REALITY on a BENDER: Cinema As the Embodiment of The

REALITY ON A BENDER: Cinema as an Embodiment of the Carnival Spirit By Joachim Wichman Strand Bachelor of Arts (Screen Art) (Honours) Submitted to the Department of Media and Information Faculty of Media, Society and Culture, Curtin University of Technology November, 2004 This thesis is protected by CREATIVE COMMONS license. www.creativecommons.org Abstract The carnival, through its formalization into the carnivalesque and its subsequent transposition into art, has been one of the most important elements of artistic expressions opposing the monolithic norms, values, and truths of the established order. With its links to Menippean discourse, as well as the fantastic, the carnivalesque facilitates an organic combination of disparate elements, polyphonic dialogism, and ambivalent significations in order to provide representations that can examine the deeper questions of life and death. This essay will examine how multiple layers of meaning can be created in cinema through the use of the carnivalesque. Acknowledgement This project would not have happened where it not for certain brilliant individuals who all deserve big golden heaps of gratitude. They are: my family, Ghazal, Donald Pulford, Lezlian Barrett, the crew and the actors on Headspace, all my friends for good advice, support and extremely valuable pints of beer, and Mike, Keith, Sam, Pete, Damian and Steve at Curtin FTV. Thanks! Joachim Wichman Strand, Perth, 05.11.04 Contents General Introduction 1 Chapter One - Carnival: Reality on a Bender 2 1.1 Fantasy and Enstrangement 2 1.2 The Carnival 4 1.3 The Carnivalesque 8 Chapter Two - The Carnivalesque and Cinema 12 General Conclusion 20 Bibliography 22 Films 25 Appendix a: Film Synopses 26 Honours Exegesis - Joachim Wichman Strand 1 “Nowhere is everywhere, and especially the place where one happens to be.” A. JARRY General Introduction This essay will examine how the carnivalesque can create multiple layers of meaning in cinema. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnival, the essay will draw connections to Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of fantasy, and in extension of that Victor Shklovsky’s concept of enstrangement. The theoretical findings will then be explored in a critical reading of cinema and, through the creative research production research of the project, the making of cinema. The essay will consist of two parts. Firstly, there will be an introduction to the concepts, providing a brief contextual overview, and a combined discussion of their main features. Particular attention will be paid to the dualistic aspect of the carnival, it’s foregrounding of Menippean discourse, and the organic combination of disparate elements, polyphonic dialogism, and ambivalent significations facilitated by the carnivalesque. The notion of enstrangement within fantasy, and the relationship between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic’ will also be discussed. The second part will consist of a critical reading of cinema specifically the four films ‘Blue Velvet’ (David Lynch, 1986), ‘Delicatessen’ (Jeunet & Caro, 1991), ‘Apocalypse Now Redux’ (Francis Ford Coppola, 2001), and the creative research production ‘Headspace’ (Joachim Wichman Strand, 2004). The ideas and concepts presented in the theoretical discussion will be critically applied, thus merging the critical ideas and theories into a unified means of understanding and creating cinema (See Appendix c for a brief synopsis of each film). 1 Honours Exegesis - Joachim Wichman Strand 2 “The Fantastic must be so close to the real, that you almost have to believe in it.” F. DOSTOEVSKY Chapter One - Carnival: Reality on a Bender Many of the concepts examined in this dissertation are first and foremost literary concepts, meaning ideas that have been developed for and researched with regards to literature. But I feel that these concepts can justly be transferred to the field of cinema, and become important tools aiding in the critical understanding and production of cinema. Fuery (2003) claims that concepts like ‘polyphony’ and ‘dialogics’ and ‘the carnivalesque’ are equally if not even more usable within the field of cinema1. This is because cinema has an even greater ability for polyphony and dialogism through its continuous flow of images, sounds and texts within texts. The fantastic and the notion of enstrangement are also concepts that have been transposed from literature into cinema. 