Patrizia Lombardo

Jim Jarmusch’s Philosophy of Composition

The philosophical aspect of art is not limited to its content or to the ideas expressed by words or images. Indeed, art presupposes the implementation of a delicate philosophy — ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, as Edgar Allan Poe entitled one of his most celebrated essays, in which he explained how his poem The Raven’ had been written not according to some prophetic inspiration but rather following his ideas on themes and sounds. According to Poe, the imagination of the poet composes using pieces of memory and needs to be organized in order to achieve an effect on the imagination of the reader. The intention is clear, namely to affirm that all poetry requires reflection; that rhetoric is a matter of thinking; that aesthetic questions have the same value as metaphysical or ethical ones. Poetry and prose must aim for the unity of effect. As Poe asserts, all aspects of a poem or story must be drawn together so that the most diverse elements work in harmony, in accordance with a careful logic which darts and beats, like a refrain that repeats itself, resonating in the listener’s ear and leaving a sense of unity in the mind. Art must be similar to music, in which different notes, harmonies and especially breaks envelop the listener’s hearing in a single mental outcome. Such is the inescapable philosophy of form, which is made more severe when there are no rules, for an even greater strictness is needed to avoid collapsing into a random collection of sounds.

Minimalist Aesthetics in Gerry

The opening sequence of Gerry by Gus Van Sant depicts one of the most iconic landscapes in American film, and from two genres: Westerns and road movies. The road that appears on the screen cuts through a desert landscape, passing shrubs, hillocks and reddish-brown soil. An off-yellow car, covered with dust, inside which we see two silhouettes from behind, is rolling slowly over the asphalt. There is nothing but asphalt and empty space: the horizontality of the wide panoramic shots extends off screen, spreading out off camera, surrounding the spectator with light and blue sky around the slow-moving dust cloud. This shot lasts several minutes, without any credits rolling, until after a cut the faces of the two characters appear through the car’s windshield: they are not speaking, and their expressions are almost impossible to interpret as they continue driving along. Are they sad? Pensive? Tired? Not a word, no explanation is given. The third shot also fails to initiate the plot’, with the description continuing through images: the ‘subjective’ first-person camera angle puts the viewer’s gaze in parallel with that of the characters, cutting across the desert, the landscape and the huge, thin clouds. The characters stop their car and, without a word, begin to walk into the desert. This will continue until the film is nearly over, for a good hour and a half.

Lives on Film: Gus Van Sant’s Milk

The biopic is a triumph. One only has to look at the list of films on release, dominated at the start of 2012 by the blockbuster about J. Edgar Hoover, directed by the giant of cinema, Clint Eastwood, and Luc Besson’s The Lady (2011), which tells the story of the family life of Aung San Suu Kyi — winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize — and the struggle for democracy in Burma at a time when she was still a prisoner in her own country. The number of biopics on release does not end there: for example, the adventures of Amelia Earhart — the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aeroplane — are told in Mira Nair’s’ 2008 film, Amelia; or Infamous (2006) by Douglas McGrath, with the excellent Toby Jones playing Truman Capote, recounts the writer’s investigation into the assassination of all the members of one family in a village in Kansas, a disconcerting story that was the impetus for Capote’s famous novel In Cold Blood (1966).

Literature, Emotions, and the Possible: Hazlitt and Stendhal

Successful literature offers either directly or indirectly rich descriptions of actions and emotions of human beings. I will first examine in this chapter what can be called the general theory of emotions in Hazlitt and Stendhal. Their approach to affectivity stood in opposition to the most common Romantic sentimentalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century: They believed, in fact, that the heart and the reason were not enemies but on the contrary deeply interconnected. Both writers were convinced that most human activities are motivated by emotions but were utterly suspicious of condescending sentimental attitudes, and condemned Rousseau’s complacency in his own feelings. I will then focus on a specific faculty of the mind as understood by Hazlitt in his essays, and by Stendhal in his various writings and his novels: The imagination has the capability of combining the real and the possible, and therefore analyzing by conjecture and thought experiments both the past and the future:

Bazin, Bresson and Scorsese: Performatives in Film

Since the late 1970s, literary studies have been fascinated by the concept of performativity. The notion of performative language (or speech acts) was launched by J. L. Austin in his 1962 book, How to Do Things with Words: here, he makes clear that performative utterances mark the link between words and actions, whether legal or practical: for example ‘Close the window’ or ‘I declare you husband and wife’. In his opinion these words have to be pronounced in real-life situations; and they are ‘hollow or void if pronounced by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy’.1 This rather secondary statement provoked a reaction among the defenders of literature. The dispute took on great proportions with polemics between Jacques Derrida and John Searle. The literary critic Hillis Miller, who took a lively part in these discussions for decades, defended the active role of literature. He proposed that the act of reading literature must cause some effects on human lives and minds: There must be an influx of performative power from the linguistic transactions involved in the act of reading into the realms of knowledge, politics, and history. Literature must be in some ways a cause and not merely an effect, if the study of literature is to be other than the relatively trivial study of one of the epiphenomena of society, part of the technological assimilation or assertion of mastery over all features of human life which is called the human sciences.2

