David Lynch – Melanie Menard Arts

December 14, 2010

Research Paper ‘Director’s Cut’

Click the link and it will send you to a pdf of my research paper Mental space on screen: through the examples of Last year in Marienbad, Stalker and Lost Highway as submitted for the MA.

Research Paper: Mental space on screen (Melanie Menard)

Abstract

This paper explores how the different elements of a film work together to depict the mental space of the characters, that is, give the impression that the events shown on screen reflect their subjective experience, and the space shown on screen is a projection of their mental state. Through the examples of Alain Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad (1960), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996), I show how similar techniques recur in films made in completely different cultural contexts, but that have in common to picture the subjective world of the characters. These techniques are: narrating events as the characters think about them, remember them or imagine them rather than how they actually happen; a labyrinthine set design where the inside and the outside contaminate each other; lighting and colours that reflect the mental state of the characters; rhythm that traps the viewer inside the characters’ subjectivity and, finally, sound that creates a mood of its own rather than illustrating or simply enhancing the images, with sparse dialogues becoming an integral part of the sound design.

Keywords: space, subjectivity, cinema, cinematography, sound

A few sections of the research paper were removed to keep word count down. Mostly I rephrased and condensed, which accounts for the somewhat dry style, and the lack of sometimes explicit transitions between ideas. The dry style is fine by me, it’s a research paper not a literary work, but I think more explicit transitions between ideas would have made the paper more reader friendly. However, I had a word count problem and decided to sacrifice a bit of fluidity in order not to cut out relevant ideas. I think the 2 last sections ‘sound’ and ‘rhythm’ are written more fluidly, with more explicit transitions between ideas. That’s because I wrote my paper backward so I was not so worried about concision when I wrote them (the last sections, more technical, were written first, and the first sections, more general, were written after).

However I cut out 3 complete paragraphs because they were interesting but not so directly relevant. I put them here.

1)This was cut out because it was a discussion where neither me, nor the person whose idea I was discussing, were really convinced of what we said. We were both formulating hypothesis to open up discussion, without being personally convinced of these hypothesis. So it was interesting but non essential.

Vida & Petrie (1994, p190) discuss Tarkovsky’s habit to shoot dream scenes in black and white in most of his films, and compare it to Stalker:

‘The choice of black and white for dreams may reflect the conventional idea that most people dream in black and white, but more probably implies, in line with Tarkovsky’s belief in the essential “reality” of black and white, that the inner truth of our experience is to be found within our dreams. In Stalker the basic pattern is reversed, with black and white creating the sordid reality of the everyday world of the future and color representing the potential escape from this offered by the Zone.’

This leads to an interesting issue. The only sequence in the Zone that contains monochrome shots (sepia rather than black and white) is indeed the dream sequence. If characters are dreaming, they may approach their inner truth. It is possible, then, that the Zone as a whole offers fake hope and illusion rather a gateway to inner reality, an interpretation that could be corroborated by the characters’ final decision not to enter the room. Maybe the Zone is, like in Lost Highway, the world of illusion and fantasy, rather than the world of hope and spirituality.

2)this was a transition between the ‘rhythm’ and ‘sound’ sections. It contained an interesting reference for further research, but was non essential to the subject.

Quoting Vlada Petric, Vida & Petrie (1994, p240-241) list ‘cinematic technique’ which can be used to simulate the experience of dream in films. Tarkovsky uses several of them, not only to depict literal dreams, but to ‘throw a dreamlike aura over virtually the whole film.’ ”Camera movement through space [contributing to] a kinesthetic sensation”, ”illogical and paradoxical combinations of objects, characters and settings”, ”dissolution of spatial and temporal continuity”, ”ontological authenticity of motion picture photography [which] compels the viewer to accept even the most illogical events … as real” together correspond to the combined action of discontinuity editing and slow rhythm described in this section. “Color juxtaposition [which] emphasizes the unusual appearance of dream imagery” has been discussed in the previous section. ”Sight and sound counterpoint” will be discussed in the next section.

3)In the conclusion, I discussed the philosophy of art of the 3 directors, and the way a film interacts with its audience. This was interesting but not directly linked to the subject, so was cut out.

When all these elements are combined, we get what Deleuze (1985, p35) calls a ‘conscience-camera’, that is a camera that ‘subordinates the description of a space to the functions of thought’ and ‘enters’ inside ‘mental relationships’. ‘Objective and subjective’, ‘real and imaginary’ then become ‘indiscernible’. The camera is no longer descriptive: instead it ‘questions, responds, objects, provokes, theorises, hypothesises and experiments’. This new nature of film allows new possibilities (Deleuze, 1985, p210): it ‘elaborates a circuit between the author, the film and the spectator’. This circuit has two ways of communication that work together: first a ‘sensory shock’ that ‘elevates the images to conscious thought’, then thought that brings the viewer back to the images and gives them an ’emotional shock’. This ‘coexistence’ between ‘the highest degree of conscience’ and ‘the deepest level of the unconscious’ is what makes, for Deleuze, the power of ‘Time-image’ cinema.

This vision of the dual nature of film, intellectual but also unconscious, sensual, emotional or irrational, the later allowing a direct connection between the artist and the audience, is shared by Tarkovsky, Lynch, and Robbe-Grillet. Tarkovsky (2008, p176) states that ‘cinema is the one art form where the author can see himself as the creator of an unconditional reality, quite literally of his own world’ and ‘a film is an emotional reality’ perceived by ‘the audience’ ‘as a second reality’, which ‘allows for an utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work’. For Lynch (interviewed by Rodley, 2005, p140), films are ‘a subconscious thing’. In an interview together with Resnais, Robbe-Grillet (Resnais & Robbe-Grillet, 1967, 170) says that art is ‘a reminiscence’ or ‘an illumination’ of ‘the world’ and that it ‘interests us because we find in it ready-made the things to which we feel impelled by the emotions reality has generated in us’, and Resnais agrees with him on that. Robbe-Grillet also says that ‘when an image strikes [him] in the cinema, it is always because [he] recognise[s] [his] own experience’ in it, and this shared experience is what makes ‘communication’ possible between the artist and the audience, through the medium of the work.

December 14, 2010

All sources for ‘mental space’ in ‘Lost Highway’

“Sometime during the shooting, the unit publicist was reading up on different types of mental illness, and she hit upon this thing called “psychogenic fugue.” The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything – they forget their past identity. This has reverberations with Lost Highway, and it’s also a musical term. A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film. ( Lynch quoted in )

“The unit publicist was reading up on certain mental disorders during production, and she came upon this true condition called ‘psychogenic fugue,’ which is where a person gives up himself, his world, his family – everything about himself – and takes on another identity. That’s Fred Madison completely. I love the term psychogenic fugue. In a way, the musical term fugue fits perfectly, because the film has one theme, and then another theme takes over. To me, jazz is the closest thing to insanity that there is in music.” ( Lynch quoted in )

Herzogenrath, B. (1999) On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology. Other Voices. v.1, n.3, January 1999.

The first part of Lost Highway presents a marital scenario of uncertainty, anxiety, and unspoken suspicion. It takes place in a house which more resembles a fortress than a cosy home. From the film’s beginning, we have the feeling of tension and fear: home, the family unit is the place of trouble and terror. This feeling is emphasized by Lynch’s masterly employment of the soundtrack. For Lynch, “[h]alf of [a] film is picture … the other half is sound. They’ve got to work together” (Press Kit). So, in Lynch’s work, the soundtrack is a most important factor to enhance the mood of a scene. For example, during the dialogues between Fred and Renee there is no resonance to their voices. It is as if the works are spoken in a sound-absorbing environment, the whole spectrum of overtones, all those features that make a human voice seem alive, seems to have been cut. In its dryness, the voices of Renee and Fred almost seem to enact an absence of sound, or better – an absence of room, of the acoustics of space: it’s as if they are living in a recording studio covered in acoustic tile. (Herzogenrath, 1999)

“the general feeling of being observed, a feeling that takes shape in the fact that they live close to the “observatory.” The outside literally starts to intrude the inside, and the threat is emphasized by the deep droning sounds (in a cinema with a good sound system, the spectators actually can feel this threat as a uncomfortable feeling in their stomachs …”(Herzogenrath, 1999)

Lacan and drone sound in sound design:
“With respect to the delusional aspects of psychosis, Lacan comments on “this buzzing that people who are hallucinating so often depict … this continuous murmur … is nothing other than the infinity of these minor paths” (Seminar III 294), these minor paths that have lost their central highway. What is the deep droning sound underlying most of the movie but this “continuous murmur?””(Herzogenrath, 1999)

Caldwell, T. (1999) Lost in Darkness and Confusion: Lost Highway, Lacan, and film noir. Metro Magazine. No. 118.

“In the scene preceding the discovery of her [Rene’s] death, Fred disappears into the darkness of their house, but emerges as two shadows that move towards her bedroom, one shadow belonging to Fred, the other belonging to the Mystery Man as the embodiment of Fred’s violence.”(Caldwell, 1999)

Biodrowski, S. (1997) The Making of “Lost Highway”. Cinefantastique. vol 28, Issue 10, April 1997.

“There is a key in the film as to its meaning,” Lynch continued, “but keys are weird. There are surface keys, and there are deeper keys. Intellectual thinking leaves you high and dry sometimes. Intuitive thinking where you get a marriage of feelings and intellect lets you feel the answers where you may not be able to articulate them. Those kinds of things are used in life a lot, but we don’t use them too much in cinema. There are films that stay more on the surface, and there’s no problem interpreting their meaning.”

To realize his noirish world, Lynch let Deming shoot LOST HIGHWAY in varying levels of darkness. The film is a little creepier than something that has contrast, with few exteriors or daylight scenes. Whenever he could, Deming consciously used hardly any light at all to keep contrast down. “There are many places in the movie where I would normally use a back light, but didn’t,” Deming laughed. “So you have people kind of melding into the background. It’s kind of an extension of when Fred walks down the hallway and disappears; it’s keeping that feeling through the rest of the movie. In another film, a director would say, `What about a back light?’ and 90-percent of the time I’d put it there, but not for this movie. (Biodrowski, 1997)

Cinematographer Deming about using underexposure:
“The thing I wanted to achieve was giving the feeling that anything could come out of the background, and to leave a certain question about what you’re looking at. The film is working under the surface while you’re watching it.”Biodrowski, 1997)

Groys, B. & Ujica, A. (2006) Sur l’Art de David Lynch. In: Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain (2007) David Lynch: The Air is on Fire. Paris: Editions Xavier Barral.

P381:
L’espace, dans les films de Lynch, est donc une hétérotopie, pour reprendre le terme de Foucault. Il s’agit certesd’un espace qui, extérieurement, ressemble à celui de la réalité américaine, qui est donc pourvu de toutes les références, de tous les comportements et de toutes les images auxquelsnous sommes fort habitués, mais qui fait tout de même naître chez l’observateur le sentiment d’être déplacé dans un autre espace, dans un espace parallèle . De ce point de vue, il est particulièrement intéressant d’entendre Foucault dire que l’hétérotopie est le lieu où les temps s’accumulent, où l’histoire s’accumule – par exemple le musée, la bibliothèque ou le cimetière. Mais on peut aussi dire que l’hétérotopie est un espace dans lequel les esprits du passé règnent et prennent possession du temps présent.

