Blind Husbands
Blind Husbands is a very good film, made by and starring Stroheim based on a novel he wrote. THe film opens with a title card noting that "alienation of affection" is a frequent cause for divorce, and when it occurs the blame is usually put on the wife and the other man, if there is one. But, it asks, what about the husband, who has stopped wooing the wife with his "wiles" in his complacency?
The husband and his wife are in town for him to climb a mountain. As a doctor, he's called away several times to help people, and Lt. Steuben (Stroheim) takes those opportunities to romance the wife. He seems to have done so successfully; she promises to run away with him. When Steuben and the doctor are at the top of the pinnacle, the husband finds a letter from his wife on Steuben, which Steuben knocks away. When the husband demands truth, Steuben admits that the wife is running away with him (which the husband already suspected) and he leaves Steuben on the peak to die.
Coming down the mountain, Dr. Armstrong finds the letter: his wife rescinded her promise to Steuben, explaining it was just to get out of an awkward situation, and she loves her husband. Armstron wants to rescue Steuben but falls off the mtn. Steuben has rescuers coming, but is frightened by the spirit of the mountain (a very expressionistic specter) and falls to his death; the film notes that the spirit is satisfied. The husband and wife are reunited.
Deleuze has argued that Stroheim is the director of entropic degeneration and Bunuel is the director of cyclical degeneration. This film does not bear that out. We see a young honeymooning couple, deeply in love, and they observe Armstrong's inattention and vow never to be that way. And Armstrong does seem to degenerate; after suspecting his wife, he reads a plaque (complete with a soul descending into hell) that explains that a lover was killed by a jealous husband on the mountain. Thus his marriage (once like the honeymooners) and his morals have degenerated, so he attempts to leave Steuben to his death. But the note brings him full circle. He no longer wishes Steuben to die, and is redeemed. And the final scene shows the two couples leaving side by side, with the mountain guide imploring armstrong to love his wife. They may not be as lovey-dovey as the honeymooners, but they do seem to be in love. In this film, degeneration seems to be cyclical, and things come full circle.
Foolish Wives
For this film, I was more interested in watching a movie and less interested in examining how it fit in with Deleuze's analysis, and perhaps for that reason enjoyed it much more. But it also seems to me a much more mature work; it legendarily cost more than $1 million, far above the budget Stroheim was given, and it was worth it. Stroheim plays Karamzin, a false count romancing a naive American woman, but he also romances everyone else. He and his fake cousins, also fake nobility, survive using counterfeit bills, and Karamzin lusts after the counterfeiters mentally challenged daughter. He also seduces his cousin's servant, convincing her to give him her entire life savings. Finally he does seduce the American, the wife of the Ambassador to Monaco, and is going to get 100000 francs of gambling winnings from her, but the jilted and cheated servant ruins the tryst by setting the house on fire. The pair survive, but Karamzin's credibility is ruined by the fact that he escaped the house first, and that his tryst was discovered.
The movie ends in a brutal way. We see several things happen: 1. the servant kills herself 2. Karamzin sneaks into the bedroom of the American, possibly awakening the manservant in the house 3. the "cousins" are arrested and exposed as frauds 4. the manservant drags something out of the house slowly, and opens a manhole to throw it away. it seems to be a body, and just as he's about to throw it away, the hood fall off and we see that it is Karamzin. the corpse is thrown in the manhole. 5. the husband points out to the wife that the end of the book she's reading (Foolish Wives by Stroheim)
One of the film's chief accomplishments is creating the "milieu" of Monte Carlo - a decadent and degenerate city - on the backlots of Hollywood. Keith Phipps (quote from Wikipdia) writes: "Foolish Wives re-creates Monte Carlo in a Hollywood back lot...Playing a fraudulent aristocrat, in a touch that echoed his own biography, Von Stroheim dupes the gullible, lusts after a retarded teenager, and attempts to undo an innocent American. It's like a Henry James novel as dreamt by a pornographer, and it illustrates what makes Von Stroheim such a problematic genius: Is it nascent post-modernism or egotism run amok that made him prominently feature a character reading a novel called Foolish Wives, credited to Erich Von Stroheim?" The Henry James analogy is very most telling; I might have put it: "It's like a Henry James novel imagined by a naturalist" or, in more Deleuzian terms, "It's like a Henry James novel in which the real milieu of Europe is corrupted by an originary world of impulses, represented here by a swamp."