Memory and Astonishment in Shutter Island

Scorsese’s film Shutter Island quickly attracted a very large audience — in the United States it was released in more than 3000 theatres; in France it has had more than 1 million spectators since release in February 2010, almost as many as for Taxi Driver in the 1970s. Its screenplay, based on the bestseller by Dennis Lehane,’ was written by Laeta Kalogridis; its editing, as always, was by Thelma Schoonmaker, and the production designer was, as usual, Dante Ferretti. Reactions to the film have been mixed, particularly in the North American and British press. Shutter Island is a noir thriller set in the 1950s, recounting the complex story of an investigation in a psychiatric hospital on an island in Boston Harbor. This film, like the powerful depiction of 19th-century New York in Gangs of New York, goes against the grain: too much violence, too much romanticized history, too much of everything. It is as if critics find it difficult to admit that popular genres may transcend their assigned limits: a prohibition — of convenience, I would say — is still in effect today, against attributing deep meanings to historical fictions based upon romantic popular novels, and to thrillers or detective movies. All these forms came into existence with novels and short stories by Honore de Balzac, such as Une Tenebreuse Affaire (A Murky Business) (1841), and by Edgar Allan Poe, such as ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, before entering the life of cinema with some Hollywood productions, and before being conserated by Hitchcock.

Space and Long Takes in Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant likes long takes: ‘I think, he says in a 2003 interview, that there’s a lot of things about not cutting that we don’t really get from a lot of modern cinema, because everyone — fashion-wise — is really into cutting like every half-second.’ Talking about Elephant and its very long takes, he mentions Kubrick’s way of not cutting and the importance of Russian and Eastern European filmmaking as examples of films that refuse the contemporary continuous cutting: I think that Kubrick, I suppose, was drawing on the cinema of Russia, as when he was making 2001. I think that being a Russian man and probably viewing [Tarkowski] films, there was something; somehow he was being influenced, because the films before that were more traditional. And the same with me; the long pieces of film in Elephant are directly influenced by Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr and also other Eastern European filmmakers.1

Living in Manhattan in the 19th Century

Gangs of New York was released in 2002, but it had been conceived a quarter of a century before. It was in the 1970s that Scorsese read Herbert J. Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York (1928), and, being such a passionate lover of the city, he was inspired by the history of the various groups in Manhattan in the 19th century. His friend and collaborator, Jay Cocks, immediately started to write the screenplay. Hollywood magazines spread the news that the producer Alberto Grimaldi had optioned the rights, and Scorsese made several attempts to get the budget, but this film remained just a wish for a long time. Finally, at the end of the 1990s, as Scorsese declared, ‘everything came together’ and ‘Harvey Weinstein at Miramax agreed to do the picture’.1 This distribution company, founded in 1979 by the two brothers Weinstein, film buffs who after their commercial success in concert production entered the film industry, was bought in 1993 by Walt Disney Studio Entertainment; the two brothers stayed on at the head of Miramax. In the 1980s, an impressive number of Oscars went to several movies produced by the company, as to United Artists in the 1940s: Miramax is a giant. As announced at the Cannes Festival in 2013, Scorsese is now collaborating with the company to develop his 2002 film on the gangs in a TV series.

Style and Signature in Film

As mentioned in the introduction, recent film theory has been afraid of using the notion of the auteur and is quite dismissive of the Nouvelle Vague’s belief in style as marking the most salient thematic and formal characteristics of some filmmakers. This critical attitude is in line with the rejection of subjectivity that was thematized by the most avant-garde theoretical approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. Unfortunately, the fear of falling into the Romantic myth of the artist has created a split between academia and the rest of the world; and so-called ‘theory’ ends up being confined to academic studies and separated out from the everyday relationship with art. Names of various types of artists or authors circulate; their usage belongs to our linguistic exchanges, to the normal flow of mean-ing. Strangely enough, the rejection of a mild form of authorship — and the confusion of this with the idolatry of genius — maintains a Romantic vein: the very one of the nihilist outcomes of some forms of Romanticism, such as the belief in the end of intentionality; the belief that, as phrased by Jacques Lacan, we are ‘spoken’ through language and that the notion of representation would deny the rights of the signifier. I am therefore putting the case for the middle ground; namely the conviction that the fact that some authors have specific styles does not detract from the amount of impersonality that is inherent in any creative act.

David Lynch: Painting in Film

Artistic genres and categories have been mixed up and conflated since the 19th century, with one art being able to lead into another: Romanticism saw the phenomenon of writers who were painters and vice versa, such as William Blake or Victor Hugo, and poets who were art critics, such as Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire. Baudelaire spoke of the beautiful fatality of his time, of the very laws of modern aesthetics: art, he suggested, needs another art in order to exist, as if it were to find its own identity through the strange nostalgia of what it is not. Every art pushes the limits of its own nature and aspires to gain what it lacks: painting wishes to be prose, poetry to be music or colour, a dramatic canvas or a tale. This is how cinema — a composite medium, and impure art par excellence — feeds on diverse artistic forms. As said by Scorsese: ‘Although film is primarily a visual medium, it combines elements from all the arts — literature, music, painting, and dance.’1 And often the most accomplished directors make films after having worked in theatre, as in the cases of Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles; or after having been inspired by literature, as in the case of Francois Truffaut; or in the case of many contemporary filmmakers by television. For his part, David Lynch — who works in all of today’s visual media, from watercolours and oils to the Internet — began as a painter. In 1964, he studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., entering the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia the following year; this was a bright period both for American art and for this celebrated school.