The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema Adam Breckenridge University of South Florida, [email protected]
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 5-9-2014 Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema Adam Breckenridge University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Scholar Commons Citation Breckenridge, Adam, "Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema" (2014). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5191 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema by Adam Breckenridge A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English with a Concentration in Rhetoric and Composition College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Philip Sipiora, Ph.D. Marc Santos, Ph.D. Margit Grieb, Ph.D. Amy Rust, Ph.D. Date of Approval: May 9, 2014 Keywords: Film Studies, Rogue Cinema, Burke, Zizek Copyright © 2014, Adam Breckenridge Dedication This work is dedicated to Roger Ebert, who was the first person to ever teach me to love the movies. Acknowledgments I would first of all like to thank my chair, Dr. Sipiora, for introducing me to the concept of rogue cinema and for guiding me through my own exploration of it. I would also like to thank my readers, Drs. Santos, Grieb and Rust, for their input into this project. I would furthermore like to extend my thanks to Steve Heller, who told me I would have better job prospects if I got a PhD in rhetoric and composition instead of creative writing and I would like to thank Steve Goldsberry, who was the first teacher to ever tell me I was a good writer. And I would like to thank my siblings-in-arms in the PhD program, because it is only a fellow PhD who is capable of understanding the agonies and miseries of the PhD process and whose friendship was often the only thing that made it bearable. Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Chapter One: Laying the Groundwork ............................................................................................1 Why Go Rogue? ...................................................................................................................1 A Rogue Film is an Act of Cruelty ......................................................................................2 Identifying Identification .....................................................................................................8 Dear Mr. Fantasy ...............................................................................................................18 Three Legs to Stand On .....................................................................................................24 Chapter Two: The Mad Visions of Alejandro Jodorowsky ...........................................................26 Why Jodorowsky? ..............................................................................................................26 Fando y Lis: A Road Trip to Heaven, a Road Trip From Hell ..........................................33 El Topo: Digging Down to Reach the Sun.........................................................................38 Ascending The Holy Mountain ..........................................................................................49 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................66 Chapter Three: Dusan Makavejev: or, How I Learned to Stop Politicizing and Love a Good Orgasm ..............................................................................................................................68 Distinguishing Makavejev from Jodorowsky ....................................................................68 WR: Mysteries of the Organism .........................................................................................75 Sweet Movie: Anything But ...............................................................................................88 Chapter Four: Lars von Trier and the Terministic Screen ...........................................................104 Framing von Trier ............................................................................................................104 On the Count of Ten, You Will be in Europa..................................................................110 Dancer in the Dark: Doing it Dogme Style .....................................................................119 Chapter Five: Werner Herzog’s Rogue Life ................................................................................133 Aguirre: The Wrath of God and the Heart of Darkness ...................................................137 Stroszek, or the Chicken Who Does Not Know Why He Must Dance ............................146 Conclusion: Bringing it All Together ..........................................................................................156 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................158 Appendix: The Dogme 95 Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity ..................................................161 i Abstract The purpose of this project was to articulate a definition and understanding of the emerging genre of rogue cinema through the lens of rhetorical theory. To this end, I lay out a theoretical groundwork based principally on the works of Kenneth Burke and Slavoj Zizek to build a definition and to analyze the works of four filmmakers whose work could be considered rogue: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dusan Makavejev, Lars von Trier and Werner Herzog. The first chapter is dedicated to articulating the theorists I use and showing how they can be used to examine rogue films. The second chapter is dedicated to the films of Jodorowsky, focusing in particular on his films Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, looking at how these films form a critique of our conventional views of religion and spirituatity. Chapter three looks at Makavejev’s films WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie and discusses how they undermine the capitalist/communist dichotomy that has defined most of 20th century politics. Chapter four examines Lars von Trier’s films Europa and Dancer in the Dark, framing them in particular with the Dogme movement and looking at how von Trier rebels against cinematic convention. The last chapter looks at Herzog’s films Aguirre: Wrath of God and Stroszek and discusses how Herzog blends fiction and reality in ways that question our cultural and moral values. Since little has been written on rogue cinema to date my aim here has been to help develop rogue cinema as a concept and begin the work of building a theoretical basis for the idea of this as a genre. In my conclusion I suggest avenues for future scholars to expand on this idea and discuss what further work needs to be done for rogue cinema to become an accepted idea. ii Chapter One: Laying the Groundwork Why Go Rogue? Rogue cinema (or alternative cinema as it is sometimes called) is a rather difficult subject matter to take up, partly because of how unfamiliar the term is even to those dedicated to film (a problem that I do hope could be corrected through these pages) but also because to date, little critical attention has been paid to it as a genre, with the literature on such films tending to focus on the works of a particular director (in which the word “iconoclast” gets tossed around a lot, but rarely are they discussed as “rogue”) or a particular film that, while it could be considered rogue, tend to focus on elements other than what constitutes it as rogue. So far, the bulk of the work in discussing rogue cinema as a genre has come from Phillip Sipiora, who originally coined the term and who has principally defined it through the lens of phenomonology1 (a lens that we will only come to obliquely in this work, primarily through the discussion of identification theory in film). I believe the reason for this dearth of criticism stems from two issues: one is the fact that rogue cinema has only recently come to be seen as a genre in its own right and the other is that, like film noir, another genre that is severely lacking in worthy critical discourse, rogue cinema is nebulous and difficult to define, even more so perhaps than noir as it is very much in the nature of rogue cinema to resist boundaries and easy categorization. By this rationale, rogue cinema could perhaps best be defined by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it.” (Jacobellis vs. Ohio) While it is tempting to offer up nothing more than this as a definition of 1 One should look at his essay “The Phenomenological Quest of Stanley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Shut” from the anthology Stanley Kubrick: Essays on his Film and Legacy for an insight into how Sipiora has approached the subject matter to date in his work. 1 rogue cinema (or, perhaps more apt: you’ll know it when you see it), it is a little too ambiguous even for our purposes. However, I quote the line only semi-facetiously, as Stewart