1.1 Fantasy and Enstrangement Todorov (1973) describes the fantastic as the moment of hesitation occurring when a situation cannot be described fully through ‘real’/’normal’ systems of knowledge and understanding. Donald (1989) places the fantastic as the moment of uncertainty between the possibilities of an uncanny situation (that can be accommodated somehow within the laws of rationality) and a marvellous situation (the truly supernatural): “The fantastic implies an integration of the reader into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s own ambiguous perception of the events narrated” (Todorov, 1973, p. 31). The fantastic often occurs through the 1 See also Shklovsky’s (1973) view on enstrangement in cinema and film as poetic language in Poetry and Prose in Cinematography. In S. Bann & J. E. Bowlt (Eds.), T. L. Aman (Trans.), Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation (pp. 128-130). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. (Original work published 1927). 2 Honours Exegesis - Joachim Wichman Strand 3 foregrounding of extreme and unusual situations, or states of mind, the transformation of something (object/image/situation) that is seemingly familiar into something strange and uncanny (what Freud called the unheimlich), and through the representation of ‘reality’ from an unusual or peculiar point of view, enabling a displacement (or alterity) of this ‘reality’ (Jackson, 1988). The ambiguous displacement of the ‘real’ facilitates a more laborious reading of the text, making unified interpretations difficult: “… the fantastic plays upon difficulties of interpreting events/things as objects or images, thus disorientating the reader’s categorization of the ‘real’” (Jackson, 1988, p. 20). The Russian Formalists called this process of making the familiar strange enstrangement. Enstrangement2 was a concept first developed by Viktor Shklovsky to relate a process that endows an object or, more importantly, an image with ‘strangeness’ through its removal from conventional and formulaic perception. He said that: “The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding closer to that which this image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere ‘recognition’” (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 10).3 Cognitive enstrangement, or cognitive dissonance, is an extension of Shklovsky’s concept devised by the science fiction researcher Darko Suvin. This concept explains the ability of science fiction stories to work as a mirror to our own world, facilitating a new way of seeing the present, ‘real’ world for the reader. The notion of cognitive enstrangement can equally well be used to explain the semantic game occurring in texts that are not purely science fiction but explore the present empirical universe through narrative, ambient and/or stylistic estrangement, while still imparting cognitive ties to the ‘real’ world. It entails a creative approach that is not only a static reflection of reality, but actually a dynamic transformation of the author’s empirical world (Suvin, 1979). 2 See Translator’s Introduction in V. Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (pp. xviii-xix) for an explanation on the added –n in “enstrangement”. 3 See Hirschkop’s Bibliographic Essay in Hirschkop, K., & Shepherd, D. (1989). Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (pp. 195-212). (Manchester: Manchester University Press) for an account of Bakhtin’s point of view as an elaboration of the theoretical moves of the Russian Formalists. Also p. 60 in Christie, I. (2000). Formalism and Neo-Formalism. In J. Hill & P. C. Gibson (Eds.), Film Studies: Critical Approaches (pp. 56-64). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3 Honours Exegesis - Joachim Wichman Strand 4 The fantastic manifests the ‘otherness’ in ‘reality’, an otherness that as a result of the secularisation of society cannot be found anywhere else but in the ‘real’ world, as Jackson states: “In a natural, or secular economy, otherness is located elsewhere: it is read as a projection of merely human fears and desires transforming the world through subjective perception” (1988, p. 24). This non-secular fantasy hollows out ‘reality’ without offering any explanations for the strangeness that ensues, thus becoming ‘uncanny’. The darker, scarier ‘reality’ now re-presented becomes the voice of the distorted mind and scrutinized the dominant notion of realism. In this way the fantastic established itself as all that is not said, or cannot be said through the realistic forms (Todorov, 1973). In much the same way the carnival was an expression of ideas and sentiments that normally had to be subdued. 1.2 The Carnival The carnival has a long history as the celebration of liberty and freedom, through excess and manifestations of restrained attitudes. The carnival and the carnival sense of the world have its starting point in Socratic dialogue (the dialogic/dual nature of truth), and Menippean discourse/satire (Kirk, 1980). The most important feasts of the carnival and the comic spectacles and ritual coupled with them such as the “feast of fools” (festa stultorum), “feast of the ass” and the “Easter laughter”

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