FILM Wim Wenders Alice in the Cities [1974]
They never really show what it was you saw
Philip Winters in Alice in the Cities
FSFF offers three samples in YouTube with links to articles on Wenders. YouTube does Alice in the Cities in 10 parts under “A//ALCE//IN///CTIES PART 1 1974″.
Blurb in YouTube:
German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer’s block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same. The three become friends (almost out of necessity) and while the mother asks Winter to mind Alice temporarily, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice will be his responsibility for longer than he expected. After returning to Europe, the innocent friendship between Winter and Alice grows as they travel together through various European cities on a quest for Alice’s grandmother.
David Tacon’s 2003 article on Wenders in The Senses of Cinema puts Alice in the Cities in the context of the life and his other films.
And then, near the end of the film
Looking up reviews and analysis of the film I came across The Internet Movie Cars Database (!). Here for Alice, a series of still of all the vehicles that come into frame, Perhaps if one were being really nerdy, there would be comparison of the number of US car makes over European….
…..I was initially intrigued by this page because of the number of grabs of the film pe se.
*
The FSFF post on Alice lists a variety of essays/academic papers,
The Art of Seeing Rescues the Existence of Things: Notes on the Wenders Road Films and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (Part 2) has some passages that get to the core of what Alice is about:
In Alice in den Städten and in Im Lauf der Zeit there may be a tendency by the main character to mirror the existential perceptions of the director/author. In Alice, the incapable of writing Philip, shifts his attempt to capture the “American scene” to photography. [37] Eventually all representations through writing and photography is abandoned and instead, Philip embarks on an improvised journey around a single photograph of Alice’s grandmother’s house. Like his lead character, Wenders abandoned the written text once the production had returned to Germany [..]
In Alice in den Städten, Philip Winter is paralysed by his writing assignment. Incapable of representing the American reality by way of the written word, he attempts to use Polaroid photography to achieve this end. As he explains to his magazine editor, “the story has to do with things that one can see … with pictures and signs.” [47] Franklin notes that Winter’s statement can be generally understood as a direct comment by Wenders to the spectator. As the narrative unfolds however, Winter’s snapshots are obviously as incapable as the written word of portraying the American reality. Winter complains that his instant snapshots, “never show what you’ve really seen.” [48] Like Wenders, Winter is powerless to capture the American scene.
Winter’s obsessive photography soon becomes a futile attempt at capturing reality. His German girlfriend in New York alludes to this when she says: “You always act as if you were the only one to experience things and that’s why you keep taking these pictures.” [49] Elsaesser comments that, “the mediations of writing, describing, recording, no longer reflect or hold the subject in any stable identity … polaroid pictures become the necessary and yet insufficient frame to hold the image of the self, which in its contact with the world is constantly threatened by dissolution.” [50] When Philip Winter complains about the complications Alice has brought into his existence, she answers him: “What else did you have to do? Just scribble in your notebook?” [51] Near the end of the film Alice asks Philip what he will do when he gets to Munich. He replies: “I’ll write an end to this story. And you?” [52] Alice simply shrugs.
FILM The Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films
The latest MovieMail catalogue highlights The Top 100 Spritually Significant Films compiled by Arts and faith. Each entry in the latter has a summary/review and a youtube extract/ trailer embedded.
FILM SOUND Sound in Tarkovski’s Stalker
This also came via Catherine Grant’s FSFF :
The Edge of Perception: Sound in Tarkovski’s Stalker
by
Stefan Smith
The Soundtrack, volume 1, number 1, 2007
FILM Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water
Catherine Grant has posted on Knife in the Water and Polanski otherwise. In fact you can watch the whole film in parts in Youtube.(No English subtitles)
PERCEPTION Seeing Myself See: The Ecology of Mind
Seeing Myself See: The Ecology of Mind
Beau Lotto, Reader in neuroscience and head of Lottolab at University College London, talks about how colour, vision and seeing ourselves see can contribute to a richer, more empathetic view of nature and human nature.
This lecture comes from the UC Channel. But I can’t find it there.
