tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29591076193635957222024-02-18T20:39:57.534-08:00CinemanticUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2959107619363595722.post-20908293720818934552011-09-23T02:25:00.000-07:002011-09-23T04:35:15.392-07:00<b><u>An Anatomy of Barbet Schroeder's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086479/"><i>Les Tricheurs</i> or <i>The Cheaters</i> (1984)</a></u> </b><br />
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It is troubling.<br />
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Games of chance as chances lost. Games of chance which, here, aren't actually always representative of chance. We will discover why, shortly.<br />
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There is an overly obvious sexual element added to this by Schroeder (and his screenwriters, Steve Baës and Pascal Bonitzer, if they had a hand in adding such content). The gambler loses and the gambler doesn't feel like it's enough. He wants to divest himself of everything that is him, that is with him. He walks to a secret location under the pedestrian overpass of the casino building and masturbates.<br />
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We never see such actions frontally, or obviously. Only adults, only those in the know about such things will know what is happening from observation and experience. Books tell us things. Movies tell us things. Experiences tell us things. And of course movies always tell us things, whether it is about the logic of the movies themselves, or about the logic of real life (of which movies are part). Movies can't help but tell us things.<br />
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Most importantly, perhaps, psychiatry tells us things. At least, since Freud, such things become, and have become overtly recognizable. Money or diamonds or good fortune become interchangeable as representative of aspects of the libido. The death instinct allows these things and one's sexual urges/bodily fluids/desires to be released.<br />
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The element of gambling by itself is enough. The depiction of the woman (Bulle Ogier) as good-luck charm (the number 7, and later, reversible numbers like 13 and 31, vessel, possible cheat, and throwaway is enough. The overemphasis by Schroeder's film is too much, or at least almost too much. Is the overemphasis a form of cheating, an over-emphatic authorial stamp? </div>
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Schroeder's films frequently feature games as caricature, games as detours towards death. Just look at his record (at least in terms of plot or obvious content: the sado-masochism in that other Bulle Ogier feature, <i>La Maîtresse </i>(1975), the disguises, impersonations, and chases in <i>Single White Female </i>(1992), and Desperate Measures (1996). Murder and evasion of responsibility for that act play a singularly important part in <i>Murder by Numbers</i> (2002) and <i>Reversal of Fortune</i> (1990). Can there be a more obvious title and a more obvious clue to the director's obsessions than <i>Reversal of Fortune</i>? </div>
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Death as a release is a way of mocking chance and denying its role, while at the same time demanding its vengeance on the transgressor in <i>Les Tricheurs</i>. Elric (Jacques Dutronc), the inveterate gambler, always feels miserable when he wins. He cannot stay on top. He has to throw his luck somewhere - the harder and the faster, the better it seems it is to him. He makes his fellow gambler friends miserable because of this. They have different motivations. While their motivations include similar ones (including release of libido, ultimately), theirs is a more controlled state. I say more controlled, but I don't say far more controlled, particularly when we consider Elric's first actual cheating collaborator, Clochard (Leandro Vale), and his outburst at the end of the film. </div>
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Cheating the casinos (with hidden cards, or remote controlled mercury-filled roulette balls) is a way not of giving up to chance, but throwing oneself away completely. It is a demand that the lover be merciless. This might explain the motivation that a lot of people have for things, from murder, robbery, fraudulent investment schemes, or many types of violent activities, including rape, especially serial rape. It is not a reason (for reason is rational) so much as motivation). </div>
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Some people often want to get caught. The bigger, or the worse the transgression (the worst transgression in the world/obsession/addiction of gambling, is cheating), the worse the punishment (or at least the more or worse the demand is for punishment). If I may say so, with this film, one which engages in self-mockery while half-seriously unfolding its romance, Barbet Schroeder comes full-circle when considering such themes similarly represented in the masochism (particularly the masochism) and the sadism of <i>La Maitresse</i>. <br />
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(I realise that I could have written much more. There is much that could be elaborated, including the scowls of the characters, the use of the freeze frame and the crane shot/overhead shot in the ending and the beginning respectively, the aspects of fate and control possibly conceived in scene at the castle with the remote control car - particularly considering that this child is like Elric himself conceived as a child, growing up here and wishing to take an active part in his fate - or fatality. Hopefully my language throughout this article is not simplistic, but merely deceptively simple.)</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15907060405795620941noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2959107619363595722.post-67983246723571678912008-02-04T14:23:00.000-08:002008-02-04T14:25:15.617-08:00Make Making Meaning Mean<p class="MsoNormal">The following arguments are presented in a rather coarse form. I expect from you guys some creative input.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Martin Lefebvre’s arguments against <i style="">Making Meaning</i> (according to my class notes)</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Bordwell’s approach to cognitive psychology is coarse. It is yet another application of Theory. There is no ground for Bordwell to criticize others with himself doing the same thing. </li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Bordwell refuses to consider interpretation, or symptomatic reading, as a legitimate candidate for possible truth in regard to films.