Lynch, D. (2002) Master Class with David Lynch. In: Tirard, L. Moviemakers’ Master Class: Private lessons from the world’s foremost directors. New York: Faber and Faber.

(Lynch, 2002)P128:
“I have always believed that sound is half of what makes a film work. You have the image on one side, the sound on another, and if you know how to combine them properly, then the whole is stronger than the sum of the parts. The image is made up of different elements, most of them hard to control perfectly – light, frame, acting, and so on. Sound, however – and I include music in that category – is a concrete and powerful entity which physically inhabits the film.”

p131:
“I like to play with contrasts; I like using lenses that give a greater depth of field; and I like extreme close-ups […] But none of this is systematic.”

Chion, M. (2007) David Lynch. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

(Chion, 2007)P247: About Fred Madison’s house
‘Son intérieur est d’un design minimaliste, souligné par les cadrages et l’écran scope.’

Rodley, C. (2005) Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber.

P140:
“Making films is a subconscious thing. Words get in the way. Rational thinking gets in the way. It can really stop you cold. But when it comes out in a pure sort of stream, from some other place, film has a great way of giving shape to the subconscious. It’s just a great language for that.”

P225:
it’s about a couple who feel that somewhere, just on the border of consciousness – or on the other of that border – are bad, bad problems. But they can’t bring them into the real world and deal with them. So this bad feeling is just hovering there, and the problems abstract themselves and become other things. I just becomes like a bad dream.

(Rodley, 2005)P225: the madison house section repeatedly uses fade-ins and fade-outs – from and to black

(Rodley, 2005)P225:
Q: Fred and René’s house has an uncertain geogrpahy. It seems that it might be endless: that once you step into it, you’re entering some potentially vast, dark labyrinth.
A: that’s the way it is in relationships sometimes.You just don’t know how they’re going to go, if there’s an end to them of if there’s just more trouble.

(Rodley, 2005)P225:
“production design is mood”

(Rodley, 2005)P226: sound in the madison house
“the home is a place where things can go wrong, and the sound comes out of that idea. If you have a room, and it’s really quiet, or if there’s no sound, you’re just looking at this room. If you want a certain kind of mood, you find the sound that creeps into that silence: that starts giving you a feeling. And there are also sounds that kill a mood. So it’s getting rid of everything that you don’t want, and then building up all the things that are gonna support it and make it whole.
(Rodley, 2005)P227: about the drones and rumbles in the Madison house
“there’s one channel of the six-tracks that’s going to the subwoofer. […] There’s an uneasiness there.”

Astic, G. (2004) Le purgatoire des sens: Lost Highway de David Lynch. Pertuis: Rouge Profond.

P35: surexposition in the desert love scene

(Astic, 2004)p55: the way the Madison living room is framed and the flattening of the depth of field in certain shots suggest an uncertain geography, with a corridor being alternatively visible and invisible.

(Astic, 2004)P56: stairs are ubiquitous in Lost Highway (and recurring in other Lynch films such as Twin Peaks). Fred goes down stairs to the Death Row and, in a mirror scene, his alter ego Pete goes up stairs in the pimp’s house before he experiences a moment of “total derealisation”. “L’escalier dit ainsi, chez Lynch, l’abandon de la surface et le creusement de la rêverie ou du cauchemar effectué à même la matière architecturale de son film.”

(Astic, 2004)P58 another recurring motif is the hotel, reminiscent of Edward Hooper’s paintings which are a strong visual inspiration for Lynch.

P63: the phone rings in Fred’s soundproofed rehearsing room. Is the phone only ringing in Fred’s head?

(Astic, 2004)P69: when Fred talks with the Mystery Man at Andy’s Party, the music and ambient noise stops, and their words are very clear, the setting becomes visually blurred: it suggest the conversation is taking place inside Fred’s head.

(Astic, 2004)P79: when Fred has a nightmare of his murdering Renée, the bedsheets are black. In the videos, they are white.

(Astic, 2004)P80: There a triptych of paintings in the Madison living room. When Pete receives a phone call from Mr eddy and the Mystery Man, his worried parents have disappeared when he raises his gaze: instead, he sees three landscape paintings that were not there before, “absurdly highlighted by the focus of the camera.”

(Astic, 2004)p84: sparsity of the dialogue, with lots of silence between lines which gives a “pure sensation of dilated time”

(Astic, 2004)p91: the Madison house is always framed so ad to never be shown in its entirety

(Astic, 2004)p100: the seemingly endless corridor at the end of which Renée anxiously calls to Fred

(Astic, 2004)p100: the recurring images of mirror suggest Fred’s shattered personality (women in mirrors, Fred in the window, Alice reflected in the mirror in the scene where she submits to Mr Eddy, Pete reflected in the car window, Andy’s face reflected in the glass table)

(Astic, 2004)p102:
At the end of the endless corridor, Fred looks at himself in a mirror that is not the only mirror we have seen so far (in the bedroom). The scene 45 in the screenplay suggests this mirror is in the living room: it can only be in this part of the living room that is always occulted by the framing.

(Astic, 2004)P128:
The cinemascope format “flattens the verticals”, “enlarge black surfaces” and “widens the lateral convergence lines”: it distorts the perspective in a way that sends the characters into a purely “mental space”.

P132: the scene where Pete sees Alice for the first time is blurred, suggesting fantasy.

Chion, M. (2009) Film, a sound art. New York: Colombia University Press.

(Chion, 2009)P149: “Lynch’s characters often speak as thoughas though they were being listened to others, by some third party lurking in the shadows – which is, in fact, the case since they are listened to by us. But that also means that they seem to be observing us listening to them. So they create a void in their voice, which then gives greater force to the sound that comes after.”

(Chion, 2009)p205: “fundamental noise” (never pure silence in Lynch films)

McGowan, T. (2007) The impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press.

(McGowan, 2007)P157: Fred’s house
‘subdued lightning’, ‘minimalist décor’, ‘drab colours (black, gray, taupe, dark orange)’, ‘minimized depth of field’

(McGowan, 2007)P158: Pete’s house
‘bright lightning’, ‘colorful furniture and décor’, ‘no empty space’, ‘depth of field’
P167: ‘traditional conventions of Hollywood realism’

(McGowan, 2007)P168: Pete section: constant background music, the actors speak naturally without ‘lengthy and awkward pauses’.

(McGowan, 2007)P162: Fred and the Mystery Man at the Party
‘the background noise of the party dims to become almost inaudible, as if, in the midst of this crowded party, the Mystery Man and Fred are having a private – intrapsychic – conversation’

Zizek, S. (2000) The art of the ridiculous sublime: on David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities/University of Washington.

Zizek (2000) interpret the stylistic difference between the world of Fred and Pete as the separation between, on the one side, the drabness of ‘pure, aseptic reality’ and, on the other side, ‘fantasy’. For Zizek, those two aspect constantly merge in the way we usually perceive our environment: fantasy constantly ‘sustains our “sense of reality”’, protecting us, somehow, from its drabness and making the world liveable. We are simply not used to seeing ‘reality deprived of fantasy’ and seeing it through Fred’s eyes causes a shock for the viewer. This forced separation of the reality and fantasy elements of our usual perception, Zizek calls the “extraneation” effect.

Hughes, D. (2001) The complete Lynch. London: Virgin.

(Hughes, 2001)P208: Peter Deming cinematographer on fred in the corridor
“Normally you would try and separate people from the background by putting a little backlight on them, but we thought it was subtly creepy to have people coming in and out of black, or standing there and becoming part of the background, and to have the audience not really knowing what could come out of the black, so you’re anticipating stuff.”

(Hughes, 2001)P211: at a preview screening, Lynch made the projectionnist turn up the volume to emphasize the ‘background drones and almost subliminal effects’.

(Hughes, 2001)P222: Peter Deming denies the difference in cinematography between Fred and Pete’s parts are a stylistic choice, he says they are a mere consequence of the locations where they were shot.

Berthomieu, P. & Lauliac, C. (2001) Music in a world of sounds: David Lynch par Angelo Badalamenti. Positif, December 2001, pp.89-92.

Music drowns in the sound design, so that the viewer sometimes doubt there is any music at all.

Henry, M. (2001) David Lynch: Désirer l’idée. Positif, December 2001, pp.83-88.

(Henry, 2001)Lynch explains that his production designer Jack Fisk once told him “If you make a film that takes place in 1955, don’t forget that most of the cars or the furniture would have been made before 1955”

Krohn, B. (1997) Entretien avec David Lynch. Cahiers du Cinéma. N°509 January 1997, pp 26-29.

(Krohn, 1997)David Lynch and his cinematographer, Peter Deming, chose a chocolate brown filter, which causes a dominant colour of “red yellow brownish” to penetrate every images.

Rodley, C. (1997) David Lynch: Mr. Contradiction. Sight & Sound. Vol. 6, Issue 7, July 1996, pp 6-10.

(Rodley, 1997) Present during the Lost Highway shooting, Rodley reports that David Lynch has a ‘very precise delivery in mind’ for the ‘sparse and enigmatic dialogue’, yet he ‘doesn’t give line readings but gives indications of mental states’ to help his actors.

Orr, J. (2009) A Cinema of Parallel Worlds: Lynch & Kieslowski + Inland Empire. Film International. Issue 37, January/February 2009, pp 28-43.

p31: ‘A cinema of parallel worlds leaves behind the sureties of time and place because it abandons a unicameral world for a bicameral world. Here, if “room” is taken generally as enclosed form of Raum, or space, then “unicameral” means one-space cinema and “bicameral” means dual-space cinema.’

Lynch, D. & Gifford, B. (1997) Lost Highway. London: Faber and Faber. That’s the screenplay.

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997) P10: Fred and Renee watch the first video
On the video, ‘the picture is accompanied by an eerie droning sound’

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P32:
After Fred stares at himself in mirror that the screenplay locates in the living room, there is a cut to Renee in the bedroom calling out for him, then a cut back to the living room where ‘no one is in the living now, but a shadow moves slowly across a wall’. Then we see the same scene from ‘Renee’s POV’, looking ‘down the hallway’: ‘there is just darkness at the end of the hall. It is eerie. After a moment, fred slowly walks out of the darkness towards Renee. He walks out of the shot and the camera remains on the rectangle of darkness at the end of the hall.’

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)p32: The next scene is Fred watching the muder tape, with the same ‘droning sound’ on it.

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P85: the night just after Pete sees Alice for the first time
Pete ‘hears a succession of highly amplified sounds at intervals with eerie stretches of silence: crickets in fractured cadence; a distant television; a fly buzzing slowly in the room; a moth’s wings beating against light bulbs in the ceiling fixture; the washing of dishes. […] Underlying these sounds is a kind of unearthly, steady drone.’

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P86: same scene
‘Pete’s parents POV down the hall towards Pete’s room. There is no one there – just an empty hallway.’
‘Pete’s POV – the hallway and the living room. There is no one in the living room.It’s empty.’

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P112-114:
After Sheila screams ‘HE’S SOMEONE ELSE!!!”, ‘the droning sound returns’ and Pete hears ‘every word and every sound’ as ‘loud and distorted’.

