In exploring how film negotiates issues of fiction and non-fiction in its textual practice, it is useful to note how discussions about film’s referent have been drawn from discussions about still photography’s referent; and consequently it is also useful to compare photography and film as signifying practices. A further comparison with theatre then can be used to discern these similarities and differences even more closely. As discussed in previous chapters, the signifying practices of theatre and film both use moving images of human bodies in order to
create their texts. Photographs are static images mediated through photography’s technology. They are also included within contemporary theatre and filmic practice. Photography and film can only produce mediated images, never ‘live’ images. The three signifying practices (theatre, film and photography), however, use in common (although, of course, not always) images of actual human bodies as textual content. Various aspects of an actor’s real life body can inform an audience, in all three practices, about that actor’s biographical existence (or at least invite speculation about this existence). As discussed earlier in the context of the ‘performance artist’, this specificity of an actor’s body can be used in theatre and film as narrative content. Moffatt’s use of her own body for a model in her photographic series
Something More (1989) illustrates how this can occur also in photography. Such
specificity also contributes to what Barthes describes as the ‘obtuse’, ‘third’ meaning in cinema — where sounds and images (or certain qualities of sound and image) appear to be in excess of narrative demands and yet conversely open up a filmic text to a much wider range of interpretations.
In his distinction between seven aspects to a theatrical actor’s body, David Graver describes the complexity of information which arises in theatre:
To understand the ontological complexity of the actor’s body on stage we need to look not for two forms of existence there but (at least) seven. Actors are (to a greater or lesser extents depending on their activities, appearance, and histories) characters, performers, commentators, personages, members of socio-historical groups, physical flesh, and loci of private sensations.62
The ontological complexity involved in using images of real bodies as textual content is increased by the technological mediation which occurs in film and photography. Although in both these forms, the image of the human body is again finally reducible in meaning to the actual human body whose image nevertheless is part of a text that exists (in contrast to live theatre) as a technological artefact. Sculpture, puppetry, robotics, masked theatre, animated film, as well as film which uses computer graphics, all use modelling processes in order to create images which are based on real human bodies. When, however, theatre or film uses people as social actors (Chapter 3, p.80), or when photography’s subject is a social actor from ‘everyday’ life, then such images are understood not as only as narrative vehicles;
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they also operate as powerfully ‘truthful’ social representations which in turn can be used to model aspects of the real world. Global society’s current and widely published obsession with ‘reality television’ testifies to the way in which images of ‘social actors’ and their lives can be drawn into society’s discussion of many issues. Although beyond the scope of this thesis, it is interesting to reflect how examples of ‘reality television’ could be analysed for their social practice via their cultural performance of particular social, conflictual issues. Such a discussion would need to address the referential relationships which could be described as existing between the images produced as ‘reality television’ and the various social actors used by particular shows.
Photography’s relationship with its referent has been widely considered. In Sontag’s words,
...a photograph is not only an image ... it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.63
Barthes similarly describes the ‘photographic referent’ as
...not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the
necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.64
He describes how this ‘necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens’ crucially affects the way in which photography enters both private and public discourse about the historically real world.65 Mulvey similarly makes the following distinction between photography and film as follows:
Cinema is a medium of sequence, event and fiction. Expectations of the still image, on the other hand, have grown from an aesthetic of transparency, autonomy and homogeneity within the single whole.66
Rosen, on the other hand, comments on film’s referential transparency as he describes how documentary cinema provides ‘indexical traces of a real past’.67 Before proceeding, however, in my discussion of a possibly shared indexicality of
63
Sontag, On Photography, Ringwood, Victoria:Penguin Books Australia Ltd., 1979, 154 64
Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Milsons Point, Sydney:Random House Australia Ltd., Vintage Books, 1993, 76
65
See Barthes’ essays: ‘The Photographic Message’ and ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Image, Music, Text, and Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography.
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referent in film, photography and theatre, it is worth noting again the two textual aspects that differentiate these three signifying practices. This differentiation allows a closer definition of the indexical referent that specifically belongs to film as a signifying practice. The first difference in textual practice is sound, as discussed in Chapter 4. Theatre and film involve audiovisual texts, photography does not.
