In Wise Blood, O’Connor’s protagonist, Hazel Motes seems imprisoned by his ‘destiny’ to become a preacher. Though he denies the existence of Jesus, Hazel is continually seeking redemption. O'Connor illustrates the need for faith, despite the denial of it. When someone tries to refute the existence of God, one is ironically only confronted by the existence of God. Hazel’s attempt to run away from God transforms the novel from bizarre comedy to an intense and searching study of the problem of redemption in the modern world.
The narrative encompasses the uncanny and the grotesque, and depicts scenes of horror and violence. Flannery O’Connor reflects her concern with questions of religious faith. Central themes include: the individual’s existential search for self and meaning; the search for and redemption; the question of faith and the conflict of good versus evil.
In the novel, O'Connor revisits her recurring biblical motif of an emotionally cut-off youth returning home (Prodigal Son) and the theme of the struggle of the individual to understand Christianity from a simply idiosyncratic core. Hazel Motes mocks communal and social understandings of Christianity, considering the followers of wandering, Protestant preachers as unwise and ill-advised, and sets out to deny God and Christ as persistently as possible.
Against everything, Motes is continually identified as a preacher by those in the community. Enoch Emery, a friend of Motes who searches for the ‘new Jesus’, ascertains that certain people have ‘wise blood’- meaning that the ‘blood’ knows even if the ‘mind’ fails to realize the truth.
Hazel is preoccupied with and fixated on salvation redemption and preachers. Ironically he is constantly endeavoring to save people from salvation, and ultimately becomes the founder of The Church Without Christ- a place where there is no salvation, no healing, where "the deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, the dumb don't talk, and the dead stay that way," and, in the end, becomes somebody who has chosen an austere life of self-denial.
Hazel states that he does not need to run away from anything 'cause I don't [he doesn’t] believe in anything”. Growing up, Hazel has come to associate the Lord with retribution and ill will, consequently leading to his need to eradicate faith and God from his life. Without Christ dying for our sins there can be no guilt and no need for salvation or redemption. It is this inner turmoil and existential quest for self experienced by Hazel that drives the narrative of the story.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The Fountainhead (Rand)
Growing up in the Soviet Union and believing in political freedom and the rights of the individual, Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead as a mark of respect to the creative individual. The protagonist, Howard Roark, is a pioneering architect whose clever and advanced designs are not appreciated or understood and are hence rejected by the rest of society. Like many inventors and creative thinkers, Roark struggles to gain the acceptance of the conservative and traditionally orientated masses, who are accustomed to following established norms and are fearful of change. The central theme of the novel is individualism being opposed to or conflicting with collectivism. It is about the clash between those who ‘think for themselves and those who allow others to think for them’.
The most palpable instance of collectivism in The Fountainhead is the political one. The novel’s villain, Ellsworth Thooey, is a Marxist intellectual, waxing lyrical about socialism to society. He maintains that a single individual has no worth in himself but exists only to aid his community. In the 1930s context of the novel, collectivism was fast becoming a predominant aspect of the social and political world. Rand witnessed this first hand when the Communists took over her country (Russia), then in surrounding Europe, when in Italy, the Fascists came to power and in Germany, Hitler and the National Socialists took control on the political level.
Roark, as an enlightened being, is opposed by an assortment of conservative collectivists—believing that a person should conform to others, that a person should rise up against others, or, politically, that we should exist under a Fascist or Communist dictatorship in which the individual is completely at the hands of the governing bodies. Regarding this aspect of the book, Rand sets her protagonist up against various collectivist ideas that exist in America.
In September 1939, as an allied front, Nazi Germany and the SU, entered Poland by fore- sending the country and most of surrounding Europe into the most damaging war of social history. In the next decade collectivism was on the brink of military occupation of not just Europe but the world at large. In the US, many politicians, academics and members of the white-collar workforce thought of the Communist and Nazi regimes as gallant endeavours- as innovative efforts to highlight an individual’s moral duties to his comrades and his country. Prior to the war, there was ideological support in the US for both the Communists and the Nazis; even after the war, support among the academics and scholars existed for Communism and continues even today.
In one respect, Rand created The Fountainhead as a ardent caution to society of the sheer dangers of collectivism, no matter of what political variety. While experiencing these horrors in Europe for herself, her novel can be interpreted as a forewarning to prevent the same difficulties in the US.
The most palpable instance of collectivism in The Fountainhead is the political one. The novel’s villain, Ellsworth Thooey, is a Marxist intellectual, waxing lyrical about socialism to society. He maintains that a single individual has no worth in himself but exists only to aid his community. In the 1930s context of the novel, collectivism was fast becoming a predominant aspect of the social and political world. Rand witnessed this first hand when the Communists took over her country (Russia), then in surrounding Europe, when in Italy, the Fascists came to power and in Germany, Hitler and the National Socialists took control on the political level.