</li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">The very process where semantic fields are applied to cues and patterns shows that these fields are indeed applicable—they have grounds in the film, and is not completely extra. For example, image is constantly used as representation of a class, besides being a mere token. To interpret this kind of image, therefore, is not to ascribe generalizations entirely alien to the image, but rather, is to point out to which class the token belongs. The class is therefore intrinsic to the token.</li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Bordwell criticized the production of<span style=""> </span>ordinary symptomatic readings, accusing them blindly apply an already discredited or yet-to-verify theory categorically to a film text, while acknowledging the existence of exemplars. However, ordinary practices exist to support, to fortify the discoveries of exemplars, which is a scientific norm explained by Kuhn.</li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">In the tradition of hermeneutics, film is essentially a human experience carried out in temporality. This cannot be reduced to the description of style and technique. Also, an interpretation uses metaphor instead of explanation to account for the narrativity. A metaphor is perhaps a falsehood, but it can reveal a truth.</li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Bordwell does not distinguish various kinds of interpretation. He should go read Schusterman.</li></ol> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No.1 If Bordwell is indeed perceived as doing so, there is a huge difference in the way he “applies” the theory to films. First, in Bordwell, cognitivism is rather an implicit belief, not a series of terms that can be filled in prominent positions of the rhetoric. One can believe in cognitivism without knowing the term, or the desire to use any established terms related to this school of thought. Because cognitivism can simply mean take films as the object of construction (technical and stylistic), perception, meaning-making, in that strict order. One can also sense that Bordwell does not take cognitivism in wholeheartedly. Historical poetics, for instance, is a concept that cannot be accounted for in cognitivism. In a nutshell, what account for Bordwell as cognitivism, as he has explained elsewhere (mostly in <i style="">Post-Theory</i>), is its bottom-up or data-driven nature. Ultimately, if Bordwell reads a film, he is not practicing a cognitivism reading of the film, because there is no such thing as a cognitivism reading. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No. 2 In Bordwell’s mind, not only should have an ideal film scholar seen many films, and acquired sufficient knowledge on both the history of film and how films are made, but he should mobilize this specific knowledge in his reading of the film. A scientist, for example, talks about science and shows his professional expertise in a scholarly journal, instead of his other interests, life, death, our society, my dog, etc.—although these interests may be nutritious and illuminating, they ultimately do not contribute to his professional expertise. In this sense, although many interpreters are qualified film scholars, sometimes an interpretation relies almost entirely on something that is not generated by their professional expertise. A philosopher goes to <i style="">Bring up Baby</i> on a Saturday night, and he comes back writing a thesis about a particular impression of his on this flick. However interesting this impression is, does it contribute to our knowledge of the film? If we take that it may, this means a) don’t go to film schools, it is waster of time, instead, study philosophy; b) you don’t have to know anything about film in order to write about film, if you are a good writer. This is indeed a very peculiar situation. So let me reiterate the point: if we take any interpretation as contributive to our knowledge of film, we cannot claim it as knowledge at all. What makes my opinion/interpretation on a medieval painting less notable than that of, say, Erwin Panofsky? A film is seen by millions, can any one of these spectators, given a good rhetoric (he might have well studied philosophy in his leisure time), contribute to our knowledge in film studies? If yes, then film studies as a academic discipline doesn’t really exist.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No.3 refers directly to Bordwell’s claim such as “there is thus no such thing as a strictly intrinsic interpretation.” (106) Bordwell may have gone too far saying “no such thing,” and as far as I am willing to believe in his sincerity, this assertion puts him in a dangerous position. On the other hand, the following observation seems to be well-founded:</p> <p class="a">As far as interpretation is concerned, there are no “cinematic” meanings as distinct from “noncinematic” ones. (106)</p> <p class="MsoNormal">What Bordwell asks us (as <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Metz</st1:City></st1:place> does, once), then, is to first distinguish these two categories, and then work from the first to the second. Contrary to what many may believe, Bordwell is not necessarily against noncinematic meaning-makings. What he does hope, though,<span style=""> </span>is to see these meanings based on cinematic ones. Hence wherever they are not, Bordwell finds them not convincing. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No.4 It is true that science makes progress this way. But when we claim that in film studies things work the same way, are we admitting film studies should be a science, after all? Nevertheless, the situation is a little bit different. In humanities, although ordinary practices work to confirm the new road opened up by exemplars, one exemplar does not constitute a progress towards another exemplar. In other words, they are completely independent of each other. Nietzsche did not throw all philosophers before him into oblivion, although he would have very much liked the idea. In science, on the other hand, heliocentrism does substitute geocentrism because Copernicus provides a better mathematic model to calculate the orbits of the planet than Ptolemy. And in modern times, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, in their turn, are found guilty of confusing the solar system with the universe.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No.5 I believe film as experience is an important and fruitful approach. But I don’t see how this contradicts what Bordwell is proposing. Is Bordwell not a human being himself and therefore experiences films in a mechanic way?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No.6 This, I think, is the real problem of the book. Bordwell identifies rhetoric as something that comes between semantic fields and the film text, but it remains to identify the subtleties of this very rhetoric—descriptive, prescriptive, performative, etc. A performative reading, for example, can be filling the gaps in a text—in this sense, it is indeed not found in the text, but it is nevertheless faithful to its inner trajectory.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3