary context.
The film initially follows Marion and her attempt to escape a repressed society to have a
respectable relationship until she is killed by Norman, in which the protagonist becomes
Norman. Hitchcock portrays these two characters alone to emphasize their exclusiveness and
in their respective ways, estrangement from society.As Marion escapes from the city,
supposedly representing the society she runs away from, she ends up at the Bates Motel. Her
journey to Bates Motel symbolizes the traversing from the public world into the private and
from the restrictive world into the free one. As the conditions become stormy when she drives,
the visual effect of the sign appearing out of the storm seems positive, a lifeline thrown to
Marion in her distress, but the motel is only an illusion of freedom and not an escape.

The viewer continues to find out that Bates Motel is another place of repression, in which
Norman is driven psychopathic because of his repressive mother. Marion gets killed by
Norman, a murderer because he is repressed. Norman’s mother represents repressive authority
as she was abusive and controlling of Norman during his childhood, so Bates Motel
symbolically represents the society that Marion is running from.

Hitchcock first shows that Marion is unable to escape repression because she is killed, and
similarly, Norman is unable to escape his mother’s oppressive control in her murder because
she still lives in his mind as he is engulfed with this obsession with her.

Hitchcock is addressing the overlying societal pressures in Marion’s previous life through the
duality between the characters. The house watches over what Marion initially sees as shelter
(Bates Motel), and it symbolizes a smaller version of the repressive society.

In a pessimistic view, Hitchcock implies that there is no escape from society because as Marion
runs away, she only finds Bates Motel and more repression. The two characters are trying to
escape from a repressive society to freedom — for Marion, respectability and for Norman,
individuality — but ended in tragedy.

Hitchcock’s film hinges on a larger societal idea that people should be free from a repressive
society but not to the extent where they become a danger to themselves or others. He addresses
greater contemporary issues with repression seen in Norman revolving around unhealthy
obsessions and desires that come from a lack of free will.

Although the film is from the ’60s, it addresses a timeless dilemma with inequality and the
oppression that comes with it through the duality of these two characters.

Plot
During a Friday afternoon tryst in a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel, real-estate secretary Marion
Crane and her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, discuss how they cannot afford to get married because
of Sam's debts. After lunch, Marion returns to work where a client leaves a $40,000 cash
payment on a property, an enormous sum for the time (equivalent to $349,900 in 2020).
Marion's boss asks her to deposit the money in the bank and allows her to leave early after she
complains of a headache. Instead, she decides to steal the money and drive to Sam's home in
Fairvale, California, returning home first to pack. She is spotted by her employer at an
intersection on the way out of town, who walks right past the hood of her car, but continues on
his way. En route to Fairvale, Marion pulls onto the shoulder and sleeps until morning. She is
awakened in broad daylight by a California Highway Patrol officer. Suspicious of her nervous
behavior, the officer follows her. She stops at a Bakersfield automobile dealership and trades
in her car for one with California plates. The officer eyes her suspiciously as she drives away.
During a downpour, Marion stops for the night at the unoccupied Bates Motel, which lost its
trade when the main highway it had been on was moved. The proprietor, Norman Bates, invites
her for dinner after check-in. She accepts his invitation but overhears an argument between
Norman and his mother Norma about bringing a woman into their home, a Gothic mansion
which sits perched above the motel. Instead, they eat in the motel parlor, where he tells her
about his life with his mother, who is mentally ill and forbids him to have a life apart from her.
Moved by elements of Norman's story that resonate with her own plight, Marion decides to
drive back to Phoenix in the morning to return the stolen money. Returning to her room, she
hides the money inside a newspaper and begins to shower. While doing so, a shadowy figure
stabs her to death. Panicked at what happened, Norman runs to Marion's room. He cleans up
the crime scene, putting her body and belongings—including the newspaper—into the trunk of
her car and sinking it in a swamp near the motel.
A week later, Marion's sister Lila arrives in Fairvale, tells Sam about the theft, and confronts
him about her whereabouts. He denies knowing anything about her disappearance. Private
investigator Arbogast approaches them and confirms that he has been hired to retrieve the
money. Arbogast sleuths local lodgings and discovers that Marion spent a night at the Bates
Motel. He questions Norman, whose stammering and inconsistent answers arouse his
suspicion. When Arbogast learns that Marion had spoken to Norma, he asks to speak to her,
but Norman refuses to allow it. Arbogast updates Sam and Lila about his search for Marion
and promises to phone again in an hour. When Arbogast enters the Bates' home searching for
Norma, a figure emerges from the bedroom and stabs him to death.
When Lila and Sam do not hear from Arbogast, Sam visits the motel. He sees a figure in the
house who he assumes is Norma, but she ignores him. Worried about further inquiries about
his mother, Norman carries her from her bedroom and hides her in the fruit cellar. Lila and
Sam alert the local deputy sheriff, who informs them that Norma died in a murder-suicide ten
years earlier. The sheriff concludes that Arbogast lied to Sam and Lila so he could pursue
Marion and the money. Convinced instead that some ill has befallen Arbogast, Lila and Sam
drive to the motel. Sam distracts Norman in the motel office while Lila sneaks inside the house.
Sensing he is being stalled, Norman becomes agitated and knocks Sam unconscious. When
Lila hears someone enter the house she hides in the cellar, where she discovers
Norma's mummified corpse. Upon hearing Lila scream, Norman, wearing his mother's clothes
and a wig, enters the cellar and attempts to stab her. Sam appears and subdues him.
At the police station, a psychiatrist explains that Norman murdered Norma and her lover ten
years earlier out of jealousy. Unable to stand being separated from her, he stole her corpse and
began to treat it as if she were still alive. He recreated his mother in his own mind as an alternate
personality, just as jealous and possessive as when she was still alive. Whenever Norman feels
attracted to a woman, "Mother" takes over. In that state, Norman had already killed two young
women before murdering Marion, with Arbogast a collateral slaying hiding "his Mother's"
crimes. While Norman sits in a jail cell, "Mother's" voice protests that the murders were all
Norman's doing. Marion's car is then seen being towed from the swamp.

Gone with the wind

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"Gone With the Wind” presents a sentimental view of the Civil War, in which the “Old South”
takes the place of Camelot and the war was fought not so much to defeat the Confederacy and
free the slaves as to give Miss Scarlett O'Hara her comeuppance. But we've known that for
years; the tainted nostalgia comes with the territory. Yet as “GWTW” approaches its 60th
anniversary, it is still a towering landmark of film, quite simply because it tells a good story,
and tells it wonderfully well.
For the story it wanted to tell, it was the right film at the right time. Scarlett O'Hara is not a
creature of the 1860s but of the 1930s: a free-spirited, willful modern woman. The way was
prepared for her by the flappers of Fitzgerald's jazz age, by the bold movie actresses of the
period, and by the economic reality of the Depression, which for the first time put lots of
women to work outside their homes.

Scarlett's lusts and headstrong passions have little to do with myths of delicate Southern
flowers, and everything to do with the sex symbols of the movies that shaped her
creator, Margaret Mitchell: actresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Mae
West. She was a woman who wanted to control her own sexual adventures, and that is the key
element in her appeal. She also sought to control her economic destiny in the years after the
South collapsed, first by planting cotton and later by running a successful lumber business. She
was the symbol the nation needed as it headed into World War II; the spiritual sister of Rosie
the Riveter.
Of course, she could not quite be allowed to get away with marrying three times, coveting
sweet Melanie's husband Ashley, shooting a plundering Yankee, and banning her third husband
from the marital bed in order to protect her petite waistline from the toll of childbearing. It
fascinated audiences (it fascinates us still) to see her high-wire defiance in a male chauvinist
world, but eventually such behavior had to be punished, and that is what “Frankly, my dear, I
don't give a damn” is all about. If “GWTW” had ended with Scarlett's unquestioned triumph,
it might not have been nearly as successful. Its original audiences (women, I suspect, even
more than men) wanted to see her swatted down--even though, of course, tomorrow would be
another day.
Scarlett's lusts and headstrong passions have little to do with myths of delicate Southern
flowers, and everything to do with the sex symbols of the movies that shaped her
creator, Margaret Mitchell: actresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Mae
West. She was a woman who wanted to control her own sexual adventures, and that is the key
element in her appeal. She also sought to control her economic destiny in the years after the
South collapsed, first by planting cotton and later by running a successful lumber business. She
was the symbol the nation needed as it headed into World War II; the spiritual sister of Rosie
the Riveter.
Of course, she could not quite be allowed to get away with marrying three times, coveting
sweet Melanie's husband Ashley, shooting a plundering Yankee, and banning her third husband
from the marital bed in order to protect her petite waistline from the toll of childbearing. It
fascinated audiences (it fascinates us still) to see her high-wire defiance in a male chauvinist
world, but eventually such behavior had to be punished, and that is what “Frankly, my dear, I
don't give a damn” is all about. If “GWTW” had ended with Scarlett's unquestioned triumph,
it might not have been nearly as successful. Its original audiences (women, I suspect, even
more than men) wanted to see her swatted down--even though, of course, tomorrow would be
another day.

Rhett Butler was just the man to do it. As he tells Scarlett in a key early scene, “You need
kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone
who knows how.” For “kissed,” substitute the word you're thinking of. Dialogue like that
reaches something deep and fundamental in most people; it stirs their fantasies about being
brought to sexual pleasure despite themselves. (“Know why women love the horse whisperer?”
I was asked by a woman friend not long ago. “They figure, if that's what he can do with a horse,
think what he could do with me.”) Scarlett's confusion is between her sentimental fixation on
a tepid “Southern gentleman” (Ashley Wilkes) and her unladylike lust for a bold man (Rhett
Butler). The most thrilling struggle in “GWTW” is not between North and South, but between
Scarlett's lust and her vanity.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were well matched in the two most coveted movie roles of the
era. Both were well-served by a studio system that pumped out idealized profiles and
biographies, but we now know what outlaws they were: Gable, the hard-drinking playboy
whose studio covered up his scandals; Leigh, the neurotic, drug-abusing beauty who was the
despair of every man who loved her.
They brought experience, well-formed tastes and strong egos to their roles, and the camera,
which cannot lie and often shows more than the story intends, caught the flash of an eye and
the readiness of body language that suggested sexual challenge. Consider the early scene where
they first lay eyes on one another during the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Rhett “exchanges a
cool, challenging stare with Scarlett,” observes the critic Tim Dirks. “She notices him
undressing her with his eyes: `He looks as if--as if he knows what I look like without my
shimmy.' “

If the central drama of “Gone With the Wind” is the rise and fall of a sexual adventuress, the
counterpoint is a slanted but passionate view of the Old South. Unlike most historical epics,
“GWTW” has a genuine sweep, a convincing feel for the passage of time. It shows the South
before, during and after the war, all seen through Scarlett's eyes. And Scarlett is a Southerner.
So was Margaret Mitchell. The movie signals its values in the printed narration that opens the
film, in language that seems astonishing in its bland, unquestioned assumptions:
“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty
world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies
Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream
remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

Yes, with the capital letters and all. One does not have to ask if the Slaves saw it the same way.
The movie sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the
sweat of slaves (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands
than for all the crimes of slavery). But to its major African-American characters it does at least
grant humanity and complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-
sighted person in the entire story (she won one of the film's eight Oscars), and
although Butterfly McQueen, as Prissy, will always be associated with the line “I don't know
nothin' about birthin' babies,” the character as a whole is engaging and subtly subversive.
Remember that when “GWTW” was made, segregation was still the law in the South and the
reality in the North. That the Ku Klux Klan was written out of one scene for fear of giving
offense to elected officials who belonged to it. The movie comes from a world with values and
assumptions fundamentally different from our own--and yet, of course, so does all great classic
fiction, starting with Homer and Shakespeare. A politically correct “GWTW” would not be
worth making, and might largely be a lie.
As an example of filmmaking craft, “GWTW” is still astonishing. Several directors worked on
the film; George Cukor incurred Clark Gable's dislike and was replaced by Victor Fleming,
who collapsed from nervous exhaustion and was relieved by Sam Wood and Cameron
Menzies. The real auteur was the producer, David O. Selznick, the Steven Spielberg of his day,
who understood that the key to mass appeal was the linking of melodrama with state-of-the-art
production values. Some of the individual shots in “GWTW” still have the power to leave us
breathless, including the burning of Atlanta, the flight to Tara and the “street of dying men”
shot, as Scarlett wanders into the street and the camera pulls back until the whole Confederacy
seems to lie broken and bleeding as far as the eye can see.
And there is a joyous flamboyance in the visual style that is appealing in these days when so
many directors have trained on the blandness of television. Consider an early shot where
Scarlett and her father look out over the land, and the camera pulls back, the two figures and a
tree held in black silhouette with the landscape behind them. Or the way the flames of Atlanta
are framed to backdrop Scarlett's flight in the carriage.I've seen “Gone With the Wind” in four
of its major theatrical revivals--1954, 1961, 1967 (the abortive “widescreen” version) and 1989,
and now here is the 1998 restoration. It will be around for years to come, a superb example of
Hollywood's art and a time capsule of weathering sentimentality for a Civilization gone with
the wind, all right--gone, but not forgotten.
The film opens with Scarlett O’Hara surrounded by admirers, but she is crushed when her
father, Gerald O’Hara, tells her of Ashley Wilkes’s upcoming marriage to his cousin Melanie
Hamilton. Scarlett’s father also reminds her of the importance and permanence of the land and
their home, Tara, but she is too distraught to listen to him.At a barbeque the next day at Twelve
Oaks, the neighboring plantation, Scarlett is surrounded by even more admirers, but she is
overtaken by jealousy when she sees Ashley and Melanie together. The roguish Rhett Butler
sees Scarlett on the staircase and expresses interest in her, but Scarlett corners Ashley in the
library to confess her love for him. When Ashley says they are too different to be together and
leaves, Rhett reveals he has been listening the whole time.The war quickly follows. Scarlett
agrees to marry Charles Hamilton and holds the ceremony a day after Ashley and Melanie wed.
Soon after, Scarlett receives a letter informing her of Charles’s death in the war. Scarlett travels
to Atlanta to stay with Melanie and her aunt, and while there she meets Rhett again. Now a
cynical war hero, Rhett pays $150 to dance with Scarlett at a charity ball. Those listening are
shocked by the offer, but Scarlett seizes on his offer as her only chance to dance, since she is
in her mourning period, and agrees. Afterward, Rhett visits her regularly.The South begins to
crumble as the war continues and deaths mount. Scarlett works as a volunteer nurse tending to
wounded and dying soldiers. She still pines for Ashley, who during his leave makes Scarlett
promise to look after Melanie. Atlanta is attacked by the Yankees, and in the resulting chaos
Scarlett is forced to help deliver Melanie’s baby when the house slave, Prissy, backs down
from the task. In the streets of the besieged city, Scarlett meets up with Big Sam, Tara’s former
slave foreman, who tells Scarlett sketchy details of her family’s fate, including the news that
her mother is ill. As the Confederates retreat, Rhett helps Scarlett, Melanie, the baby, and Prissy
flee the city. Rhett leaves Scarlett, giving her his gun for protection, and he leaves to join the
war effort. The women return to Tara to find Scarlett’s mother dead, her father helpless, and
Tara in ruins. Undaunted, Scarlett ends the first part of the film resolving to do whatever she
must to never go hungry again.Part Two opens with Scarlett, her family, and the slaves picking
cotton in the field. Later, when Scarlett discovers a Yankee deserter trying to loot Tara, she
shoots and kills him with the gun Rhett gave her and takes the money he has stolen from others.
Frank Kennedy asks Scarlett for the hand of Suellen, her sister, and Scarlett agrees to the match.
Later, Scarlett discovers that the taxes on Tara have been raised to $300, an impossible amount.
A despairing Scarlett once again meets Ashley in secret, declaring her love for him and asking
that they run away together. Ashley replies that Scarlett could never leave because she loves
the land too much.

When Tara’s former overseer returns and attempts to buy the property, Scarlett refuses. Her
father mounts his horse to chase the overseer away but falls off during a jump and dies. Scarlett
goes to Atlanta in an attempt to charm Rhett into paying her debt, but Rhett is a Union prisoner,
jailed for blockade running and war profiteering. He realizes what she’s up to and tells her that
his money is tied up in Europe. On the way back to Tara, Scarlett runs into Frank, whom she
marries for the tax money after she lies that Suellen is engaged to someone else. Scarlett uses
Frank’s money to build a successful mill and shames Ashley into working there. Later, Scarlett
is attacked by hobos on her way through Shanty Town to the mill, and on a revenge mission
Frank is killed and Ashley is injured. Rhett, who tried to stop the men from going, protects the
 remaining men from any repercussions that might result from their investigation of Yankee
officers by claiming they spent the night in a brothel run by Belle Watling.Rhett asks Scarlett
to marry him, and she finally says yes. After moving to Atlanta they have a daughter they name
Bonnie Blue, after an early Confederate flag. Scarlett says this will be their last child because
she is still in love with Ashley. Rhett leaves, though Belle convinces him to return because
Bonnie needs him. Rhett and Scarlett’s marital problems continue. Finally, after getting drunk
one night, Rhett swears he will drive Ashley out of Scarlett’s mind forever and carries Scarlett
upstairs to their bedroom.