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P118:
After Pete gets a phone call from Mr Eddy and the Mystery Man, ‘down at the far end of the hall he sees his parents staring at him.’ A close up shows the ‘parents staring in the direction of the living room as if sensing something, but not seeing’. The Parent’s POV then shows ‘the hall and living room beyond. There is no one there.’

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P125:
After Andy’s murder, Pete goes upstairs and ‘staggers toward the bathroom at the rear right of the hallway. The hallway suddenly becomes hazy, different from and longer than it appeared to be.’ Doors are numbered like in a hotel. Pete considers door 25, passes it and enters door 26 where he experiences an hallucination involving ‘an extremely whorish version of Alice’. When he flees and closes the door, ‘the hallway has “changed back” to Andy’s hallway. The doors no longer have numbers.’

(Lynch & Gifford, 1997)P134:
Fleeing the desert to escape the Mystery Man, Fred finally stops in front of ‘an old two-storey building’: the ‘Lost Highway Hotel’ and gets a room there. The hallway leading to it is ‘strangely similar to Pete’s vision upstairs at Andy’s’ and his room is number 25. Fred falls asleep and the film cuts to the camera moving down the hallway at night and stopping in front of room 26. Inside Renee and Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent make love.

Full Synopsis

The plot of Lost Highway (1996) needs to be explained in more details because of the complex time structure and relationships between (and changes of) characters that could become confusing otherwise.

The film starts with a view of a highway through a desolate, desert landscape at night shot from inside a moving car. The next scene shows Jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (played by Bill Pullman) at home: a voice in his intercom tells him ‘Dick Laurent is dead’. He looks through the window but can’t see anyone at the door. Over the next few days, Fred and his wife Renee (played by Patricia Arquette) receive anonymous videos showing, first, the outside of their house, then, them sleeping in their bedroom. They call the police. At a party at Andy’s, a friend of Renee’s, Fred meets the Mystery Man who tells him they have met before, and that he is inside Fred’s house at this very moment, proving so with a phone call. Fred is freaked out and asks Andy who the Mystery Man is. Andy replied he is a friend of Dick Laurent, to which Fred automatically replies that Dick Laurent is dead. This confuses and worries Andy and Renee, because they do not know that he is dead, and Fred is not even supposed to know him. Back in their house, Fred checks the house while Renee calls out to him from the bedroom. This echoes a dream Fred had when they started getting the anonymous tapes. The next morning, Fred, alone, watches a new video: on it, he sees himself murdering Renee.

Fred is condemned for the murder of Renee and sent to the death row. He experiences increasingly painful headaches, culminating in a terrible crisis one night. The desert highway at night is shown again. The next morning, Fred has inexplicably vanished from his cell: instead a younger man, Pete Drayton (played by Balthazar Getty) is found in it. Pete is unable to explain how he came to be there and is released to his parents, though a police car secretly follows him constantly. At home, Pete’s parents make mysterious allusions to ‘that night’ before Pete was found in prison. He goes out with friends, and his girlfriend Sheila makes similar allusions. The next day, Pete goes back to the garage where he works as a mechanic and checks the Mercedes of a gangster, Mr Eddy. The cops who follow Pete identify Mr Eddy as ‘Laurent’. Eddy comes back with Alice, a beautiful blonde who looks exactly like Renee (played too by Patricia Arquette). Alice convinces Pete to have a secret affair. Pete begins to experience hallucinations, culminating in a confrontation with Sheila and his parents who all refer again to ‘that night’. Alice tells Pete Mr Eddy knows of their affair and convinces him to steal money from Andy, the guy who introduced Alice to Eddy, and run away together. Pete gets a threatening phone call from Mr Eddy and the Mystery Man. Pete meets Alice at Andy’s house: it is the same Andy whose party Fred and Renee Madison went to. Pete finds a photograph showing both Alice and Renee between Andy and Mr Eddy. Pete accidentally murders Andy and experiences hallucinations involving a hotel lobby. Pete and Alice drive off to the desert (recurring view of the deserted highway at night). As they make love, Alice suddenly leaves him and vanishes. Pete inexplicably turns into Fred and is violently confronted by the Mystery Man who produces a video camera and tells him Alice’s name is Renee.

Fleeing the desert to escape the Mystery Man, Fred finally stops in front of the ‘Lost Highway Hotel’ and gets a room there. In the room next to Fred’s, Renee and Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent make love. The next scene shows detectives investigating the crime scene at Andy’s house: they find the photograph, on which Renee is alone between Andy and Mr Eddy/Laurent. Back at the hotel, on what appears to be the next morning, Renee leaves Eddy/Laurent, then Fred attacks him, drags him out from his room as the Mystery Man watches from the window and drives him to the desert. In the desert, Fred and the Mystery Man shoot Eddy/Laurent together but the last shot after he dies shows Fred alone. Fred drives back to his house in Eddy/Laurent’s Mercedes and says ‘Dick Laurent is dead’ on his own intercom. A police car was waiting for him and chases him down the desert highway.

October 22, 2010

Film Noir / Sartre on the Fantastic / Lost Highway & Mulholland Drive

In her book about film noir “Power and paranoia: history, narrative and the American cinema, 1940-1950”, Dana Polan quotes Jean-Paul Sartre on the Fantastic:

“The fantastic is no longer for modern man anything but a way of seeing his own reality reflected back at him.” And Sartre goes on to find the traces of this fantastic precisely in the resistance of everyday human objects to everyday human projects in an ordered world in which “each [tool] represents a piece of worked matter, their ensemble is controlled by a manifest order, and the signification of this order is an end, an end that is myself or, more precisely, the human in me, the consumer in me”.”

“Objects don’t have the mission of serving ends but rather of relentlessly manifesting a fleeting and unsettling finality: thus, this labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.”

I like the way this quotation refers to the warped spaces in David Lynch’s movies or Resnais’ “ Last year in Marienbad”.

“As Sartre notes in his analysis of the fantastic, much of the horrific uncanniness of a new fantastic art of everyday life derives from its disturbance of systems of communicated meaning; uncannily anticipating Lacan’s argument. Sartre suggests that horror comes from a letter that reaches its destination, but reaches it wrongly.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Aminidab, ou du fantastique considere comme une langue”, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)

In “More than night: film noir in its contexts”, James Naremore talks about david Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive”:

“In regard to Lost Highway, Zizek argues that “one should absolutely insist that we are dealing with a real story (of the impotent husband, etc.) that, at some point (that of the slaughter of Renee), shifts into psychotic hallucination in which the hero reconstructs the parameters of the Oedipal triangle that again make him potent. … [We] return to reality, precisely when … the impossibility of the hallucination reasserts itself””

About the witchy hobo living near the dumpster at Winkie’s Diner in “Mulholland Drive”:
” “He’s the one who’s doing it”, a character says at one point, and at the end of the film we see the derelict in possession of the blue metallic cube that provided a hinge between “dream” and “reality”. Whatever his or her symbolic function might be (abject reality? the Lacanian “Real”? the Freudian id or “it”? the dirt and poverty we’re afrais to recognize?), he os she exists both within and beyond the time-space inhabited by Betty and Diane, and he or she might well be dreaming everything.”

“Diane dreams (or in my view the film dreams) that she is Betty, a fantasmatic ego ideal who achieves blissful sexual love with Rita; afterward, Rita takes Betty to the beautifully tawdry, patently artificial Club Silencio, a melancholic netherworld where fantasy begins to break down and where, in McGowan’s words, “we experience the loss of a relationship we have never had”. Unlike the male character in Lost Highway, Diane elaborates her fantasy to the point where Betty attains a moment of fulfillment, but this entirely imaginary experience is followed by a scene of painful mourning, then by the black hole of the unrepresentable, and then by an awakening into desire – a repetitive, excruciating longing for an object always out of reach, which can be ended only in death.”

“like all Lynch’s films, Mulholland Dr. is affectively complex, oscillating between humor noir and pathos, between horror and sweetness, between irony and sincerity. No director aside from Hitchcock has been able to invest subjective travelling shots with such uncanny and suspenseful effects, as when Betty first moves through her apartment at Havenhurst or when she and Rita walk along a decaying courtyard toward Diane Selwyn’s bungalow.”

October 6, 2010

Critical essays on David Lynch’s movies

This post reviews of lots of critical essays on David Lynch’s movies. David Lynch is one my key influences, I love the look and ambiguous atmosphere of his films, and share his concern with producing work that does not come with a ready-made explanation, that requires the audience to come up with their own explanation.

WARNING !!! THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS TO Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive/Inland Empire/Blue Velvet/TwinPeaks !!!

The Heart of The Cavern, Sean French, 1987

Sean French on the films of David Lynch
Sight and Sound, Spring 1987

‘To me a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something that’s unknown, it has a pull to it. For instance, if you were in a room and there was a doorway open and stairs going down and the light just fell away, you didn’t even see the bottom, where the stairs ended; you’d be very much tempted to go down there.’ David Lynch, on Blue Velvet

Denis Diderot about 18th century novelist Samuel: ‘He carries the torch right into the heart of the cavern; he teaches us to recognise the subtle, twisted motives which disguise themselves with motives that are more respectable. He blows away the gentle spirit who appears at the cavern entrance and reveals the dreadful monster behind.’

Good to know for later: “scripts usually work out at about a page per minute”

“David Lynch has adapted Shelley’s injunction to make the familiar unfamiliar into a vision that makes the familiar weird”

The Lynch Film, Rebecca Paiva,1997

“Bizarre camera angles are a favorite of Lynch. He will position the camera in a far, overhead corner of the room; shoot the scene from under a table; or even through a crystal ball (as in Wild at Heart.)”

“Fadeouts and slow motion are also prevalent; they both contribute to the abstract, under-the-surface mood Lynch strives for […]There are many more slow motion sequences, too numerous to mention, that create similar moods of dreamlike confusion, horror, or primal drives. “

“Lighting techniques are also very similar in Lynch’s films; he has an affinity for dark vs. light settings. Sometimes, this can resemble film noir techniques (as in Blue Velvet and Lost Highway), or it can suggest an unyielding world of darkness and confusion (Eraserhead, Industrial Symphony #1, Wild at Heart), or it can even hint at a dark underbelly of an idyllic setting (Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, Blue Velvet.) But whatever the metaphor behind the lights, a Lynch buff quickly gets accustomed to oddly-shaped shadows, dark rooms, slats of sunshine, and strobe lights. “

Useless for essay but cool to know: “In the film Fire Walk With Me, the letters “IS 432” appear on a license plate; this is a reference to Isaiah 43:2, which reads:

When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
And through the rivers,
They shall not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire,
You shall not be burned,
Nor shall the flame scorch you.”
“In Hollywood … they’re making … stories that are understood by people … and they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what’s so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way, that you can’t put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say “Did you understand that?” but they come out with a strange fantastic feeling … “(Lynch)

MORE DEEPLY LOST: LOST HIGHWAY AND THE TRADITION OF ALIENATION IN FILM NOIR

An examination of the contemporary noir phenomenon and its wider cultural significance
Simon McKenzie, 2003

“Let’s say you don’t want to be yourself anymore. Something happens to you, and you just show up in Seattle, living under the name Joe Smith, with a whole different reality. It means that you’re trying to escape something, and that’s basically what Fred Madison does. He gets into a fugue state, which in this case means that he can’t go anywhere – he’s in a prison cell, so it’s happening internally, within his own mind. But things don’t work out any better in the fugue state than they do in real life. He can’t control the woman any more than he could in real life. You might say this is an explanation for what happens. However, this is not a complete explanation for the film. Things happen in this film that are not – and should not be – easily explained.”
– (Gifford B 1997a in Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997)

“What is happening to Fred seems closely related to the psychological dynamics Freud (cited by Cowie 1993, p123) describes in the behaviour and suffering of both psychotics and neurotics:

“whereas the new, imaginary external world of psychosis attempts to put itself in the place of external reality that of neurosis, on the contrary, is apt, like the play of children, to attach itself to a piece of reality – a different piece from the one against which it has to defend itself”
-(Freud S, cited in Cowie 1993, p 123)
Cowie E 1993, ‘Film Noir and Women’, in Copjek, J., (ed), Shades of Noir: a reader, Verso, London.

