San Soleil

What really strikes me about San Soleil is the ways in which Chris Marker manipulates the medium to express the concept of time. I often hear people mention admiringly that a film passed in no time at all, that they were sucked into the story world so completely that 2 hours felt like seconds. San Soleil makes the viewer aware of the passage of time, and invites us to lovingly reflect on time even as we sit in the act of viewing. Time is marked by the recorded ceremonies- Coming of Age Day, Doll Burning Ceremonies- as well as through narration, which marks the passage of time, while retaining the ability to see beyond the present. The viewer is shown two “extreme poles of survival” in Japan and Africa, and we are guided by a woman’s voice reading letters from the cinematographer Sandor Krasna. The film, however, assumes a position that references the ethnographic gaze even while it resists this mode of viewing. The images are occasionally “clothed” in “soft focus or electronically processed textures” (Marks, 177). The electronic processing is one of the finest touches in the film, distorting the image while deepening our knowledge of the subject. It invites the viewer to employ the caressing eye and bodily relationship the haptic viewer shares with the image. We are unable to see distinctly, but the shape of a dog, the truncheon of protestors, or the gaping mouth of a television villain is plainly visible. This distortion of the image also references “how much of perception is generated by memory and longing, rather than engagement with a crisply available object” (Marks, 156). Krasna’s excitement at returning to Japan and his engagement with the country is not something that can be communicated through traditional narrative, and the electronically altered images encourages us to trace the edges of “his” Japan.

Laura Mulvey and "Peeping Tom"

I really respect Laura Mulvey for her work, force of intellect, and her efforts in forging an aesthetic of feminist/counter cinema. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is an incredibly rich essay, but one in which the author tragically overlooks the role of the female spectator. The female viewer presents the opportunity for rupture in the narrative ideology of the film, and I think it is just this mechanism that is at work in Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960). Much of Mulvey’s comments on Hitchcock can be applied to this work (Mulvey, 722-723). Powell similarly absorbs the audience “into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegisis” and oscillates “between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination” (Mulvey, 722). Peeping Tom, however, delivers a critique of viewership that goes far beyond those found in Psycho or Rear Window, and specifically addresses the female viewer in ways that challenge Mulvey’s essay.

Dziga Vertov

      I recently read Dziga Vertov's "Film Directors: A Revolution", and have been reflecting on how this work interacts with the history and contemporary atmosphere during the time in which Vertov was writing. Vertov expresses a fetishization and obsession with the new technology, more perfect than the human eye, while Benjamin seems abivalant towards the new world of technological reproduction. It’s surprising how the themes of technology and modernization are mirrored throughout the cinema of the 20s, and Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov) resounds in many ways with Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Ruttmann), which had been released two years earlier, in 1927. Both are shining examples of the “city symphony” genre, and similarly manipulate technology to reveal modern, mechanized cities. Man with a Movie Camera makes the use of filming technology even more explicit, placing the camera high above the city, and demonstrating filmic abilities in ways that recall the “Cinema of Attractions”.