The next morning Rhett leaves, taking Bonnie with him to London. When Bonnie says she
wants to go home to her mother, Rhett returns her to Scarlett and then says he’s leaving again.
Scarlett admits that she’s pregnant and that she doesn’t want the baby. Rhett says cynically that
maybe she’ll have an accident. Immediately, Scarlett falls down the stairs and loses the baby.
Some time later, Rhett and Scarlett are sitting on their porch, discussing the possibility of a
reconciliation and watching Bonnie ride her pony. Bonnie attempts a jump and dies when she
fails to clear the fence. Rhett goes mad with grief and, despite the pleas of Mammy, an old
slave, temporarily refuses to allow his daughter to be buried.These events prove to be too much
for Melanie, who is already weakened by fatigue and a second pregnancy. She collapses.
Before dying, she asks Scarlett to look after Ashley and their child, Beau, and to be kind to
Rhett. When Scarlett sees how stricken Ashley is, she realizes that she and Ashley will never
be together and rushes home to tell Rhett that it’s him she really loves. When she arrives,
though, she finds Rhett leaving for good this time, preparing to return to Charleston. Scarlett
begs him not to go and asks what she will do without him, to which Rhett replies, “Frankly,
my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Scarlett decides to go to Tara to think of a way to get him back,
reminding herself that “tomorrow is another day.”

• Scarlett O’Hara
Played by Vivien Leigh

A headstrong Southern belle and the protagonist of the film. A self-centered, determined beauty
willing to step on anyone in her way, Scarlett deeply resents anything that interferes with her
own interests. Constantly seeking money and entertainment, Scarlett fights for Tara only when
it becomes a part of her self-image and even then is willing to abandon it at a moment’s notice
for a life more free of responsibility. Seeing Ashley as a living example of the social position
she craves, Scarlett finds herself madly in love with him throughout most of the film. Though
attracted to Rhett, Scarlett resents his ability to see the calculating woman beneath her charming
veneer.

• Rhett Butler
Played by Clark Gable

A Confederate rogue and major foil for the protagonist. A bold, cynical rule-breaker, Rhett
claims that his heroic smuggling during the war was purely for profit and that he doesn’t care
 what society thinks of him. Despite these assertions, he joins the fighting as a soldier and later
works to carefully cultivate his relationships with his neighbors. Comfortable with his wealth
and the presentation of it, Rhett tries to downplay any service he performs to those around him.
Rejected by everyone in his hometown of Charleston, Rhett is drawn to Scarlett because he
sees her as his soul mate in rebellion. Despite his many problems with Scarlett as a wife and
mother, Rhett loves their daughter Bonnie very deeply.

• Ashley Wilkes
Played by Leslie Howard

A Southern gentleman and major obsession of the protagonist. A passive, blond, handsome
man, Ashley is so caught up in visions of the world as he feels it should be that he never does
anything to affect the world as it is. Though Ashley claims to care deeply for both Melanie and
Scarlett, the way he strings both women along suggests that he cares more for the tragic
romance of the situation. Unlike Rhett with his daughter, Bonnie, Ashley is rarely shown
having contact with his son, Beau.

• Melanie Hamilton Wilkes

Played by Olivia de Havilland

Ashley’s wife. A kind woman unable to turn away anyone who needs help, Melanie is well
liked by a swath of society that ranges from community leaders to the local madam. Wanting
to find the best in everyone, Melanie foolishly sees Scarlett as a supportive sister-in-law and
defends her at every opportunity. Despite this sweet nature, Melanie is also highly practical
and willing to do what must be done to save those she loves.

• Mammy
Played by Hattie McDaniel

A house slave who helped raise Scarlett. Big-voiced and bold, Mammy remains unafraid to
firmly chide Scarlett for her misbehavior despite the little effect it has. Though very loyal to
the O’Haras, Mammy eventually warms up to Rhett and becomes his firm supporter.

• Gerald O’Hara
Played by Thomas Mitchell

Scarlett’s father. A native Irishman with a fierce love of Tara and the land surrounding it,
Gerald has a reckless side he indulges through wild jumps on his horse. Though he is the
unquestioned head of the house, Gerald regularly seeks his wife’s counsel on how to run the
plantation, and it is her death as much as the destruction of the land that finally drives him to a
state of half-madness.
• Ellen O’Hara
Played by Barbara O’Neil

Scarlett’s mother. A stately, dignified woman, Ellen has very firm views on what is and what
is not proper behavior and expects to see those views maintained by others in her household.
She is the emotional center of her family, and the O’Haras begin to break apart after her death.

• Belle Watling
Played by Ona Munson

Madam of an Atlanta brothel. A kind, no-nonsense woman who maintains self-respect despite
what other people think of her, Belle loves her son and has sent him away to keep him from
the vices of her profession. Belle respects and admires Melanie, cares deeply for Rhett, and
works to look out for their best interests

• India Wilkes
Played by Alicia Rhett

Ashley’s sister. A serious, dignified young woman, India was in love with Charles Hamilton
before Scarlett stole him away. Because of this action, as well as the way Scarlett continues to
chase after the married Ashley, India considers Scarlett a despicable woman who thinks only
of using others.

• Suellen O’Hara
Played by Evelyn Keyes

Scarlett’s younger sister. A young woman constantly in Scarlett’s shadow, Suellen deeply
resents Tara and all the indignities the O’Haras must go through to keep the plantation. Suellen
begins to hate her older sister after Scarlett marries Suellen’s sweetheart Frank, leaving Suellen
with the fear that she will die an old maid.

• Franklin Kennedy
Played by Carroll Nye

Scarlett’s second husband. A shy, older man whom Scarlett tricks into marrying her, Frank is
truly in love with Scarlett’s younger sister Suellen. Frank’s marriage makes his life miserable
despite his part ownership in a business made even more successful by Scarlett

• Prissy
Played by Butterfly McQueen
 A squeaky-voiced house slave. Silly, squeamish, and inclined to exaggeration, Prissy is the
film’s comic relief.

• Charles Hamilton
Played by Rand Brooks

Melanie’s brother and Scarlett’s first husband. A young, rash idealist who is instantly enamored
of Scarlett, Charles is completely unaware of his wife’s feelings for Ashley.

• Aunt Pittypat Hamilton

Played by Laura Hope Crews

Melanie’s aunt. A high-strung woman who despairs over her role as Scarlett’s chaperone,
Pittypat is regularly in need of smelling salts.

• Bonnie Blue Butler

Played by Cammie King

Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter. An attractive woman and a skilled horse rider who loves both
her parents, Bonnie is the glue that holds her parents’ marriage together.

• Carreen O’Hara
Played by Ann Rutherford

Scarlett’s youngest sister. Barely a teenager at the beginning of the film, Carreen remains
optimistic and encouraging throughout the film. She cares deeply for Tara, working hard and
calmly bearing the sacrifices required to maintain the plantation.

• Dr. Meade
Played by Harry Davenport

The local doctor in Atlanta. An intelligent, brusque man with a low tolerance for foolishness,
Dr. Meade takes his responsibilities to the wounded and dying Confederate soldiers very
seriously.

• Jonas Wilkerson
Played by Victor Jory

Tara’s overseer at the beginning of the film. Thin and weasel-like, Jonas attempts to combat
his feelings of inferiority by going north after the war and becoming wealthy. He later returns,
 marries his mistress, and attempts to buy the plantation that once fired him. Jonas becomes
enraged when Scarlett refuses to consider him her equal.

• Emmy Slattery
Played by Isabel Jewell

Jonas’s mistress and later his wife. Though Jonas gives her money and legitimacy after the war,
Emmy is still considered “white trash,” even by the O’Haras’ slaves. Scarlett blames Emmy
for her mother’s death.

• Mrs. Dolly Merriwether

Played by Jane Darwell

An Atlanta gossip. A self-declared monitor of propriety, Mrs. Merriwether warms up to Rhett

only after he begins coming to her for advice. Scarlett, not willing to make such a gesture,
never escapes Mrs. Merriwether’s disapproval.

• Mrs. Meade
Played by Leona Roberts

Dr. Meade’s wife. A gossip almost equal to Mrs. Merriwether, Mrs. Meade thinks highly of
Melanie. She is susceptible to moments of gullibility.

• Big Sam
Played by Everett Brown

A farm slave. Large and friendly, Sam remains loyal to the O’Haras even when he is no longer
at Tara. Though never acknowledged for it, Sam risks his life defending Scarlett against his
fellow shantytown residents.

• Stuart and Brent Tarleton

Played by Fred Crane and George Reeves

Twin brothers. Two of Scarlett’s many admirers, Stuart and Brent predict that the coming war
will be short and glorious for the South. Later, they are included among the lists of the dead.

• Pork
Played by Oscar Polk

A thin, nervous house slave. Pork is one of the small group of slaves who remain loyal to the
O’Haras despite emancipation.
• Beau Wilkes
Played by Mickey Kuhn

Ashley and Melanie’s young son. Beau has very few speaking lines. Beau’s birth severely
weakens Melanie’s health and adds to Scarlett’s jealousy.

The Permanence of the Land

As Gerald tells Scarlett in the opening scenes of the film, the land should be cherished because
it can survive humanity’s recklessness. However, it is not until Scarlett escapes from Atlanta
and returns to her destroyed home that she begins to believe her father. Though her entire way
of life is gone, she fights to keep the land because it is all that remains of the world she lost.
While she is in Atlanta making her fortune, Scarlett knows that the land will be there waiting
for her. After Melanie, Bonnie, and Rhett are gone from her life, Scarlett uses the land as a
starting point to help her rebuild. The South, too, lives through the horrors of war and remains
unbroken, though it is forever changed. The Old South is gone, but as long as the land remains
its people will always be able to start life over again.

The Real Cost of War

Shying away from scenes of dramatic battles and military heroism, Gone With the
Wind expresses the true horrors of war by showing the destructive effect it has on people caught
in the crossfire. Rather than focusing on glinting sabers or dramatic cannon fire, the film instead
concentrates on the pain-twisted faces of hundreds of mutilated and dying soldiers. The cynical
Rhett is commended for his wartime “heroism,” but those few words of praise are quickly
overshadowed by the mobs of people desperate to hear whether their loved ones are alive.
Death is a frequent occurrence. Dr. Meade’s family gathers close as they mourn the loss of
their oldest son and brother. When the younger boy swears vengeance against the Yankees,
Melanie squelches the young man’s desire with a simple truth: it would do his parents no good
to have both their sons dead.

Self-reliance As the Key to Success

The characters in Gone With the Wind are most successful when they depend on no one but
themselves. Scarlett refuses to listen to other people’s opinions and builds a successful business
relying only on her own judgment and skills. Her insistence that Ashley be by her side is only
an impediment. Melanie, too, refuses to allow the opinions of others to influence her, and while
some call her judgments foolish, she dies having lived a happier life than anyone she leaves
behind. Rhett, rejected by his family, builds his fortune through his own confidence and
abilities. Though he remains unbeaten by war and Yankee imprisonment, his need for Scarlett’s
affection eventually drains him of his strength. Only at the end of the film, when he heads out
on his own, does he find his feet again.

Personal Strength Can Lead to Loss

Though strong characters succeed through the Gone With the Wind, the film suggests that
strength is often a person’s undoing. Scarlett, who has beaten poverty, the Yankees, and public
opinion, loses the man she has come to love because she is too stubborn to see that she was
wrong about Ashley. Melanie, who has enough emotional strength to carry every other
character in the film on her shoulders, dies when her pregnancy proves to be too much. Gerald,
whose bravery made him such a skilled horseman, dies taking a final, reckless jump. The
determination that made Rhett a successful smuggler and social black sheep proves to be his
undoing and causes him to stay with Scarlett long after he should have let her go.

Rashamon
Akira Kurosowa
A woodcutter and a priest are seated beneath the impressive gate into the city of Rashomon as
a means of protection against the rain when a common appears. He joins them beneath gate
and the two immediately launch into telling him about the distressing story they witnessed. The
woodcutter discovered the body of a murdered samurai three days ago and the priest confirms
having seen the samurai traveling with his wife earlier that day. The woodcutter and the priest
were summoned to court to bear witness, and the police arrive with a bandit in custody who
had confessed to the murder. This framing device paves the way for flashbacks that give each
of the participants a chance to offer their own subjective version of what took place.

The Bandit’s Tale:

The bandit proves to be a notorious outlaw and his story is one involving tricking the samurai
to veer off the mountain trail with the enticement of ancient swords. Once he got the samurai
into the grove, he tied him to a tree and then fetched the man’s wife. While she valiantly
attempted to defend herself with the use of small dagger, the bandit ultimately succeeded in
what he terms a seduction. Afterward, overcome with guilt and shame, she begged the bandit
to challenge her husband to a duel to death in order to avoid the presence of two men who bore
witness to her dishonor. The bandit claims gallantry by agreeing to this demand, thus arguing
that the samurai’s death was therefore not murder but an honorable defeat in battle. The woman
then ran away into the woods. At the conclusion of his tale, the court inquires about that
expensive dagger that was left behind. He explains that he simply forgot about it amidst all the
confusion, and pleads to being foolish in allowing such a valuable prize to escape his greedy
grasp.

The Wife’s Tale:

The samurai’s wife also appears in court, but her version is markedly different. She claims that
the seduction was, in fact, rape and that afterward the bandit simply left. She went to her
husband and begged for forgiveness, but received only cold silence. Releasing him from his
bondage to the tree, she begged her husband to put her at peace by killing her. Again, the
samurai merely stares with disgust and hatred. This expression so distressed the woman that
she fainted with the dagger still in her grip. Upon coming back to consciousness, her husband
lay dead with the dagger sticking from his chest. Her attempt to commit suicide failed.
The priest and the woodcutter then tell the commoner beneath the gate with them that the
testimony of the dead samurai was even heard. This was accomplished through the intervention
of a medium through whom the spirt of the dead samurai related his version.
The Samurai’s Tale:
The samurai explains through the medium that after raping his wife, the bandit asked her to go
off with him. She agrees and then begs to kill her husband. That way she can absolve herself
of the guilt of belonging to different men. The bandit, appalled by this display, grabbed her and
offered the samurai the choice of whether she lived or died. It was this offer that moved the
samurai to feel compassionate enough to pardon him. Meanwhile, the wife runs away and after
failing to catch up to her, the bandit returned and set the samurai free. He then took up his
wife’s dagger and killed himself. Somebody later removed the dagger.

The Woodcutter’s Story

After the trial, the story returns to the city gate where the woodcutter tells the commoner that
every one of the accounts told at the trial was a lie. He knows this because he witnessed
everything, but never came forward with everything knew because he just didn’t want to get
involved. The woodcutter explains that the bandit pleaded with the wife to marry him, but
instead she chose to set her husband free. The reason the husband was not willing to fight the
bandit was because he could not see the wisdom in risking his own life for that of a spoiled
woman like his wife. The woman then began upbraiding both her husband and the bandit with
recriminations challenging their manhood. In fact, she had incited the men to fight over her
only to cover her face once they raised swords to each other. The men reluctantly fought,
resulting in a duel far less honorable than that described. The only reason that the bandit
emerged victorious was the result of a lucky stroke that left the samurai begging for his life on
the ground before the bandit ran his sword through him. This caused the woman to flee in
terror. The bandit, failing to catch up to her, instead grabbed the samurai’s sword and limped
away.

Following the woodcutter’s story, all three hear the sound of a mewling baby. They discover a
basket with the baby inside. The commoner steals a kimono and amulet that was left behind
for the baby. The woodcutter confronts the commoner over the theft from a defenseless infant,
but the commoner turns the table on the woodcutter when he realizes that the real reason for
his silence in court was that he was the one who took the missing dagger. The commoner takes
his leave with the expression of a philosophy that each man is only motivated by his own self-
interest.

The priest holds the baby, overcome by a sudden lack of faith in the goodness of man. The
woodcutter reaches for the baby and the priest backs off, suddenly suspicious of the other’s
intent. The woodcutter allays his fears by asserting that since he has six children of his own
already, one more will hardly matter. This information suddenly changes every assumption
about the woodcutter in the mind of the priest, and thus restores his belief in the goodness of
humankind.

