A 21st century film analysis on Amacord and Belle de Jour
Life is but
a dream. This simple phrase from a
child's song can sum up the first 100 years of cinema. For it is our consciousness in all its
constructs—collective and individual—that defines who we are as a people and
defines what becomes expressed through cinema, one of many conduits that
conveys the human condition. The art of
cinema really is no art at all, but life itself, or rather life within
life. For it takes many conscious minds
to produce this life which entertains, captivates and inspires us to continue
creating such life, therefore creating the ability to dream and express dreams.
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| "Lady of the Lake Tarnished" (photo illustration by Malacara) |
Since the
landscape of the mind is the jumping off point for surrealist cinema, we must
examine its roots. Surrealism came of
age in the early 20th century—specifically the mid-to-late 1920s. Their
spokesman, André Breton, said surrealism "was based on the belief in the
superior reality of certain forms of association, heretofore neglected, in the
omnipotence of dreams" (Bordwell 411).
What probably attracted surrealists to cinema, according to Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith, was the different films they saw at the cinema. "As A.L. Rees has remarked in his
"History of Experimental Film and Video (BFI, 1999), they were the original channel-surfers, watching brief
snatches of a film in one Parisian fleapit before dashing onto another in
search of further thrills (found at
Those who subscribed to surrealism
studied the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who had laid
the groundwork for modern psychology (found at http://www.gosurreal.com/history.htm). Through his research with a female patient, Freud came up with a
division of the mind into three aspects of the mind, which he called id, ego
and super-ego. The id represents a
person's child-like need for instant gratification, while the ego acts to
temper any urge and creates the image of "the self" while the
super-ego rules over the other two aspects by using punishment or pride as a
check and balance system
(Stevenson, found at http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/division.html).
Amacord
With this in mind, an examination
of the Federico Fellini film Amacord
will illustrate some Freudian points.
Fellini, although not considered a surrealist by any film scholar, does
employ some surrealistic elements in this 1974 film, which is a narrative based
on memory (conscious) and fantasy (subconscious). The story is an autobiographical account of
Fellini's memories as a teenaged boy coming of age during the reign of Benito
Mussolini. The story also has multiple
characters that, at one point or another during the film, get to express some
inner thought or desire, which is usually reserved for any protagonist.
An example of Freudian psychology
at work within Amacord is in the act
mid-way through the film where Titta, Fellini's alter ego, and the rest of his
family visit Uncle Teo in the mental hospital.
Uncle Teo is pure id unbound. Teo
is insane, although no explanation is given as to why, and acts purely on
impulse. In his own surrealist sense of
the world and its order, Teo confuses two different priests—one who is living
(conscious) and one who is dead—because his own sense of time (consciousness)
is altered by his illness. He cannot
distinguish between the two. We see what
he sees through a comic eye because he lacks humility, i.e. he forgets to unzip
his fly and wets himself, a truly infantile act. He exhibits more impulse when he suddenly
disappears from sight only to wind up a tree shouting, "I want a
woman!" The comic effect is
emphasized when Titta asks his father if he should send for Volpina, the town's
streetwalker.
The
preoccupation with sex is a running motif in the film. This falls in line with Freudian theory
because sexual desire is a basis for this theory. We even see motifs within motifs. In the confessional scene, we see Titta
remember the festival of St. Anthony and the blessing of the animals with
images of sheep contrast cut with images of women's posteriors emphasizing Titta's teenaged obsession
with the opposite sex. The posterior
motif is present again in the scene where Titta and his friends view the
Victory statue shot with a tight, close-up shot of its
posterior. The boys then end the scene
by masturbating to this visual stimulus.
The woman's posterior is an example of synecdoche because it represents
Titta's idea of women as sex objects rather than complete human beings with
conscious thoughts of their own.
Women, sex and power
The Volpina character also is a
motif because she reappears at certain moments to re-emphasize the film's
prevailing ideology that women are nothing more than sex toys to be played with
and then tossed aside after self-gratification.