FILM Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou
by Royal Brown in Cineaste, vol 33, no. 3 (summer 2008)
FILM Godard Art and Arriflex
GODARD: You forget the cinema is people who invest their money, invest their ideas, their heart. Actors invest their body and sometimes their heart. I invest my heart. One has rarely seen technicians invest in the cinema. [Excuse me.] One has rarely seen technicians invent equipment. It wasn’t a sound engineer who invented the Nagra. You didn’t invent the Arriflex — you don’t even know who invented it. Hitler invented the Arriflex, so battles could be filmed. That’s why you have a light camera.
CINEMATOGRAPHER: This is not what they invented…
GODARD: NO, but the Arriflex was developed from it…
CINEMATOGRAPHER: I know the story…
GODARD: It was the military…
CINEMATOGRAPHER: I know the story…
GODARD: I regret that a cameraman or a camera operator never invented, the way a singer invents a song. There are many things like that. So when one is insulted, one knows what risks he’s taking on the film; he doesn’t have to take risks but he doesn’t have to sulk either! There are enough unemployed in France.
CINEMATOGRAPHER: It’s now been 5 weeks that we have a strange relationship with you…
GODARD: And I have a strange relationship with you. And you have a curious relationship with the sun. I’d rather spend an hour discussing an intonation.
CinemaTechnic Camera Profiles: ARRI 35 II
From Jorge Diaz-Amador at Cinematechnic.com
FILM Bergman: cinematic philosopher?
Irving Singer, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity, MIT Press, 2007, 240pp., ISBN 9780262195638.
Reviewed by Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College
FILM Godard Histoire(s) du cinéma
Histoire(s) du cinéma
Doug Cummings review (10 September 2008) in Moviemail.
Histoire(s) du cinéma – Alifeleti Brown in Senses of Cinema.
From end note 13:
La « partition » des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard created by Celine Scemama.
Jean-Luc Godard and the other history of cinema.
Ph.D. Thesis. Douglas Morrey. Warwick University 2002.
Making History – Essay and inteview with Jean-Luc Godard
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Excerpts from his essay on Godard’s Histoires[s] du Cinema
Jean-Luc Godard by Craig Keller Senses of Cinema.
FILM More on decoupage
Translator’s note on découpage.
What is Cinema? by Andre Bazin. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Caboose 2009.
Mentioned in Girish in post, A Cinema Haunted by Writing, 3 may 2009, on cinema as writing.
FILM DISSERTATION Viewing novels, reading films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation
Viewing novels, reading films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation.
Ph. D. Thesis by Charles Bane, 1998.
FILM Climates by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Watched Climates on iPlayer last night and was struck by the way several shots were set up in extreme close up, trying without success to remember a well-known film that used the same technique.
Steven Yates in his review of Climates in kamera.co.uk, did not give a direct answer but confirmed that Ceylan is both filmmaker and photographer. Right from the beginning of the film the main character Isa, played by Ceylan himself, is taking digital photographs, boring his girlfriend played by his wife Ebru Ceylan.
In his own photography website, nuri bilge ceylan photography, the bumf for his 2007 Grenada exhibition includes:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s career as a filmmaker is indivisible from his interest in still images. He is in charge of the cinematography of his own films and often includes a photographer in the plot, such as the protagonist of Distant, a spectator of the city of Istanbul from the other side of the lens, and who is incapable of verbal communication beyond images. During the preparation and shooting of his latest feature, Climates, which Cines del Sur presents in the Itineraries Section, Ceylan took a panoramic camera with him to capture exteriors; what were initially locations to be used in production soon became a specific work…
One of photographs in his Turkey cinemascope series, Ishakpasa palace, 2005, is in the film near the end.
FILM The Neuroscience of film
Neurocinematics: the neuroscience of film
Film, Narrative, and Cognitive Neuroscience by Zacks, Jeffrey, et al.
Inter-subject synchronization of cortical activity during movie watching
Summary of paper in workshop on the cognitive neuroscience of film held in 2005.
Links to pdf paper in Science 12 march 2004:
Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision.
FILM NON-FICTION Werner Herzog
Came across some of these Herzog documentaries before but reappeared in a surf on something not that related purely serendipitously:
Mein liebster Feind – Klaus Kinski
Notes: wiki: my best Fiend
Notes: Wiki: Dieter Dengler
notes: wiki: Little Dieter needs to Fly
Extract from Denglaers’ Escape from Laos
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There is no doubt a personality disorder called STBOS -BWNTBSTMTACAU*: I need to say about Herzog’s non-fiction that he films it in feature film style, which is in sharp contrast to the default style coming from cinema direct/cinema verite tradition. Even his colouration and mis-en-scene is big-filmic. This has a strange but satisfying effect, a kind of equivalent visual effect to the aspects of the contrapuntal in music.