Shortly before filming was to begin on "Rashomon," Akira Kurosawa's three assistant directors
came to see him. They were unhappy. They didn't understand the story. "If you read it
diligently," he told them, "you should be able to understand it, because it was written with the
intention of being comprehensible." They would not leave: "We believe we have read it
carefully, and we still don't understand it at all."
Recalling this day in Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa explains the movie to them.
The explanation is reprinted in the booklet that comes with the new Criterion DVD of
"Rashomon." Two of the assistants are satisfied with his explanation, but the third leaves
looking puzzled. What he doesn't understand is that while there is an explanation of the film's
four eyewitness accounts of a murder, there is not a solution.
Kurosawa is correct that the screenplay is comprehensible as exactly what it is: Four
testimonies that do not match. It is human nature to listen to witnesses and decide who is telling
the truth, but the first words of the screenplay, spoken by the woodcutter, are "I just don't
understand." His problem is that he has heard the same events described by all three participants
in three different ways--and all three claim to be the killer.
"Rashomon" (1950) struck the world of film like a thunderbolt. Directed by Kurosawa in the
early years of his career, before he was hailed as a grandmaster, it was made reluctantly by a
minor Japanese studio, and the studio head so disliked it that he removed his name from the
credits. Then it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, effectively opening the world
of Japanese cinema to the West. It won the Academy Award as best foreign film. It set box
office records for a subtitled film. Its very title has entered the English language, because, like
"Catch-22," it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
In a sense, "Rashomon" is a victim of its success, as Stuart Galbraith IV writes in The Emperor
and the Wolf, his comprehensive new study of the lives and films of Kurosawa and his favorite
actor, Toshiro Mifune. When it was released, he observes, nobody had ever seen anything like
it. It was the first use of flashbacks that disagreed about the action they were flashing back to.
It supplied first-person eyewitness accounts that differed radically--one of them coming from
beyond the grave. It ended with three self-confessed killers and no solution.
Since 1950 the story device of "Rashomon" has been borrowed repeatedly; Galbraith cites
"Courage Under Fire," and certainly "The Usual Suspects" was also influenced, in the way it
shows us flashbacks that do not agree with any objective reality. Because we see the events in
flashbacks, we assume they reflect truth. But all they reflect is a point of view, sometimes lied
about. Smart films know this, less ambitious films do not. Many films that use a flashback only
to fill in information are lazy.
The genius of "Rashomon" is that all of the flashbacks are both true and false. True, in that
they present an accurate portrait of what each witness thinks happened. False, because as
Kurosawa observes in his autobiography, "Human beings are unable to be honest with
themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing."
The wonder of "Rashomon" is that while the shadowplay of truth and memory is going on, we
are absorbed by what we trust is an unfolding story. The film's engine is our faith that we'll get
to the bottom of things--even though the woodcutter tells us at the outset he doesn't understand,
and if an eyewitness who has heard the testimony of the other three participants doesn't
understand, why should we expect to?
The film opens in torrential rain, and five shots move from long shot to closeup to reveal two
men sitting in the shelter of Kyoto's Rashomon Gate. The rain will be a useful device,
unmistakably setting apart the present from the past. The two men are a priest and a woodcutter,
and when a commoner runs in out of the rain and engages them in conversation, he learns that
a samurai has been murdered and his wife raped and a local bandit is suspected. In the course
of telling the commoner what they know, the woodcutter and the priest will introduce
flashbacks in which the bandit, the wife and the woodcutter say what they saw, or think they
saw--and then a medium turns up to channel the ghost of the dead samurai. Although the stories
are in radical disagreement, it is unlike any of the original participants are lying for their own
advantage, since each claims to be the murderer.
Kurosawa's screenplay is only the ground which the film travels, however. The real gift of
"Rashomon" is in its emotions and visuals. The cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa evokes the
heat, light and shade of a semi-tropical forest. (Slugs dropped from trees onto the cast and crew,
Kurosawa recalled, and they slathered themselves with salt to repel them.)
The woodcutter's opening journey into the woods is famous as a silent sequence which suggests
he is traveling into another realm of reality. Miyagawa shoots directly into the sun (then a
taboo) and there are shots where the sharply-contrasted shadows of overhead leaves cast a web
upon the characters, making them half-disappear into the ground beneath.
In one long sustained struggle between the bandit (Mifune) and the samurai (Masayuki Mori),
their exhaustion, fear and shortness of breath becomes palpable. In a sequence where the
woman (Machiko Kyo) taunts both men, there is a silence in which thoughts form that will
decide life or death. Perhaps the emotions evolved in that forest clearing are so strong and
fearful that they cannot be translated into rational explanation.
The first time I saw the film, I knew hardly a thing about Japanese cinema, and what struck me
was the elevated emotional level of the actors. Do all Japanese shout and posture so? Having
now seen a great many Japanese films, I know that in most of them the Japanese talk in more
or less the same way we do (Ozu's films are a model of conversational realism). But Kurosawa
was not looking for realism. From his autobiography, we learn he was struck by the honesty of
emotion in silent films, where dialog could not carry the weight and actors used their faces,
eyes and gestures to express emotion. That heightened acting style, also to be seen in
Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and several other period pictures, plays well here because many
of the sequences are, essentially, silent.
Film cameras are admirably literal, and faithfully record everything they are pointed at.
Because they are usually pointed at real things, we usually think we can believe what we see.
The message of "Rashomon" is that we should suspect even what we think we have seen. This
insight is central to Kurosawa's philosophy. The old clerk's family and friends think they've
witnessed his decline and fall in "Ikiru" (1952), but we have seen a process of self-discovery
and redemption. The seven samurai are heroes when they save the village, but thugs when they
demand payment after the threat has passed. The old king in "Ran" (1985) places his trust in
the literal meaning of words, and talks himself out of his kingdom and life itself.
Kurosawa's last film, "Madadayo" made in 1993 when he was 83, was about an old master
teacher who is visited once a year by his students. At the end of the annual party, he lifts a beer
and shouts out the ritual cry "Not yet!" Death is near, but not yet--so life goes on. The film's
hero is in some sense Kurosawa. He is a reliable witness that he is not yet dead, but when he
dies no one will know less about it than he will.

The film opens on a woodcutter (木樵り; Kikori, played by Takashi Shimura) and a priest (旅
法 師 ; Tabi Hōshi, Minoru Chiaki) sitting beneath the Rash HYPERLINK
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj%C5%8Dmon"ō HYPERLINK
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj%C5%8Dmon"mon city gate to stay dry in a downpour.
A commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) joins them and they tell him that they have witnessed a
disturbing story, which they then begin recounting to him. The woodcutter claims he found the
body of a murdered samurai three days earlier while looking for wood in the forest. As he
testifies he first found a woman's hat (which belonged to the wife), then a samurai cap (which
belonged to the husband), then cut rope (which had bound the husband), then an amulet, and
finally he came upon the body. Upon discovering the body, he says, he fled in a panic to notify
the authorities. The priest says that he saw the samurai with his wife traveling the same day the
murder happened. Both men are then summoned to testify in court, where a fellow witness
presents the captured bandit Tajōmaru (多襄丸), who claims to have followed the couple after
coveting the woman when he glimpsed her in the forest.
The bandit's story
Tajōmaru (Toshiro Mifune), a notorious outlaw, claims that he tricked the samurai to step off
the mountain trail with him and look at a cache of ancient swords he discovered. In the grove,
he tied the samurai to a tree, then brought the samurai's wife there. She initially tried to defend
herself with a dagger, but eventually was seduced by the bandit. The woman, filled with shame,
then begged him to duel to the death with her husband, to save her from the guilt and shame of
having two men know her dishonor. Tajōmaru honorably set the samurai free and dueled with
him. In Tajōmaru's recollection, they fought skillfully and fiercely, with Tajōmaru praising the
samurai's swordsmanship. In the end, Tajōmaru was the victor and killed the samurai, and the
woman ran away after the fight. At the end of his story to the court, he is asked about an
expensive dagger owned by the samurai's wife. He says that, in the confusion, he forgot all
about it, and that the dagger's pearl inlay would have made it very valuable. He laments having
left it behind.
The wife's story
The samurai's wife (Machiko Ky HYPERLINK
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiko_Ky%C5%8D"ō) tells a different story to the court.
She says that Tajōmaru left after raping her. She begged her husband to forgive her, but he
simply looked at her coldly. She then freed him and begged him to kill her so that she would
be at peace. He continued to stare at her with a look of loathing. His expression disturbed her
so much that she fainted with the dagger in her hand. She awoke to find her husband dead with
the dagger in his chest. She attempted to kill herself but failed in all her efforts.
The samurai's story
The court then hears the story of the deceased samurai (Masayuki Mori), told through
a medium ( 巫 女 ; miko, Noriko Honma). The samurai claims that, after raping his wife,
Tajōmaru asked her to travel with him. She accepted and asked Tajōmaru to kill her husband
so that she would not feel the guilt of belonging to two men. Tajōmaru, shocked by this request,
grabbed her and gave the samurai a choice of letting the woman go or killing her. "For these
words alone", the dead samurai recounted, "I was ready to pardon his crime". The woman fled,
and Tajōmaru, after attempting to recapture her, gave up and set the samurai free. The samurai
then killed himself with his wife's dagger. Later, someone removed the dagger from his chest,
but it is not yet revealed who removed the dagger.
The woodcutter's story
Back at Rashōmon (after the trial), the woodcutter states to the commoner that all three stories
were falsehoods. The woodcutter says he witnessed the rape and murder, but that he declined
the opportunity to testify at the trial because he did not want to get involved. According to the
woodcutter's new story, Tajōmaru begged the samurai's wife to marry him, but the woman
instead freed her husband. The husband was initially unwilling to fight Tajōmaru, saying he
would not risk his life for a spoiled woman, but the woman then criticized both him and
Tajōmaru, saying they were not real men and that a real man would fight for a woman's love.
She urged the men to fight one another, but then hid her face in fear once they raised swords;
the men, too, were visibly fearful as they began fighting. In the woodcutter's recollection, the
resulting duel was far more pitiful and clumsy than Tajōmaru had recounted previously, with
the men constantly tripping and flailing their swords wildly. Tajōmaru ultimately won through
a stroke of luck. After some hesitation, he killed the samurai, and the woman subsequently fled.
Tajōmaru could not catch her, but took the samurai's sword and left the scene limping.

Climax
At the gate, the woodcutter, priest, and commoner are interrupted from their discussion of the
woodcutter's account by the sound of a crying baby. They find the baby abandoned in a basket,
and the commoner takes a kimono and an amulet that has been left for the baby. The woodcutter
reproaches the commoner for stealing from the abandoned baby, but the commoner chastises
him. Having deduced that the reason the woodcutter did not speak up at the trial was that he
was the one who stole the dagger from the scene of the murder, the commoner mocks him as
"a bandit calling another a bandit". The commoner leaves Rashōmon, claiming that all men are
motivated only by self-interest.
These deceptions and lies shake the priest's faith in humanity. He claims it is restored when the
woodcutter reaches for the baby in the priest's arms. The priest is suspicious at first, but the
woodcutter explains that he intends to take care of the baby along with his own six children.
This simple revelation recasts the woodcutter's story and the subsequent theft of the dagger in
a new light. The priest gives the baby to the woodcutter, saying that the woodcutter has given
him a reason to continue having hope in humanity. The film closes with the woodcutter,
walking home with the baby. The rain has stopped and the clouds have opened revealing the
sun in contrast to the beginning where it was overcast..

Momento

Christopher Nolan
In 2000 it’s Christopher Nolan’s turn with his second movie Memento, freely adapted from the
short story Memento Mori written few years earlier by his younger brother Jonathan –
showrunner for acclaimed TV series as Westworld and Person of Interest. Free from all the
technical limitations of his first feature film Following – a remarkable debut which contains
elements that will become increasingly relevant in his following movies – and having quite a
remarkable budget of nine million dollars despite the magnitude that it will reach over the next
few years, twenty-nine years old Nolan has directed a cynical and rigorous neo-noir which has
its main strength in turning its fabula and syuzhet around. A brilliant example of montage
breaks up the story into small fragments all mixed up in a particular order: first scene, last
scene, second scene, penultimate scene, until you get to the end of the movie showing the
events happening at the center of the plot and revealing its before-and-after perspective. A
brilliant and winning idea, considering its – absolutely deserved – status of cult it has acquired
nowadays and the fact it has given rise to a long-standing debate between fans despite nearly
twenty years after its first screening at the Venice Film Festival, 2000.

Leonard “Lenny” Shelby is a broken man. “The Ten-Minute Man” as named in Jonathan
Nolan’s story. The last thing Lenny can remember is his wife’s face after they have been
attacked by two assaulter in their apartment. Despite his wife survives that assault Lenny, who
manages to kill one of the aggressors, develops a severe brain injury that leads him to suffer
from anterograde amnesia: anything happening to him doesn’t stick in his mind for more than
a few minutes. His wife – she suffers from diabetes – tries any possible solution to restore his
consciousness, until one day she desperately asks him to give her three insulin shots in quick
succession. Lenny is unable to even become aware that he himself has caused his wife’s death
because something has broken inside his mind: as Andrew Laeddis and Diane Selwyn, Lenny’s
mind creates the false memory of the accountant Sammy Jankis, a man suffering from
anterograde amnesia who has unwittingly killed his wife with insulin, driven by the goal of
neutralizing guilt after lying but meanwhile the “real” Lenny’s mental illness turns into
methodical madness.

Lenny turns into a modern Philip Marlowe looking for John G, the surviving attacker
disappeared into thin air who Lenny believes is responsible for his wife’s death, and he uses an
orderly system of notes, tattoos and polaroid pictures. Aided in this effort by the police officer
Teddy who takes over his case taking pity on him, Lenny manages to track down and kill John
G but this event fails to impress in his memory and in a very short period of time he is in
desperate need to find “John G” again because it’s the only purpose of his existence, in an
endless loop. He can’t reconcile himself, he can’t forgive himself as he can’t “remember to
forget”.

Teddy tells Lenny there’s plenty of John Gs to find in order to help him, setting him on new
criminals’s path to get rid of by providing him clues and even complete police reports from
which Lenny deletes all the parts that don’t fit his new reality. Eventually, he begins using
Lenny’s disorder to get his dirty work done for him so he tries to persuade him that Jimmy
Grantz, a local drug dealer who operates out of the bar and the motel where Lenny lives, is the
man he is after. After collecting clues to find Jimmy – in the black and white sequence of the
movie – Lenny agrees with Teddy to set a trap for Jimmy in an abandoned building where
Teddy has previously contacted him and set up a sale of amphetamines. Jimmy arrives at the
meeting place but he finds Lenny there instead, who manages to strangle Jimmy to death. In
his final breath he whispers “Sammy” causing Leonard to realise he has killed the wrong John
G in a glimpse of clarity and sending him into a tailspin.

As Teddy arrives he reveals his trick to Lenny reminding him of the previous “John Gs” as
well as his wife’s murder and the fake Sammy Jankis’ story – actually a man Lenny exposed
as a fraud when he was an insurance claims investigator – suggesting that it was Lenny who
told the Sammy Jankis’ story to Jimmy in a previous forgotten meeting. However, Teddy goes
on to make the biggest mistake revealing to Lenny his real name: John Edward Gamble, John
G. At this point, Lenny gets angry with his trusted friend who made him face reality and before
his short-term memory would be reset within a few minutes he records Teddy’s license plate
number and he decides to continue his hunt.

Placed as the final sequence of the movie this last scene is actually the beginning of the main
plot – the one filmed in color. Wearing Jimmy’s clothes and stealing his Jaguar, Lenny finds
an address into his jacket pocket. Arriving on the spot, Lenny has now forgotten about his
previous actions and he meets Jimmy’s partner Natalie who begins to believe in his story after
the initial distrust and she eventually takes advantage of him using Lenny to get rid of Dodd, a
criminal having an issue with her to whom Jimmy owed money. In return for doing her a favour
Natalie tracks down Teddy’s car license plate number for Lenny and she confirms the name
John G. The movie opens / closes with Lenny killing Teddy, his last (maybe) John G.

Based on classic noir narrative patterns yet distorted storyline, Nolan gives the viewers a
valuable insight into the protagonist’s mind taking them on a backward journey through a
deceptive memory where all characters seem to emerge from the fog. We as spectators are just
as lost as Lenny, we don’t know whether we should trust the characters he interacts with or not
due to a lack of clues. In addition to this, by changing the order in which the different states
occur as Lenny has convinced himself he has solved the case, the viewer is inclined to perceive
the protagonist as a brilliant and winning character despite his impaired memory, a certainty
that is going to collapse as a house of cards when the filmmaker / magician reveals his trick
showing us Lenny for the first time according to an objective perspective: a freak, an eternal
loser imprisoned in a fake world full of seemingly infallible notes but actually manipulated as
everyone wish – the emblematic final / initial scene when he switches into Jimmy’s clothes.

Compared to the original story where the protagonist is named Earl, Nolan adds in the
screenplay all the characters and all the additional vicissitudes all personally rewritten as the
framework of the movie. Nevertheless, Memento Mori can provide a useful explanation to
understand the importance both Nolan and his brother place on our perception of time as the
protagonist is caught in an infinite loop. Trough its fifteen pages the story – which alternates a
fragmented narrative structure yet chronologically correct with a inner dialogue sequence –
deals with the protagonist Earl – we see him getting old – searching for the murderer over the
years. Its ending suggests his hunt will start over again.

Nolan’s first partnership with the cinematographer Wally Pfister – who makes a great job both
in the black&white and the color scene followed by the astonishing colors transition in the
ending sequence – and with the composer David Julyan (Insomnia, The
Prestige), Memento only took twenty-five days to shoot. Nolan’s first choice for the role of
Leonard was Alec Baldwin but he also considered some big-name actors like Brad Pitt, Charlie
Sheen and Aaron Eckhart and he eventually decided to stage Guy Pearce, who was originally
two hundred thirty pounds before the movie was made and lost all of the weight extremely fast;
Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano had just starred in The Matrix. Nolan originally
wanted Paranoid Android by Radiohead to play during the end credits but felt that the rights
were too expensive, so he used David Bowie’s Something In The Air. In 2015 AMBI Pictures,
run by film producers Andrea Iervolino and Monika Bacardi, acquired the rights and
announced it will finance and produce the movie’s remake but since then, there has been no
further development news.

Memento – gloomy, alienating, hopeless – represents the unsurpassed pinnacle of the sparkling
career of one of the most acclaimed directors of our time: in 2017 the US Library of Congress
added this movie to the National Film Registry. It’s a movie anyone passionate about film noir
and cinema in general should see, a must-see masterpiece.