The second differentiating textual aspect is movement of the audiovisual image, as also discussed in Chapter 4. Theatre and film both use the movement of audiovisual images in three ways: sounds and visual images are synchronised in various ways (see p. 106), texts show actually moving images (moving bodies, for example), and audiovisual images are juxtaposed against each other in sequences that can suggest movement. Photography can also use this latter kind of movement, both within a photograph and within a photographic series. An interesting example of this occurs in Moffatt’s series Invocations (2000), where several images, both in their internal design and through their juxtaposition, suggest specific patterns of movement. In Chapter 7, I discuss further how photography and film can be seen to move towards each other in Moffatt’s photographic and filmic work, but for the present purpose of differentiating between film, theatre and photography, the latter is generally understood to consist of literally static images. Barthes well sums up this distinction in the context of an indexical referent:
…in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something
has passed in front of this same tiny hole ...68
He conceptualises the ‘punctum’ in photography as that aspect of photography through which a viewer makes meaning through adding to a photograph’s referentiality: ‘…it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’.69 This addition ‘animates’ both the viewer and the photograph: meanings are thus extended beyond and are yet inclusive of the substance of the photographic image.70 Whilst the punctum brings to mind Benjamin’s ‘aura’ and the mémoire involuntaire, Barthes seems to be suggesting a more textually based referentiality that is more ‘conscious’ than ‘unconscious’. The punctum derives its conceptual force from the close analysis of particular photographs. This force recalls his
67
Rosen, ‘Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts’, 63 68
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 78 69
conceptualisation of a ‘third meaning’ in cinema, which derives from notions of ‘excess’ in cinematic images and from the consequent flights of interpretation that can exist in counter-point to the explicit narrative content of filmic texts (Chapter 3, p.95). With Roger Warren Beebe, I am interested in applying the ‘punctum’ to cinema. Whereas he uses it as a way of describing ‘temporal disruption’ within a film’s narrative,71 I am more interested in Barthes’ description of how it links the world of a text with the world of the spectator. If the punctum is translated into a discussion of film, however, it would be possible to describe its impetus as potentially also sound-based. Barthes’ concept of the ‘grain of the voice’ (which I discuss in some detail below in my discussion of animated film) could similarly be used to discuss ‘punctum like’ moments in the reception of film which pull individuals in an audience into a heightened state of receptive awareness. A photograph’s punctum would always have to be described in terms of a static visual image. If, however, this concept is used in terms of film, it may be another way of describing how film’s moving, audiovisual referentiality can initiate intertextual connections with the historically real world in filmic reception. Filmmakers constantly look for such audio and visual ‘hooks’ which can make a film attractive to an audience. The attraction may take various forms — for example, a film may be considered more entertaining or more informative, or both at the same time.
Fiction Film in Reflexive Mode
The Brechtian ability to inform and entertain simultaneously can be achieved by fiction film through combining the mimetically powerful and attractive devices of theatrical acting and fictional narrative with some of documentary film’s approaches to filmmaking. Nichols’ reflexive mode of documentary obviously does not only apply to documentary film; it also is used by fiction filmmakers who seek to draw their audiences into Brechtian attitudes of reception. For example, director Oliver Stone describes as follows how he intends to affect his audiences through filmic style:
70
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 59 71
Roger Warren Beebe, ‘After Arnold: Narratives of the Posthuman Cinema’ in Meta Morphing. Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, Ed. Vivian Sobchack, Minneapolis, London:University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 164
The style of my films is ambivalent and shifting. I make people aware that they are watching a movie. I make them aware that reality itself is in question.72
Some forms of fiction film not only seek to bring the artifice of filmmaking to the attention of an audience by drawing attention to the technology of film. Fiction films can be reflexive by referring (via generic intertextuality) to observational, expository and interactive modes of documentary filmmaking. Fiction film also can be reflexive via statements of authorial intention which lie outside of the filmic text: these statements can refer directly to ambitions towards society’s indicative mood of communication. In this sense, reflexive fiction film can adopt some of the filmmaking performances which are associated with the cultural performance of documentary film, in order to achieve the Brechtian aims of directing an audience towards reflection on social issues through the processes of alienation and entertainment. French ‘new wave’ cinema of the 1960s and 1970s (exemplified by Godard’s films) were based stylistically on similar precepts to cinéma vérité . Direct cinema and Italian Neorealism (for example Visconti’s La terra trema: episodio del mare, 1948) have much in common stylistically, as well as in the sense that their overall address to an audience is one of social inquiry.73
The ‘Dogma 95’ filmmaking project, instigated in Copenhagen in Spring 1995, is another important and more recent example of reflexive fiction filmmaking as described above. Film directors who belong to ‘Dogma 95’, claim the following:
To DOGMA 95 the movie is not illusion!
Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind.