With this in mind, I am a little bit disappointed with some of the music he uses, particularly in films like Lessons in Darkness. Though music can be used to almost poke fun at the cinematic. In the oily-boy story – which is as riveting as any he has made – the music is what can only call kitsch because of its relation to the visual: that is, it is not kitsch in and of itself, but becomes so when associated with the particular visuals he uses. I would be prepared to argue this one! But it does need a sort of reply that includes the details in shot (moment-by-moment) specific film terms to explain why my opinion is wrong.
The music in Dieter does work very well unlike that in Lesson in Darkness. One is reminded of Dr.Strangelove: I can’t give chapter and verse right now, but will add to this post when I re-look at some extracts of the Kubrick.
Even if one can see where Herzog is going with all the heavy music with its deeply ironic tone, it is not as one-to-one as one might think on first seeing/hearing the film. There are many layers to the symbiosis between the music and cinematography in Lost. Repeated watching highlights subtler colours within the, at first, seemingly bleeding obvious purpose to this particular set of sound backdrops.
STBOS-BWNTBSTMTACAU* = Stating The Bleeding Obvious – But Wot needs To Be Said To Make Things Absolutely Unambiguous
FILM Godard – Pierrot le Fou
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” target=”_blank”, by Richard Brody. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. Hardcover $40.00. 720pp. ISBN: 0-805-06886-4.
Book review in Bright Lights Film Journal
Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou
Edited by
David Wills {pdf} First published 2000
FILM DIRECTOR Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray’s World of Restless Watchfulness and Nuance
by
Terrance Rafferty
NYT: 2 April 2009 [May need to register for access]
I can remeber the sensation I got when I first watched Panther Pachali what is now probably over 30 years ago.
If there was such a thing as Film studies for preen-teens, the Apu the trio starting with Panther Pachali would be some of the first I would show, because it they hold within them all that is the magic of film.
FACTS, IDEAS AND VALUES : The Ecology of thought and action
Academic Anatole Pierre Fuksas has a blog {2}and an upcoming book of this name. It’ll sell on the title alone: The Ecology of the Novel. For people of a certain mind set (including me) adding ecology to anything non-biological makes it instantly attractive. That’s partly because, 40 years ago, ecology came into my higher education, and it always seemed a transferable part of the intellectual tool kit: out of biology and into other disciplines.
Unfortunately, the use of the word ecology in non-biology does not necessarily mean that the subject is being tackled under the constrains of the concepts involved in the science of ecology. It’s often just a metaphor or a statement of intent which means, “I’m going to tackle this in a comprehensive, all-encompassing way.” Though, as I write, I can imagine the flow charts we used to study which showed how energy moved up the food chain, and see how a literary scholar might fancy that this was not dissimilar to all that French stuff (intertextuality) about every book being from another book. The trouble is, saying something is like something is not necessarily a full explanation. Finding sets of analogs is a route to an explanation (Darwin’s use of analogs between domestic and natural breeding gave him the clue to natural selection) without being a complete one.
35 years ago, immediately after a science degree, having dutifully tackled Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logioco-philosophicus in the lull-before-the-storm-of-work-and-life-intellectual-catch-up-period, I set to with a will on an outline of a book boldly titled Tractatus Ecologico-Mentus, without any idea if it was correct Latin, let alone if it contents meant anything sensible.
dealing w/problem/subject/treatment; treatment method; handling/management
v.
draw| haul| pull| drag about; handle| manage| treat| discuss
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I felt sure it was what one could say, in an ecological framework, in much the way Wittgenstein did with his Tractatus, except that unlike the Tractatus, (see Bertrand Russell’s attempt to explain what it was about in his intro. in 1922), it only dealt with the commonplace things one could say about mind from thinking about it, by subjecttive report and inference. For example, I could not allow myself to conjecture – about duality for example – about what a mind was or came from, because I could not tell, except through designed experiments. I could not take any one’s word for it. Though I could say something about consciousness because I was aware of being aware. I could say people seemed to stop thinking when they died. That would be classed a natural experiment. I could see they stopped talking, but not be sure they stopped thinking. The point being that all of us could do this basic philosophising (= clear thinking) and build up what was true for each of us. Later these notes could be compared with others in a dialogue or in a wider social setting. We do this all the time in any case because that is what being human is about, but we do not nornmally do it by means of numbered lists or flow charts!