The universe of Lost Highway can be seen to exist as a space whereby this psychosis and neurosis (both are present) play themselves out.”

“The repressed will return to haunt Fred in a number of ways (like videotape of the murder being dropped off on his doorstep, to give an example).”

“It doesn’t do any good to say, ‘This is what it means.’ When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.”
– (Lynch 1997, in Cinefantastique, April 1997)

“Barry may have his idea of what the film means, and I may have my idea, and they may be two different things. The beauty of an abstract film is it’s open to interpretation.”
– Lynch in Cinefantastique, April 1997

As a final note on narrative structure, it is useful to consider Barry Gifford’s allusion to his Lost Highway as a moebius strip in Film Threat magazine:

“We realized we didn’t want to make something that was linear, and that’s why the Moebius strip [as the film’s structure]. A Moebius strip is a long strip of paper curved initially into a circle, but with one end flipped over. The strip now has only one side that flips both inside and outside the shape. It made it easier to explain things to ourselves and keeping it straightforward. The story folds back underneath itself and continues.”
–(Gifford 1997b, interviewed in Film Threat, 1997)

Moebius strip image comes from Lacan:

“Lacan’s use of the moebius strip as a way to illustrate his conceptualization of the return of the repressed. This geometric form can be described as a two sided strip (say of paper) that is given one half twist along its length and then sutured together to create a loop which appears to be two sided on first examination but proves to now only have one (Herzogenrath, 1997 pp5-6). If Fred has repressed the murder of his wife, and gone into a fugue state creating alternate realities, he is doomed to circle around on a moebius strip of illusory reality.”
Herzogenrath B 1999, “On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology”, in Other Voices the (e)journal of Cultural Criticism, v.1, n.3 (January 1999), University of Pennsylvania, web site, viewed 08 August 1999,

Naremore cites an exchange between Andre Bazin and Roger Leenhardt where it is described as film noir’s “vocation” to reverse the conventional norms which creates a “specific tension which results from the disruption of order and “the disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts”” (Naremore, 1995, p19).
Naremore J 1995, ‘American Film Noir: The History of an Idea’, Film Quarterly, 49(2), Berkely, CA.

Borde and Chaumerton show their influence here, having stated in their seminal Panorama du Film Noir Americain that the removal of these psychological reference holds the key to the aim of film noir, again to create “a specific alienation.” (Borde & Chaumerton 1955, p25).
Borde R & Chaumeton E 1955, ‘Towards a definition of film noir’, trans. A. Silver in Silver A & Ursini J (eds), 1996, Film noir reader, Limelight Editions, New York.

Kaplan’s description of film noir as something that offers the space for the playing out of identity struggles (Kaplan, p.9).

“The main difference between Lost Highway and Double Indemnity, Out of The Past, The Killers is not due to any lack in noir sensibility, nor a lack of desire on behalf of the film-maker to create this sensibility but in the lack of desire in the audience. I am here talking of popularity of 1940s noir versus the relative obscurity those rare examples of a true film noir sensibility remain locked in now. A personal rip in the fabric of identity does not generate a widespread yearning to share what Sharrett refers to as a desire to share in fears for the future (Sharrett, 1998, p4). Pre-millennium angst did not disrupt all segments of the community, World War II did. Add to this the fact that the film-going public also has greater choice, and if ticket sales for Pulp Fiction (1994) are anything to go by, they prefer to spend their dollars on fare that speaks to their post modern malaise not by reminding them of their alienation but glossing over it and enjoying the surprises it may bring.”

I really like this conclusion. Most people today are scared of their own social alienation, and find it something shameful that should be repressed. I wonder whether this is due to post 1989, where there is only one social model left, the “end of history”. Therefore individuals today feel that their own alienation is their own fault, some kind of mental illness that must be hidden in order to survive in the outside world. Because the outside world today is perceived as omnipotent and unchangeable, contrary to the 40’s/50’s where alternatives, however flawed, were still available, the individual today considers that he is the one that needs to adapt to the outside world.

On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology

Bernd Herzogenrath, 1999
Other Voices, v.1, n.3 (January 1999)

“the beauty of a film that is more abstract is everybody has a different take. … When you are spoon-fed a film, people instantly know what it is … I love things that leave room to dream …”

Christian Metz, in The Imaginary Signifier (9):
in the cinema, the spectator and the spectacle do not share the same space, since not only the diegetic reality of film is an illusion, “the unfolding itself is fictive: the actor, the ‘décor,’ the words one hears are all absent, everything is recorded” (The Imaginary Signifier 43). Thus, “[t]he unique position of the cinema lies in this dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree … it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present” (The Imaginary Signifier 45).
Christian Metz. The Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. C. Britton, A. Williams, B. Brewster and A Guzzetti. Bloomington, 1982. Subsequently quoted as (The Imaginary Signifier).

“With Lacan, the term suture denotes the “conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic.” (14) With respect to the Lacanian registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, suture thus refers to the stitching of the representational registers, with the seam closing off the real from reality, closing off the unconscious from conscious discourse. Suture thus prevents the subject from losing its status as a subject, prevents it from falling into the void of the real, from falling into psychosis. Thus, the subject’s identification with the movie fundamentally relies on this “conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic” levels within the cinematic discourse itself.”
14 Jacques Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York, London, 1978, 118. Subsequently quoted as (Fundamental Concepts).

“Fred meets the Mystery Man for the first time. In fact, the Mystery Man – simultaneously being inside and outside – can be read at the place where these (and in fact: all) opposites meet, he is – so to speak – the twist in the Moebius strip. In Lacan’s use of the Moebius Strip, the place denoting the suture of the imaginary and symbolic in a way “hides” the primordial cut that instigated this topological figure in the first place, the cut that is the unconscious (or, in Lacanian terminology: the real). It is by suturing off the real that reality for the subject remains a coherent illusion, that prevents the subject from falling prey to the real, that is, falling into psychosis. It is no wonder, then, that the Mystery Man always appears when a change in personality is close. “

The movie has been dubbed by Lynch and Gifford (e.g., in the published version of the screenplay) as “A 21st Century Noir Horror Film. A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises. A world where time is dangerously out of control. A terrifying ride down the lost highway.”

Lost Highway Sound design:
The first part of Lost Highway presents a marital scenario of uncertainty, anxiety, and unspoken suspicion. It takes place in a house which more resembles a fortress than a cosy home. From the film’s beginning, we have the feeling of tension and fear: home, the family unit is the place of trouble and terror. This feeling is emphasized by Lynch’s masterly employment of the soundtrack. For Lynch, “[h]alf of [a] film is picture … the other half is sound. They’ve got to work together” (Press Kit). So, in Lynch’s work, the soundtrack is a most important factor to enhance the mood of a scene. For example, during the dialogues between Fred and Renee there is no resonance to their voices. It is as if the works are spoken in a sound-absorbing environment, the whole spectrum of overtones, all those features that make a human voice seem alive, seems to have been cut. In its dryness, the voices of Renee and Fred almost seem to enact an absence of sound, or better – an absence of room, of the acoustics of space: it’s as if they are living in a recording studio covered in acoustic tile.

Confusing terminology of schizophrenia/multiple personalities and such:
“It is the phrase parallel identity crises that interests me the most here. It is usually read in terms of ‘double identity,’ mostly using the term schizophrenia. There has been quite some misunderstanding about this very term. In 1911, the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler replaced Kraepelin’s term for a group of psychoses, dementia praecox, with the term schizophrenia. Dementia praecox meant a psychosis of early onset, which Bleuler wanted to capture with the term schizophrenia, meaning literally “split mind,” since he thought the splitting of psychic functions to be the structuring element of these psychoses. Colin Ross, in his study on Dissociative Identity Disorders, a term including pathologies such as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and the Borderline Syndrome, states that, “dementia praecox is actually a better name for this group of disorders [described by Kraeplin] than schizophrenia, while schizophrenia is a better name for [Dissociative Identity Disorder] than multiple persona disorder.” (31) Hence the popular notion of schizophrenia as “split personality,” a misconception that does not account for the fact that schizophrenia is an organic disorder of the brain, and not actually a personality disorder.”

Apart from the Mystery Man, scenes that link the 2 sides of the Moebius strip:
“These two scenes of Fred in the dark hallway (Renee calling “Fred!”) and Pete in front of his parents’ house (Sheila calling “Pete!”), viewed in parallel, function like a kind of worm-hole which traverses the different event-levels of the movie”
+ the transformation of Fred into Pete in the prison cell

“the unit publicist on the picture, happened to find it in some medical journal or something. She showed it to us, and it was like Lost Highway. Not literally, but an interior thing can happen that’s very similar. A certain mental disturbance. But it sounds like such a beautiful thing – ‘psychogenic fugue.’ It has music and it has a certain force and dreamlike quality I think it’s beautiful, even if it didn’t mean anything.” (Lynch on Lynch 239)

Image of the Highway for Lacan:
“In his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan explores the factors that trigger off a psychosis. And again, he takes recourse to the metaphor of the road. In a chapter appropriately named “The highway and the signifier ‘being a father,'” he writes:

a succession of minor roads and a highway are not at all the same thing. … The highway isn’t something that extends from one road to another, it’s a dimension spread out in space, the presencing of an original reality. If I take the highway as an example, it’s because … it’s a path of communication. … the highway is an undeniable signifier in human experience. (34)
Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-56. Transl. by R. Grigg. New York, 1993, 290-1. Subsequently quoted as (Seminar III).

What Lacan is alluding here to is his notion of the point de capiton, the quilting point, which is that point which makes sure that some temporary notion of meaning can be created in language. […]So a point de capiton is a place where signified and signifier are literally stitched together – this is suture in the register of the symbolic. Like a highway with respect to a system of smaller streets, the quilting point holds that system of discourse together, and a minimal number of these points are “necessary for a human being to be called normal, and which, when they are not established, or when they give way, make a psychotic” (Seminar III 268-9)”

Lacanian interpretation of Fred turning into Pete:
Fred Madison tries to escape the threat of castration, but he experiences a “return of the repressed” in the real instead of in the symbolic, in his hallucinations (that is, in his second identity as Pete), because he does not accept the name of the father, the agency that might disturb his symbiotic relationship with Renee and/or Alice: Dick Laurent is dead! So, the “Highway” of the title is exactly this quilting point, this suture, that would be necessary for the subject to be inscribed into “reality,” into a state of “normality.” Once this point is lost, once this seam is undone, the subject falls prey to the real, becomes psychotic.”

