 |
| Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present (Vishnevetsky, 2013) |
 |
| Les Miserables (Hooper, 2012) |
The image-text relation in
film and theater is not a merely technical question, but a site of conflict, a
nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves
out in the materiality of representation…The real question to ask when
confronted with these kind of image-text relations is not “What is the
difference (or similarity) between the words and the images?” but “what
difference do the differences (and similarities) make?” That is, why does it
matter how words and images are juxtaposed, blended, or separated?
-W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory:
Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation
I was briefly struck while watching Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present how much the main shot used to
represent its ontological subject: a single light with a mostly out of focus
background, the camera handheld, often attempting to re-frame its subject. Of
course, it reminded me of Tom Hooper’s Les
Miserables, which used a similar shot for the film’s apparently “big show stopping”
moment of when Anne Hathaway[1]
sings “I Dreamed a Dream.” At the time, I shouted at the screen (I was at
home), “Holy [explicit]! Just keep the camera still.”
Jim Emerson nails exactly the problem with this, beyond the content of what she is singing: “On the most obvious level, the actors are
playing to the balcony while the camera (and those wide-angle lenses) push their
faces into ours. It's like ‘Full Metal Jacket: The Musical!’ with all the parts
played by R. Lee Ermey.”
Now imagine this: what if Hathaway didn’t scream the song? What if she played it almost as a whisper, with the camera as intimate as it is now? That’s what you get in Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s film: a man in his solitude revealing his secrets. The camera captures his face amidst the darkness, almost like a traveler you meet in the middle of the night. The film is about history—personal history, film history, the idea of history—and we are diving into a past otherwise unknown to us. History is seen in the DVDs and books that line the walls—the physical aspects of history—as well as that opening shot of Lake Michigan (where we can see the movement of time). The image thus presents the traveler, stoic, alone, hidden in darkness: the privacy becomes the content of the image.
There’s no privacy in Hooper’s image. The emotions are
present, reflected, emphasized to the point of parody.
This is not a single woman’s tortured moment; it’s the world’s. We are not
brought into intimacy, but pummeled with it.
Not all films should build a symmetrical relationship
between image, text, and sound. Read the scene in which Travis Bickle asks
Betsy out on a date. On page, it appears like it’s more out of pity, a lonely
soul reaching out for help. On screen, he’s magnetic (just watch that image of
his hand floating across the desk, shot from top down). Scorsese doesn’t
present us with a maniac until much later.
So why doesn’t Hooper’s approach to breaking text and image
work? Because if we are about to be blasted with feelings (Feel all the
feels as the kids say these days), we need to be appropriately ready for
them. Hooper apparently cited The Passion
of Joan of Arc as a reference for this shot. Perhaps he forgot that Dreyer
planed the film to be played in complete silence without any orchestration.[2]
To feel the passion of Hathaway, we must be near to her, but not physically. We
have to feel we are the only ones feeling or hearing what she is saying. But
that’s not we get; she is playing for the balcony, and for America’s heart.
[1]
It should be noted I refer to the star specifically because this moment is not
about the character; it’s about Hathaway showing us everything she has.
[2]
Sound is almost the key element often not discussed in the image-text
relationship, and is obviously part of the key in what I’m discussing. But
sound is also related to the content here ie. Rosenbaum is telling Ignatiy;
Hathaway is screaming at the audience. That works on stage—she’s emptying her
emotions to what is usually an empty set. She’s truly all alone. Here, the
awareness of an audience being built by the close-up is all too infuriating.
No comments:
Post a Comment