Plot

The film starts with a Polaroid photograph of a dead man. As the sequence plays backward, the
photo reverts to its undeveloped state, entering the camera before the man is shot in the head.
The film then continues, alternating between black-and-white and color sequences.The black-
and-white sequences begin with Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator, in a motel
room speaking to an unseen and unknown caller. Leonard has anterograde amnesia and is
unable to store recent memories, the result of an attack by two men. Leonard explains that he
killed the attacker who raped and strangled his wife Catherine, but a second clubbed him and
escaped. The police did not accept that there was a second attacker, but Leonard believes the
attacker's name is "John G" or "James G". Leonard investigates using notes, Polaroid photos,
and tattoos. Leonard recalls Sammy Jankis, another anterograde amnesiac, from his insurance
industry days. After tests confirmed Sammy's inability to learn tasks through repetition,
Leonard believed that his condition was at best psychological (and perhaps faked) and turned
down his insurance claim. Sammy's distraught wife repeatedly asked Sammy to administer her
insulin shots for her diabetes, hoping he would remember and would stop himself from giving
her a fatal overdose. However, Sammy continued to administer the injections, and his wife
died.

The color sequences are shown reverse-chronologically. In the story's chronology, Leonard
self-directively gets a tattoo of John G's license plate. Finding a note in his clothes, he meets
Natalie, a bartender who resents Leonard because he wears the clothes and drives the car of her
boyfriend, Jimmy Grantz. After understanding Leonard's condition, she uses it to get Leonard
to drive a man named Dodd out of town and offers to run the license plate as a favor.
Meanwhile, Leonard meets with a contact, Teddy, who helps with Dodd, but warns about
Natalie. Leonard finds that he had previously annotated his Polaroid of Teddy, warning himself
not to trust him. Natalie provides Leonard with the driver's license for a John Edward Gammell,
Teddy's full name. Confirming Leonard's information on "John G" and his warnings, Leonard
drives Teddy to an abandoned building, leading to the opening, where he shoots him.
In the final black-and-white sequence, prompted by the caller, Leonard meets with Teddy, an
undercover officer, who has found Leonard's "John G", Jimmy, and directs Leonard to the
abandoned building. When Jimmy arrives, Leonard strangles him fatally and takes a Polaroid
photo of the body. As the photo develops, the black-and-white transitions to the final color
sequence. Leonard swaps clothes with Jimmy, hearing him whisper "Sammy". As Leonard has
only told Sammy's story to those he has met, he suddenly doubts Jimmy's role. Teddy arrives
and asserts that Jimmy was John G, but when Leonard is undeterred, Teddy claims that he
helped him kill the real attacker a year ago, and he has been using Leonard ever since. Teddy
points out that since the name "John G" is common, Leonard will cyclically forget and begin
again and that even Teddy himself has a "John G" name. Further, Teddy claims that Sammy's
story is Leonard's own story, a memory Leonard has repressed to escape guilt.

After hearing Teddy confess all of this, Leonard burns the photograph of dead Jimmy and, in
a monologue, explains that he is willing to lie to himself in order to get justice against anyone
who has wronged him. He therefore targets Teddy by ordering a tattoo of Teddy's license plate
number and writing a note to himself that Teddy is not to be trusted so that he will mistake
Teddy for John G and kill him. Leonard drives off in Jimmy's car, confident that, despite this
lie, he will retain enough awareness of the world to know that his actions have consequences.
The story follows Shelby, who has a short-term memory loss following a break-in at his house
that gave him his "condition" and also his wife was raped and murdered. Leonard has been
chasing the guy who did it, but his search is complicated by the fact that he can't make new
memories since the accident. So Leonard convinces himself that through conditioning, he can
be disciplined enough to find vengeance. But as the story unfolds, the reveal isn't the true culprit
but to show that Leonard is chasing his own ghost. He has purposefully been creating a mystery
he can never solve because he's already solved it, but forgotten that he already achieved his
vengeance. Instead, everyone he meets uses him including corrupt cop Teddy (Joe
Pantoliano), vindictive bartender Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), and even Burt, the hotel desk
clerk. Leonard clings to this shred of control he believes he has, but that control is an illusion.
He thinks that his Polaroids and tattoos are hard evidence, but their just as fallible as memory.
In the end he learns (before he forgets again) that his wife survived the attack and that she
committed suicide by having Leonard give her too much insulin.
The figure of Leonard Shelby—a man who believes he's in control only to learn that his control
was an illusion—recurs in Nolan's filmography, but it works particularly well
in Memento because of how Nolan is able to upend expectations of the noir genre. Leonard is
our detective, and while he suffers from a crippling ailment, he should still be able to solve the
case, but the film slowly reveals that what Leonard's working towards isn't justice or even
vengeance, but clinging to the scraps of an identity. He's conditioned himself not to solve the
case, but rather to create a simulacrum of his old life as an insurance investigator (another
reason he can't stop talking about Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky)). Leonard has
constructed an elaborate lie that allows him to live out the same fantasy and hold onto the
identity that he can solve a mystery. Everyone lies to Leonard, most of all Leonard.

What gives the story its potency is that Memento recognizes we all lie to ourselves. Nolan
simply found a vehicle to make the lie one of the stars of the film. Leonard's not lying to himself
about his success or his ego. He's lying to himself about his very identity, and his brain damage
allows him to perpetuate this mythology endlessly. It's only when we recall the very first scene
that we remember that Leonard has a new opportunity to break the cycle. Without Teddy
around to use Leonard as a weapon and a new photo marking Teddy's demise, maybe Leonard
will tell himself the truth. Maybe that can break the cycle, but until we reach that resolution
(that comes at the very beginning), we have to get to the thematic truth of the film, which
doesn't come until we understand why Leonard killed Teddy in the first place.
Like all of us, Leonard is looking to feel like his actions have meaning. "The world doesn't just
disappear when you close your eyes," Leonard says, but with causality broken in Leonard's
mind, he has become somewhat divorced from the world. Memento is a powerful story about
the hold that identity has on us and how it even can transcend the loss of short-term memory.
Leonard is convinced that he knows who he is, but it's not until the climax that Teddy tells him,
"That's who you were." Leonard doesn't want to face the fact that without his vengeance and
without a mystery to solve, he's just a guy with brain damage and probably has no place in the
world. His own wife chose suicide, and rather than remember what happened to her, he made
up a comforting narrative about Sammy Jankis.
Constructing all this together within a neo-noir framework is brilliant, and
watching Memento is like looking at a house of cards you're sure is going to topple over any
moment. But Nolan and editor Dody Dorn know exactly where to cut in the action, and how
to immaculately structure the narrative so that the audience is never lost.
Like Following, Inception, Dunkirk, or any other Nolan film that plays with time, Nolan isn't
trying to lose his audience. This isn't Primer where you throw up your hands and just have to
go along for the ride. Nolan goes to the point of making sure that his prologue is in black-and-
white so that you're aware you're looking at Leonard in a narrative that's separate from the
reverse-narrative that continues until both narratives meet up at the climax of the movie.

Nolan movies are obsessed with notions of control, and the control over time contrasts nicely
with Leonard's illusion of control over his own story. Where Nolan and his protagonist sync
up is how much control they exert over the power of narrative. Nolan is fascinated by the
concept of narratives and how the power of creation is inextricably linked to destruction.
Leonard has created an entirely new identity built on a lie, and because his creation is based on
a lie, it ultimately leads to a destructive conclusion, which is that he becomes nothing more
than Teddy's hitman. Like The Young Man from Following or Robert Angier from The
Prestige or Mal from Inception, Leonard has provided himself a comforting lie, and that lie has
proven to be his downfall until he finally decides to pursue something that's true—Teddy is
using him and so Teddy must be stopped.
The cautionary tale in Memento is that Leonard Shelby, despite his unique condition, is
universal in how he lies to himself. Nolan isn't opposed to the concept of a lie—he's a storyteller
after all. But he's fascinated by how lies are implemented. For Nolan, lies are tools, and
sometimes they can be used to benevolent purposes like a magic show in The Prestige or the
mind heist in Inception. In Memento, Leonard finds a new lie—that Teddy is responsible for
the rape and murder of Leonard's wife—but like all good art, it's a lie that tells the truth. Teddy
may not be responsible for Leonard's condition, but his desire to use Leonard as a weapon
makes him at least partially responsible for Leonard's predicament. "You don't want the truth,"
Teddy tells Leonard. "You make up your own truth." And so the truth Leonard decides to
follow is that Teddy must be eliminated, and the reason why doesn't matter because Leonard's
never going to remember the reasons anyway. Leonard lies to himself on a tapestry of good
intentions; he tells himself he's not a killer. But it's his actions that have meaning even if he
can't remember them.
Through its ingenious plotting and characterization, Christopher Nolan made a movie where
the lie itself became the protagonist. The central irony of Leonard Shelby is that his motives
are based on the search for truth, but he consumes nothing but lies. He even conditions himself
to believe more lies because the truth can be too painful. "You lie to yourself to be happy…We
all do it!" Teddy exclaims. But to quote a later Nolan film, "Sometimes the truth isn't good
enough. Sometimes people need something more. Sometimes they need their faith rewarded."
Leonard Shelby eventually learns that he needs to believe his actions still have meaning. That
conditioning himself into a vengeful detective isn't the truth he needs. Whether his lie leads
him to a better truth is a question for before the opening credits roll.

Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish

Rituparno Ghosh.

PLOT
Rudra Chatterjee (Rituparno Ghosh) has spent his life going against social convention. As a
young man he defied his father's wishes, and became a choreographer instead of an engineer.
As he prepares with his team to stage Tagore's Chitrangada, he meets Partho (Jisshu Sengupta)
who is a drug-addict percussionist introduced to the team by the main dancer Kasturi (Raima
Sen). Soon, Rudra develops a chemistry with Partho and they are deep into a passionate love
affair. During the course of their relationship, they decide to adopt a child. But there is one
problem: same-sex couples are not permitted to adopt children. So Rudra decides to go through
a gender change treatment to embrace the womanhood he longs for. But will this surgery
change his life and fulfill all his long-cherished dreams? The story ends with the line "Be What
You Wish To Be".

Rhituparno Ghosh’s Chitrangada :The Crowning Wish, is an alternative cinema based on