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
Cinema 1: The Impulse Image
I have now read the chapter on naturalism in Cinema one 4 or 5 times, so I'm finally going to try to make sense of it. It will be a crucial text for me.
First, Deleuze situates the "impulse-image" between the action-image and the affect-image. In the affect-image, which highlights emotion, a part (especially face) is rendered such a way as to become a whole. And space isn't part of a larger environment, but becomes an "any-place-whatever" (123). Through these techniques, emotion is evoked. And moving beyond that, to the action-image, we'll get the "Determined milieu" where things are where they are, not any place whatever. This will trade in affect for action. But in between is the impulse-image, which takes place in an originary world.
To try and make sense of this: a determined milieux is a realistic place. An originary world, by contrast, is a place dominated by impulses, which is to say animal drives. In an originary world "the characters are like animals: the fashionable gentleman a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena" (123). The impulse image creates a strange fusion of a real milieux and an originary world; it is a determined milieux which seems to have been invaded and controlled by an originary world, usually with a single setting where nature dominates infecting the entire film. Deleuze has a whole list of originary worlds in Stroheim and Bunuel films: "the mountain peak in Blind Husbands...the rock garden of the Golden age..." (125). He concludes that list with: " Even though it is localised, the originary world is still the overflowing location where the whole film happens, that is, the world which is revealed at the basis of the social mileiux which are so powerfully described" (125).
This idea - that the originary world is the originary point - has so much room for unpacking. First, it reminds me of Freud's/Lacan's navel of the dream, which is the place where the conscious mind's meaning-making system is no longer able to graft an interpretation on the overdetermined expression of the unconscious. This seems to be very similar to Deleuze's concept; in the impulse-image, the originary world erupts into the real milieux, rendering the entire milieux a naturalistic system. And at the point of contact between the milieux and the originary world (the desert, the rockgarden) the interpretive act becomes problematic - after all, the desert potion of McTeague/Greed has long troubled reviewers. Besides that navel, the milieux and the originary world seem to have the same relationship as the conscious interpretation of the dream and the unconscious expression lying below it: "But what gives their description such force is, indeed, their way of relating the features to an originary world which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them. This world does not exist independently of the determinate milieux, but conversely makes them exist with characteristics and features which come from above, or rather, from a still more terrible depth" (125-126).
Deleuze identifies a number of directors who attempt to be naturalist but fail, with some interesting results (p 134+, including Vidor, Nicholas Ray, Fuller, Renoir, and others). But he is mostly interested in the three directors who do succeed in being naturalist: Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey. The most interesting part of Deleuze's commentary on these directors seems to be his distinction between how they treat degeneration. Stroheim does straight degeneration; he has an entropic system of degeneration, and he uses Expressionistic techniques of lighting and shadow to demonstrate how degeneration occurs over a period of time (126-127).
Bunuel has a much more interesting and problematic version of degeneration, one which, like Stroheim and expressionism, is linked to surrealism. Deleuze describes the system as follows: "The originary world thus imposes upon the successive milieux not exactly a slope, but a curvature or a cycle" (127). This cyclical nature of degeneration, which takes place as a "precipitating repetition, eternal return" means that there is never anyone who is completely evil (as they will always swing back to good) and that good figures play a stronger role than in Stroheim, as there always exist those on the upper part of the cycle. But ultimately things do not improve, as even the positive figures ("the male or female lover, the holy man") will eventually return and thus are "no less harmful than the pervert or the degenerate" (127). Either way, naturalism becomes very close to leaving the movement image and finding the time-image, but will never get there because it keeps its conception of time "subordinate to naturalistic co-ordinates" and thus naturalism could "only grasp the negative effects of time: attrition, degradation, wastage, destruction, loss, or simply oblivion" (127).
Much later than Stroheim or Bunuel is Losey, in whom the degradation takes the form of "the reversal against self" (137). In Losey, every character breaks down and degenerates when their own impulses are too strong to bear. "Fundamentally, there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality" (137). But Losey does seem to offer up, like Stroheim and Bunuel, an ambiguous form of salvation. This reversal only affects the men: "It seems that the world of impulses and the milieu of symptoms enclose the men hermetically, delivering them up to a sort of male homosexual game from which they do not emerge" (138). The women in Losey, by contrast, do not seem to feel the impules. "The leave naturalism to reach lyrical abstraction."
Well, I'm sure there's much, much more, but I think that's all I have for now. Whew. This Deleuze is a bitch to read and think through, but it's also very satisfying and above all rich with meaning.