Roark, as an enlightened being, is opposed by an assortment of conservative collectivists—believing that a person should conform to others, that a person should rise up against others, or, politically, that we should exist under a Fascist or Communist dictatorship in which the individual is completely at the hands of the governing bodies. Regarding this aspect of the book, Rand sets her protagonist up against various collectivist ideas that exist in America.
In September 1939, as an allied front, Nazi Germany and the SU, entered Poland by fore- sending the country and most of surrounding Europe into the most damaging war of social history. In the next decade collectivism was on the brink of military occupation of not just Europe but the world at large. In the US, many politicians, academics and members of the white-collar workforce thought of the Communist and Nazi regimes as gallant endeavours- as innovative efforts to highlight an individual’s moral duties to his comrades and his country. Prior to the war, there was ideological support in the US for both the Communists and the Nazis; even after the war, support among the academics and scholars existed for Communism and continues even today.
In one respect, Rand created The Fountainhead as a ardent caution to society of the sheer dangers of collectivism, no matter of what political variety. While experiencing these horrors in Europe for herself, her novel can be interpreted as a forewarning to prevent the same difficulties in the US.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Blog 1. Cocteau
Jean Cocteau dedicated himself to the aesthetic implications of the surrealist movement rather than using its characteristics to evaluate and challenge the status quo. In Le Sang d'un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), Cocteau uses certain special effects to create an expressionistic and dislocated commentary on the plight of an artist. Cocteau finds his inspiration from the tale of Orpheus- and uses fragmented dream like images to illustrate (rather than narrate) the sacrifices that the artist makes in the service of art.
In Le sang d’un poete, Cocteau takes the poet/spectator through a cryptic and discontinuous series of dream sequences and images that encapsulated his own poetic conditions and expression. Cocteau does not follow the concept of a coherent subjective narrative cinema and hence mimics the characteristics and absurd logistics of dreams.
Le sang d’un poete “draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes."- Jean Cocteau
There is no specific allegorical reading- rather; Cocteau presents the audience with a sequence of images and fragmented surrealistic representations that are open to individual interpretation. There is no set story or setting- something of ourselves is needed to draw on an allegorical reading. The film encourages us to read it metaphorically. As Cocteau states himself, "The collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shade is very like a spiritualist séance. Then, the film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict." (Speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, September 9, 1946, quoted in Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 25)
He suggests that both viewer and viewed as well as the creator all participate together "thorugh a kind of hypnosis"- the film is no longer something which is simply viewed- but there is a need for interaction. Unlike literary texts- where the image is mental (created in the mind of the viewer) and hence the viewer plays a part in the overall creative process, films present images visually- meaning that the viewer is simply required to 'view'. However, the lack of narrative structure and the various structural and filmic dislocations of Cocteau's film mean that the viewer is required and prompted to 'think'.
“The audience’s role is huge and has to be relearned.”
Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin
Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 41
The incredibly original succession and play of sequences and events in Cocteau's film mimics the absurdity of individual dream sequences. Dreams being tied to the individual who is experiencing them are themselves overtly original.
Through Cocteau's definition of the dream as a "succession of real events that follow on from one another with...magnificent absurdity" the parallel between dreams and the disjointed fragmented and 'anti-narrative' nature of his film becomes apparent. Because dreams are indeed exclusive to the individuals having them, the spectators of Cocteau's film would not have since linked the various sequences together in the same way that Cocteau has. Rather the viewer is forced to "experience them (sequences) in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible"… Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 40.
An interesting link from the Criterion Collection website with an essay by Jean Cocteau on Le sang d'un poete:
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=67&eid=21§ion=essay
Monday, September 3, 2007
Gunning, Keaton and Chaplin and the Modern Cinematic Machine
Exposure to new technologies brought about by modernity after the 1870s, generated a perceptual environment of chaos, overstimulation and sensation that Georg Simmel has characterized as “the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions”. Leo Charney, In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, (Berkley: The University of California Press, 1995), p. 279.
The presence of technological modernity in the film is evident thorough the use of sound. Sound and music means that the film becomes a series of moving images rather than a representation of life. The absence of dialogue means that the viewer must engage more intimately with the film to read deeper into its narrative and its meaning rather than if the story was being propelled by a constant dialogue between characters.
The medium of silent film mechanizes the filmic process- likening movements actions and characters to parts of a larger machine- the film itself. Where the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton uses mimicry to illustrate modernity, technology and ‘the machine’ through the bodies of the actors, illustrating the fate of humanity at the hands of technology, Piccadilly utilises silent film (absence of dialogue and the presence of accompanying music) to highlight the technological and machine like nature of the medium of film itself.
