Mellard, Lacan and King Kong

I’m considering writing about the relationship between King Kong and Wise Blood from the “film leads writing” week in my essay, so I thought I’d consider those texts in a blog post. Specifically, I’m interested in how James Mellard’s Lacanian reading of Wise Blood might approach King Kong. I want to consider three quotes from Mellard’s article in particular.

Mellard argues that Hazel Motes “has no ordinary sense of sociality, no ordinary understanding of sexuality, no ordinary grasp of the immorality of murder. He operates by a code of values and behavior entirely his own” (51). This invites comparison to Kong, who is definitively unsocialised even while these terms remain relevant to him. It is Kong’s desires (and their frustration) to which the audience relates and this is actually increased by his responses to desire being supposedly untempered by socialisation. He functions as the “real” or natural at that level, except that he does clearly have values of his own. Kong grabs Ann and runs off, indiscriminately attacking both the men who try to rescue her and the creatures that try to harm her. Kong’s desires are centred on Ann, and her relationship with Kong is repeatedly described by Denham as a “beauty and the beast” narrative. This casts Kong as animal, but also in a story about becoming human. This desire ultimately leads to his capture. As Denham insists, “She’s the story, without her we couldn’t have gotten near Kong. He followed her back to the village”. That “she’s the story” might lead directly into a Lacanian reading in which the idealised Woman as object defines the subject’s self-comprehension and place in the world.

Mellard also argues that self-destruction in pursuit of meaningful experience is a “sacrifice” that “has meaning nonetheless, for it says what kind of Other exists out there in the emptiness”. He elaborates with a citation from Lacan: “‘The sacrifice,’ Lacan says, ‘signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of the Other that I call here the dark God’” (64).

There are several ways of thinking about Kong as “other”. Modernity’s privileging of novelty and the commodity are directly employed to represent Kong. King Kong is partly a text about modernism, centring on crucial modernist oppositions between the civilised and the primitive, the banal and the spectacle, the nation and the tribe, science/technology and religion/ritual. Denham’s reputation as an “adventure” filmmaker, his selection of shooting location, and his marketing language all foreground trying to provide a shockingly novel experience for an audience now less impressed by “ordinary” films: “I’m going out to make the greatest picture in the world, something that nobody’s ever seen or heard of. They’ll have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back.” What he displays in the end is Kong as a story about humanity and animal “other” at once. Adventure and novelty are still his selling points for this show. 

Lacan’s idea of the “other” is related but different. Lacan’s other is not just another being, however exotic, but a “big” other (often capitalised to make this point), definitively opposed to the subject as it enters the social or “symbolic order”. Mellard stresses the role of the Mother in this for Lacan but, as many readings of King Kong suggest, racial difference can also function in the place of the Other. Mellard stresses “the gaze” in this relation to the Other. And Kong works, at one level, as absolutely Other for the film’s audience, and for those that look at Kong’s gaze within the film. But, in another sense, Kong is also not radically Other, as the film’s suggestion of the possibility of human feeling emphasises the ways in which Kong’s desires are identifiable for the audience. Thus, as Mellard says of Motes “He becomes the screen on which others can project their gaze, the surface on which they may search for the object, the gaze, that represents them in their wholeness, the wholeness that always escapes on in life, but that in death. . . will not.” (64)

Didacticism in The Fountainhead

Earlier in the semester I did my class presentation on melodrama in The Fountainhead—in the book, in the film, and in Rand’s Objectivism.  Here I want to talk about Rand’s didacticism, but I am particularly interested in some of the subtler ways in which The Fountainhead conveys its message, as opposed to the already-discussed melodramatic aspects like Roark’s impassioned speeches and Toohey’s evil manipulations.

A particularly interesting way in which Rand conveys her ideology, and one repeatedly cited in scholarly work on the novel, is the manifesto claim of modernist architecture (to which both novel and film refer) that “form follows function”. This claim cites an essay by architect Louis Sullivan:

It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. (111)

Although Sullivan isn’t directly quoted in Rand’s novel, and instead his words are re-interpreted and attributed to various characters, the tone of Sullivan’s statement is as relevant as its sentiment. As Nancy Levinson points out, the manifesto claims of modernist architecture were as grand and world-forming as Roark’s (30), and clearly part of the inspiration for his vocation.