DOGMA 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.74
The first three tenets of this ‘vow of chastity’ also describe observational film, as found in the formulations of direct cinema and cinéma vérité:
72
Oliver Stone, ‘Open doors of perception’ in Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 2000, 4
73
MacDougall discusses ‘reflexivity’ in the context of Godard and Italian Neorealism in his essay ‘Visual Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing’, 87, in Transcultural Cinema
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1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).75
The filmmakers belonging to DOGMA 95 have produced some very well made and entertaining films, whose narratives directly address such disturbing social issues as incest, suicide and insanity. Their films include Festen (1998), The Idiots (1997) and
Dancer in the Dark (1999). These filmmakers explicitly state their intention to use audiovisual technology in order to ‘capture’ profilmic reality in a way that is similar to documentary filmmaking. Reflexive fiction filmmakers, however, negotiate a profilmic reality which includes professional actors acting out often powerful stories; these actors’ actions have to be chased all over the place by the camera- operators and sound recordists. Nichols’ definition of documentary (p. 169) clearly acknowledges the similarities between this form of documentary and fiction film. The only remaining distinction between reflexive fiction film and performative documentary appears to be the former’s use of fictional narrative, whereas the latter uses non-fiction for narrative content.
Reflexive fiction films acknowledge and subvert documentary film’s power to communicate in the indicative mood; they draw explicitly on how both documentary and fiction film share an indexicality of the profilmic image. They subvert documentary by showing how documentary filmmaking techniques do not guarantee a non-fictional narrative. They highlight the fictional aspects of documentary at the same time as they use documentary filmmaking techniques to approach a more indicative mood in relating the fiction contained in their filmic texts to non-fictional social issues in the real world. Reflexive fiction films make the following point again: that the textual practice of using audiovisually mediated images of people is also a usage of historically real individuals (actors in theatre as well as film) in order to ‘model’ situations which are devised as fiction but can be themselves ‘models’ of situations in the real world. It is interesting to note how digital technology impacts
on my above arguments about the filmic text as a specific signifying practice. My description of film as a textual practice which uses audiovisual images of the real world in order to create fictional and non-fictional narratives is problematic with regard to completely ‘animated’ films, those totally constructed from computer imaging, and those that use morphing technology as an editing technique.76 What kinds of referents to these films have? My following discussion addresses this question.
Film As Disembodied Text in the Age of Digital Technology
Although an animated film may not represent sounds and images from the real world, the audiovisual technology involved in the making of these films is used by filmmakers nevertheless in order to create mimetically empowered images. In other words, animated film, like other forms of film, uses a combination of movement and audiovisual representation in order to evoke the same pan-sensual mimetic, theatrically-based experience which is the reception of film. What Hansen describes as ‘the iconic relationship between film and referent’77 still has its effect in animated films: firstly by association (animated films are still films) and secondly, through the ways in which these animated moving images are derived from the movements of real people, objects and places in such a way that it is possible to recognise various aspects of the real world.
Dai Vaughan’s lament that perhaps ‘from today, cinema is dead’78 is drawn from his proposition that digital technology in film will destroy (or has already destroyed) ‘the assumption of a privileged relation between a photograph and its object’.79 He extends this privileged relation to cinematography and is particularly concerned about this destruction because documentary film has traditionally and explicitly relied on its relationship with its profilmic referent. He also claims that the reception of fiction film must be similarly affected, via its similar (although more implicit) reliance on the profilmic reality of real actors who perform in front of a camera.
75
THE VOW OF CHASTITY, DOGMA 95, Press Release, Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995, 2
76
See Vivian Sobchack, ‘"At the Still Point of the Turning World" Meta-Morphing and Meta- Stasis’ in Meta Morphing.
77
Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, 185 78
Dai Vaughan, For Documentary. Twelve Essays. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:University of California Press, 1999, 189
79
Vaughan claims that for some time digital film will maintain a mode of reception which draws on this assumption even while it is no longer operating. He says that this is due to the force of a habitual association with analogue film, but that film will finally lose the authoritative power which is dependent on this assumption. He mourns the outcome for documentary film. It is possible, however, that his pessimism is based on two false assumptions.
The first is his claim that an audience’s ‘trust’ in the truth-saying quality of a filmic text is based on an assumption about profilmic reality. Audiences have long attributed truth-saying to fiction films, and yet they also have known enough about wielding a video camera to understand that non-fiction film is a very selective re- presentation of profilmic reality, with the same ability and need as fiction film to use the structuring provided by narrative. Although an audience may be confused about how a particular film can be considered fiction or non-fiction, in societies that are constantly exposed to film and television, people are generally aware of how, to quote Renov again, ‘the two domains inhabit one another’.80 In the terms used in this thesis, the majority of filmic audiences are able to distinguish, to some extent, between fiction film’s subjunctive mood, and non-fiction film’s indicative mood. People negotiate between fiction and non-fiction in both filmic forms: they are