The policeman investigating the videotapes asks Fred if he makes video/photographs himself and he says no and explains why;
“I like to remember things my own way. … How I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

“Seen in this light, the videos might represent the truth “the way it happened,” that is: the repressed truth of Fred”

Definition of “psychogenic fugue:
“involves a sudden, unexpected travel away from one’s home or customary place of work, with an inability to recall the past, that occurs in the absence of an organic mental disorder … There is often the assumption of a new identity. … Typically, individuals in a fugue state have no memory of their primary identity. When they recover their primary identity, they often have a reciprocal amnesia for the events of the fugue state. (39) “
Frank W. Putnam. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Persona Disorder. New York, 1989. 13-4. Subsequently quoted as (Putnam).

Fred’s murder of his wife Renee is referred throughout the film by the euphemism “that night”.

The article states that multiple personality disorder (MPD) is almost exclusively American, and suggests links to playing social roles for success, the Hollywood system, the culture of sitcom, zapping and characterisation of typical consumer profiles. It is unclear how much of this is theoretical hypothesis from media studies, and how is from actual psychological surveys … Also, creating a second personality to escape a traumatic event is linked to USA ideals of limitless possibilities/ myth of the endless road.

“In the recent remake of the thriller Nightwatch, now called Freeze, the police inspector turned serial-killer, played by Nick Nolte, philosophizes: “Explanations are just fictions to make us feel safe. Otherwise, we would have to admit the unexplained, and that would leave us prey to the chaos around us. Which is exactly what it is.””

Lost in Darkness and Confusion: Lost Highway, Lacan, and film noir

Thomas Caldwell, 1997
Originally appeared Apocalypse Whenever (The University of Melbourne, 1997) and was later published in Metro Magazine, No. 118, 1999

Lacan’s 3 orders (however the exact identification in LH seems dubious to me):
“To understand Fred’s condition, and the complex non-lineal narrative of Lost Highway, Lynch’s film can be de-coded by using the psychoanalytic methods developed by Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s mirror stage theory developed the idea of three distinct but overlapping orders of human identity – the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. They influence each other and work together simultaneously to give most individuals a stable relationship with reality. However Fred Madison has come unstuck and the three orders have become quite distinctly separate, leading to the creation of three versions of the same story with Fred represented by three different persona. The start of the film features Fred in the symbolic order, the middle part of the film has Fred transformed into Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) during the imaginary order, and the final part of the film has Fred possessed by the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), representing the real order.”

“Lacan’s notion of the three orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real are a development of his mirror phase theory. None of the three orders are necessarily more true than the other, but they need to be properly aligned in order for the individual to be present in the stable human world (Bowie 1991: 111-112). The imaginary is the order of mirror-images. It is the dimension of experience where the individual seeks to dissolve their otherness by becoming their counterpart. Through the imaginary, the individual repeats their relationships with the external world of people and things, to desperately create an imaginary ideal self, what Freud called the ego. The imaginary links inner and outer mental acts, having the effect of resisting the development of the self (Bowie 1991: 92). The middle section of Lost Highway exists in the imaginary order, where Fred relives his life through the ideal identity of Pete Dayton.
The symbolic order is where the subject, distinct from the ego, comes into being. The symbolic exists in the realm of language, the unconscious and an otherness that remains other. Their is no concrete existence in the symbolic order, since it is constantly moving and gives meaning that is inter-subjective and social. The symbolic order does not allow the subject to keep to themselves since everything depends on the subject finding meaning in what is around them (Bowie 1991: 92-93). The first part of Lost Highway takes place with Fred still in the symbolic order, since he appears to interpret the world around him with more cohesion than later in the film.
The order of the real is a constant threat during both the symbolic and imaginary sections of Lost Highway and comes into full effect during the final section of the film when Pete has transformed back to Fred, but now aligned with the Mystery Man. The real lies outside the symbolic process and can be found in the mental and material world. The real is that which cannot fall into the signifying dimension (Bowie 1991: 94). The real presents itself as that which does not cohere to the symbolic order. It manifests in the form of the trauma and determines all that follows despite appearing to be accidental (Lacan1977b: 55). The real is what seems impossible to the individual. The real cannot be coded and hence fall in the symbolic, and therefore it cannot be mirrored to fall into the imaginary.
Lacan, Jacques, 1977, “Tuche And Automaton” The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psycho-Analysis, The Hogarth Press, London, pp53-64

[…]Although the symbolic has priority over the imaginary, the imaginary does aid the symbolic in its process of understanding the external world (Bowie 1991: 99). However in Fred’s case the imaginary has taken over the real to such a dangerous extent that he imagines himself to literally be another person. This collapse of identity is due to the intrusion of the real. In the real, “the network of signifiers, that our being exists in, is not all that there is, and the rest of what is may chance to break in upon us at any moment” (Bowie 1991: 103).
Bowie, Malcolm, 1991, “Symbolic, Imaginary, Real …and True”, Lacan, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp88-121
[…]The real in Lost Highway is represented by the Mystery Man who is an “essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence“(Lacan 1988: 164). When Pete is making love to Alice and she says to him “You’ll never have me”, the imaginary world of him possessing her and Fred is thrust back into the symbolic. The imaginary has been torn away, exposing Fred in his isolation to the rest of the world, exposed the world as something “originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded” (Lacan 1988: 167). Fred is left in the real order that falls outside of the imaginary, but cannot be labelled or nominated either and therefore falls outside the symbolic order.
The Mystery Man represents the real because he is the violence and inspiration for the murders that Fred will commit.”

Irony: “The things that Fred suspected Renee of are actually done by Alice.”
“In the scene preceding the discovery of her [Rene’s] death, Fred disappears into the darkness of their house, but emerges as two shadows that move towards her bedroom, one shadow belonging to Fred, the other belonging to the Mystery Man as the embodiment of Fred’s violence.”

Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Alanna Thain, 2004

The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. According to [Henri] Bergson, paramnesia (the illusion of déjà vu or already having been there) simply makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a
recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself, as closely coupled as a role to an actor. .Our actual existence, then whilst it is unrolled in time,
duplicates itself alongside a virtual existence, a mirror image.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 79

Hitchcock had begun the inversion of this point of view by including the viewer in the film. But it is now that the identification is actually inverted: the character has
become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear
what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3

In the Madison home, the space is unremarkable, rooms are quite barren, there is no obvious visual sense of things being hidden or concealed, but the very familiarity and exposure itself becomes uncanny through compression and repetition. The spaces
are all decorated in earth tones, and are shot in such a way that they are overly intimate.hallways seem to lead nowhere, entrances are compressed into the space, the geography of the house is uncertain, the lack of doors makes it all the more claustrophobic. Hallways are treated as either dead spaces, lit so that they are merely black gaps between rooms, with no sense of transition, or singular spaces that are unconnected from the rest of the house.

Chris Rodley describes Patricia Arquette.s understanding of the film:
Arquette.s own rationale for Lost Highway goes something like this: a man murders his wife because he thinks she.s being unfaithful. He can.t deal with the consequences of his actions and has a kind of breakdown. In this breakdown he tries to imagine a
better life for himself, but he.s so fucked up that even this imaginary life goes wrong. The mistrust and madness in him are so deep that even his fantasies end in a nightmare.
Lynch on Lynch 232

David Lynch Keeps His Head, David Foster Wallace, 1996

US Premiere magazine, September 1996.

AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

City of Quartz (anonymous comment from crew) check this

British critic Paul Taylor says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.”

This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We’re defenseless in our dreams too.)
This may in fact be Lynch’s true and only agenda – just to get inside your head. He seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this good art? It’s hard to say. It seems – once again – either ingenuous or psychopathic. It sure is different, anyway.

The Making of “Lost Highway” , Steve Biodrowski • April 1, 1997

PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR IN THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH, Valtteri Kokko – Wider Screen 1/2004

“Making films is a subconscious thing. Words get in the way. Rational thinking gets in the way. It can really stop you cold. But when it comes out in a pure sort of stream, from some other place, film has a great way of giving shape to the subconscious. It’s just a great language for that.”
David Lynch in Lynch on Lynch (Rodley 1997, p.140)

“Commonplace objects or ideas can assume such powerful psychic significance in a dream that we may awake seriously disturbed, in spite of having dreamed of nothing worse than a locked room or a missed train” (Jung, published 1979, p.43)

“The double does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s development.” (Freud in The ‘Uncanny’ 1990, p.357).
Freud states that Otto Rank “has gone into connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death.” (Freud, The ‘Uncanny’ 1990, p.356).
“As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.” (Jung, published 1979, p.23)
Jung, Carl G. (ed.) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books Ltd. 1979

“there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully understand.” (Jung, published 1964, p.21)

Sigmund Freud rejects the method of dream interpretation based on assigning particular and fixed meanings for specific dream images. He calls this the “decoding” method, which “treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key.” (Ferguson 1996, p.77)

Ron Garcia, the director of photography on FWWM says in an interview that the camera angles carry a lot of meaning in the film as well. In the film, we have a consistent high camera angle. “The high-angled shots reflect an angelic presence that continues throughout the film, with an unseen angel looking down on the evil events below.” (Garcia 1992, p.60).

Ron Garcia argues that “David (Lynch) creates an emotion in everybody by tapping into the subconscious. From a Jungian perspective, the subconscious is real: you’re there until you wake up, and some people don’t wake up from those nightmares.” (Garcia 1992, p.62).

Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film, Adam C. Walter

This is by far the most useful David Lynch essay I’ve ever read! Very insightful, yet concise, clear and free of jargon!
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, 1891, Ambrose Bierce (escape fantasy of a condemned man at the moment of his death)

“In the work of Jungian writer Marie-Louise von Franz, for example, one encounters the concept of the fairy tale as a single, sealed psyche in which every character, setting, and object corresponds to some aspect of the psyche’s function. If we interpret a particular Lynch film largely as a fantasy, then many of the events and characters can be viewed as aspects of a dream that is playing inside the “consciousness” that is the film—inside the psyche that is Fred Madison, Diane Selwyn, or Nikki Grace. Because of this, certain recognizable, and psychologically-significant, character types will be seen to intrude from time to time:”

1)“the liars/unreliable narrators”: try to escape their repressed content into an idealised version of self
2)“shadow selves and detectives”: In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche”: The shadow id Frank in Blue Velvet, Bob in Twin Peaks. The detective engineers the confrontation of the conscious with the shadow (the psychotic character with their repressed content). When this happen in Blue Velvet, Jeffrey incorporates a part of the shadow into himself. In Lost Highway, “the Mystery Man shadow-character has taken on the role of detective in rebellion against the controlling ego-character, Fred, who is in complete denial.” The Cowboy in Mullholand Drive = less aggressive detective.
3) “Oracles”: sometimes doubling as shadows and detective but often separate. Grace Zabriskie in Inland Empire, Dwarf/Giant/Log lady in Twin Peaks. The Old Woman and the little boy in twin peaks ?
4) “Openings, Corridors, and Taking Directions”: “In a Lynch film, it is worthwhile to note any talk of doors, openings, windows, alleys, or corridors—or even the physical representation of them onscreen. These motifs are often loaded with suggestion, symbolism, and double meaning. The same holds true for any directions that a character is given or any descriptions of a “path” to take.”