For Melissa Hardie, Rand’s “extraordinary didacticism is mitigated by the function of readerly persuasion and consent: Rand’s libertarian philosophies, above all, suggest the interrogative participation of her reader in the formulation of her novels’ complex rhetorics”. Thus, she claims, the “uncanny appeal of the cult text” is an effect of what exceeds its “polemic” (371). Hardie and Robert Hunt agree that Rand “generates ironic humor in her texts precisely at the point of hyperbolic sincerity” (377). Aspects of The Fountainhead that might be seen as camply funny are often also central to the ideological impact of the narrative: its silhouette cast of extreme types, highlighted in the movie by stagy performances and extravagant sets that strive to further type the characters with which Roark interacts and to which he is evidently superior. Levinson also stresses the ideological force of casting Gary Cooper as Roark given that he was, by “the late 1940s, a screen icon identified with the portrayals of. . . legendary Americans” (Levinson 30). And costumes, Levinson points out, work to reinforce this as a kind of architecture of character: “Dressed in a plain suit or, more often, in physique-flattering shirtsleeves, Cooper/Roark is too confident and good-looking even to need the crutch of costume; this is in pointed contrast to his adversaries”, notably Wynand’s various costumes for different roles and Toohey’s dated dressiness (31).

Hardie and Levinson both use Sullivan’s “form follows function” to make their point, and Christensen uses the quote to open an essay on the film of The Fountainhead. He argues that The Fountainhead is a film about corporate/studio authorship in which Roark stands for Warner Bros. To make this argument he dwells on a contradiction between Sullivan’s “form (ever) follows function” and Rand’s/Roark’s “a man has a right to exist for his own sake” (Christensen 24). Christensen draws on a now long architectural debate to argue that “functionalist architecture was more symbolic than functional. It was symbolically functional. It represented function more than resulted from function (17). This is an argument that could be used to discuss Roark’s ambivalent relationship to the practice of architecture but also to discuss how Rand’s message is conveyed through her blunt use of symbolism while trying to remain independent from its form. This explains the problem of Rand’s attempts at controlling the film, on which Christensen focuses, and the slippage Melissa points to as open to “camp” reading.

Christensen, J. ‘Studio Authorship, Warner Bros., and The Fountainhead’. The Velvet Light Trap, no. 57, Spring 2006, pp. 17-31.

Man with a Movie Camera

In discussing Man With a Movie Camera, I wanted to focus primarily on the concept of “collage” as a film-making technique. Vertov’s film-making has been described as a collage process largely because of his critique of montage, which he saw as manipulative and thus ideological. Acknowledging that avant-garde cinema generally had “only industrial film production to rebel against”, rather than canonically authorised high art, Alexander Graf notes that the exception seems to be Vertov, “who railed against German Expressionist film as well as against American drama” (84). His objection is chiefly to the narrative art of editing.

Instead of such production of affect in the audience, Vertov claimed his cinema would produce the truth: kinopravda. He was particularly passionate about newsreels rather than narrative cinema, and he describes the process of searching for cinematic truth as the process of gathering together many tangentially associated materials. Describing the editing process for Three Songs of Lenin he wrote: “I had to write poems and short stories, dry reports, travel sketches, dramatic episodes, musical word-collages; I had to make schemata and diagrams--and all this to achieve the graphic, crystalline composition of a given series of shots” (122).

Collage in this sense is of course a kind of montage, but one freed from the usual cinematic uses of time and with a changed relation to what is filmed. To create the collage aesthetic, Vertov uses a mixture of footage of life on the street that is ostensibly “found” or “natural”, and obviously staged scenes like the woman getting dressed after waking up, and even footage that directly reminds the audience that they are watching a film. While it could be argued that Ruttmann’s Berlin also uses a similar mix of “found” and “created” footage, the feeling for a viewer is quite different and the imposition of narrative order more comprehensive and detailed.

In Man With a Movie Camera Vertov is taking individual images or slices of the city and carefully placing them together to create his film, with a lot of emphasis placed on the editor, who is also represented a character in the film. Collage in this sense is not about accident, and to call this collage shouldn’t confuse it with the avoidance of intentionality in surrealist collage, but Vertov does not particularly emphasise narrative sequence or the passage of time. Vertov’s film does pass through a day, as does Ruttmann’s, but not a day in the same city and not a day unified by narrative devices like act titles, or divisions dedicated to individual parts of the day. While Vertov does represent the “waking” of the city in the opening to his film, he does not close with nightfall, instead trailing off into games with camera-work and the camera’s eye, including a series of representations of film audiences watching the screen.

As noted on the wikipedia page, Man With a Movie Camera was originally released with a statement at the beginning, which read:

“The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.”