Volpina appears within the mise-en-scene at a distance, disassociated
from the rest of the film's characters, except when "duty"
calls. In the beach scene where workers
are constructing a house or building, Volpina tells the workers she's looking
for her lost "cat." The
foreman replies, "There are no cats here—Go home." The scene's subtext: I'm selling sexual gratification. Who wants to find it. Reply:
Get lost you sick whore. It's
repeated in another of Titta's memories during confession as he fixes her flat
tire. The camera closes in on her face,
mouth wide open, licking her lips as her head drops down from the camera's
view, again implying some type of sexual activity.
She either appears in the
mise-en-scene in a long shot to show disassociation, or with a facial close-up
to show a lascivious nature, which appears somewhat deranged, which leaves the
viewer asking how that nature came to be.
In the first part of the film, Volpina appears at a distance, but as the
festive nature builds during the "witch burning" festival, a gang of
men appears and grabs Volpina, lifting her up in the air spread-eagle, and
carrying her out of the frame. The
implication here could be for an orgy or gang rape, therefore she's viewed as
powerless.
The character known as Gradisca
(translation: help yourself) is also viewed as a sexual object or an object of
desire. She's worshiped from afar by
many of the town's men and boys, most of all by Titta, who actually pursues her
into a darkened theater. One isn't quite
sure if this is an actual memory or a dream because no one else appears in the
theater and the lighting suggests a surrealist moment. But reality comes back with a bite when Titta
gets rejected after touching Gradisca's knee.
The town's people tap Gradisca's
sexual power when they need to secure some capital for the harbor. They tell her to date an aristocrat who will
comply with their wishes if she will comply with him. Each time she appears in the film, she's
either wearing a bright red coat or a bright red scarf, which overtly
symbolizes her sexual power. In the
scene with the aristocrat, she removes the coat and wears a black negligee while he appears wearing a white uniform, presumably of a
high-ranking military officer. In the
mise-en-scene, this is meant to imply the purity or sincerity of the man's
sexual advances while the woman is cast in the role of the less sincere
temptress, or the less important being in this brief on-screen relationship.
The tobacco
woman is the only woman who forcefully exerts her sexual power by taking
advantage of a naive Titta. In the
scene, he walks into her shop at closing time, presumably for a cigarette. The woman knows what Titta really wants and
obliges by producing the objects of desire, i.e. her breasts, and allows Titta
to suckle them. She spoils his
short-lived ecstasy by immediately dismissing him and embarrassing him by not
even fully opening the sliding door to let him pass without hunching over. He had his cake and didn't like the taste it
left in his mouth. What he didn't
realize is that she ripped his innocence from him and he can never retrieve it.
More surreal
The
previous scene analyses had some surrealist flavoring, but do not truly capture
the genre's essence. The following
scenes adequately illustrate surrealist qualities, symbolized by water. First, the scene where the idiot vendor
Biscein, "recounts" the story of a harem cloistered away in the Grand
Hotel. In his mind he sees many willing
women either in or surrounding a bathing pool inside the room. The pool represents his subconscious desire
for sex with these women and is shot with deep focus to emphasize the strength
of his desire.
Second, the scene where the town's
folk row or sail out in the harbor to meet the regime's masterpiece ship. The seawater represents everyone's
subconscious desires—Gradisca's longing for a husband and children, Aurelio
(Titta's father) wanting to know more about the universe and other characters
expressing their inner desires while sailing on this sea of subconscious. The sea also acts as motif.
A third example of a subconscious
water motif is the snow scene where Titta pursues Gradisca through a maze of
snow walls. The snow symbolizes the
purity and sincerity of his desire to mate with her, but cannot because she
remains elusive, much like a dream.
Gradsica is also seen wearing white to camouflage her sexual experience,
but is given away with her red scarf. A
male peacock appears within the mise-en-scene in a kind of overkill of the
male-dominated ideology.
The fog scene with Titta's little
brother and his grandfather illustrates the subconscious fear of death. Both wander around in fear of their lives
while bare trees accentuate this via the pointed tree branches.