Lost Highway: Unveiling Cinema’s Yellow Brick Road, Reni Celeste, 1997

“And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end… enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary… blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness… this, my Dionysian world, the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying… without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal. “
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Will to Power”

Various philosophical interpretations of the Mystery Man:
“Three primary fissures are foregrounded in this film: that which exists between one discrete individual and another, that which exists between the individual and itself, and that which exists between the thing and its representation. […]This Nameless Man [Mystery Man] will play a leading role in the film as that which stands between doubles, between passages from one realm to the next, and between each individual and itself. He exceeds the constraints of temporality and spatiality, moving from past to present, from subject to subject, and occupying two spaces simultaneously. […]It is perhaps tempting to interpret him as the unconscious, especially in the light of Fred’s apparent forgetfulness of his wife’s murder. [5] One might also be inclined to understand him as the figure of death as symbol, like the ghoul who comes to call in Bergman’s _Seventh Seal_. But I will do neither. I also want to insist that I am not understanding this figure in terms of a Hegelian negativity that serves as a resource in the dialectical process. Rather I want to understand him in the Bataillian sense as that excess which undoes and exceeds *any* system of signification–a dark tear that is revealed through heterogenous matter, excess, obscenity, sacrifice, and eroticism. [6] This is also close to Derrida’s concept of Otherness, which he insists is not a lack or void but a ‘negativity without negativity.’ [7] This is not the reverse side of positivity, but rather something that transgresses signification. To even name this figure is problematic because he is precisely what is nameless. He both is and is not. He is the downfall of Aristotelian logic and Hegelian dialectics. He is what breaks apart all construction and yet serves as its groundless ground. He is beautiful and terrifying. He is in everything and yet he is nowhere and nothing. He is glimpsed at the threshold of the paradox, the aporia. And he is everyone’s double.”
6. Cf. Georges Bataille, Eroticism (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986).
7. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Harvard University Press, 1986) p. 103, quoting Derrida from The Truth in Painting.

“The classic American road narrative actually leads not to California but to a shattering moment of consciousness somewhere across the barren desert of adversity and solitude where a terrible truth emerges: that this is the road to nowhere. What lies ahead is only more of the same, what lies behind is a receding history that cannot be regained, and destination is impossible. This double bind leaves only one exit to glory: temporal death, whereby one enters the American metaphysical kingdom like James Dean, by dying and becoming an absence that is present as an afterimage in the dreams of the surviving: to be an American myth. To pass this exit is to meet either failure or farce.”

“The mirror has been a source of mystical transversion and a point of passage in narratives for so long as to have become cliche. It has signaled the divided self, the marker between dream and waking, fantasy and reality.”

The mirror not as something that gives a sense of self, “reflection” not as something that encourages rational thinking. Derrida, “ On Grammatology”:
“There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split *in itself* and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.”
12. Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, p. 36.

“Critiques which read texts in order to delineate the politically ‘progressive’ from the ‘regressive’ remain ensconced in the stability of metaphysics, fixed in a modern conception of static justice. Lynch’s cinema has never fallen under the good graces of such readings. His vision of America has been neither condemning nor embracing, and his pastiche never simply playful nor nihilistic. Ultimately Lynch’s primary interest has been in dissecting the cat, following along its strange corridors, peering into its pink folds and red tunnels. [22] If we come closer, the inner organs begin to emerge. Lynch is interested in coming closer. Exaggeration, the seeing ‘too much’ of obscenity, has always been an important part of Lynch’s language. Even a florescent diner sign can be obscene if we look at it long enough; and especially if we listen to it. Such visions unconceal something beneath form, something naked in its neutrality, the horrible thing that Emmanuel Levinas called the ‘there is’ and described as

…something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. It is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that ‘there is’ is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is.’ “[23]
22. Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Translated by Robert Julian. London: British Film Institute, 1995.Michel Chion speaks of Lynch’s childhood fascination with dissecting and then rebuilding animals.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985) p. 45. Also discussed in length in Existence and Existents.

Various Quotes

http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/quotes.html

“It’s about a couple who feel that somewhere, just on the border of consciousness – or on the other side of that border – are bad, bad problems. But they can’t bring them into the real world and deal with them. So this bad feeling is just hovering there, and the problems abstract themselves and become other things. It just becomes like a bad dream. There are unfortunate things that happen to people, and this story is about that. It depicts an unfortunate occurrence, and gives you the feeling of a man in trouble. A thinking man in trouble.”
– Lynch on Lynch, Faber and Faber publishing.

“You can say that a lot of Lost Highway is internal. It’s Fred’s story. It’s not a dream: It’s realistic, though according to Fred’s logic. But I don’t want to say too much. The reason is: I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger … everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there’s got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going.”
– Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997

Barry Gifford on Lost Highway:

http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/losthighway/lhabout.html

Lynch:

“There is a key in the film as to its meaning. But keys are weird. There are surface keys, and there are deeper keys. Intellectual thinking leaves you high and dry sometimes. Intuitive thinking where you get a marriage of feelings and intellect lets you feel the answers where you may not be able to articulate them. Those kinds of things are used in life a lot, but we don’t use them too much in cinema. There are films that stay more on the surface, and there’s no problem interpreting their meaning.”

Gifford:

“This story is really about a man who creates a situation, finds himself in a dire situation and has a kind of panic attack. And that he really has a difficult time in dealing with the consequences of his action. And this action fractures him, in a way.”

Lynch on Blue Velvet:
“A film that deals with things that are hidden within a small town called Lumberton and things that are hidden within people.”

“[the ear is] a ticket to another world.”

Lynch on various things:

“In my dream, I see these fantastic paintings that were done by somebody else. And I wish that I had painted them. And I wake up, and after a while the impression wears off. I say, wait a minute, those are my paintings. I dreamt them; they’re mine. Then I can’t remember what they were.”
I’ve had exactly the same frustrating dream!!!

“I like the feel of film noir a lot and it – to me it’s all about a mood that comes about when people’ s desires lead them into areas where they’re doing something against their conscience and, you know, then suffering the results. So it’s about fear, and it’s a nighttime feeling and that – that thing creeps into my work, you know, quite a bit.”

“It’s a simple thing he [Frank Daniel] taught me. If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.”

“Everything sort of follows my initial ideas. As soon as I get an idea, I get a picture and a feeling, and I can even hear sounds. The mood and the visuals are very strong. Every single idea I have comes with these things. One moment they’re outside of my consciousness, and the next moment they come in with all of this power.”

September 19, 2010

Surrealism, Photography, Cinema

Notes from “Explosante fixe”, Exhibition Catalogue at Centre Pompidou

Some notes are in French, I do not fully translate everything, only the most important bits. I’ll translate later what will actually be used in the essay.

André Breton, L’entrée des mediums (1922)
Definition of Surrealism
“un certain automatisme psychique qui correspond assez bien à l’état de rêve, état qu’il est aujourd’hui fort difficile de délimiter.”

Breton “hasard objectif”

George Bataille “L’informe” “Bassesse”-> chûte

Salvador Dali
“Photographie, pure création de l’esprit” (1927)
in Dawn Ades, “Salvador Dali”, Thames and Hudson 1982
“Ils trouvent vulgaire et normal tout ce qu’ils ont l’habitude de voir tous les jours, si merveilleux et miraculeux que ce soit”

Dali, “Film Art, Fil Antiartistico”, Gazeta Literacia (1927), in Dawn Ades
“Le monde du cinema et de la peinture sont très différents: les possibilités de la photographie et du cinéma résident precisement dans cet imaginaire illimité qui nait des choses elles-mêmes. Un morceau de sucre sur l’écran peut devenir plus grand que la perspective infinie d’édifices gigantesques.”

Dali, “Psychologie non euclidienne d’une photographie”, Minotaure 7.
“La donnée photographique est toujours et essentiellement le plus sûr moyen d’expression poétique et le procédé le plus agile pour saisir les plus délicates osmoses qui existent entre la réalité et la surréalité. Le simple fait de la transposition photographique implique une invention totale: la capture d’une réalité secrète.”

Salvador Dali – Realité Secrète
The image reflects reality but forces people to see the world without prejudice/preconception. Therefore the representation of the world presented by the image (i.e. By Art) is truer than the world directly gazed at.
-> the reflection of the world in the mirror (=Art) is truer than the direct image.
-> Alice Through the looking glass

Benjamin Péret, Minotaure 12-13
“Ruine des ruines”

Dawn ades, “La photographie et le texte surréaliste” in Explosante fixe
“ces visions litteraires ou photographiques de produits de la civilisation engloutis par une nature triomphante et vorace traduisent symboliquement l’opposition des surréalistes à leur propre culture. Et celà, chose curieuse, se situe dans le prolongement du culte romantique de la nature, propre à l’esthétique de la fin du 18ème siècle, qui prend le parti de l’état sauvage contre la domestiqué, et celui de la nature contre la civilisation.”

Notes from La subversion des images: Surréalisme, Photographie, Film, Exhibition Catalogue at Centre Pompidou

I saw this show in December 2009.

Les images du dehors, Michel Poivert

“definition de la photographie comme empreinte”
“une odieuse laideur dont le pouvoir de fascination révèle la jouissance inavouable que procure le mauvais gout” George Bataille

Un photogramme, à l’instar d’une photographie documentaire, exemplifie une relation interiorisée au monde

Le fantastique moderne, Quentin Bajac

techniques d’enregistrement indicielles

Louis Aragon
“ne conçoit pas de merveilleux en dehors du réel”
“un fantastique, un merveilleux moderne autrement riche et divers”
“La réalité est l’absence apparente de contradiction. Le merveilleux, c’est la contradiction qui apparait dans le réel. Le fantastique, l’au delà, le rêve, la survie, le paradis, l’enfer, la poésie, autant de mots pour signifier le concret” La révolution surréaliste 3
“sentiment du merveilleux quotidien”

About Eugène Atget, self taught photographer of Paris whom the Surrealist admired:
Waldemar George: « un quart de siècle avant Aragon, il a écrit Le Paysan de Paris en sondant, en dépouillant de sa gangue et en mettant à nu cet immanent mystère qui a pour nom: banalité. »
Albert Valentin: « tout à l’air de se passer au delà, dans la marge, dans le filigrane, dans l’esprit »
« une même poésie spectrale et populaire de la ville. Eloignés des utopies modernistes urbaines contemporaines, ils prennent leur source dans un Paris où seuls les lieux banals et surannés peuvent faire surgir un merveilleux moderne. »
« une nouvelle mythologie moderne urbaine dont les clichés d’Atget, dans leur brutalité primitive, fourniraient une des clefs d’accès. »
« autant de contenus manifestes, d’apparences trompeuses qu’il convient de déchiffrer »
« mettre au jour un contenu latent, souvent chargé de mystère et de percer littéralement l’ombre, lieu de tous les fantasmes »

Below some pictures by Atget:

Atget - Hell Mouth

Atget - librairie

atget - vitrine

atget - mannequins

atget - stairs

atget - appartment

atget - cabaret

atget - foggy street

atget - stairs

atget - cabaret

Dali, « Le témoignage photographique »
« la nature intrinsèquement fantastique du médium photographique »

Pierre Mac Orlan, « Masquer sur mesure », 1928
« révélateur d’une puissance merceilleuse »

About the photographs illustrating André Breton’s Nadja:
« hallucinations simples »

André Breton about night in « Les vases Communicants »:
« la grande nuit qui sait ne faire qu’un de l’ordure et la merveille »
This may refer to Brassai’s photographs of Paris by night.