Vertov’s manifesto clarifies this further: “WE are cleansing kinochestvo of foreign matter - of music, literature, and theatre; we seek our own rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things.” These things are the shots comprising a cinematic collage, and the movement is their ordering as film. Taking images of the city, ostensibly without the input of the director in creating the scene to be filmed, Vertov can present a story of life in a modern city without the help of intertitles, a script, rehearsed actors or constructed sets. Vertov’s avoidance of narration also serves to separate the visual medium of film from the other art forms that Vertov calls “foreign matter”, as the emphasis for the viewer in determining what is happening is purely on the visual.

This isn’t to say that no narrative appears in Man With a Movie Camera. The editing process, wherein a camera looks at a window, then at a room, then at a girl waking, does construct a story, just as the laying of this or that collage piece first incites a sequence of interpretation, but it does not constrain its meaning in the way laid out, for example, by Sergei Eisenstein in his careful account of effective film montage in Film Form. Vertov believed his films were “organized from bits of life into a theme, and not the reverse. This also means that Kinopravda doesn’t order life to proceed according to a writer’s scenario, but observes and records life as it is, and only then draws conclusions from these observations” (Vertov 45).

Vertov, D & Michelson, A Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984.

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City

Alexander Graf’s essay on city symphony films makes one central claim: that the main innovation in these films is not their use of montage, but instead it is their use of montage to explore the experience of the city that is innovative. His most extended reference point for this is the sociologist Georg Simmel and in particular the essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”. I thought it would be interesting to think about what Graf takes from Simmel’s essay and how these ideas are apparent in Ruttmann’s Berlin.

Berlin begins not with crowds of people living in close proximity, but with an image of a rising sun, followed by a train travelling into the city from the countryside. Still, the opening of the film with the opening of a day is also an opening on the temporal and spatial order of capitalism. No living person is seen in the first five minutes of the film as the city “wakes up”, but the streets and buildings are not empty of meaning. They are the framework within which people and money will circulate, and they create the constraints and possibilities of life there. Shots of empty factories and sewers are juxtaposed with images of mannequins in a store window and advertising posters (there are many parallels to Vertov here, and many differences, but that comparison would be another post). Ruttmann’s emphasis here is also that of Simmel’s essay, which explores the way that money, as well as city spaces and temporal arrangements, order the experience of urban life.

Simmel argues that

The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.

Ruttman’s representations of machines in Berlin parallel his representations of the residents of the city. Scattered throughout the film are shots of factories and machinery, sometimes showing their overall function but often limiting the view to a close-up shot of a turning wheel or another isolated mechanical process, without any indication of what exactly is being done. Similarly, when people appear in the city we see their activities but it is rarely suggested that we know their precise purpose. Still, as people begin to populate the city they are clearly organised by money and time, and by a class framework closely related to these influences. There is a distinction between the ordinary citizens of the city who ride trains and buses and the wealthy men who ride in chauffeured cars, as well as those who rise early or stay late to work and those who spend the day and the following night at leisure, on the street and in cafes, restaurants, and theatres. As Graf suggests, the editorial strategies here do offer comparison as well as juxtaposition. People of various distinct classes and professions go about their business, and as the day progresses during Act 3 Ruttmann focuses almost exclusively on the actual people in the city and not their surroundings.

A lot of writing on modernism stresses its changed relationships to time and space but Simmel’s version, unlike Graf’s, doesn’t prioritise time over space. Clocks and time organise the day in Berlin, as do the rigors of labouring life. But this is a structuring by space as well as time. Recurring motifs like the train and the swirling circle or spiral (of typewriter keys or the chaotic camera viewing the city from a rollercoaster ride) set out and distort time and space at once.

For Graf, the city symphonies are caught between “documentary” and an “unstable point of view” needed to document city life (89). They also mark a shift from documenting the city to documenting experience of the city (85). But experience is exactly what the filmic experiments of Berlin struggle to capture. People appear as functions—workers or school students or patrons—as cogs in the machine of city life, but these are only cryptic hints at what their life might be. These lives are in the gaps left by the editing process or what Graf calls “the interval” after Vertov. Ruttmann’s film is thus not just an image of the city but a theory of urban experience. This can be seen again in the swirling keys of the typewriter, as Act 2 comes to an end and the workday begins, causing individual activities to blur together for the viewer. Graf sees the city symphonies as stressing one of Simmel's main points--the fast-paced experience of city life that strips human beings of extended contact with others and gives rise, defensively, to urbane individualism. But to find this in Ruttmann's film he must stress internal references to a comparitively minor scene in which one woman commits suicide, centring it as a dramatic moment of individual refusal.