TEM consisted of numbered lists of statements, as in TLP, without science – except in using the concepts of ecology – under three rough headings: Monologue, Dialogue, Society. I could say my mind – and by inference other minds – were capable of taking in the facts, constructing ideas from them [such as relations, or even correlations], developing values from the world of direct experience and reading, but not concern myself with any sort of examination of the significance of the knowlege.
I could say things like “I can read that the leaning tower of Piza is in Piza”, and I could say that I might prove it was there by going to Piza. I could discuss whether the leaning Tower of Piza really was the leaning tower of Piza. I could only find out by historical research. I could not, for example rely on general opinion that it was. All standard philosophy.
This led on to the problem of accepting the word of others, which was dealt with under various headings such as trust, confidence, belief, lying, deceit, camouflage and red-herrings in the dialogue and social spheres.
In those days they divided ecology into synecology and autecology. The terms have gone out of favour. So my monologue corresponds roughly to autecology, while one-to-one or more communication to synecology.
Putting ecology in the title was meant to be serious. It didn’t just mean inter-connectedness. If you are not familiar with ecological concepts, there are masses of website to help. Wiki: ecology is fine, and so is Fundamentals of Ecology, which has diagrams to help. The diagram I rather like and have not seen before (Section 1.3), ‘Scales of ecology’, pretty much encompasses why I thought I could write this. Logically, progressively, I could say what I knew about minds starting from my own mind, as thinkers have always done. (Bear in mind I was not and am not a philosopher of mind). For example, I was rather keen on in some way finding ways to categorise mind according to ecological interactions (Diagram section 3.3): parasitic thoughts, mutual thoughts, commensal thoughts, etc.
The idea was any one with reasonable intelligence could work this all out using an ecological protocol. Everything from idle thoughts and random acts to mental illness could be covered. When you are convinced someone is lying to you, where does it fit into your mental ecosystem? There are things we think, and there are things we say. What was this tendency to want to spread what we thought? Or, to keep certain things hidden. Could it be described as some sort of food chain? Would such schemas help to in Dawkin’s term, extend the phenotype?
Thoughts lead inevitably to action. So it is obvious that a comprehensive ecological analysis cannot exclude anything that the mind sets upon. Can one filter all actions and artifacts (culture) as products of minds through an ecological sieve?
A not dissimilar process is going on when (o.k., I do such things, but am probably rare in so doing..) a chart or some sort of record is made of web surfing. Elsewhere I have described how long after this ecology of mind idea, I went through a period of making flow charts of individual web surfs, to see how they went, what was discovered, and ultimately how to get back into the surf at a particular point later, for a follow through in an area of the ‘map’ of thought/enquiry. I used to find I was highlighting certain discoveries as being significant to me or what I deemed to be of import in a fairly consistent way.
This is not to say that this is a significantly different a process from sitting down in library with a pile of reference books, and with a combination of prior suggestion (from one’s academic guide or mentor for example), of chapter headings and indices, working through till such a point as a clear set of clearly significant/important areas are delimited. But with a chart of a surf shows by visualisation where you have been (even if you tought you are so inclined..) in a way that the mind will not be able to recover from sets of written notes.
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Nowadays, all sorts of things are confidently ruminated over by evolutionary psychology. It requires a willful Casaubon-like refusal to see the mind cannot be studied within such strict ecological bounds. (If you wish to consider syncretism as against eclectism, feel free. Try Syncretic Reality: art, process, and potentiality: though about art disusses syncretism. For example:
As far as science as a whole is concerned (its institutions, ideologies and discourses), syncretism is in many ways anathema. The whole history of modern science has been to keep to the straight and narrow path of reductionism. This tunnel vision has had huge success and undoubtedly is the bulwark of pragmatism. So much of the economy of utility depends on it. But it has been singularly unsuccessful in terms of human development, biological understanding and psychological or spiritual insight. Science is firmly cautious of straying beyond the bounds of strict causality and reductive materialism, but artists are prepared to look everywhere and anywhere to try to reveal what is real and authentic in human experience. Science is caught in a trap of its own making: for example, it recognizes the counter-intuitive precepts of quantum physics, while refusing to recognize their metaphysical implications. In so far as matters of consciousness are concerned, science is in denial.