Below some photographs by Brassaï:

brassai - foggy paris

brassai - gutter

brassai - house

brassai - foggy

brassai - broken windows

brassai - marechal ney

Random quotations:

Henri Cartier Bresson p152:
« laisser l’objectif photographique fouiller dans les gravats de l’inconscient et du hasard »

Dali, « Mes toiles au salon d’automne », 1927 p219
voir le monde « d’une manière spirituelle, dans sa plus grande réalité objective »

Freud:
Schaulust = pulsion scopique p220

André Breton, « Le Surréalisme et la peinture » p274
« L’oeil existe à l’état sauvage » = the eye exists in a savage state (he means that people see things instinctively, the sense of sight does not need to be educated, tamed.)

about strange perspectives in Dora Maar’s collages p275:
« les décors sont sombres et composés de perspectives dépravées: une fenêtre disparaît derrière une colonne pour ne jamais reparaître; un couloir penche vers la gauche jusqu’à se tordre; une voûte s’avère à la fois concave et convexe selon le point de vue qu’on adopte. Ainsi les personnages chimériques ont-ils l’air d’errer dans des espaces qui, par leur contiguïté et leur hétérogénéité, ne peuvent qu’être mentaux. »

Warped spaces in Dora Maar collages:

dora maar

Original Surrealist published material, reprinted

Louis Aragon, « Du décor », 1918, p417
« Doter d’une valeur poétique ce qui n’en possédait pas encore »

Robert Desnos, « Puissance des fantômes », 1928, p418: a poetic ode to cinema and the power of imagination
« Nés pour nous, par la grâce de la lumière et du celluloïd, des fantômes autoritaires s’assoient à notre côté, dans la nuit des salles de cinéma »
« le cinéma ne saurait être que le domaine du fantastique. En vain le réalisme croit-il régner sur les films ».
« Le merveilleux se manifeste où il veut et, quand il veut, il paraît au cinéma à l’insu peut être de ceux qui l’introduisent. »

« Heureux l’homme soumis à ses fantômes. Certes, il connaîtra des nuits désertes, d’inexplicables nostalgies, des mélancolies infinies, le désir sans raison, le spleen, l’implacable spleen. Mais il remettra la terre à sa place parmi les astres et l’homme parmi les créatures. Jamais l’or ne le détournera de son chemin. Jamais un boulet d’esclave n’entravera sa marche. Mieux, tout ce qu’il désirera, il l’obtiendra par la magie même de son imagination et les visites mystérieuses charmeront sa solitude. Libre, il agira librement en toute chose et sorti du dédale terrible de ses rêves, est-il quelque chose sur terre qui pourrait l’épouvanter? […] Initié au fantastique par la seule puissance de la surprise, son esprit connaîtra bientôt la sérénité, née du conflit de son orgueil et de son inquiétude. »

I translate this particular bit because it is very poetic and I like it:
« Fortunate is the man who submits to his ghosts. Sure, he will be prey to deserted nights, unexplainable nostalgies, infinite melancholies, mindless desire and spleen, the merciless spleen. But he will put the Earth back in its place among the stars, and man among the creatures. Never will gold sway him from his path. Never will he be hindered by a slave’s ball and chain. Better, all that he may desire, he will get it by the mere magic of his imagination, and mysterious visits will charm his solitude. Free, he will act freely in all things and, out of the terrible labyrinth of his dreams, is there anything on Earth that could terrify him? […] Initiated into the Fantastic by the mere power of surprise, his mind will soon know serenity, born out of the conflict of his pride and anxiety. »

Note: « ghost » = « fantôme » in French = « fantasma » in Italian (learnt from watching too many Dario Argento subtitled movies 🙂 and also spanish
« Fantasme » in French = « a fantasy » in English
« Fortunate is the man who submits to his ghosts. » I’m wondering whether there is some kind of pun here about fantôme (ghost) -> fantasma → fantasme → « Fortunate is the man who submits to his fantasies. » May be worth looking into the latin root of « fantasme » and « fantôme »

Antonin Artaud, « Sorcellerie et cinéma », 1927, p419
« cette espèce de griserie physique que communique directement au cerveau la rotation des images »
« cette sorte de puissance virtuelle des images va chercher dans le fond de l’esprit des possibilités à ce jour inutilisées. Le cinéma est essentiellement révélateur de toute une vie occulte avec laquelle il nous met directement en relation. Mais cette vie occulte, il faut savoir la deviner. »
« le cinéma […] dégage un peu de cette atmosphère de transe éminement favorable à certaines révélations. »
« un certain domaine profond tend à affleurer à la surface »

« Le cinéma me semble surtout fait pour exprimer les choses de la pensée, l’intérieur de la conscience, et pas tellement par le jeu des images que par quelque chose de plus impondérable qui nous les restitue avec leur nature directe, sans interpositions, sans representations. Le cinéma arrive à un tournant de la pensée humaine, à ce moment précis où le langage usé perd son pouvoir de symbole, où l’esprit est las du jeu des representations. La pensée claire ne nous suffit pas. Elle situe un monde usé jusqu’à l’écoeurement. Ce qui est clair est ce qui est immédiatement accessible, mais l’immédiatement accessible est ce qui sert d’écorce à la vie. Cette vie trop connue et qui a perdu tous ses symboles, on commence à s’apercevoir qu’elle n’est pas toute la vie. »

I translate this bit because it is crucial:
« To me, cinema seems to be made to express thoughts, the inside of the consciousness, and not so much through the play of images than through something more fleeting that communicates them to us with their direct nature, without interpositions, without representations. Cinema was discovered at a turning point of human thought, at this very moment when overused language has lost all of its symbolic power, when the mind is weary of the game of representations. Clear thought is not enough. It paints a word overused to nausea. What is clear is what is immediately accessible, but what is immediately accessible is nothing but the mere surface of life. This life that we know too well, that has lost all its symbols, we start to realise that it is not the whole of life. »

Benjamin Fondane « Du muet au parlant: grandeur et décadence du cinéma » 1930
« un nouveau moyen d’expression qui non seulement remplacerait la parole mais la mettrait en échec, soulignerait son creux; exiger d’autre part du spectateur une sorte de collaboration, ce minimum de sommeil, d’engourdissement nécessaire, pour que fût balayé le décor du signe et que prît forme à sa place le réel du rêve.
Que le spectateur perdit pied, c’est tout ce que le cinéma voulait. »

Albert Valentin « Eugène Atget, 1856-1927 » 1928
« tout a l’air de se passer au-delà »
« Le reste est au-delà, vous dis-je, dans la marge, dans le filigrane, dans l’esprit, à la portée du moins perspicace ».

Brassaï « Images latentes » 1932
juste cette expression « images latentes »

Dali « le témoignage photographique » 1929
« essentiellement le véhicule le plus sûr de la poésie »
« percevoir les plus délicates osmoses qui s’établissent entre la réalité et la surréalité »
« l’enregistrement d’une réalité inédite »

Raoul Ubac « L’envers de la face » 1942
« Une image, et surtout une image photographique, ne donne du réel qu’un instant de son apparence. Derrière cette mince pellicule qui moule un aspect des choses, à l’intérieur de cette image il en existe à l’état latent une autre, ou plusieurs autres superposées dans le temps et que des opérations le plus souvent dues au hasard décèlent brusquement. »

Jean Goudal « Surréalisme et cinéma » 1925
« Au cinéma comme dans le rêve, le fait règne en maître absolu. L’abstraction perd ses droits. Aucune explication ne vient légitimer les gestes des héros. Les actes succèdent aux actes, portent en eux mêmes leur justification. Et ils se succèdent avec une telle rapidité que nous avons à peine le temps d’évoquer le commentaire logique qui pourrait les expliquer, ou tout au moins les relier. »
« hallucination consciente »
« cette fusion du rêve et de l’état conscient »
« ces images mouvantes nous hallucinent, mais en nous laissant une conscience confuse de notre personnalité et en nous permettant d’évoquer, si c’est nécessaire, les disponibilités de notre mémoire. »
« Dans le langage, la donnée première est toujours la trame logique. L’image naît à propos de cette trame et s’y ajoute pour l’orner, pour l’éclairer. Au cinéma, la donnée première est l’image, qui, à l’occasion, et point nécessairement, entraîne à sa suite des lambeaux rationnels. »

January 5, 2010

A filmmaker’s guide to freaking out your audience – Part 2: camera placement and editing

Gilles Deleuze believes that our brain has two modes of functionning: action and reflexion, and that these 2 modes are mirrored in cinema. He calls them “movement image” and “time image”.

“Movement image” is the most traditional in cinema: the camera follows a character and the point of view changes in response the character’s actions. “Movement image” follows the principle of action-reaction and abides to rationality: the camera reacts to the character’s action in a way that is predictable, so that the audience knows what to expect. For example, somebody walks out of a room. When this person crosses the door threshold, the camera stops filming towards the inside of the room (now empty) and instead films the character now walking outside.

In “time image”, the length of the shots is not determined by the action taking place. Deleuze calls this “a purely optical and sonorous situation”. For example, a long shot on 2 characters fishing and not talking. Since nothing is said, the only information to be gathered by the viewer is that the characters are fishing, and this would require only a very short sequence to be communicated. The time after which the shot ends is arbitrary since no specific action by the characters cause the shot to end, and, if the shot had continued longer, nothing more would have happened (the characters would still be fishing in silent). In “image time”, the next shot is also unrelated to the previous one. For example, a shot of one of the characters going on an undescript errand in town. The new action the character is doing is not caused by the previous action (fishing) and therefore the viewer is unable to determine when it is taking place compared to the first one. The errand could take place just after, long after or even in the past compared to the fishing.

Deleuze place the apparition of the “time image” in cinema after the second world war. He thinks that the war was such a complex and unprecedented events that is escaped people’s understanding, and therefore shattered their ability to plan rational actions responding to events. The traumatic event, too big for human understanding, broke the chain of action-reaction. Unsettled, the characters of a time image find themselves unable or unwilling to act. Instead, they become witnesses of “a pure moment of time”.

Because the logical chronology of actions is broken by the “time image”, Deleuze believes that “the cinema image is not in the present”. Rather, cinema images show different layers of memories whose meanings sometimes converge towards the present.

