Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna I Teatralna Im
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Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna im. Leona Schillera w Łodzi WYDZIAŁ REŻYSERII FILMOWEJ i TELEWIZYJNEJ Gabriel Herrera Torres Numer albumu: 7637 Realism in contemporary filmmaking Praca Magisterska Master thesis, written under the supervision of professors: Dr. Jakob Mikurda Dr. Andrzej Bednarek Lodz, 2015 1 2 Index. Introduction.........................................................................................4 Reality...................................................................................................8 Interlude Subject and object's playful collaborations...................................................22 Film's pursuit of reality.....................................................................25 Language and state. Direction and territory Immersive and Semiotic cinema.................................................................33 Bibliography, filmography and web................................................40 3 Introduction As my thoughts on the selected topic developed, which started as a study of the collaboration between the sacred and the absurd, it was not easy to find out what this essay was meant to achieve. For months, with no self-consciousness what so ever, I tried to make a properly structured theory that would collect notes and comments I've been gathering along the years and turn them into a properly standing, self-sufficient, working tool, some kind of coherent landscape of the way I've came to perceive the world through filmmaking and how does it connect and reflect upon everything else. I felt exited, infatuated even, with the megalomanic idea of a personal “worldview”, filled with the concepts, confusion and feelings that have grown in me for the last several years. It didn't took long (or maybe it did) to figure out that the notes, quotes and ideas where not necessarily consequent with each other and phrases that seemed to be deeply provocative or mysterious had little to say when you'd try to unfold them or integrate them to a coherent point of view, one that you could actually stand for. In the spirit of what came to be, though, the final topic of the essay, I take the liberty to transcribe a few choices from those examples and paste them, unrelated to anything else, as opening line for the present work: If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much1 / The entirety of a room remains intact regardless of turning-on or turning-off the switch of the light2 / A grand protocol, a wonderful protocol! I will write the most beautiful protocol that anyone has ever seen / The sudden understanding that anything I'd make the rest of my life was condemned to be made by myself drew the borderline between two things. I still don't know exactly which things those are / ...And there she goes again, on and on with the same, stubborn topic. I am so afraid of women like that, So deeply satisfied with anything / That man does not like music at all / Oh! Such a happiness it is! To be right here, balancing my feet! The old man seems to think, They move back and forward 1 Dialog from Fat City (1972, john Huston) 2 Aphorism by Mexican writer Jerónimo Game Ruiz 4 this feet. They move wonderfully this feet! / A narration must not be lineal but cubical / Talent is a small, meaningless detail / The repetition of joy / A series of war generals in a meeting room report the current losses to the emperor. They cry with bitter existential awareness every time they mention a sunken boat: The A46, master! The A 46! / He could not see the conceptual frontier that divided a room from a hall, a street from a highway, a plate from a cooking pot / Cosmetic intelligence / “I guess they're not so different things, in the end, the harassment of nature and its total indifference” said the snail. The frog looked at him without paying any attention: the snail was so shiny, beautiful and soft. Like a lover's tong / There's a some kind of beauty in stupidity which maybe, just maybe, we should all be striving for / So that not everything would happen to a single person, God created many persons; So that the same thing would not happen to every person, God created many things; As a result of such superb organization, different things happen to different Persons all the time. Out of my first failure, then, I tried to reduce the work to the study of specific cases or films that would represent one or other position, but I soon realized I didn't have enough to say about any of them. Finally, the on-going topics of simultaneity/free association and realism jumped into the table as clearer and closer concepts, holding, I hope, a slightly analogue relationship to that of the sacred and the absurd, where one seems to be the most unlikely and most fertile collaborator of the other and vice-versa. Reality doesn't exist anymore or, maybe, out of an almost officially accepted convention it is not anymore Just One. It is not ubiquitous, nor perfect, nor logical, nor continuous, nor finished. We know nothing about reality except, perhaps, that it is multiple and subjective, but not anymore polarized between observer and observed: they seem, more often than not, to be smashed in some sort of polymorphic suit that no one is wearing. To this extent, the sole idea of realisms or neorealisms in cinema is today unthinkable and the nearest it might be rests in films of the likes of Apichatpong Weerazeetakul or Carlos Reygadas or meta- fantasies like the Act of Killing, all of them trying to respond to this polymorphic, self-referential but un- 5 judgmental shapeless reality and making an effort to link it together through associations, parallelisms, and by materializing the subjective into the objective and back. They often turn, therefore, mythological in more than one sense. Mythologies that, though initially might be rooted in the cultural grounding of each film, often get to overcome that relative identity— films using similar devices from radically different cultural backgrounds, like anthropological documentaries that come out as mystical cowboy road-movies or documentaries about sensory-horror on a fishing boat, for example (sweetgrass and Leviathan from Lucien-Castaing Taylor, US). All of this slowly builds up into some kind of dadaist sacrality, onomatopoeic, that through 3 something as a subsidiary consciousness, an informed naivety , tries to create a mythologic body for perception, to restore an assembly of imaginary “beings”. I belong to a generation and social class saturated of self-criticism and extenuate analysis, lusting for self-love even when self-love is by all means a senseless idea, a desire without rational fundings or historical justification, when by all proofs we are not only sick: we are the sickness itself. This lust has walked its way through film culture along a decade or little longer and is today expressed in the ways that reality and people are being further and further portrayed (who would have said that the director that 30 years ago was teaching us to identify what we had in common with an alienated, misanthrope sociopath—Travis from Taxi Driver—would be today making a humanistic film about Wall-Street (The wolf of wall-street)? In the end, I believe, the present work is just an attempt to convey and structure a way in which film, along the years, could (and partially already has) slowly become a tool to develop a view on the world and myself, a thinking and feeling tool, that aims to nothing else but to help me deal, understand and create my own place and my own ideas through the times and with the people and places that I have and to which I will relate. I hardly believe there are closed or mature enough concepts in it but I hope it will at least reflect a first, honest, effort of structure and sense and a portrait of my own struggle with reality, what ever this one might be. 3.- A kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other. Quoted from Luke Turner's article: Metamodernism: A brief introduction. 6 “If you believe in the Rabbit, you’ll believe in anything. If you don’t believe in the Rabbit, it means that you wouldn’t believe anything.” Atsushi Wada: The Great Rabbit. “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.” Chris Marker 7 Reality. We have no choice but to write about what we know. —But because is hard to say that we are really aware of what we know, being honest about it is rarely true enough, deep enough, embracing enough. The shape of honesty is often deceitful by being subjected to one's preconceptions, to one's sense of duty, blind faith in facts or, simply, to one's current mood. An honest statement is rarely a true statement and is a concept as highly overrated and misunderstood as Truth itself. Maybe we should never reduce ourselves to our degree of honesty but to the creative potential of our own confusion. Fair enough, though, Honesty and Truth are both almost necessary there where they are, ruling their moral kingdom as they do, and we should not put out their basements by pure sadistic pleasure or by the misguided vanity of being right. Anyone should know, by now, that there is little to no value in being right. Then again, we have no choice but to write about what we know and the first thing I can think about is fear. Is in fear where a list of babbling arguments burst effortlessly into my mouth as with an old song we can hardly still understand.