In filmic imagination, the end of the world is really associated with the end of the city. World War II saw the full destruction of great cities by radiation and fire. The massive loss of life in the powerful haze of giant mushroom clouds and the slower deaths, memorialized in films like Gojira (1954) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) became a real threat for urban dwellers caught in the Cold War. Walking through city streets after seeing this film, how could we not imagine the hot nuclear breath of Godzilla?
Below is an excerpt from a conversation between writer, Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), and legendary film editor and sound designer, Walter Murch, from the book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film (2002).
As you read, think about all the ways that loving cities is so close to loving films, and why films can be great archives of the experience of living in cites.
Walter Murch: In film, there’s a dance between the words and images and the sounds. As rich as films appear, they are limited to two of the five senses–hearing and sight–and they are limited in time–the film lasts only as long as it takes to project it. It’s not like a book. If you don’t understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it again at your own pace. With a film, you have to consume it at one go, at a set speed.
But if a film can provoke an audience’s participation–if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work…
Even though it’s a mass medium, it’s those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear that they saw it, but in fact it wasn’t there…
How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the Continue reading →
In your opinion what effects can films have on society? What can a filmmaker do for society?
He can do a lot. Entertain. Tell stories in such a way that the moviegoer is entertained and afterwards is no stupider; he can make various things clear to him or make him want to get various things straight for himself, he can express fears. For others. If no one does that we’d withdraw into the kind of silence in which sooner or later you become a moron. Film can give the moviegoer the courage to continue expressing things, taking a position on them, and making it known. I do feel that film as a medium can be effective in all sorts of ways. And it’s always a means of entertainment, and should remain that, too. Like literature, which is also supposed to be fun, or music, quite aside from the effect it can have.
–”I’ve changed along with the characters in my films: An Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.” Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 14 No. 2 (May 1992)
Some still images from my favorite Fassbinder movies:
Vendredi Soir (Friday Night), dir. Claire Denis (2002)
Cinema is a materialization of our psychic life. It makes visibly tangible all psychic phenomena, including the work of memory and the imagination, the capacity for attention, the design of depth and movement, and the mapping of affects.
…Film repeatedly shows that pictures–moving pictures–are the current documents of our histories. Indeed, filmic memories–fragile yet enduring–are fragments of an archival process porously embedded in our path, part of our own shifting geography.
–Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007)
A couple of weeks ago, I checked out VALIE EXPORT’s 1976 experimental film Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries). It was presented at NYU by Hari Kunzru.
A crazy tale of an alien invasion of everday residents of 1970s Vienna, Austria:
The city stars in this film, in which the increasing paranoia of the human protagonist is matched by the harshness of personal interactions between the Viennese. While no “aliens” are ever seen–no little green men running around–strange occurences and affects seep into the spaces between people. Especially into the spaces between each person and her image, her reflections, her representations.
The doubles and shadows no longer walk in lock step with their originals. They have lives, affects, of their own.