In fact the intrinsic narrative of a film is generally lost when the dialogue is removed- making it seem visually and narrationally disjointed.
-“Words. Words. They're all we have to go on.” (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)
Likewise, without dialogue, the film Piccadilly becomes fragmented and machine-like.
The process that the film adopts is non-naturalistic, and presents a technology of mirroring and of kaleidoscopic images. The overall feel is that of a mechanical ballet, of dislocation and disjointedness. This relates to the theory of the cinema of attraction. Tom Gunning argues that what the "cinema of attraction reveals about earlier spectators has less to do with any notion of naiveté then revealing a ‘lack’ which both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer term the ‘fragmentation of modern experience’”. The modern human experience is characterised by a feeling of being overwhelmed and lost, not unlike Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Aside from the mechanization of cinema through the lack of dialogue and utilisation of techniques of silent film, there is also an interpolation of interior and exterior spaces- an issue at the crux of the modern experience. Piccadilly is fundamentally expressionistic and shot in a way that internalises the interaction of viewer and viewed- it is very interior. There is no natural landscape, rather, the outside becomes insider space as interior and exterior combine and become interchangeable. The “club” itself implies exclusivity and an ambiguity of private/public thresholds. It is a place of regulated flow and of advertisment and commodity- all intrinsically modernist characteristics.
A further note by Gunning on narrative/disjointedness the cinema of attraction and modernity:
“… Even with the introduction of editing and more complex narratives the aesthetic of attraction” can still “be sensed in periodic doses of non-narrative spectacle. Yet, our interaction with this sensory expression is not just characteristic of our contemporary experience of the loss of engaged participation; rather it tells us something that is intrinsic to our being”.
This theory of the cinema of attraction highlights that even in “narrative, representational cinema” the audience does not merely react to narrative logic and realism by taking a passive role as spectator. Rather, the contemporary viewer interacts and connects with and reads the film in terms of individual sensory experiences drawn from it.
The presence of technological modernity in the film is evident thorough the use of sound. Sound and music means that the film becomes a series of moving images rather than a representation of life. The absence of dialogue means that the viewer must engage more intimately with the film to read deeper into its narrative and its meaning rather than if the story was being propelled by a constant dialogue between characters.
The medium of silent film mechanizes the filmic process- likening movements actions and characters to parts of a larger machine- the film itself. Where the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton uses mimicry to illustrate modernity, technology and ‘the machine’ through the bodies of the actors, illustrating the fate of humanity at the hands of technology, Piccadilly utilises silent film (absence of dialogue and the presence of accompanying music) to highlight the technological and machine like nature of the medium of film itself.
In fact the intrinsic narrative of a film is generally lost when the dialogue is removed- making it seem visually and narrationally disjointed.
-“Words. Words. They're all we have to go on.” (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)
Likewise, without dialogue, the film Piccadilly becomes fragmented and machine-like.
The process that the film adopts is non-naturalistic, and presents a technology of mirroring and of kaleidoscopic images. The overall feel is that of a mechanical ballet, of dislocation and disjointedness. This relates to the theory of the cinema of attraction. Tom Gunning argues that what the "cinema of attraction reveals about earlier spectators has less to do with any notion of naiveté then revealing a ‘lack’ which both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer term the ‘fragmentation of modern experience’”. The modern human experience is characterised by a feeling of being overwhelmed and lost, not unlike Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Aside from the mechanization of cinema through the lack of dialogue and utilisation of techniques of silent film, there is also an interpolation of interior and exterior spaces- an issue at the crux of the modern experience. Piccadilly is fundamentally expressionistic and shot in a way that internalises the interaction of viewer and viewed- it is very interior. There is no natural landscape, rather, the outside becomes insider space as interior and exterior combine and become interchangeable. The “club” itself implies exclusivity and an ambiguity of private/public thresholds. It is a place of regulated flow and of advertisment and commodity- all intrinsically modernist characteristics.
A further note by Gunning on narrative/disjointedness the cinema of attraction and modernity:
“… Even with the introduction of editing and more complex narratives the aesthetic of attraction” can still “be sensed in periodic doses of non-narrative spectacle. Yet, our interaction with this sensory expression is not just characteristic of our contemporary experience of the loss of engaged participation; rather it tells us something that is intrinsic to our being”.
This theory of the cinema of attraction highlights that even in “narrative, representational cinema” the audience does not merely react to narrative logic and realism by taking a passive role as spectator. Rather, the contemporary viewer interacts and connects with and reads the film in terms of individual sensory experiences drawn from it.
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