Tagore’s dance drama under the same name. This is Ghosh’s much autobiographical film.
Ghosh’s adaptation of Tagore’s Chitrangada to tell the story of Rudra’s desire to undergo sex
reassignment surgery is remarkably aided by Tagore’s own adaptation of an episode in the
Mahabharata. As the study of adaptation of Tagore’s Chitrangada by Rhituparno Ghosh is
already discussed, this paper focuses on representation of emotions using dance as a tool.
Through the application of gender studies the representation of a serious issue like gender
identity crisis is discussed. The use of dance in the film is observed and how dance is used to
represent the emotions of the character in the film. The film Chitrangada by Rhitupano Gosh
uses classical dance as a tool for representing gender identity crisis of the main Character Rudra
and dance plays a very important part in expressing his emotions. The selection of particular
Bhavas and Mudras are also explored. The represntation of a very sensitive issue through a
conventional art form such as classical dance in the film Chitrangada by Rhitupano Gosh is
discussed in this paper. The research tries to answer the question how dance used as a cultural
vehicle in the film for challenging hetero-patriarchal repression of gender identity and to
represent emotions?
The 2012 film Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish is Ghosh’s autobiographical movie. The film
is based on the story of Chitrangada, an ambisexual figure in Indian classical literature. This
film is an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama under the same name. The identity
crisis of the main character is represented through dance in this movie. Dance is a powerful
tool which Rhituparno Ghosh experimented with. Chitrangada is about acceptance of a
person’s identity. The film is not just about sexuality or one’s own identity but the story of a
choreographer. The pain and struggle of a choreographer with the gender identity crisis,
undergoing a sex realignment surgery etc are very well expressed through classical
dance.Dance is a powerful medium to express emotions. The Bhavas, Rasa and the Mudras
convey emotions. Dance provided a gender fluid space for Ghosh to discuss a serious theme
such as gender identity. In this film dance is used as a tool to challenge the hetero-patriarchal
repression of sexual and gender fluidity.The film Chitrangada by Rhitupano Ghosh uses
classical dance as a tool for representing gender identity crisis of the main Character Rudra and
dance plays a very important part in expressing his emotions. Objective of the paper is to study
the use of representation of a very sensitive issue through a conventional art form such as
classical dance in the film Chitrangada by Rhitupano Ghosh. The liberty art attributes to artists
as regards to transcending their gender role-playing is very well evident in the film Through
the application of gender studies the representation of a serious issue like gender identity crisis
is discussed. The use of dance in the film is observed and how dance is used to represent the
emotions of the character in the film.
In cinematic representations particular to the Indian context, topics which deal about the LGBT
community are considered taboos, as subjects that must be excluded, whose mention means
that the general norms are being flouted. The very mention about any such topics brings to the
mind, vague images that the mind cannot readily digest. If the very mention of this theme has
such drastic implications then the actual problems of sexual identity falls far outside the
periphery of acceptance. This paper studies how topics dealing with the problems of LGBTQ
community are addressed in the film using classical dance as a tool. The research is a study to
learn how is dance used as a cultural vehicle in the film for challenging hetero-patriarchal
repression of gender identity and to represent emotions? Chitrangada is blend of art and
commercial element. Rhituparno Ghosh (1962-2013) was a film maker, writer and lyricist.
Ghosh arrived into Bengali films when Bengali cinema was going through a particularly
difficult phase. With a very different style of storytelling Gosh made his own space in Bengali
Cinema. He merged art and commercial cinema and brought a new revival in his films. In most
films, Gosh chose to work within strict realistic mode. In Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish he
even experimented with form and style. Chitranagada was a tribute to Tagore in his 150th birth
year. In cinematic representations particular to the Indian context, topics which deal about the
LGBT community are considered taboos, as subjects that must be excluded, whose mention
means that the general norms are being flouted. The very mention about any such topics brings
to the mind, vague images that the mind cannot readily digest. If the very mention of this theme
has such drastic implications then the actual problems of sexual identity falls far outside the
periphery of acceptance. Ghosh courageously talks about these serious issues. By exposing
middleclass society to narratives about parallel sexualities Ghosh made a positive contribution
in changing the perspective and knowledge about the sexual minorities. Chitranagada created
awareness among the public of India about same-sex desire. The film is the adaptation of
Tagore’s dance drama under the same name.
warrior on a quest to discover her gender identity. Tagore’s dance drama is deploying the space
of theatre in intriguing ways in this film. Chitrangada was the daughter of a king of Manipur,
the king being blessed by Lord Shiva that he will have a son, but the birth of Chitrangada was
an opposite case. So, the king decided to raise the daughter as a son. She continued to be that
way until she was enchanted by the love of Arjun (from Mahabharata). Falling in love made
her revert back to her feminine original self. Thus the conflict arose which became a clash of
the wishes, the wishes of the father and that of his daughter. Gosh reworked this myth to extend
more fluid possibilities of gender and alternate sexual identity. His theatrical interpretation of
Chitrangada’s transformation revitalised the stage presentation of this drama. This theme lies
as the undercurrent of the movie in discussion. The whole movie revolves around this identity
crisis. Ghosh was very much influenced by the works of Tagore.Throughout the film Ghosh is
drawing parallels with Tagore’s Chitrangada and Rudra. Chitrangada’s lines from Tagor’s text
are narrated in voice overs in the film which becomes the representation of identity.The word
emotion is derived from the Latin word: “emovere” meaning to move, move out or move
through. Deep emotions are the essence of dance. The purpose of dance is to express emotions.
It allows the deep feeling inside a person to move through the body. Emotions are not just in
mind. It is incorporated to the body. Indian classical dance forms use different elements of
body language like mudras, bhavas, for non verbal communication as well as to express
physical, emotional, social status and conditions. The emotions and feeling of a character can
be depicted through them. In the film Chitrangada, Rudra uses his body as an instrument
through the dance he performe to express the feeling and emotions which are engraved within
himself. Dance is a powerful element used to reperesnt the emotions of Rudra in this film.
Elements of dance forms such as Karanas (Transitional movements or postural alterations,
Hastas (Hand gestures), Adavus (Series of movements or expressions) and Bhedas (Eye
contact, different gazes and neck-head movements are used to express the feelings or to tell a
story. The dance form used in the film is Odissi. It often begins with graceful, slow and lyrical
moments of the eyes, neck, and torso and feet and slowly builds in swell to climax in a fast
tempo at the end. And the next part of the dance involves expressive graceful, sensual dance
and drama to communicate a story through hands gestures, body movements, and
expressions.The film brilliantly uses these techniques to present the story of Chitrangada, the
warrior princes. The inner conflict within her to identify herself as a woman or man is expressed
through the dance. At beginning Chitranagada is presented with masculine attributes and later
in the dance drama when she fell in love with Arjuna her body language and expressions
changes to more feminine. Chitrangada talks about the ardent wish for identifying once gender.
The protagonist Rudra, a successful choreographer had recently staged a successful production
of Tagore’s Chitrangada. In the new percussionist of his troupe, he had found a lover; and in
the drama, a new meaning – that ‘it is the story of a wish’, the wish to change one’s gender. It
spoke to him powerfully as he himself had that hidden desire, which he could fulfil only
superficially by wearing jewellery and applying kohl. It is strange that though he connects with
the character of Chitrangada while staging the play, it is after it was over that he BECOMES
her. Here the dance drama Chitrangada itself become the outlet of his desire. He identifies
himself as the princess Chitrangada of Manipur who was raised as a son. In Chitrangada, Ghosh
not only challenges the stereotyping and shaming of men who dance, but problematizes it even
further by celebrating the fluidity of the body and sexuality, by dissociating biological gender
from sexuality, and most importantly from the performance arts. Constantly emphasizing on
the mutability of the body, notwithstanding its biological gender, Ghosh makes a very strong
statement on dancing as well as acting– as liberating the body from coded performances of
gender.In other words, the film is a commentary not only on sexuality, but also on the
performance arts which carry remarkable possibilities for re-inscribing bodies with new
meanings, extricating them from the compulsory performance of masculinity or femininity
following normative gender registers. The classical dance form, Odissi is experimented in the
film. The dance drama is miniaturist and minimalist in style. The costumes are in Oriental style.
The stage is black and the hospital (where Rudra is admitted after the breakdown) will be a
clinical grey (Fig 2). The stage will be used as a language. For instance, we will use the
spotlight. The stage is an emotional space here. The two spaces where dance is placed (the
stage and the hospital room) uses dance as a tool to express the emotions of Rudra. The
emotions of Rudra are also portrayed through the mudras. The gestures speak in the movie. As
the counsellor remarks that Rudra has the ability to speak with hands, hand gestures plays a
very important role in expressing the emotions. While staging the first scene of the dance drama
within the film, Rudra gets terribly upset by the fact that Kasturi’s (playing the masculine
kurupa Chitrangada) hand gestures appear too ‘feminine’ and shouts at her: “Chitrangada is
conditioned to be a man! That is how she is brought up!”- the idea of conditioning clearly
shows gender as a construct. Gender is socially constructed, disseminated and internalised.
Rudra knows very well what it means by conditioned to be a man so he wants Kasturi to express
it through the dance. Here also dance is very much related to the life of Rudra. In another scene
(Rudra’s alter ego) questions whether the audience would recognise Rudra’s Chitrangada as
Tagore’s. This provides Rudra with the opportunity of explaining him of what he realizes to be
the crux of Tagore’s Chitrangada. To Rudra, the thematic import of the play is that of the
fulfilment of a dream. The dance itself is the achievement of Rudra being able to express his
gender identity.
In Chitrangada, Ghosh not only challenges the stereotyping and shaming of men who dance,
but problematize it even further by celebrating the fluidity of the body and sexuality, by
dissociating biological gender from sexuality, and most importantly from the performance arts.
Constantly emphasizing on the mutability of the body, notwithstanding its biological gender,
Ghosh makes a very strong statement on dancing as well as acting– as liberating the body from
coded performances of gender.In another scene, with a spectacular of Tagore’s dance drama in
the backdrop, post hir (instead of his/her is used to show the gender neutrality of the character.
The character is in a crisis of identifying the gender) breast implants, gazes at hir own reflection
in a large bowl of water, as Chitrangada’s lines from Tagore’s text are narrated in a voice -over
by Ghosh himself. The beauty of the scene is with the dance movement of Rudra gazing at hir
own reflection. At a metaphorical level, Ghosh inserts his own subjectivity within Tagore’s
text and the dance and thereby claims it as his own. The exploration of sexuality is portrayed
through Rudra seeing the reflection and dancing around the large bowl of water. (Bakshi 215)It
is important to note that in the dance drama, within the film, Rudra hirself plays the role of
Madan, the divine engineer of Chitrangada’s transfiguration. Th e suggestion seems to be that
here Ghosh is literarly acting out the role of the engineer auteur, which effectuates the sexual
transfiguration and is simultaneously the object of it. The character Madan itself has the
autobiographical touch of Rudra. In other words, the film is a commentary not only on
sexuality, but also on the performance arts which carry remarkable possibilities for re-
inscribing bodies with new meanings, extricating them from the compulsory performance of
masculinity or femininity following normative gender registers. Rudra, naturally a male, opts
for being a dancer and that too classical. This dance form is specifically characterized by its
grace, gestures and delicate moves. The society cannot readily grasp the fact that a male is
dancing on the rhythm of classical music.
For Rudra, it’s not just the society but also the father opposes him in this case. He even
mentions: “He doesn’t like me dancing on stage.” The father discourages his son to dance and
suggests him to focus on his direction instead. The father fails to understand that dance is
Rudra’s quest for identity. The father is never interested to watch his show. This has always
hurt Rudra but in the course of life, he has realised what his father dislikes in him and even
confess: “In fact I have stopped missing you baba (father).” It is because of the society that
even the father cannot accept that. Chitrangada turn to the performance arts, and locate within
the radical questions about sexualities and sexual behaviours. (Mandeep, Raina 64)Like
Chitrangada of Tagore’s dance drama Rudra wants to relocate his gender identity. For
Rituparno Ghosh “The film is about acceptance of a person's identity... It isn't just about
sexuality or one's image with which he is identified”. With such an intense thought Ghosh sets
a benchmark for all film makers, critics and viewers who will definitely feel the need of a
changed outlook to understand the world of those who do not fall under the set pattern of
society. The grace and elegance of that characterizes the protagonists dance and all the feminine
elements like makeup, dressing up and the whole countenance is in itself, the mute
reinforcement of being applicable to a fixed gender called a ‘female’. The Dance form itself is
considered to suit a being according to the gender. When the character says dance is not is not
limited to my gender, the question of reinforcement of feminine attributes to the form itself
becomes problematic.But as Rudra himself says that dance is not bond to neither gender nor
his identity we can say that dance deconstruct the idea of gender and it’s a space of gender
fluidity. Chitrangada is an autobiographical film, the sexual politics of Rituparno Ghosh and
his life projected in his movies are further scope of study in this area. Lot of his movies gives
glimpses of the life of Rituparno Ghosh through the characters in his movie. Rudra in
Chitrangada is one among them. Ghosh challenges the idea of identity through socially
constructed paradigms. He uses brilliant techniques in representation of emotions. The
selection of beautiful Rabindrasangeet in his films makes unforgettable visual experiences. His
films were lauded as being in line with Satyajith Ray’s legacy, he was, at the same time,
censured for his non-normative sexual and gendered persona. Gender is a construct that is
ingrained in our lives from childhood; Ghosh deconstructs these techniques and present it
before his audience with charm. As Rhituparno Gosh’s body politics is very much prevalent in
this movie it can be seen as a further scope for study. The identity crisis of Rudra is only
discussed in this paper but how Rudra himself be the representation of Gosh can be studied.
‘Chitrangada – The Crowning Wish’ (2012) starring and directed by Ghosh, is a heartfelt and
challenging story. Told through a series of conversations between Rudra Chatterji (Ghosh) and
his therapist (Anjan Dutt), about Rudra’s dilemma’s as a homosexual, and his difficult
relationship with his partner drug addict Partho (Jisshu Sengupta).Rudra is a passionate dancer
and choreographer who is putting on a show based on Tagore’s own tale of ‘Chitrangada’ – the
princess of Manipura from the Hindu epic ‘Mahabharat’, whose father brings her up as a man,
where she then falls in love with Arjun and asks the gods for a boon, to claim the desires that
a woman has in order to attain him. Using Tagore’s story as a backdrop, the audiences quickly
realise Rudra’s life has become some what parallel to Chitrangada’s. Though his demons
maybe different to his plays main character, with a drug addict partner and parent’s who see
his sexual status as an illness, Rudra is going through the same realities as the princess. The
uncertainty about who he really is, living up to what he feels is expected of him, going through
a sex change himself in order to keep his partner with him so they have a child, all make Rudra
feel he is not what he is suppose to be. Who is he? What is his place in the lives of others? How
can he be who he is and be accepted by those around him?

Ghosh manages to tell a humble yet powerful story, where he gives his audiences the space to
develop their own opinions about the reality of homosexuality and the way society deals with
it. With a cameo from Raima Sen and other brilliant performances where each character
represents different questions that are often raised about the issue, Ghosh repeatedly conveys
the same messages of identity gradually through the film.Ghosh’s performance was
outstanding, and though this was one of his few (and his last) performances as an actor, he
managed to capture his audiences attention in an instant with his presence alone; even at times
where no dialogue was being delivered. This film stands as a perfect example of Ghosh’s
exceptional talent as a director, merging Rudra’s reality and his stage performance in-sync
perfectly, to reflect on ��character and integrity to oneself.However, ‘Chitrangada – The
Crowning Wish’, will perhaps not appeal to everyone. With the relationship between two men
being shown in close proximity on screen, as well as man being represented as somewhat more
feminine, this project is all the more controversial. Despite this, the way that the film is
unapologetic about the reality of homosexuality works in its favour, and the overall message
that it transmits applies to everyone; “Just be who you wish to be.

Bicycle Thieves
Italian Neorealism

From the early days of cinema (late nineteenth/ early twentieth century) through the 1960s,
theories of film tended to divide into the opposing camps of Formalism and
Realism. Formalists emphasized the formal properties of cinema that shaped the way films
were made, as well as our responses to them. For the formalists, the challenge was to establish
film as an independent art form. In virtue of what, they might ask, is a film of Romeo &
Juliet any more than a mere recording of a dramatisation of the play? Doesn’t a camera just
provide a mechanical recording of reality? They found their answer in film’s formal properties,
which enable the filmmaker to alter reality – to create a new world within the dimensions of
the cinema screen. Formalist filmmaking reached its peak in the Soviet Montage of the
1920s. Here, Sergei Eistenstein, among others, utilised the formal property of editing to
startling effect through the process of intellectual montage. This process is demonstrated in the
famous Odessa Staircase scene in Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925).
In contrast to the Formalists, Realist theorists (like André Bazin) stressed the importance of
cinema’s ability to record or capture reality – here, they argued, is where the essence of
filmmaking lies. This realist approach was exemplified in the period of filmmaking which has
come to be known as Italian Neorealism.Italian Neorealism was a brief but hugely influential
film movement, lasting from the end of WWII until 1951. Neorealism originated from the
writings, in the magazine Cinema, of a particular circle of film critics who, prevented from
writing about politics, rebelled against the prevailing Italian film industry under Mussolini. The
main focus of the critics were the telefono bianco films of the period, as well as the influx of
Hollywood imports. In contrast to these bourgeois escapist melodramas, critics urged Italian
cinema to turn to the verismo literature of the turn of the century and the poetic realism of
French cinema of the 1930s, exemplified by the works of Jean Renoir. The result was a
selection of Italian films that gained worldwide recognition: Rossellini’s Rome Open
City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1947); Visconti’s La Terra
Trema (1947); De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Umberto D (1951).
Socio-economic factors were influential in the development of Neorealism and they also led to
its downfall – most mark the end of the Neorealist movement with De Sica’s Umberto D (see
below), which sparked public controversy on its release. With the new-found positivity of Italy
in the early 1950s (and need to seek outside investment) Neorealist films were seen to be too
negative – the public preferred the facile optimism of the American movie, while the famous
politician, Giulio Andreotti, described Neorealist films as ‘dirty laundry that shouldn’t be
washed and hung out to dry in the open’.The major feature of Neorealist filmmaking is a
concentration on the lives of ordinary people struggling against adversity in the devastation of
the aftermath of WWII. They tend to focus on poor, working class people and their everyday
lives, the socio-economic conditions of the time, and the desperation and moral ambiguity
which results. However, not only was the subject matter different that what had come before
– Neorealism also created a distinctive approach to film style.
By 1945, most of Cinecittà, the large Roman studio complex, had been destroyed or was
occupied by refugees and so sets were in short supply, as was camera and sound equipment.
As such, Neorealist mise-en-scene relied on actual location shooting (mainly outdoors), and its
photographic work tended towards the rawness of documentaries. Shooting on the streets and
in private buildings made Italian camera operators incredibly adept at cinematography. In
addition, the lack of sound equipment (dialogue was dubbed through post-synchronization)
allowed for smaller crews and much greater freedom of movement. This more complex mise-
en-scene and more adept camerawork (the use of long shots, deep focus, long takes) allows for
a multiplicity in the details. As such, the viewer is able to select for themselves what is of
importance and to look for their own meaning, rather than having this forced upon them (as
with Soviet Montage). These characteristics are clearly evident in the opening scene of De
Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic, Bicycle Thieves (below).
Another major feature of Neorealism is the use of nonprofessionals, even in leading roles. For
the adult ‘star’ of Bicycle Thieves, De Sica chose a factory worker – Lamberto Maggiorani:
“The way he moved, the way he sat down, his gestures with those hands of a working man and
not of an actor … everything about him was perfect”. Hollywood funding had been available
for the film if De Sica had agreed to cast Cary Grant in the lead – thankfully, he refused. This
distinction between Hollywood ‘stars’ and the ‘real people’ used in neorealist films is shown
to great effect when Ricci is told to avoid putting creases in a poster of Rita Hayworth – real
people, unlike Hollywood stars, have wrinkles.
In keeping with the use of ‘real people’, everyday conversational speech, rather than literary
dialogue, was used. Children also feature prominently in Neorealist films, perhaps due to the
innocent, untainted objectivity they bring to what they see – an objectivity which the Neorealist
filmmakers wished to themselves achieve.
Perhaps even more influential was the Neorealist sense of narrative form. Reacting against
Hollywood and white-telephone conventions, Neorealist films tend to focus on character and
the plot seems to evolve organically rather than being strictly dictated – the story comes from
the characters and their situation rather than character being determined and limited by a
particular storyline. Shots are no longer treated, as in Hollywood (continuity) editing, as units
of information – their job being to convey the essential information as quickly and clearly as
possible and cut to the next unit. Rather, Neorealist films provide true continuity, and will even
will allow events which have no causal import to intrude – these events are casual as opposed
to causal (consider Ricci’s son stopping to pee in Bicycle Thieves). Neorealist films also differ
from their Hollywood counterparts in terms of their lack of a happy ending or a resolution of
any kind – a form of what might be called epistemic ambiguity – evident in the final scene
from Bicycle Thieves (have a box of tissues at the ready).
This ambiguity (moral as well as epistemic – was Ricci wrong to steal the bike? Was the initial
thief?) seems to admit that the totality of reality is just never fully knowable. If Realist films
offer us a window on a small portion of the world (slice-of-life) then we cannot ever hope for
the omniscience that Hollywood offers us over their creation. In Neorealist film, as in life,
sometimes there are no answers.
In conclusion, Italian Neorealism provides us with the paradigm example of Realist
filmmaking. Its main focus is on the everyday struggles of poor, working class people in
difficult socio-political conditions. Stylistically, it employs a well developed mise-en-scene to
achieve objective reality, as opposed to the Formalist techniques of montage which emphasise
how cinema can manipulate reality. In terms of narrative, Neorealism differs from Hollywood
filmmaking – focusing on character, and allowing plot to develop organically. There is often
an ambiguity with reference to the outcome of events and no judgments are made as to the
morality, or otherwise, of characters and their actions. All of this allows space to the viewer
to interpret the scene or film for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Despite being
short-lived, Italian Neorealism has had an enormous impact on the development of film which
continues to this day.
Antonio Ricci never gets his bike back. The film simply ends. The viewer is left shrugging
their shoulder and wondering, what will happen to the Ricci family?!?
That’s the point, because that’s the truth. Not everything gets resolved in life. There may not
have been a happy ending and even if there was, the story still continues for the rest of the
characters lives.

Neorealistic films, like “The Bicycle Thief”, dealt with the accurate social, political and
economic situation Italians were facing at the time, as well as the realistic treatment of their
citizens. De Sica hoped to expose the physical hunger and spiritual despair that was felt, as it
was a common feeling among people all over the world. By naming the brand name of the
films bicycle “Fides”, which in Italian means faith, and having it stolen, he is explaining that
the faith of the Italian people in themselves, and each other, was not just lost, but cruelly taken
away. He wanted the viewers to understand this feeling, feel it themselves and sympathize with
the population.
In post-WII Italy, a large crowd of men gathers around an employment office in Valmelaina.
Antonio, a family man, is desperate for work in the lackluster Italian economy. The
employment officer miraculously offers Antonio a job hanging up posters around the city. The
job pays well, and the officer explains that Antonio will need a bicycle for the job.
Unfortunately, Antonio pawned his bike to feed his family and tells the officer that he will
retrieve it in a few days. Because the job can easily be offered to another prospective employee,
the unsympathetic officer unequivocally tells Antonio, “No bicycle, no job.” The other men
begin shouting, declaring they have bicycles and can take Antonio’s job. Desperate, Antonio
lies and says he is prepared to report to work as soon as possible with a bike.
Antonio then finds his wife, Maria. He informs her of the job offer but says he can’t accept it,
lamenting, “Damn the day I was born!” Maria dismisses Antonio's hysteria and pessimism; she
rationally decides to sell their bed sheets for extra money. She reasons, “We can sleep without
sheets,” and they later get offered 7,500 Italian lire for the linen, which is more than enough
for Antonio to repossess his bike from the shop. Antonio then shows up early to meet with his
boss while fiercely clutching onto his bicycle. His boss tells Antonio that he will begin his job
tomorrow morning, much to Antonio’s excitement.

