FILM AS ART

One of the most celebrated contemporary Spanish filmmakers, a director who has interestingly managed to marry popular success and auteurist prestige. Pedro Almodóvar is a highly prolific director, who has managed to maintain a steady stream of film releases, most of which have been produced by the company he runs together with his brother Agustin (El Deseo). In keeping with the narrative conventions of the genres he is usually exploring, Almodóvar often privileges intricate plots in which coincidence and chance play a significant part. The focus is often placed on queer identities and on the performance of gender. Sexuality in his films is portrayed as eminently fluid, families are often dysfunctional, relationships are unorthodox and complicated, often involving more than two people, and the stories are laced with references to literary and art works, as well as to other films (intertextuality). In addition to references to other works, Almodóvar has also been known to reference his own films (for instance, his 2009 film Broken Embraces references his earlier 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Visual design is central to his films and he is widely considered to be a fashion-conscious director, who pays meticulous attention to set and costume design, often marked by his characteristic flamboyance. One of the genres within the framework of which Almodóvar frequently works is melodrama (often combined with comedy and/or a crime story). Melodrama is one of the most studied genres in the history of cinema; amongst the scholars who have written on the topic are Thomas Elsaesser, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Klinger. Most scholars discuss melodrama with reference to its expressivity, its ability to elicit strong emotions through its style (in particular, through mise-en-scène and the use of music – in fact, melodrama is often defined as a ‘dramatic narrative accompanied by music’), but also in terms of the moral universe it typically articulates, one that is polarised around victims and evildoers. Typical plots may include stories of star-crossed lovers, forced marriages, crimes of passion, tortuous and tense family relationships and situations, stories of injustice and maltreatment etc., which allow themes such as redemption, innocence, disillusionment, guilt and the clash between individual desires and social pressures to be examined in depth. Oftentimes, melodramas feature virtuous heroines who suffer sexual and/or emotional aggression at the hands of a villain. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Landy, Marcia (ed.) (1991) Imitations of Life, pp.68-91. ‘… when in ordinary language we call something melodramatic, what we often mean is an exaggerated rise-and-fall pattern in human actions and emotional responses, a from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous movement, a foreshortening of lived time in favour of intensity – all of which produces a graph of much greater fluctuation, a quicker swing from one extreme to the other than is considered natural, realistic or in conformity with literary standards of verisimilitude..’ (p.76) At a later point in his essay (p.83), Elsaesser comes back to this strategy of ‘letting the emotions rise and then bringing them suddenly down with a thump’, causing a ‘vertiginous drop in the emotional temperature’ which he considers to be central to the emotional experience afforded by many melodramas and which we can see at work in Almodóvar’s melodramas too.

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) was a successful theatrically released documentary. It had the advantage of a well known director: Werner Herzog. The film has two narratives. The first, and most prominent, is the narrative of Herzog who, in reflexive documentary style, is revealed to be making an expose about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, who died in 2003. However, we also see Treadwell’s footage – footage that Herzog himself admires. This footage is representative of direct cinema (observational documentary). Treadwell filmed his surroundings and nature as they transpired in front of him. In doing so, as Herzog admits, he gained some stunning insights into the natural world. Despite Treadwell’s footage, we also see him as a performer in his own right. Doing more than one take – mainly because he plans to edit his footage into a larger presentation and, therefore, he wants to look good. There is still evidence of manipulation even from Treadwell. As Herzog reveals, although Treadwell would portray himself as someone braving out the wilds of Alaska alone, his girlfriend filmed some of his footage – something he chose not to reveal (again, returning us to questions about whether documentary is ever anything but manipulative!) Herzog also chooses what footage we are permitted to see and even listen to. For instance, the director opts not to let us hear the final moments of Treadwell’s death. There has been conjecture about why this decision was made. Werner Herzog’s documentary style is derived from his experience of filmmaking. As a well-known film director, he has already composed his own film aesthetics and adopted them into documentary skilfully. He masters the camera use in regard of perspectives and composition. For instance, in Grizzly Man, as Davidson (1986, p20) elaborated, “his camera pans with measured grace the vast stretches of” the snow-berg, in which, the illustration of the wild, tranquil but isolated landscape heavily indicates Timothy Treadwell’s inevitable lonesome and the soreness of his soul". The film language like this, combines the documented footage with iconic interference, which is commented by Steingrover (2012, p474) as “an affective experience for the spectator through carefully constructed characters that highlight the themes of mystery and tragedy.” It displays Herzog’s intention of “transforming things that are physically there into more intensified, elevated and stylized images” (Cronin, 2002, p301).

Definition of the remake Film or television remake = a film or television series based on an earlier film or television series. Linda Hutcheon considers the remake to be a sub-type of adaptation (‘remakes are invariably adaptations because of changes in context’), but a sub-type of adaptation which does not involve ‘a shift of medium or mode of engagement’. Remakes are also a form of intertextuality. If the original film is an adaptation to begin with, then we are dealing with a triangular or triadic relationship (literary source – original film – remake), but many times the original film is not an adaptation, in which case we are dealing with what Constantine Verevis calls in his book Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2006) a diadic relationship (original film – remake). The Japanese film Ringu = based on the novel Ring by Kôji Suzuki, who collaborated in an advisory capacity to the script development of both the Japanese adaptation and the American remake. Rather than being a re-adaptation of the novel, the Hollywood film reworks the Japanese film, but the films are products of two different horror traditions. The narrative in both films focuses on a female journalist (Reiko in the Japanese version, Rachel in the Hollywood remake) who investigates unsolved cases of people dying seven days after watching a mysterious videotape. There is a rich tradition in Japanese culture of ghost stories centred around a vengeful female spirit, and the Japanese film situates itself within this tradition. An additional theme in the films – the fear of technology (technophobia) as the videotape is the means through which the horrific female character manages to make the transition from one realm to another. Body horror – Sadako/Samara’s physical appearance – the long black hair hiding her facial features, the dripping white clothes, the removed nails, the swollen feet etc. – different details emphasised in the Japanese version and the Hollywood remake. Sadako/Samara crossing the boundary between the supernatural and the natural world in the two versions (the Japanese original and the US remake) – differences in setting: despite the time of day being similar, the Japanese interior is darker, more sparsely decorated and feels cramped, while in the American version, the interior is more spacious, thus allowing for more possibilities of evasion, encouraging the viewer to hope for an escape for the male protagonist under attack (especially since the interior shots are cross-cut with shots of Rachel (Naomi Watts) rushing to Noah’s apartment); the sequence in its two different treatments relies on different cultural notions of suspense and horror