« When is a person truly free? | Main | Betty Blue Movie »
March 04, 2005
The role of aesthetics in film
Last night we viewed "The Night Porter" and today I am thinking about why it so strongly pulled me into it. It "worked" for me because I was stimulated and affected erotically by the main characters. It's elegant portrayal of the high mark of Germanic culture created a complex dialectic when juxtaposed with the scenes of the concentration camp, so that one could not just read " German Nazi=bad guy." I think Cavani was trying to create a constant fluctuation between attraction and repulsion so that the viewer would experience what the main characters experienced. I'm interested in the politically incorrect inquiry about what, deep down, might be attractive to any of us about the vision of National Socialism: its cleaness, its discipline, order, purity, refinement and control. It just not enough for me anymore to see the same story told again and again with the same programmed reactions, like in the "B" westerns where Native Americans=savages and Frontier Families=civilization. We have since deconstructed that destructive myth, but it was bought hook,line and sinker by viewers in that period. And we better start asking ourselves what is attractive about National Socialism if, as many suggest, we are moving closer to it each day in this country.
On a more cinematic note, just telling a good story is not enough, we also need some kind of interest, sympathy, eroticism, or repulsion towards the characters. This post-modern distrust of means of desire and its turn to anti-aesthetics leaves me in a much too cognitive/analytic detached stance by failing to arousing my unconscious desires and emotions. I don't care much for the characters or the story that seems to be shot in such a stylized fashion that I am constantly reminded "this is only a movie and I am a spectator." (Moulin Rouge and Dogville are good examples of this). Many contemporary films are just plain boring to me. So we have a politically correct distrust of methods to arouse the spectators' desires and a huge rise in the pornographic industry where its all about desire. So all we have done is to create a split in what we are after in film viewing. I think the French have done a better job of merging the two and contine to do so, so that I feel many times more integrated in watching French films than in trying to figure out what Hollywood is after these days. In our last film series we showed "Stranger than Paradise" and "Lost Highway" and neither of them moved me at all, even though they are considered by many to be brilliant and well-made.
The time that a movie may also be a critical factor in determining filmic pleasure in that it captures a certain cultural matrix at the time of our most profound development. The late 60's and early 70's was the time of my identity formation and so films of that period often resonate with me personally (such as Women in Love, Carrie, Harold and Maude, Equus, King of Hearts) while films from the 80's and 90's might resonate with the developmental stage of younger viewers.
The making of the Night Porter pulled on many conventions that were designed, I believe, to help us leap to the unbelievable, to accept that someone could fall in all consuming love with one's torturer. I think it did this admirably. David
Posted by lyceum at March 4, 2005 09:24 AM