Before returning home, Maria wants to visit a woman at Via della Paglia. After a group of
women approach Antonio and ask him where the “holy one” is, Antonio asks a child to watch
his bike so he can investigate what Maria is doing there. He discovers she’s seeing a fortune
teller, and Maria justifies this visit by claiming the seer predicted Antonio’s employment. Since
the fortune teller’s prediction was correct, Maria now feels obligated to give her some money.
Finding the whole encounter frivolous and senseless, Antonio says, "how can a woman with
two children and a head on her shoulders listen to all this stupid nonsense? You must have
money to throw away” to Maria. Though frustrated by Antonio’s outbreak, Maria is eventually
convinced to return home without offering the seer money.

On Antonio’s first day, his co-worker instructs him on how to properly paste up posters. In this
case, it’s a poster of 1940s Hollywood icon Rita Hayworth. Later Antonio becomes so
engrossed in his work, he fails to pay careful attention to his bike, and a young man jumps on
Antonio’s bike and quickly rides off with it. In an attempt to chase after the man, Antonio
latches himself onto a moving automobile, but he loses the thief in the tunnels. Devastated,
Antonio reports the stolen bike to the unsympathetic and useless police, who have Antonio file
a complaint. The officer tells Antonio to search for the bike himself, to which Antonio replies,
“Look all over Rome? What's the point of even filling out a complaint?" Because Antonio filed
a complaint and the police received the bike’s serial number, the officer claims that they will
be able to proceed with the investigation if the bike shows up, but there is not much more he
or Antonio can do in the meantime.

Antonio is too ashamed to tell Maria or his young son, Bruno, the truth about his bicycle.
Instead, he seeks advice from his friend, Baiocco, who’s working on a rehearsal of an amateur
stage play. Baiocco tells Antonio that he should look for the bike at Piazza Vittorio, Rome’s
largest square, as soon as possible.
The following morning, Antonio, Bruno, Baiocco, and Baiocco's friends visit Piazza Vittorio,
where they discover countless bicycles and parts. They decide to split up and meticulously scan
different pumps and tires. Believing to see a part of his bike, Antonio asks one of the sellers
for the bike's serial number. The seller refuses, so Antonio returns with a cop, who demands
the man to reveal the serial number. The serial number doesn't match the one belonging to
Antonio's bike. Defeated, he tells the officer, “A man who's been robbed has a right to look.”

Baiocco tells Antonio to search in another market, Porta Portese, but he and the others cannot
join him this time. At Porta Portese, Antonio spots an elderly man and a young man conversing,
and he suddenly recognizes one of them—the younger man—as the thief. Antonio and Bruno
begin to chase them, and they eventually stumble upon the older man. Antonio approaches the
older man about the thief, who pretends to be oblivious and walks away.

Antonio and Bruno follow the old man into a church, and Antonio again confronts him about
the young man during the service. The old man ignores Antonio and then demands that he
leave. Antonio does not give up, and the old man eventually succumbs to Antonio’s persistence
and tells him the address and apartment number of the young man. The old man refuses to
escort them there and manages to escape from Antonio.
It’s now late afternoon, and Antonio begins to lose hope, as the chance to retrieve his bike has
seemingly slipped away from him. He projects his frustration onto Bruno and slaps him when
he begins to question his father. A tearful Bruno asks Antonio, “Why did you hit me?” and
Antonio says Bruno deserved the punishment.

Antonio and Bruno separate to look for the old man. Near a lake, Antonio spots a crowd
shouting about a drowning child. Not knowing the whereabouts of Bruno, Antonio begins to
panic, but Bruno is thankfully safe and sound, and Antonio realizes how important his son is
to him.

Deciding to momentarily forget about the bike, the father and son go to a restaurant. Antonio
justifies this irresponsible decision, saying, “why kill myself worrying when I’ll end up just as
dead anyway?” The restaurant is filled with bourgeois families, which reminds Antonio and
Bruno of their lower socioeconomic status. By the end of the meal, Antonio begins to think
sensibly and realizes he must find his bike if he wants to provide for his family.

Desperate, Antonio visits the same dubious fortune teller he mocked earlier in the film. He
hopes that she will have an answer to his problem, but she gives him generic, cliche advice
upon hearing his predicament. She tells Antonio, “Either you find it right away or you never
will." Antonio than offers her some of the last of his money and leaves.

Antonio and Bruno then stumble upon the young thief immediately after their visit with the
seer. Antonio chases him into a brothel and drags him out into the street. The young man denies
the accusations, and the neighbors in the street form a hostile crowd and tell Antonio he can’t
accuse anyone of a crime without evidence or witnesses. During the commotion, Bruno fetches
a police officer. The young man then falls to the ground and begins to have a seizure once
Antonio fervently attempts to force a confession out of him. The irate neighbors blame
Antonio's accusations for provoking the boy’s fit.

The policeman and Antonio converse about the thief. The cop asks Antonio if he’s positive that
the young man is the thief, and Antonio says he’s sure. The policeman says Antonio is fighting
a worthless cause—there were not any witnesses who saw the young man steal the bike, and
all the malicious neighbors would testify for the young man. Antonio leaves the area in despair,
and the crowd keeps shouting at him.

Antonio and Bruno sit on a curb outside of a packed football stadium. Hundreds of bicycles
surround the duo, and Antonio spots an unattended one in the distance. Conflicted, he paces
back and forth and gives Bruno some money to take a streetcar home. He then approaches the
unguarded bicycle and jumps on it. The outcry over his attempted theft is immediate, and
Bruno—who missed the streetcar—watches his father forced off the bike by a group of men.
Bruno runs into the angry crowd, weeping, “Papa! Papa!” The men begin to muscle Antonio
toward the police station. The owner of the bicycle notices Bruno, and compassionately decides
to not press charges against Antonio. Antonio and Bruno walk amid a crowd, and Antonio
holds his head in shame, trying not to cry. Bruno tearfully grasps his father’s hand, and they
continue walking home.

Michel is an amateur gangster who, when we first meet him, is stealing cars in the French
countryside. He is a free spirit who loves getting away with petty crime, but when he is cornered
by a cop, he shoots him on the side of the road, and his problems start to get worse.
Michel goes to Paris where he asks various people for money and tries to catch up with a fellow
petty criminal, Antonio, who has money for him. While in Paris, he reconnects with an
American woman, an aspiring journalist named Patricia, with whom he has fallen in love.
While she is meeting with an editor (with whom she is also having an affair), Michel procures
her key and sneaks into her apartment. She finds him there the next morning and the two of
them engage in a long conversation, at times professing their desire for one another and at
others pulling away. Michel wants very badly to have sex and tells Patricia he's in love with
her, but she is unsure if she's in love with him. She then tells him she is pregnant, most likely
with his child.
Michel drives Patricia to her office, then to a press conference where she has been tasked with
interviewing a famous novelist. The novelist is quite taken with Patricia and flatters her as she
asks questions. Later, at her office, an inspector visits Patricia and asks if she's seen Michel, as
she's been spotted with him and he's wanted for murdering a cop. She tells the inspector she
doesn't know where Michel is, but takes his card to call him in case she encounters Michel.

Michel and Patricia meet up and spend a romantic evening together, first going to the movies,
then stealing a car, then going to visit Michel's friend Antonio, who has money for him. They
then go to a friend of Antonio's apartment to hide out and spend the night. The next morning,
Patricia goes to run some errands, but stops at a cafe along the way to call the inspector and rat
Michel out. When she returns to the apartment, she tells him she's turned him in, and that the
fact that she had the impulse to do so is evidence of the fact that she doesn't love him. Michel
gets angry at this flawed logic and opts not to make a run for it. Antonio gives him a gun, but
he does not want to use it and instead runs from the police. After getting shot in the back,
Michel looks up at Patricia and tells her, "You're a real louse," then dies. Patricia does not
understand what he means.

Patricia
Patricia is an American woman who is an aspiring journalist living in Paris. Her parents want
her to study at the Sorbonne, but she wants to be a novelist and has found a job writing for and
selling The New York Herald Tribune. She met Michel one month prior, and they slept together
a few times, but she does not know much about him, in spite of being drawn to him erotically.
Once he reappears in her life, she tells him she is pregnant and that the child is his. She goes
along with him when she finds out he is a murderer on the run, but ultimately betrays him by
calling the police and giving them his location. Patricia is fickle, capricious, and seemingly
depressed. She expresses an existential insecurity and longs to find meaning in her life, but she
cannot commit to a love affair with a criminal, and she becomes something of an antagonist by
the end.
Michel
Michel is a French con man who lives day to day by stealing what he needs from anyone who
he can find. He tells Patricia he loves her, but his only evidence for his love is his erotic
attachment to her. Having murdered a police officer, Michel is on the run and trying to get
money to get to Italy for much of the film. He is reckless, somewhat immature, and starry-
eyed. His persona as a "gangster," complete with fedora and suit, is directly connected to his
admiration for old Hollywood movie stars like Humphrey Bogart. In contrast to those craggier
gentlemen, however, Michel has a soft boyish face that betrays a certain naivete. He longs to
be a character in a noir, a desire which ultimately costs him his life, but in his heart he is a
romantic.
Antonio Berrutti
Berrutti is only seen twice in the film, but he is the reason that Michel stays in Paris. Berrutti
has Michel's money, which Michel needs in order to flee to Italy. In the final scene, Berrutti
tries to give Michel his gun, throwing it on the street in a definitive moment.
Police Inspector Vital
Vital is the police inspector hot on Michel's trail. The inspector knows all of the low life
criminals in Paris, but it's Patricia who eventually gives up Michel to Vital after deciding she
doesn't want him to love her. In the final scene, Vital shoots Michel in the back, killing him.
The Novelist
The novelist is an acclaimed figure in Europe and is attended by a throng of eager journalists
who want to hear his opinion on everything. He has a casual, somewhat flip attitude towards
all the philosophical questions posed to him. In contrast to Michel, who is physical and
instinctive, the novelist is cerebral and somewhat pretentious. He shows admiration for Patricia
when she asks a question.

Breathless
French Newwave
Godard, along with his contemporaries, pioneered a revolutionary style of filmmaking. A kind
of filmmaking that strove to redefine the director as an intrusive presence in the experience of
their audiences.To do so, Godard introduced revolutionary concepts of filmmaking. He was the
jump-cut trendsetter and the 180-degree rule purposeful violator. All were techniques that made
his audience conscious of the fact that they were watching a film.After the liberation of France
from Nazi control, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and a representative for the French
government, Leon Blum, organized a deal to wipe away France’s war debt by opening
American markets to French consumers.This agreement was called the Blum-Byrnes Accords.
It shaped French culture at unprecedented rates and included a kick-start of French New Wave,
one of the most influential movements in the history of cinema.
Godard’s films were born from the intellectual community of young New Wave cinephiles who
were united by Andre Bazin’s journal Cahiers du cinéma HYPERLINK
"https://twitter.com/cahierscinema".The Cahiers critics embraced mise-en-scène aesthetics and
highlighted the idea of breaking all conventions to the point where the audience becomes
hyper-aware of the fact that they are watching a film.
In the eyes of French filmmakers, Hollywood producers were seen as “cultural
colonizers” whose power over European markets directly related to a pointed manipulation of
the film distribution.Godard’s quintessential film, Breathless, both emerged from and
responded to the cultural implications of the Blum-Byrnes Accords.

Breathless was an extended investigation of French cinema being pushed into the shadow of
Hollywood dominance. It essentially asked the question if an identity informed by another
nation’s culture can exist at all?Godard comes to the conclusion that to be able to do so would
be impossible.The film follows Michel Poiccard, a wandering criminal who shoots a policeman
after stealing a car. While on the run from authorities, Michel develops an intimate relationship
with an American woman, Patricia.At the end of the film, Patricia betrays Michel to the police,
an event that eventually leads to his death.
In making Breathless, Godard followed Bazin’s basic principle of a complete rejection of the
traditional, American, montage aesthetic, in which the style continuity and editing were
supposed to be absolutely invisible to the audience.Both Godard and Bazin believed in the
revolutionary concept: la politique des auteurs, a philosophy that dictated that exemplary films
should have the distinct signature of the director who created it.While la politique des
auteurs was not meant to lambast American directors, Godard’s filmmaking tactics purposely
pushed the boundaries of what, at the time, was considered “acceptable” filmmaking–a field of
practice that was largely defined by Hollywood itself.Michel models himself off the film
persona of the famous Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart in a similar manner by
which Breathless both models and parodies itself as a classic American Noir movie.
Therefore, to follow the progression of Michel’s character is to examine the argument
concerning the negative effects of the Blum-Byrnes Accords that Godard is suggesting.The
film opens with a shot of Michel dressed like a parody of an American gangster–a trilby pulled
low over his face, massive cigarette, and an obnoxiously patterned suit–while mimicking a
move attributed to Bogart.Michel steals an American car from an American military officer
and then proceeds to find the American’s gun in the glove compartment.This final action not
only completes Michel’s character as a criminal but also triggers the inciting incident of the
film whereby Michel shoots the police officer that chases him, setting the rest of the events in
the film in motion.In the middle of the film, the connection between Michel and Bogart
becomes even more overt. Michel examines a larger-than-life poster of Bogart for his final
film The Harder They Fall (1956): in this shot, Michel’s reflection is literally dwarfed in
Bogart’s shadow.This shot is reflecting the fact that Michel’s lack of identity cannot be
supplemented by just mimicking a symbol of classic Hollywood.
Film critic Dennis Turner says that this moment is an example of Lacan’s mirror stage, which
describes the milestone in a child’s development in which they are able to recognize themselves
in the mirror.While the infant recognizes a unity with its reflected image, this image of a unified
body and mind does not correspond with the infant’s weak state. The infant aspires to that unity
by projecting itself into the place of the “other.”This reflects an interaction between the
identities of Michel and Bogart, in which the audience is clued into Michel’s lack of identity
without the reflection of the Hollywood star.
Movie critic A.O. Scott agrees with this analysis, writing that with this scene, Godard tells his
audience that Michel a cinematic construct, unknowingly utterly incapable of achieving the
ideal he projected onto an emblem of American culture.This directly translates into an adept
criticism by Godard concerning the French trying to emulate and adopt American culture.The
finale of the film drives home Godard’s message that the unity between Patricia, Michel’s
American girlfriend, and Michel–which mirrors the unity between France and America both
during and after the Blum-Byrnes Accords–is inherently exploitative.Patricia, betraying
Michel to the cops, watches as Michel is gunned down.This scene, which became a cultural
touchstone after the film’s release, is one long, relatively unbroken shot as Michel stumbles
down the street, pressing his hand against his bullet wound until he collapses.The soundtrack
here is loud and intrusive. It sounds like something that would be at the climax of an action
scene in a Bond movie. Not the music one would expect to accompany the tragic death of the
main character.The symbolism here is clear: the union between Patricia and Michel was never
going to work. Patricia violates Michel’s love in the same way that Hollywood, with the help
of the American government, violated French theaters.By 1948, barely two years after the
Blum-Byrnes Accords, 222 American films populated French cinemas. This number,
compared to the 89 French films, and only 8 films from other countries released that year,
understandably shocking for French filmmakers.This final sequence clearly illustrates how
Godard viewed the only possible outcome for the French film’s cultural identity if they
attempted to move with–as opposed to against–the grain of the American culture forced upon
them.In an adept and incredibly “meta” twist, Breathless itself, with its purposeful break from
all traditional conventions, the use of jump cuts, and breaking of the fourth wall is the solution
to the problem Godard sees.It successfully goes against the grain of the American cinematic
precedent.American economic dominance over French culture produced a cognitive
dissonance for the identity of French filmmakers. Breathless wants to identify with the
Hollywood filmmaking it admires.However, Godard is conscious of the fact that such an
identification is utterly impossible.

Marriage of Maria Braun

New German Cinema
Bombs fell as Maria was married to a soldier named Hermann Braun, with the wedding party
scrambling for safety. Then came more years of the war. Whatever happened to Maria Braun
during those years created a woman who is strong and cruel, sad and indomitable. She is so
loyal to her husband of less than a day that she kills for him, and so pitiless to her lover of many
years that she drives him to death.
All the time she is keeping score: nylons and cigarettes at first, then a good job, fashionable
clothes, a house in the suburbs, expensive restaurants. At the end, her desperate lover, who is
also her boss and has made her rich, tries to get a word with her; as he talks, she continues to
enter numbers into an adding machine.