The race car scene where Titta and
his fat friend imagine themselves as racecar drivers illustrates desired sexual
prowess. Titta has his arm wrapped
around Gradisca while the other boy gives a rather vulgar gesture to the girl
he has a crush on.
One final surrealist example is the
running motif of the motorcycle man. He
represents time streaking forward while serving a diegetic purpose of
transition from one scene to the next, similar to a wipe. The opening and closing scenes have a surrealist
quality, which serves to tie the film together.
Puffballs float around the city and hang in the air like a slow motion,
or dreamlike snowfall. The diegetic
puffballs signal the beginning of spring and also act as a slow motion
transitional wipe.
Ideology
The scene where Titta's corpulent,
red-headed friend sees the large Mussolini head made from flowers officiating
over his fantasy marriage to school-girl Aldina. Mussolini's head in this dream is synecdoche
representing the whole of the fascist regime.
In the ideological context, this means that only fascism can achieve
this boy's deepest desires and will benefit the state in return via a
complacent, obedient individual.
However, Fellini show us that Mussolini is merely a 'cult of
personality' that the townspeople readily buy into, but at least one—Titta's
father—resists. He calls the fascists
"black-shirted lice," and gets picked up by the police. They force him to drink a toast to fascist
victory with a glass of castor oil. In
doing so, he defecates on himself, destroying his super-ego and leaving him
humiliate by his id.
The male dominant ideology has
already been pointed out in the previous analyses, but it follows Laura
Mulvey's theory of male narrative cinema and visual pleasure, which states the
camera takes on the "male gaze."
For example, we see the police hassle Titta's father—not his mother,
probably because she's a woman and not ideologically threatening. We see Gradisca running to touch "Il
Duce," therefore wanting to embrace this patriarchal society where women
are objects and not people. We also see
both the men and women in the town falling over each other to see the arrival
of the new prostitutes at the local bordello.
Belle de Jour
This
particular movie, written and directed by Luis Buñuel, remains somewhat
faithful to the surrealist movement that he helped start during the late
1920s. The movie is a restrictive
narrative about a young, married, upper-class woman who leads a double life
within her head and within the on-screen reality. The woman, Severine (Catherine Deneuve) is
the protagonist who opens up the film with a dream sequence where she's riding
in a carriage with her husband Pierre as the carriage bells chime. He has her forcefully removed, dragged
through the woods where she's horsewhipped and raped by one of the
drivers. While this transpires, Severine
tells her husband "not to let the cats out." This, along with the bells, becomes a motif
that will be elaborated on later.
We find out
it's a dream when we see Severine in the next scene lying in bed answering her
husbands query, "What are you thinking about?" She says, "Us." Through this scene we have some
exposition. We find out they've been
married for a year, sleep in separate beds and are going on a skiing
vacation. The action shifts to the ski
resort where we meet their friend Reneé.
She asks them if they wish to see the hypnotist perform later that
evening. Pierre tells her that it's not
a hypnotist but a magician performing later.
He then tells her hypnosis reveals dark secrets while magic
doesn't. What Buñuel does with the
mise-en-scene is tell us indirectly that the dark subconscious will get a light
shined on it if we're patient enough.
Belle's surrealism
Buñuel
launches the audience off this platform and plays around with the narrative,
oscillating from the traditional (cause and effect) to the surreal (causality
doesn't apply). After we meet Reneé, we
meet her husband Husson. We discover he
lusts for Severine, which very much disturbs her. So much so, she drops a vase of roses and a
bottle of perfume. These actions
symbolize her subconscious turmoil with her masochistic fantasy life, i.e. the
fluid inside these containers spilling out, therefore no longer contained. This creates another dream or flashback where
we see Severine as a little girl being molested by an older man. Buñuel may have "cheated" by
showing us this, but one could argue that he doesn't violent the tenets of
Freudian theory by letting her conscious memory display this. However, this line is very blurry at best.
After
Husson and Reneé tell Severine about their other friend Henriette becoming a
prostitute, Severine decides to do the same.
