CINEMA
Linking past and present
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Film theoretician Laura Mulvey looks at how technological advances can be harnessed to give a historical context to cinema, writes VASANTHI SANKARANARAYANAN.
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LAURA MULVEY, through her seminal article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and many other lectures and essay films, has contributed a great deal to a better theoretical understanding of gender and representation in the context of cinema. She was in Chennai to lecture on a subject now close to her heart, "Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age" at the Asian College of Journalism. Clippings from some films illustrated the talk.
Laura Mulvey began her lecture with a comment on how the enthusiasm with which the avant garde cinema movement was introduced in the 1970s and the 1980s dwindled within 10 years, and caused a great deal of frustration, disillusionment and angst for the film enthusiasts, students and theoreticians. However, she felt, there is no need to lose hope. Changing times do not always mean abandoning old theories and convictions. Certain shifts will have to be made in accordance with the changes, which will result in new thoughts and new developments.
The big difference in the field of cinema has been through the introduction of new technological developments, which have resulted in new formats and structures in cinema. The explosion of electronic and digital technology and the consequent new formats such as video, television and DVD have made a big difference to films made on celluloid. The main change is in the technique of 24 frames per second, which was the basis for celluloid cinema. But, these developments are not per se harmful; they can be harnessed to link the past to the present thus giving a historical context to cinema and thereby documenting film history. Cinematic past can be used to understand the cinema of the "now".
Through video and DVD techniques, cinema can be stopped to observe in stillness certain moments and gather hitherto invisible details. This is a great achievement. While watching a film as a linear narrative, many finer details go unobserved. But when the same sequences are fragmented through stopping the film in between, the hitherto invisible or unobserved comes into light and helps the viewer get a greater understanding of the filmmaker, his intentions and his techniques.
To illustrate this point Laura Mulvey showed a filmstrip from a 1929 film. This showed a street scene in Berlin. When shown thus, after taking it out of the linear film context, it revealed the urban modernity caught by the movements within the film. The images also revealed how time past can be fossilised and projected to the present. A moment in time can be captured, held and reviewed for details. Thus, the new technological developments can be harnessed to develop archival material on cinema.
The other development that has come about with the introduction of new techniques such as video is the possibility of a deeper textual analysis of film. In the celluloid films, the linearity of sequences takes precedence to observance of details within the frame. Slow motion and freezing of frames make it possible to see details, which were hitherto invisible. These details infuse new meanings to the images, the positioning of the images.
Details of accidental gestures and movements which cannot be seen in the normal course of film because of the speed with which the frames move can be seen by slowing of the film. To illustrate this a fragment from a Douglas Sirk film was shown. The scene is that of two women searching for their children in a crowd. Some details such as the white woman taking her dark glasses in a spectacular manner (almost like a model posing) when the photographer takes her photo or the two dark people amid a host of white faces shown in the background, during the entry of the black woman, were lost when the film was shown at normal speed. But, when the film was stopped and shown in slow motion these details were revealed. The positioning of the two women within the frame, then assumes a hitherto unnoticed significance.
Laura Mulvey also spoke of the effect of juxtaposing a photograph in cinema; when a viewer sees a stop-freeze frame along with a free-frame the possibility of showing two kinds of time in cinema becomes clear. The viewer can either be a hurried spectator or a pensive spectator. The hurried spectator becomes a voyeuristic spectator while the electronic spectator (the pensive spectator) with the capability of watching the frame in stillness has the benefit of prolongation of the time for watching a single frame. The stillness of the avant garde film is very different from the illusion of the narrative cinema time of celluloid cinema. The idea of introducing a photo in film is not to reduce film but to entwine the stillness of photo film into the moving narrative time film and creating a new aesthetic.
Lastly Laura Mulvey showed a film "AMY!" made by Peter Wollen and herself, which brought home most of the points discussed by her during the lecture.
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