"The Marriage of Maria Braun" was made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1979, near the end
of a career so short and dazzling that it still seems incredible he did so much and died so young.
Fassbinder made at least 30 features, or many more if you count his television productions,
including the 15-hour miniseries "Berlin Alexanderplatz," and he did it all between 1969 and
his death at age 37 in 1982.
Some of his early work looks homemade ("We didn't know what we were doing, and it was
like a game" remembers Hanna Schygulla, who starred in 20 of his films). Despite his
production of two to three films a year, he was not a hit-and-run improviser, but a stylist who
often worked with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus to create elegant, mannered visuals. His
great influence, he said, was the German director Douglas Sirk, who fled Hitler and in
Hollywood made a series of silky melodramas ("Imitation of Life," "Written on the Wind,"
"All That Heaven Allows") in which, one critic observed, the characters seemed to glide within
invisible glass walls which kept them from touching. Fassbinder's later films looked like
elegant studio productions, although even "Maria Braun," perhaps his most expensive, cost less
than $1 million.
Fassbinder's world was one in which sex, ego and money drove his characters to cruelty, sadism
and self-destruction. It is never difficult to discover what they want, or puzzling to see how
they go about it. His occasional gentle characters, like the old woman in "Ali -- Fear Eats the
Soul" (1974), are eaten alive. The suggestion is that the war years and the postwar years
wounded the German psyche so profoundly that the survivors wanted what they wanted, now,
on their terms. Fassbinder himself was cruel and distant to those around him, particularly those
who loved him, and in Maria Braun, he created an indelible monster who is perversely
fascinating because she knows exactly what she is doing and explains it to her victims while it
is being done.
After the brief opening wedding scene, the story rejoins Maria and her mother immediately
after World War II, when they are sharing a flat carved out of a bombed building. She believes
her husband, Hermann (Klaus Lowitsch) is dead, although she haunts rail stations with his
photograph. The population is starving and desperate; when an American GI tosses away a
cigarette butt, a dozen Germans scramble for it. Maria applies for a job in a nightclub for
American soldiers; it's located in a high school gym where she once attended school, and she
mounts the parallel bars, which are still in place, and more or less orders the owner to give her
the job. Her mother (Gisela Uhlen) alters the hem of her skirt while fretting that Maria's father
would have been heartbroken to see his daughter as a bar girl; then she says she hopes
somebody gives Maria some nylons.
The B-girl joint is the first step on Maria's relentless climb to success. We follow her from
about 1946 to the mid-1950s. There is a black American soldier she is fond of (they share the
movie's only scene of physical affection), but when her husband unexpectedly returns and finds
them in bed, she settles the matter by breaking a bottle over the GI's head. She did not plan to
kill him, but he's dead. Her husband tells the court he did it and is sentenced to prison. Maria
remains fiercely loyal to this absent spouse, who is essentially a stranger, for all the rest of the
film; perhaps it is her form of loyalty to Germany in its defeat.
The most sympathetic character is Oswald (Ivan Desny), a manufacturer who sat out the war
in comfort, perhaps in exile, and has returned to take over the reins of his business from his
faithful accountant Senkenberg (Hark Bohm). Maria crashes first class during a train ride,
forces Oswald to notice her, tells him to hire her and asks him to sleep with her: "I wanted to
make the first move before you could," she tells him, and later, "You're not having an affair
with me. I'm having an affair with you."
Poor Oswald would marry her, but she is married. She calls him up when she wants sex,
humiliates him, says she is fond of him and then treats him distantly. Yet all the time, she is an
ideal employee, quickly rising from "personal assistant" to the company's key decision-maker.
At one business meeting, translating the English of a customer, she changes it to reflect what
she thinks Oswald should hear in order to do what she has decided he should do.
The cinematographer Ballhaus worked with Fassbinder on a dozen films in nine years, then
"burned out," resigned, and started working for Martin Scorsese, who by comparison "was like
a dream." "Maria Braun" was their final film together; observe how they like to keep the camera
moving, through elegant setups in which characters and locations are arranged so that the fluid
visuals flow from long shots through closeups without cutting, often moving behind walls,
peering through doors and windows, looking around posts, so that the characters seem jammed
into the space around them.
Notice, too, the gradual evolution of Maria Braun from a desperate scavenger to a rich beauty;
Hanna Schygulla, who met Fassbinder in school and starred in 20 of his films, had an uncanny
ability to float just out of range of analysis, as if she were not acting but getting her effects
through dreamy murderous impulses -- that despite the fact that every shot was precisely
blocked and the dialogue has the precision and brutality of a play by Neil LaBute.
Maria has a childhood friend named Betti (Elisabeth Trissenaar) who marries another friend,
Willi (Gottfried John). With both of them, she sometimes returns to bombed-out buildings,
where she climbs up rubble-blocked staircases in her high heels, peering down through twisted
beams and remembering that this room was their classroom, and that one was -- but why is she
doing this? I think because she gains a savage energy from these reminders of how her world
was blown to pieces. When a black marketeer (Fassbinder) offers her a rare edition of books,
she says "Books burn too fast, and they don't give any heat."
Maria is always honest, uses no deception, admits she is toying with Oswald, is coldly amused
at his weakness. It is the sentimental accountant Senkenberg who loves Oswald best, but he
loves the company, too, and sees that Maria is good for it. Her conversations with Oswald are
like the sparkling wit of screwball comedy, rotated into psychological cruelty. She orders him
to meet her at a restaurant and is already eating when he arrives. He confesses he was frightened
to come; she has him so off-balance he has no idea how to please her. They quarrel. "Why don't
we just leave?" he asks. "Because," she says, "you were well brought up, and I pretend that I
was."
What happens to Maria and her husband in the final scene was the subject of heated discussion
after the film played at Cannes in May 1979. It's a surprise, but you must admit it is as plausible
an ending as any other. I remember Fassbinder late at night at a back-street bar at Cannes that
year, always in his black leather jacket, surrounded by his crowd, often scowling or arguing as
they tried to please him. He was Maria Braun and they were all Oswalds. But he was a genius.
That much everyone admitted.
Three years later, alone in a room, naked on a mattress, surrounded by money, watching
"20,000 Years in Sing Sing" on television, he gave a fatal jolt to his heart with what he phoned
a friend to say was his last line of cocaine. He would be 60 this year. There should have been
at least 23 more films.

Plot
The film starts in Germany in 1943. During an Allied bombing raid Maria marries the soldier
Hermann Braun. After "half a day and a whole night" together, Hermann returns to the Eastern
front the following day. Following the end of the war, Maria is informed that Hermann has
been killed. Maria starts work as a prostitute in a bar frequented by American soldiers. She has
a relationship with African-American soldier Bill, who supports her and gives her nylon
stockings and cigarettes. She becomes pregnant by Bill.

However, Hermann was not killed, and returns home to discover Maria and Bill undressing
each other. A fight between Hermann and Bill ensues. When Hermann seems in danger, Maria
unintentionally kills Bill, striking his head with a full bottle. Maria is tried by a military tribunal
and expresses her love for both Bill and Hermann; Hermann is so struck with Maria's devotion
that he takes the blame for the killing and is imprisoned. Maria has a stillbirth and asks her
doctor to promise to maintain the grave. On the train home, Maria positions herself to catch the
eye of a wealthy industrialist, Karl Oswald. Oswald, an older man, offers her a position as his
assistant, and shortly thereafter Maria becomes his mistress as she had planned. Maria visits
Hermann again and tells him about the development, promising that their life will start as soon
as he is released. Maria becomes wealthy and buys a house.

Oswald visits Hermann and offers to make him and Maria heirs to his wealth if Hermann
deserts Maria after his release. Neither man tells Maria of their agreement. On release,
Hermann emigrates to Canada and sends Maria a red rose each month to remind her he still
loves her.

Following Oswald's death, Hermann returns to Germany and to Maria. When Oswald's will is
read by Senkenberg, the executor, Maria hears about Oswald's agreement with Hermann.
Distressed, Maria and Hermann briefly argue about how they supposedly sacrificed through
their whole life for each other, then she goes into the kitchen to light a cigarette from the burner
of the stovetop. Maria is offscreen as Hermann is seen watching her, when he lurches away
and screams "Nein". Before this, Maria had left the gas stove opened after lighting up a cigarette
in the same place. A moment later, the apartment suffers a gas explosion from the stove, killing
Maria and Hermann.
The old film is dead. We believe in the new one,” declared a group of young, radical West
German filmmakers in the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto. With the signing of this brief and
fervid manifesto, the New German Cinema was born.Filmmakers like Alexander Kluge, Haro
Senft, and Edgar Reitz were among the signatories who rejected the kitschy, dull films
dominating West Germany and advocated for an innovative vision of cinema that unnerved
and educated mainstream audiences. Their bold ambitions reflected both the artistic and
political stagnation of mid-20th century West Germany. With the German film industry in
severe decline, the output of conventional and politically voiceless films was perpetual, leaving
the aspiring filmmakers yearning for a new film language. Also, while sometimes thought of
as an emblem of democratic idealism and capitalist success, West Germany experienced
massive cultural upheaval throughout the mid-century. Generational tensions, widespread
grappling with the legacy of Nazism, the terrifying Red Army Faction, high employment rates,
new lifestyles, and protests all challenged the capabilities of the divided nation’s established
and bourgeois political institutions.With this artistic and political dissatisfaction came
filmmakers like Kluge, Senft, and Reitz, as well as a phalanx of other talents: Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta, and Helke Sander. These
leaders of New German Cinema — which flourished from the late 60s into the early 80s
— rebuffed the standard film production process; they requested financial state support to
alleviate their creative visions from the aching constraints of a commercially driven film
industry. Many New German Cinema projects did receive some funding and distribution from
subsidy laws, The Federal Ministry of the Interior, and Kuratorium Junger Deutscher
Film (Young German Film Committee), which prompted the filmmakers to experiment with
evocative subject matter and the potentials of cinema itself.

In their mission to create a new insightful film language, the young German filmmakers
reflected their own (often leftist) political stances and radically confronted contemporary issues
in their work. This intermingling of art and politics often criticized bourgeois institutions and
commented on attempts to reconcile a brutal past, marginalized groups, alienated youth, the
limits of a liberal democracy, and journalistic integrity — themes which still resonate 50 years
after the signing of the Oberhausen Manifesto.

Sadly, New German Cinema’s intent to create the new German film was never quite
achieved. As reported in a 1977 HYPERLINK
"https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/11/archives/german-films-are-subsidized.html"New York
Times HYPERLINK "https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/11/archives/german-films-are-
subsidized.html" article, most of the movement’s films were commercial failures and “were
greeted with apathy by the German public.” Thus, New German Cinema never truthfully met
its demands or gained the attention it deserved. However, in a short documentary about New
German Cinema,“The Heirs of Daddy’s Cinema” (1968), filmmaker Peter Schamoni remarks,
“We established a certain fixed place for ourselves in German cinema” — a declaration as true
in 2018 as it was in 1968. Ultimately, the leaders of the movement produced an insightful,
acclaimed body of work and restored the international reputation of German cinema along the
way.

New German Cinema comprises of dozens and dozens of films, which all vastly differ in style,
themes, and scope. The most ideal way to experience the movement’s richness and allure is to
simply watch some of the following films listed below, which include some of the main
representatives of the movement, as well as lesser-known gems. Fassbinder took interest in the
relationship between the past and present while reflecting the effects of Germany’s fascist
history on the post-war profitable, bourgeois public. These themes permeate The Marriage of
Maria Braun, one of Fassbinder’s greatest international box office and critical successes.The
film opens with Maria Braun (played by the captivating Hanna Schygulla) marrying a WWII
soldier Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) amidst chaos, fallen bombs, a crying baby, and a
wedding party desperately searching for safety. The rest of the film follows Maria as she thrives
in post-war Germany, all the while remaining fiercely loyal to Herman, a man she barely
knows. Maria is cruel and calculating; she refers to herself as “the Mata Hari of the economic
miracle” and uses her sexuality to get exactly what she wants without ever hiding her perverse
motivations from her victims.With Maria Braun, Fassbinder pointedly attacks a society trying
to forget its past. Maria’s devotion to Herman metaphorically reflects her loyalty to a defeated
nation, and her pragmatic, forward-thinking disposition reflects the typical post-war German
mindset — which wanted to freely move on from a calamity on its own terms. Fassbinder
glimpses into Maria’s humanity when she returns to a shambled, dilapidated area that was once
her old school. Perfectly dressed and in high heels, she stumbles through the ruins with her
sister, while laughing, crying, and singing together. The scene illuminates how Maria can profit
from the post-war economic miracle, but this escapism is not absolute: the lingering effects of
WWII carnage are real, haunting, and irresponsible to ignore.

OFFSIDE
THIRD CINEMA
Discussing alternative cinema through the film Offside After describing what alternative media
and alternative cinema, it is important to what alternative cinema represents to mention through
the film Offside exactly. This study uses sociological film interpretation method. The method
of sociological film interpretation allows comparative analysis of film content of a large sample
in terms of the films’ social reference. Films are viewed for social context and in terms of their
date of origin. Cognitive interest focuses on the relation of film content and social reality. What
is meant here by “society,” is the entire environment surrounding the film, including the
production conditions, financing, politics, etc., of the film. From this arises the issue of the
ideological positioning of a film’s content Questioned are the messages and biases of a film.
Films are investigated in terms of their reality content and their positioning in terms of relations
of power and authority, problematic themes, peripheral groups, etc. The analysis of the content
of a film begins at the manifest, explicit level. The significance of the film requires the working
out of latent, implicit constructions of meaning. Sociological film interpretation is mainly
relevant for large samples that work systematically with focused lines of questioning (e.g.,
certain epochs, occupations, political themes, etc.) (Flicker, 2003: 309) The film Offside is
analyzed by the sociological film interpretation method. Sociological research method is a part
of cultural history. The key of sociological research method is society; therefore Offside can
be analyzed based on society in detailed with sociological film interpretation method. Thus the
social meaning of the movies, minorities in society, social class, and social role are questioned.
Offside is analyzed and searched based on the reflect of the reality of the era with the reflect
sociological film interpretation method. The key of this method is not the profile of the director
or “tradition”, on the other hand the main thing is “society”. This study will join together typical
issues of sociological film interpretation:
The situation of women
Islamic faith
Mass media in Iran
Ideology & Hegemony
Alternative voice for minority
Daily life imagery
The plot of the film Offside
Offside is about a group of Iranian girls who attempts to enter Tehran’s Azadi Stadium dressed
as boys in order to watch a big football match but some get caught and arrested. The film begins
with a girl, who disguises herself as a boy, sitting on a bus with some men going to see the
2006 World Cup qualifying match between Ian and Bahrain. During her journey to the stadium,
some notice her gender, but do not tell anyone. In June 2005, the Iran’s national soccer team
has an important game against Bahrain in the Azadi Stadium for the qualification of the World
Cup. A group of Iranian girls and lovers of soccer dresses like boys and unsuccessfully attempts
to enter in the stadium being arrested. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran,
women are not allowed to enter the stadiums. The film ends the image of the city of Tehran
explodes with festivity, and the bus becomes caught in a traffic jam as a spontaneous street
party begins. Borrowing seven sparklers from the boy with the fireworks, the women and the
soldiers leave he bus and join the party, holding the sparklers above them.The film Offside as
an alternative media.Alternative media are the nemesis of mass media refusing or challenging
established and institutionalized politics. In this sense, Panahi’s cinema narrative and language
is an alternative film within Iranian cinema. Panahi criticizes the status quo within the Iranian
state and society and creates an alternative voice for the status quo by the issues he
addresses.The films of Jafar Panahi stand in a unique place with their symbolic and thematic
structure and hermeneutic approach to socio-political debates in Iran. Inheriting a gift of
lyricism prevalent in Farsi poetic tradition, these filmmakers of the new cinema in Iran are the
visual poets of their nation using the poesies of cinema wrapped in a neo-realistic
documentative mode. “Through a process of cultural negotiation and haggling- not just hailing
and interpellation” (Naficy, 1995: 551)post-revolution cinema in Iran is characterised by
narratives that are locally contingent but aim to create a universal and experimental cinematic
language. Offside can be discussed as an alternative cinema within the context of different
themes as below: The situation of women The use of space specifically by women has
historically been marked by an anxious limitation conventionally imposed by repressive
regimes. Prior to the restrictions introduced by the 1979 Revolution, there was no objection to
women watching football matches in Iran. After those restrictions, the matches have become
completely male-dominant, extremely chauvinistic and vulgar. The use of swearing and slang
is used as the reason for not allowing women to see football matches, the defenders arguing
that women should not be subjected to such behaviour. This is demonstrated with examples in
nearly all the scenes in the film, such as the scenes in which the soldiers argue with the girls
when the girls talk among themselves, and the scene of the old man calling his daughter and
narrating the phone call to the taxi driver. These scenes can also exemplify the idea that women
cannot be at football matches or in any public sphere where naked arms and legs are displayed.
The girls who are arrested and put behind the iron bars ask the soldiers: “Why is this prohibited
to us? Why can’t we watch the match?” Their answer is: “Because this is how it has to be.
Women are not allowed to football matches because, while they play, men swear and say things
you shouldn’t hear, and because they wear shorts or short-sleeved shirts. Do you want to see
naked male arms and legs?” The film shows that women do not have a place in the public
sphere in Iran. It also shows that the women are not allowed to a social activity in the public
sphere (and), moreover, they are put behind the iron bars, waiting for punishment under the
supervision of the soldiers only because they wanted to watch the football match live in a
football stadium. The film seriously refers to the means of communication and new reporting
in Iran. The urban girl with the most masculine demeanour questions the case, and the dialogue
between her and the soldier with the highest rank proceeds as follows: “Why are you doing
this?” “This is how it should be.”Don't spin a yarn to me. This is not the local radio, don't give
me that nonsense.” The film shows that the women are unequal in the public sphere even when
they want to meet their basic needs. When one of the arrested girls wants to go to the toilet, the
soldier says,“Have you been possessed by Satan? One wants to go to the toilet. The other wants
to be a soldier,” indirectly expressing that the women/girls do not have the right to do these in
the society, that they have to live with what is offered to them as he has been taught. Raymond
Williams (1980), a Welsh cultural theorist, points out to the importance of social practices and
defines culture as “whole way of life”. He states that mass media, on the other hand, are the
realm of conflict of interests for different social groups (cultural activities) and that different
social class contribute to the "common culture", helping the society to advance in this process
of struggle (Williams, 1980) At this point, the mass media, on the other hand, are seen as the
arenas reflecting the conflicts of the groups attempting to make their cultural existence
acknowledged. Instead of evaluating the communication process in a directly cause and effect
mechanism, Birmingham School theorists focuses on the ideological effects of media rather
than its contribution to ensuring consensus in a society divided inti different groups and social
classes, and see media as an expression of wider political and social powers with indirect and
even hard to grasp influences. In this respect, Panahi’s film Offside can be described as a tool
for minority group as it allows women to be heard.
Islamic faith
Restrictions affect people from different classes and social layers. Panahi shows in the film that
religion underlies the problems faced by people from different classes manifesting as into
sanctions. In fact, in Iranian society, most of the prohobitions and sanctions are related to
religious beliefs. In their desire to participate in social event (such as this football match),
women and girls express themselves in the public sphere risking serious sanctions instigated
by religious belief. And thus everybody, both male and female, start displaying extreme
behaviours in the public sphere. In the film, Panahi makes one of the arrested girls wear chador
after a certain time. By this, the director actually explains through the film that such problems
can happen not only to people without much faith but, on the contrary, to devout people as
well, and that a religious problem underlies this issue. It is very common to use the masks in
the Iranian films.The use of masks actually has many meanings and messages, and this upsets
the authorities. In fact, masks are used on TV as well. It is not a matter of whether or not
authorities enjoy the messages in the first place, but preventing the problems that may arise
from their use. The position of the women, their status in the society and their desire to attend
a match are intolerable for the authorities. And the film uses masks, as it is generally believed
that wearing a mask refers to isolation from the realities. A good example of this is seen in the
scene when the soldier makes the girl wear a mask taking her to the toilet, and tries to prevent
her from reading. the male writings in the toilet. Mass media in Iran Traber argues that the
conventions of mass media marginalize the role of the ‘simple man and woman’, emphasizing
instead the rich,the powerful and the glamorous. The former are regarded only as observers or
marginal commentators on events; they achieve prominence only when they are the actors in a
situation that is bounded by values based on, for instance, conflict or the bizarre. He divides
alternative media into two sectors: advocacy media and grassroots media.The alternative
advocacy media adopt very different news values from the mass media, introducing ‘alternative
social actors such as the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and indeed the ordinary manual
labourer, woman, youth and child as the main subjects of their news and features’ (Traber,
1985: 2) For O’Sullivan, alternative media argue for social change, seek to involve people
(citizens, not elites) in their processes and are committed to innovation in form and content.
This set of aims takes into account not only content, but presentation and organizational
procedures. It defines alternative media positively and usefully. With these considerations in
mind, we can consider Michael Traber’s notion of alternative media where: the aim is to change
towards a more equitable social, cultural and economic whole in which the individual is not
reduced to an object (of the media or the political powers) but is able Grassroots media is
focused more specifically on media making by and for the local community that it serves
making the discussion more narrow and precise It is essentially a subset focusing on small scale
media projects which aim to bring different visions and perspectives to the “codes” that are so
easily embedded in the social psyche.While no prior censorship of nonfiction exists, any
published book that is considered un-Islamic can be confiscated, and both the author and the
publisher are liable for attempting to offend public morals or Islam. Private publishing
companies thus tend to restrict their titles to subjects that will not arouse official ire. Numerous
new books in history, science, geography, and classical poetry and literature have been
published since 1987, including many manuscripts that had been banned under the Shah.
Virtually no new works of contemporary fiction, however, have appeared in print. All radio
and television broadcasting is government controlled with stations in Tehran and the major
provincial cities. In this sense, in the film, one of the girls says, Don't spin a yarn to me. This
is not the local radio, don't give me that nonsense.” This sentence indirectly shows that the
mass media in Iran are a part of the status quo serving directly the government. Another
conversation between the soldiers themselves, reveals that the women wearing turban are not
arrested because there are many members of the world press in Iran to watch the match, and it
would not be proper to let the world know that women are arrested, further depicting media as
a tool of the government.