She locates the local brothel, wearing sunglasses to disguise herself
from herself (very surrealistic) and has another flashback. This time we see her at communion refusing
"the body" of Christ. We hear
the priest ask her "What's the matter with you?" as she returns to
the doorway of Madame Anais, the words still ringing in her head. Severine accepts employment from Anais and
meets her first customer. But before
this, Anais "christens" Severine with a new name, "Belle du
Jour," because she can only work during day between 2 and 5 p.m. To celebrate, Anais offers up some cherries
from a jar. Again, the cherries, symbols
of what's left of Severine's virtue, are ready to be swallowed up as she
embarks on this dark journey.
Severine
meets her first customer, Mr. Adolphe—oddly enough, a candy salesman. After having his way with "Belle,"
Severine returns home and fantasizes again—this time with her husband and
Husson standing over a cold pot of soup "that never warms up." They are surrounded by a herd of cattle and Pierre
asks Husson if bulls have names like "cats." Husson says they are called "remorse and
expiation." The bulls symbolize
male genitalia, the cats symbolize female genitalia, while the cold soup
symbolizes Severine's frigidness towards her husband. Husson asks Pierre what
time it is. Pierre replies, "It must be between 2 and 5, not later
than 5," a reference to Severine's "day job." The men then lob mud at her, call her names
like slut and whore while she's bound to a post—smiling throughout the
ordeal.
We flash
forward back to Anais' apartment. Belle
has been gone for over a week and begs for her job back. She gets it back, tries to please "The
Professor," a regular customer who's into domination, but can't because
she likes to receive punishment, not administer it. She then has sex with a Chinese customer,
which is then immediately jump cut into a scene with a little girl, presumably
Severine, but again Buñuel blurs the reality lines. The girl could be the maid's daughter, but it
could also be a Severine stand-in.
Buñuel uses this in the mise-en-scene by having the girl show off her
report card, complete with a B in history and an A in languages. This surrealistic moment could mean Severine
is overcoming her past inhibitions and learning to "communicate"
those urges by serving the customers.
Severine
continues to be disturbed by Husson. He
invites himself over to her house but is immediately sent away. She fantasizes again—this time she and Husson
have sex right under her husband's nose.
She tells Pierre they are passing a letter full of lily seeds. The seeds tie back to earlier in the film
where Severine asks Pierre if he's ever visited a whorehouse. He says "Not often," and asks her
why she's asking. She says she wants to
learn more about her husband and he then replies, "Semen retentum
venenumest" (roughly translated: 'My seed unbends and poisons you'). In other words the seeds are killing her
inside.
The
conflict within Severine's head comes to a head, of sorts, with an imaginary
duel between Pierre and Husson. Both men
shoot at each other, but surrealistically miss their intended targets. Pierre's bullet strikes Severine in the
head. She bleeds to death kissing
Pierre.
Belle's power
triangle
The
conflict Severine faces with Pierre and Husson takes a third angle of
attack. She falls in love with a young
thug, Marcel, who falls for her while on a trip to Anais' place. They make love and she offers her services
for free. He replies many other women have
given it up to him for free also. She's
attracted to him because he's had a rougher life than she, and has the scars to
prove it—the missing teeth, the stab wounds, etc. Time passes without the two lovers
meeting. Marcel meets up with Belle
again and threatens to beat her. She
turns around and tells him if he does, she will never see him again. He complies.
Marcel cannot live without Severine, so he has her stalked and threatens
to expose her to Pierre. She refuses,
causing Marcel to shoot Pierre, crippling him, and losing his own life in the
process.
What Buñuel
does with this love triangle narrative is ingenious. He turns the ideological male domination on
its ear by actually having Severine gain power through her physical and mental
relationships with these men. She may
still be the victim overall with her tortured psyche, but she is in control of
all three men. She keeps her boy-scout
husband at arms length, longing for children—she keeps Marcel on a short leash
and away from her husband—and she keeps feeding Husson lust each day that he
can't have her while only having him once in her mind. She even controls Anais on some level because
she manipulates Anais through innocence and later pity.