The question began to arise, Is attempting to squeeze brain and mind into an ecological framework nothing more than using ecology as a metaphor. And, Is analogising bound to fail?
Anthony Campbell: The Casaubon Delusion, Avoiding the Casaubon Delusion.
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When you use a map it is to find a fact in two dimensions that you can use in practice in three. But sometimes the detail hides the answer. A simple map often provides the answer a more detailed ones hides. So An Ecology of Mind (There is a book, Towards an Ecology of Mindth, by Gegory Bateson, and it is, to me, largely incomprehensible), would only be a route devised from a map with a lot of the detail left out.
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As I review what I briefly and almost perfunctorily tried to achieve (Had I gone doolally after the rigors of finals imagining there lay some sort of comprehensive working protocol? ), almost as if nothing had come before,? Compiling my A-Z of topics to consider, it was clear there is something, in principle, to be said for treating the mind ecologically – that is to say pretty much ignoring the structure of the brain inthe sense of what bit is responsible for what function. Any possible links between structure and function which are claimed now with scanning are still a bit iffy, in that these are in the end often just correspondences which seem significant but which we have no real way of knowing if there is cause and effect or ifthey reperesent some sort of epiphenomena – an area lighting up in the brain may be in a module but the whole brain is probably involved in some way.
The scan is not revealing the details of the relationshion between the words read, listened to, or learnt or responded to and the highlighted area in any very meaningful way. Most scans just says, “yes, the word you are thinking about now is being processed in some way in that area of the brain.”
There will be limited use in simply searching for analogs and then applying particular ecological rules to the analogs.
You only need to read an introductory ecology text to see sentences such as, “When the human activity lacks controls and regulations, great catastrophes can take place.” {1} It seems pretty sensible to try to squeeze the round peg into the square hole. Only a week or two ago, I was watching a tv programme in which a tribal group demonstred its ‘ecological’ credentials (they knew nothing else but the ecological) by only taking a few fronds from each tree as they prepapared to build a shelter. So, one assumes, man was ecologically-minded once. How did he become what he is now from that? An answer to be found in the study of civilisation and civilisations. Or did this ecological way of thinking persist in the mind but become subsumed by more powerful concerns?
So those civilisations which petered out had reached a critical mass, so to speak, as an organised society, beyond which they were incapable of acting ecologically. Easter Island comes to mind. But of course these tribes had a simpler system to consider: when they had removed too many leaves in the past, and the tree had died, they learnt not to do it again. After all that tree had other things they wanted.
My idea was to use ecological principles to describe and organise what we thought, saw, heard, said, smelt, felt, did. Nothing to do with how the brain worked, the details of how these experiences or thought were produced: just the thinking and the consequences in general terms of all the thinking, which is a mixture of old-fashioned philosophical ratiocination and and an ecological framework or template or limiter.
Plenty of people have used the metaphor of ecology to explain how the brain works (Bateson, Edleman neural group selection). The typical pop-science explanation of Edleman’s theory was that the brain was like a tropical rain forest. This directs to something that might not be immediately obvious to a non-biologist. Ecology = evolution. That is, ecology operates through evolution and genetics. Though a description of an ecosystem can be made without reference to Darwin or DNA, what has been described wouldn’t work without evolution. In practice, as this interview with Eugene Odum, one of the founders of modern ecology, who wrote Fundamentals in Ecology, shows, ecology went from the descriptive to a holistic approach which dealt with every aspect of how an ecosystem worked: the pH of the soil, the moisture in the air, the physiogical adaptations of the plant or animal.
FILM TRUFFAUT His Myspace page
You’d expect a man like that with the vision and energy for film to find a way to tap into the social networks beyond the grave!
Here Truffault’s Myspace page, which is full of interesting stuff produced by Carletto di San Giovanni, whose own myspace is pretty fulsome too.