This article tries to address established notions of Third Cinema theory and its film makers
from developing and postcolonial nations. The 'Third Cinema' movement called for a
politicised film-making practice in Africa, Asia and Latin America, since its first appearance
during the 60s and 70s taking on board issues of race, class, religion, and national integrity.
The films investigated in this paper, from directors such as Sembene, Getino, Solanas and
Guzman, are amongst the most culturally significant and politically sophisticated from this
movement and which denote the adoption of an independent, often oppositional stance towards
commercial genre emanating from the more developed capitalist world. However, despite the
contemporary popularity and critical attention enjoyed by films from Asia and Latin America
in particular, Third Cinema appears to have lost its momentum. This article wants to bring
Third Cinema back to attention. There are difficult and challenging questions Third Cinema
posed and continues to pose. This article seeks to suggest new methodologies and redirections
of existing ones, but also reread the entire phenomenon of film-making in a fast-vanishing
'Third World', with case studies of the cinemas of Argentina, Chile, Senegal as well as from
European Third Cinema movements.
Overview
There is an endless debate about Third Cinema and its strategies in offering valuable tools
of documenting social reality. From the 70s to recent days, appreciation of its value and
aesthetics was unfolded through controversial approaches and different views on this 'radical'
form of cinema. The idea of Third Cinema was raised in the 1960s as a set of radical manifestos
and low-budget experimental movies by a group of Latin American filmmakers, who defined
a cinema of opposition to Hollywood and European models. Possibly this new form of
expression was coming from three different areas of the world: Asia, Africa and Latin America.
At the time these three zones were labelled 'Third World (in some parts and sometimes they
still are). Even though scholars such as Willemen explained how the notion of Third Cinema
was most emphatically not Third World Cinema, these two concepts have often been confused
either voluntarily or accidentally.
As an idea, the roots of Third Cinema came from the Cuban Revolution (1959) and the figure
who supported this revolution - Che Guevara. The Brazilian Cinema Novo, where Glauber
Rocha provided an uproar with his polemic manifesto titled The Aesthetics of Hunger (July
1965), was part and element of this new wave. It shared roots with certain aesthetics of Italian
neo-realism and Grierson's notion of social documentary and ultimately influenced by some
Marxist aesthetics. Filmmakers influenced by Latin American documentary include figures
such as Fernando Birri, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, and Julio Garcia Espinosa.
The term Third Cinema was invented by the Argentinean film makers, Fernando Solanas and
Octavio Getino who had produced and directed the most important documentary for the Third
Cinema in the 60's La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of Furnaces, 1968). At the same time,
they wrote an important essay sustaining the radical ideas of Third Cinema: Towards a Third
Cinema (1969). The principle characteristics of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is
made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it
displays. In one word we might not be far from the truth when we claim the Third Cinema as
the cinema of the Third World which stands opposed to imperialism and class oppression in all
their ramifications and manifestations.
The Third Cinema has offered a significant means of documenting social reality through the
analysis of documentaries from Argentina, Chile and Algeria and, on the other side of the
Ocean, also from Black Independents documentaries for what concerns the British context.
Self-conscious ideological opposition to Hollywood was the first marker of Third Cinema,
while identification with national liberation was the next most common theme, at least in the
early writings on the subject. The idea of the nation in this discourse, however, always rubs up
against globalized Third World identification. On the one hand, the tri-continental definition
of radical film aesthetics defies national boundaries. On the other hand, if any cinema is
determinedly 'national' even 'regional' in its address and aspirations, it is Third Cinema.
The political-cultural trends of the 80s and 90s have demonstrated the need for a definitive
reappraisal of the terms in which a radical practice like Third Cinema had been conceived in
the 70s: questions of gender and of cultural identity received new inflections, and traditional
notions of class determined identity were soon to be seen as a tool inadequate as the forms of
struggle that corresponded to them.

Third Cinema as 'third space'

Third Cinema may relevantly result as third, the 'third space' which displaces the histories
and needs that constitute it and sets up new structures of identity, new political initiatives,
which are inadequately understood through the actual mainstream channels of production and
distribution.
Due to the changing multiracial and multicultural world reality, Third Cinema must reinvent
itself in terms of gender, class and geographical identity and consequently in terms of narrative
structure and aesthetics.
The challenge between those cosmopolitan images and the struggle of local identity continues
to move film authors looking for new ways to co-produce new Latin American, African and
Asian cultural identities through collaborative practices that have as their ultimate aim not the
removal of the local but a meaningful relocation of it in the global community.
As happened also for Solanas, the Third Cinema needs to configure itself as authorial icons
representing their respective national culture within the global market, without losing their
status of oppositional figures to the mainstream cinema, without losing the local identities
either coming from the Third World area or from a European context.
These concerns to define a necessary and new form of Third Cinema must not leave behind the
primary concerns in the production of 'revolutionary films'. The need of Third Cinema is
undoubtedly a call for social and cultural transformation. Even though historical contexts and
aesthetic responses may change, its mandate to face post-colonialism and to protect local
identities still holds. Obviously the present aim of Third Cinema, ignoring geographical
borders, is to continue in seeking its own place in a global context. Third Cinema is not the
cinema of the Third World but is the cinematic expression of the desire to express ourselves
and our identities, although a general tendency of politics and culture is pushing towards a way
of homologation and annulment.

Plot
Most of the characters in the film are not named.

A girl disguises herself as a boy to go attend the 2006 World Cup qualifying
match between Iran and Bahrain. She travels by bus with a group of male fans, some of whom
notice her gender, but do not tell anyone. Upon arrival at the grounds of Azadi Stadium, she
persuades a reluctant ticket tout to sell her a ticket; he only agrees to do so at an inflated price.
The girl tries to slip through security, but she is spotted and arrested. She is put in a holding
pen on the stadium roof with several other women who have also been caught; the pen is
frustratingly close to a window onto the match, but the women are at the wrong angle to see it.
The women are guarded by several soldiers, all of whom are just doing their national service;
one in particular is an Iranian Azeri boy from Tabriz who just wants to return to his farm. The
soldiers are bored and do not particularly care whether women should be allowed to attend
football matches; however, they guard the women carefully for fear of their "chief", who could
come by at any moment. They occasionally give commentary on the match to the women.
One of the younger girls needs to go to the toilet, but of course there is no women's toilet in the
stadium. A soldier is deputed to escort her to the men's toilet, which he does by an increasingly
farcical process: first disguising her face with a poster of a football star, then throwing a number
of angry men out of the toilet and blockading any more from entering. During the chaos, the
girl escapes into the stadium, although she returns to the holding pen shortly after as she is
worried about the soldier from Tabriz getting into trouble.

Part of the way through the second half of the game, the women are bundled into a bus, along
with a boy arrested for carrying fireworks, and the soldiers ordered to drive them to the Vice
Squad headquarters. As the bus travels through Tehran, the soldier from Tabriz plays the radio
commentary on the match as it concludes. Iran defeats Bahrain 1-0 with a goal
from Mohammad Nosrati just after half time and wild celebrations erupt within the bus as the
women and the soldiers cheer and sing with joy. The girl whose story began the film is the only
one not happy. When asked why, she explains that she is not really interested in football; she
wanted to attend the match because a friend of hers was one of seven people killed in a scuffle
during the recent Iran-Japan match, and she wanted to see the match in his memory.
The city of Tehran explodes with festivity, and the bus becomes caught in a traffic jam as a
spontaneous street party begins. Borrowing seven sparklers from the boy with the fireworks,
the women and the soldiers leave the bus and join the party, holding the sparklers above them.
The film was filmed at an actual stadium during a qualifying match for the Iranian National
team. Panahi had two separate outcomes to the film depending on the turnout of the match.
 Glass
Documentary

Glas, a 1959 Oscar-winning short subject documentary film made by Bert Haanstra explores
the visual beauty which is inherent in the traditional process of glassblowing and elicits a
comparison between the scrupulous method-based craftsmanship of the glassblowers and the
automatic process of the machines making glass bottles. This 10 minutes 30 seconds
documentary film is shot in the glass factories of Leerdam and Schiedam. Along with some
peppy jazz music, a ballet of working hands and the mechanical work of the machines is
amalgamated in a synchronized manner which enhances the beauty of the film. By showing
the little glitch in machine work wherein many bottles break, it presents the precision and
perfection of the work of the glassblowers and brings out the fact that machines can’t work as
efficiently as the workers do.

The film seems to have been divided into four parts. The first part presents the workers blowing
glass in the factory efficiently. Their actions seem to go with the music as it flows, playing
around with molten glass with a certain sense of comfort, ease and perfection in glassblowing.
The second part is taken over by the machines where bottles were being manufactured by
machines in bulk in the absence of workers. As a bottle gets stuck on the belt, many other
bottles break as they fall. This particular scene brings out the importance of the glassblowers.
The third part is an amalgamation of the work of the glassblowers and the machines, glimpses
of the process of glass-making is shown along with the jazz music. In the fourth and the last
part, music takes over. Instead of the sand, fire and smoke, the cheeks, fingers and movements
of the glassblowers are focused on which run along with the music.

Music plays a vital role in this documentary. Music lightens up the film and gives it a distinctive
quality. Each part has music of its own. The music is soft and easy in the first part whereas in
the second part when machines take over, the music changes to a digital/robotic tone signifying
automation. The third part manifests the playing of various instruments such as saxophone,
piano, etc. In the fourth part, the actions of the glassblowers are shown in such a way that it
seems like they are playing the instruments. Their actions brilliantly follow the rhythm of the
Jazz music. For instance, when saxophone plays in the film, one of the glassblowers is shown
blowing the glass which looks similar to playing the saxophone and when the piano plays the
focus is on the glassblower’s fingers working to make glass. The music seamlessly merges with
the activities of the glassblowers giving it a bit of humoristic and beautiful tone.

Bert Haanstra’s Glas (1958) is at once a passionate celebration of human labour and
craftsmanship and a biting critique of the mechanistic mass-production of objects. On the very
surface this documentary can appear as a demonstrative film keenly elucidating the very basic
processes that go into the making of handmade glassware and juxtaposing it with the process
of bottle-making in a mechanised factory. Yet this very juxtaposition coupled with a Haanstra’s
strong stylistic intervention takes the film into a polemical space. Haanstra uses the very
essential elements of film language – image, sound and montage – to create a provocative
rhythm which argues that the assembly line mass production renders the products de-
humanized - lacking any sentiment or affective value beyond utility.

Viscosity of hot and glowing semi fluid glass being moulded into magnificent glass articles by
the sheer skill of human body – a hand rolling pipes, mouths puffing to calibrate the girth and
thickness of glass, contours forming under the gentle touch of hands, delicate curves emerging
around a finger – shot in tight and sensuous close-ups affirm the beauty and the awe of human
creation. To take something elemental – a stone, a chemical, a word – and transform it into a
thing of beauty – by sculpting, by intervening, adding, negating, composing, by infusing in it
a character unforeseen yet imagined – in one word art – which manifests often in crafts as well
– is celebrated with a romantic fervour in these images. The question arises – such a
transformation happens in a factory as well; then what differentiates the value of the products
created by human endeavour and those created by machines en-mass. It is perhaps, as the film
suggests – a flaw. This artistic flaw is the beauty of human creation – the impossibility of
cloning as each man/creator infuses a unique character, a personality, a tone – however little
or negligible- into the object he is making with his own hands and lungs and eyes- is removed
from the impersonal perfection of mass production. He is at once at Eliot would say working
in a tradition but with individual talent. We never see two or more completely identical objects
being churned out by different workers in the workhouse – unlike the perfect copies that the
bottles produced on the assembly line are.

This perfection of industrial production is also questioned in a sequence reminiscent of

Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), where just one little fault of a bottle on the assembly line
breaks the normalized chain and the bottles start collapsing one after the other. The robotic
hands of a machine unlike a man’s cannot act with thought and imagination to intervene and
mould the situation – it keeps looping futilely in its instructed drone. Unlike the workers who
are involved in the entire process of the creation comprising of several operations performed
on a single object, in an assembly line each worker gets to be part of a single fragmented
operation on several clone like objects. This degrades, severely the affection, reverence and
intimacy felt by the worker towards the product. As in one of the telling sequences, where a
worker in a Fordsian factory carefully and skilfully rolls a joint, much like the workers creating
glassware from scratch in the workhouse, but he very casually lights that joint with a hot piece
of glass picked out of the assembly line with absolute irreverence.

Having said that, the greatest triumph of the film is not its cynicism but the adoration it reserves
for the dignity of human artisanship. The sequences of the workers manually working on glass
are shot with such tenderness and buoyancy – the montage set to beautiful jazz music – organic,
non-electronic wind instruments and piano – and the images – workers blowing into the pipes,
twisting and turning them, hands deftly playing with instruments and churning out lanterns and
vases, wine glasses and statues tied to this music, turns the work of these men into a soulful
orchestra. The work that these men are doing is shot like one shoots the concerts – with similar
shot divisions, warm tonality and interactive rhythm.
There is of course that question that comes to mind – after all, even these workers are working
in a factory albeit of a different kind. Even this situation is not entirely free of that alienation
as the products that these artisans create will be adorned not in houses like theirs, but will most
probably become relics of bourgeois vanity. Yet, when one remembers the stark staccato, de-
humansised images of a more ‘sophisticated’ factory in the film – the glass fragments rushing
restlessly one after the other in the complex tangles of the assembly line with the least human
intervention possible- set to jarring, disconcerting electronic music in this film, one longs for
the dignity of human endeavour – the beauty of the process of creation rather than the finished
product.