Just as human beings constantly alternate between action and reflexion, it is possible to mix “movement images” and “time images”. Let’s take the same example of a man going out of a room. The camera shows him walking out but rather than cutting just after he crosses the threshold, it keeps showing the empty room for a bit before switching to the man outside. This confuses the viewer: why is the camera still showing the empty room ? The viewer starts wondering whether there is something in the room that he is not noticing or understanding. Is there a hidden threat in the room ? The camera follows follows the man going out and cut shortly after he is gone so there is action-reaction, but is perverted by the unexplained pause to look at the empty room: the timing of the reaction is not correct. Additionally, when the camera stops showing the empty room, it may not show the man now outside, but switch to something completely different. In that case, not only is the timing of the reaction wrong, but the reaction itself is not logical. The presence of action reaction but the absence of correct timing and/or logical sequences of events unsettle the viewer: it gives them the feeling that they are confronted with a sequence of events whose logic they cannot understand. Therefore, this sequence of events is perceived as threatening however ordinary each individual event might be. This process is often used by David Lynch: a noise or flash suggesting sudden action is shown, then an empty room is shown so that the viewer wonders “could the sudden event be happening right now behind my back ?” Often also, a phone is shown ringing and nobody picks it up. Later in the film, someone may be shown picking up the same phone up, so that the chronology of all events shown in between the 2 shots involving the phone become unclear. Or, if someone picks the phone up straight away, the camera stays on the phone and does not show the person apart from a glimpse of their hand.

September 27, 2009

How to pitch my project ? – Space and consciousness – the unpremeditated – Surrealim is dead anyway

This post won’t be a well thought-out well organised dissertation on some subject but rather a list of issues/uncertainties I have about how to pitch my research project according to the structure given to us last week. In particular, how to phrase the research question and how to pitch it within the contextual categories: history, contemporary, critical theory, parallel theory, projective or generative theory.

The main problem I have is I know what types of artwork I want to make but am unsure about how to pitch it within a coherent research project. It’s like there are a couple of different threads I want to explore, and they are all somehow related to the big soup of things I may call “interests, obsessions and inspiration” which share lots of similar themes but I’m not fully sure how I may knot these threads into a bullet-proof research question.

Bluntly, this is how I came up with my initial research proposal: I have been doing the ghost houses for 3 years because I like exploring them, I find them fascinating. I had been doing (and went on doing) other things I personally found equally interesting before doing the ghost houses (photographs of woods where light was very fairy tale-like, random wood sculptures, dream paintings, found objects assemblage) but those were constantly rejected from exhibitions. Then out of nowhere, the ghost houses started being accepted to about a third of the exhibitions I offered them to, with on top of that quite a few of “sincere” (i.e. personalised rejection letter with comments, not standard letter) sorry-we-think-they’re-great-but-don’t-quite-fit-the-subject refusals. To me it was an amazing success rate. It seemed when I started the ghost houses, I had unknowingly started making fashionable artworks !!! Indeed, when you look in AN, there are quite a lot of events going on about space, urban, the built environment and such. These is obviously a fashion going on about that. I was completely unaware of it when I started the ghost houses, I did them because I found them fascinating. But, hey, I’m not suicidal either, if one of the things I do is fashionable by sheer luck, it has to be in my research project !

So exploring derelict places became part of the research project. It could not, however, be the complete research project for several reasons:
1) I don’t live near the ghost houses and can only explore them in summer (derelict places in England are heavily guarded old public institutions that require a lot of jackass skills to get in). Even if I lived near them, I’m not sure I would like to spend all my week ends in places where there might me asbestos, pigeon droppings and such. A couple of times per year wearing a good dust mask won’t kill me, but I would not like to spend my life in there.
2) You cannot predict the productivity of a ghost house. It may be locked up, wrecked, empty, too dark or without anything interesting in it. It is not only in the Art world that space/the built environment has become fashionable over the last 2 years, urban exploration as a hobby has become hype, with dedicated websites flourishing. Some urban explorers seek fame and glory from it, advertising their explorations with exact location name as trophies. The consequence being that the place owner just has to google the name of their property to learn about the unwanted visitor, and heavily lock up the place, making it inaccessible to others (I have even been wondering whether this consequence was not intentional. After all, the rarer the trophy, the more valuable). The best places I had planned to visit this summer were heavily locked up after some high visibility reports were put online about them … Thankfully, this type of behaviour is not too common and most urban explorers are relatively discreet and helpfully share tips about access to places. While I’m at it, I just would like to state than the urban exploration moto is “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints”, so it is a peaceful, non destructive activity.
3) I might get bored of the ghost houses, in which case I’ll stop, however fashionable they might be.

So the research project had to have other things in it. I had been making paintings of dreams, and love cinema exploring consciousness, so the obvious was to make videos inspired by dreams and inner worlds.

Then came the issue of how to knot those 2 apparently unrelated threads. This is the main issue I am researching in books at the moment. Instinctively, I know space and consciousness are related, but I do not have a couple of smart quotations to prove it (tough luck). Why do I know it instinctively ? One of my favourite paintings is Birthday by Dorothea Tanning. The corridor seems to go on indefinitely, there is a mirror on the left but the real space does not seem any more real than the reflection. It seems this beautiful strange house is not the outer world but the (infinite) inner world of the artist.

Dorothea Tanning - Birthday

I’ve always seen my house as a shelter: I can make it look the way I like (since a teenager, I have skimmed bric a brac shops and garage sales, lovingly doing up old fashioned objects in the colors and patterns I like), and in it I can do whatever (harmless thing) I like without the fear of being marked as odd. To me a house is a private place where people are free to be themselves away from the judgemental looks of others. See also Virginia Woolf’s essay “A room of one’s own”: people need a private space to be able to think independently. When I am invited in other people’s houses, I look at the colours they chose, the objects they like and I feel I know the host more intimately thanks to those. I see their house as the closest approximation to a physical projection of somebody’s inner world. Many Raw artists actually takes this statement literally, and turn their whole house into a huge artwork, creating their own self contained universe with a unique mythology.

A recurrent theme in films and books set in the former Soviet Union (Dr Zhivago, The Master and Margarita) are the dreadful communal housing, and the nosiness, gossips, mutual spying that came with them. What was probably started as an emergency war-time measure to give decent housing to everyone was soon turned into a control instrument to make people conform by encouraging neighbours to spy on and denounce each other. The recurrence of the theme shows how traumatising it must have been for people to be suddenly deprived of their private space like this. One of the selling point of Capitalism was that, within Capitalism, contrary to the Eastern Bloc, people were granted the right to individuality and privacy. Yet, today, many young adults with decent, steady jobs cannot afford a private space and are forced to live with perfect strangers met through the small ads well into their late 30s. Flatshare are contemporary Communal housing. It is not greed but flatshare-phobia that made me take a boring but reasonably lucrative engineer job in the first place. Open space offices are another contemporary example of the use of space as an instrument of mind control. In contemporary UK, people do not talk of “houses” anymore but of “property”. What used to be an intimate space where people were free to be themselves is now a commodity passed from hand to hand every 3 years in order to reap the profit from speculation on it.

In many movies, madness manifests itself as a distortion of space and time. In David Lynch’s films, there a recurring image of a corridor with drapes whenever a character goes insane, looses grip on reality or feels a menace. In many of his films, the inside architecture of the houses where the character live do not make sense (at least not within Euclidian geometry …): the inside seems far too big compared to the outside, there seem to be doors and corridors leading from everywhere to everywhere, characters walk around the house and they seem to go through the whole of it as though the house was built as an endless circle. In many interviews, Lynch confesses an obsession with houses: he sees them as self contained worlds were dreadful things happen, unknowingly of the outside world. So his vision of houses is tainted with menace and claustrophobia. Strange architecture is also present in German expressionist movies. In Last Year in Marienbad, the characters seem trapped in the immense hotel, going round in endless spatio-temporal circles, unable to leave the space until their mind makes sense of what is happening. In Polanski’s Repulsion, Catherine Deneuve, alone with her hallucinations, traps herself in her flat, a refuge turned menacing prison. Generally, in movies, people often drive themselves mad in close spaces (Kubrick’s Shining). In popular culture, the haunted houses and poltergeist phenomenon suggest a strong link between people’s minds and the places they used to inhabit.

So a house, a shelter, place and freedom and projection of one’s inner world may very quickly turns into a prison, a projection of one’s anxieties and obsessions. Where/when is the turning point or the trigger, or are both aspects constantly present ? Are they the same thing ? This question is definitely one of my obsessions.

Yet, I don’t think I want to call my research project “space and consciousness” or something like that, because this is not all I see in the ghost houses. Another important aspect of them is the unpremeditated compositions and putting my own meaning on something that already exists by itself. I feel it is an important part of my art process as I was already exploring something similar when I made the random wood sculpture. So I don’t want to leave this aspect out of the research project.

When I said “madness manifests itself as a distortion of space and time”, there is also the time factor that I could not explore in photography and paintings, but that I will use in moving image.

So in the end, the only common thing I could find in my obsessions and interests is subjectivity. The subjectivity of one individual’s vision. The problem is, this does not make a research question ! So I decided that the best solution was to call the project Digital Surrealism, since the surrealists were themselves interested in many of the things I am want to explore (dreams, consciousness, randomness). That will do the trick, I thought happily …

But then I’m reading “Surrealism and Cinema” by Michael Richardson, where he says that David Lynch’s work has nothing to do with Surrealism because Lynch has no desire to change the world, and his interviews show he has a bad understanding of what Surrealism was. Indeed Lynch is no revolutionary (though I have no clue what his political leanings are, and I don’t care). The interviews in question, I don’t remember them if I read them so I cannot comment on the level of expertise in Lynch’s understanding of Surrealism within Art History until I read them again. However, my humble opinion is that, even if David Lynch was a trotskyist and held a Phd in Art History about Surrealism, he could not be a Surrealist anyway because Surrealism as an Art movement died in the 60s at latest. In passing, Richardson does not comment about Lynch’s use of images he does not know the meaning of (the blue box in Mulholland Drive) and his use of altered states of consciousness (namely transcendental meditation) in order to find ideas for artworks without being censored by his “Conscious”: he dismisses Lynch as a neo/post-surrealist purely on the ground of intent, ignoring method or process.

Anyway, even when Surrealism was alive, there was no clear definition of who was or was not a Surrealist. Breton and the hardcore wrote theoretical texts about the principles of Surrealism. Some of these texts are better forgotten for Surrealism’s sake, especially homophobic rants and ludicrous dogma about women’s say in the practical organisation of sexual intercourse. But many artists gravitated around Surrealism without being formally part of the movement, which did not prevent them from being invited to take part in surrealist exhibitions. They were attracted mostly by its aura of freedom. This included many women artists without formal training, who were not bothered by Breton’s outdated views on female sexuality, or simply granted them the amount of attention they deserved … Some of these artists did not want to join to preserve their independence, because the authoritarian personality of Breton annoyed them (Leonor Fini), or simply because they could not be bothered (especially Belgian painters who were away from Paris). Later on, Breton became more dogmatic and starting “excluding” lots of artists for all kinds of dubious reasons. This did not prevent those excluded dissidents from going on making their work, with or without Breton’s approval.

Even if the theoretical writings about Surrealism were completely free of rubbish, no contemporary artists could be expected to follow them literally nowadays. They were written in the 20s and 30s and the social conditions in which the artwork are produced have drastically changed.

All this to say that what at first seemed a convenient title now seems like a needlessly dangerous magnet for criticism by hair splitters who think they have the authority to decide who is or is not influenced by Surrealism in 2009. There was a hint in the chat that in the “contemporary context” part of our project proposal, we could give names of current academic research. So this seems to imply that the way we pitch our research proposal could influence academic opportunities we have at the end of the MA. With that in view, it seems suicidal to choose a title that is like a criticism magnet, however convenient it might have sounded at first.

So it’s now 00.01, I have written 2352 words and I still don’t know how to call my research project …