Belle's ideology
It should
not go without notice that Buñuel has a rather pointed view against bourgeois
ideology. He embodies this in his
characterization of Husson. He is an
elitist who has too much money and time on his hands (he freely admits this in
the film's beginning), he has a predatory nature (he likes to hunt, therefore
use those who he feels are beneath him) and when he can't get what he wants, he
acts childish (a trait he associates with those who haven't had to work for a
living). We can take Mulvey's theory and
do with it what Buñuel did with Severine's power play—we can reverse it. The camera work might have been from a male
point of view, but we see what Severine sees, therefore viewing the film from
the female perspective. She holds the
cards and knows how to play them. She's
left at the end in control of her husband's life, both real and surreal.
Buñuel
plays into exposing bourgeois ideology by not filming anything in the dark or
at night. Every scene plays out during
the day with plenty of adequate lighting.
The only exceptions are the rain scenes, but they are gray, not
black. In fact, the only mention of
darkness occurs at the café where Severine meets the Duke. He mentions his cat, "Dark Beauty,"
and says the afternoon sky has a "dark sun," but we never see
darkness. This man lives in the dark
recesses of his own mind and expresses his subconscious desires by having
Severine feign death. She gets inside a
casket—he "mourns" her passing and proceeds to masturbate underneath
the casket. The cat motif shows up when
his butler asks "to let the cats in" and we actually hear a cat's meow
within the diegesis. Also we hear
diegetic bell ringing at each encounter, which signals us that Belle will
engage in real or surreal sexual activity.
His camera
shots are usually full shots with few close-ups. However, he does something rather unique for
a 1960s film. He actually has the adult
Severine and the child Severine occupy the same film space within the same film
time. This occurs when Severine quits
her job for the final time. Although the
child appears less than 30 seconds, Buñuel keeps the audience off balance,
therefore toying with our notions of what's acceptable to our beliefs in
reality.
From surreal to
sub-atomic
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| Image courtesy geneaologyreligion.net |
What we do
know from quantum physics is a sub-atomic particle can exist simultaneously in
several places all at once until that particle collides with matter or energy,
causing it to "choose" one steady state that we can perceive on our
level of existence. Out of all these
possibilities, we are able to perceive the one reality—or that one pattern that
forms conscious thought (Freedman, 94). Along with neuroscientist and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, who
discovered a component of brain cells, called microtubules, where quantum
consciousness very likely takes place—have been collaborating to solve this
ultimate puzzle of where, how and perhaps why consciousness takes place.
There are a
large group of scientists, philosophers, and other nay-sayers who believe
Penrose and Hameroff are wrong. They
very well might be wrong, but I propose (and I do so cautiously) that they are
right. Why? Because what I've just written about
different possibilities coming together to form one single thought already occurs
in cinema. Look at how many different
circumstances collide within the text of Amacord.
Each provides the viewer with a complete, quirky yet
coherent picture of a reality (the product) created by many other conscious
beings that comes together within the consciousness of the viewer to form
meaning, perceived as beauty, ugliness or good and evil. Observe
how different realities—surreal or otherwise—come together within Belle du Jour to give us the one reality that is Severine's
diegetic life.
It is this notion—from the many,
the one (E pluribus Unum) that I wish to share with you. This
notion may be as far from center as one can get, but what better place to
explore this possibility than the dream world of cinema.
Works Cited
Bordwell & Thompson.
Film Art: An Introduction,
6th ed.
New
York: McGraw Hill. 2001.
Freedman, David H.
"Quantum Consciousness."
Discover. June 1994.
89-98.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey.
"Cinema and Surrealism."
1 Jan. 2002. Movie Mail.
28 April 2003.
<http://www.moviemail.com/scripts/article.pl?articleID=85>
Sanchez, Monica.
"History of Surrealism."
28 April
2003.
<http://www.gosurreal.com/history.htm>
Stevenson, David B.
"Freud's Division of the Mind."
Brown University. 29 April, 2003.
<http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/division.html>
Further reading
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html
The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics
book by Roger Penrose