First, Deleuze situates the "impulse-image" between the action-image and the affect-image. In the affect-image, which highlights emotion, a part (especially face) is rendered such a way as to become a whole. And space isn't part of a larger environment, but becomes an "any-place-whatever" (123). Through these techniques, emotion is evoked. And moving beyond that, to the action-image, we'll get the "Determined milieu" where things are where they are, not any place whatever. This will trade in affect for action. But in between is the impulse-image, which takes place in an originary world.
To try and make sense of this: a determined milieux is a realistic place. An originary world, by contrast, is a place dominated by impulses, which is to say animal drives. In an originary world "the characters are like animals: the fashionable gentleman a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena" (123). The impulse image creates a strange fusion of a real milieux and an originary world; it is a determined milieux which seems to have been invaded and controlled by an originary world, usually with a single setting where nature dominates infecting the entire film. Deleuze has a whole list of originary worlds in Stroheim and Bunuel films: "the mountain peak in Blind Husbands...the rock garden of the Golden age..." (125). He concludes that list with: " Even though it is localised, the originary world is still the overflowing location where the whole film happens, that is, the world which is revealed at the basis of the social mileiux which are so powerfully described" (125).
This idea - that the originary world is the originary point - has so much room for unpacking. First, it reminds me of Freud's/Lacan's navel of the dream, which is the place where the conscious mind's meaning-making system is no longer able to graft an interpretation on the overdetermined expression of the unconscious. This seems to be very similar to Deleuze's concept; in the impulse-image, the originary world erupts into the real milieux, rendering the entire milieux a naturalistic system. And at the point of contact between the milieux and the originary world (the desert, the rockgarden) the interpretive act becomes problematic - after all, the desert potion of McTeague/Greed has long troubled reviewers. Besides that navel, the milieux and the originary world seem to have the same relationship as the conscious interpretation of the dream and the unconscious expression lying below it: "But what gives their description such force is, indeed, their way of relating the features to an originary world which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them. This world does not exist independently of the determinate milieux, but conversely makes them exist with characteristics and features which come from above, or rather, from a still more terrible depth" (125-126).
Deleuze identifies a number of directors who attempt to be naturalist but fail, with some interesting results (p 134+, including Vidor, Nicholas Ray, Fuller, Renoir, and others). But he is mostly interested in the three directors who do succeed in being naturalist: Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey. The most interesting part of Deleuze's commentary on these directors seems to be his distinction between how they treat degeneration. Stroheim does straight degeneration; he has an entropic system of degeneration, and he uses Expressionistic techniques of lighting and shadow to demonstrate how degeneration occurs over a period of time (126-127).
Bunuel has a much more interesting and problematic version of degeneration, one which, like Stroheim and expressionism, is linked to surrealism. Deleuze describes the system as follows: "The originary world thus imposes upon the successive milieux not exactly a slope, but a curvature or a cycle" (127). This cyclical nature of degeneration, which takes place as a "precipitating repetition, eternal return" means that there is never anyone who is completely evil (as they will always swing back to good) and that good figures play a stronger role than in Stroheim, as there always exist those on the upper part of the cycle. But ultimately things do not improve, as even the positive figures ("the male or female lover, the holy man") will eventually return and thus are "no less harmful than the pervert or the degenerate" (127). Either way, naturalism becomes very close to leaving the movement image and finding the time-image, but will never get there because it keeps its conception of time "subordinate to naturalistic co-ordinates" and thus naturalism could "only grasp the negative effects of time: attrition, degradation, wastage, destruction, loss, or simply oblivion" (127).
Much later than Stroheim or Bunuel is Losey, in whom the degradation takes the form of "the reversal against self" (137). In Losey, every character breaks down and degenerates when their own impulses are too strong to bear. "Fundamentally, there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality" (137). But Losey does seem to offer up, like Stroheim and Bunuel, an ambiguous form of salvation. This reversal only affects the men: "It seems that the world of impulses and the milieu of symptoms enclose the men hermetically, delivering them up to a sort of male homosexual game from which they do not emerge" (138). The women in Losey, by contrast, do not seem to feel the impules. "The leave naturalism to reach lyrical abstraction."
Well, I'm sure there's much, much more, but I think that's all I have for now. Whew. This Deleuze is a bitch to read and think through, but it's also very satisfying and above all rich with meaning.
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