Metacinema: The Form and Content of Filmic Reference and Reflexivity

331 Pages·2021·3.952 MB·English

by  David LaRocca

Metacinema

Metacinema
The Form and Content of Filmic
Reference and Reflexivity
Edited by
David LaRocca
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Contents
Foreword: The Cinematic Question—“ What Do You Want from Me?” vii
Robert B. Pippin
Contributors xi
Introduction: An Invitation to the Varieties and
Virtues of “Meta- ness” in the Art and Culture of Film 1
David LaRocca
I CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL
REORIENTATION TO METACINEMA
1 Cinematic Self- Consciousness in Hitchcock’s Rear Window 31
Robert B. Pippin
2 Adaptations, Refractions, and Obstructions: The Prophecies
of André Bazin 53
Timothy Corrigan
3 A Metacinematic Spectrum: Technique through Text
to Context 63
Garrett Stewart
4 Recursive Reflections: Types, Modes, and Forms
of Cinematic Reflexivity 85
Daniel Yacavone
5 Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese: Authorship, Historiography,
and Videographic Styles 115
Eleni Palis
II ILLUMINATION FROM THE DUPLICATIONS AND
REPETITIONS OF REFLEXIVE CINEMA
6 8½: Self- Reflexive Fiction and Mental Training 139
Joshua Landy
7 C louds of Sils Maria: True Characters and Fictional
Selves in the Construction of Filmic Identities 155
Laura T. Di Summa
vi Contents
8 H oly Motors: Metameditation on Digital Cinema’s
Present and Future 173
Ohad Landesman
III A FFECTIVITY AND EMBODIMENT IN
METANARRATIVES
9 F ight Club: Enlivenment, Love, and the Aesthetics
of Violence in the Age of Trump 191
J. M. Bernstein
10 F unny Games: Film, Imagination, and Moral Complicity 219
Paul Schofield
11 S hoah: Art as Visualizing What Cannot Be Grasped 233
Shoshana Felman
IV METADOCUMENTARY, EXPERIMENTAL FILM,
AND ANIMATION
12 T he Act of Killing: Empathy, Morality, and Re- Enactment 255
Thomas E. Wartenberg
13 W altz with Bashir’s Animated Traces: Troubled Indexicality
in Contemporary Documentary Rhetorics 271
Yotam Shibolet
14 A lone., Again: On Martin Arnold’s Metaformal
Invention by Intervention 291
David LaRocca
Acknowledgments 319
Index 323
Foreword
The Cinematic Question— “What Do You Want from Me?”
Anything filmed— fictional narratives, documentaries, experimental films,
animated films— and offered for viewing is inherently reflexive. That is, it
embodies a concept of itself and assumes there is some point in displaying the
film to viewers, some end to be achieved. One dimension of that reflexivity is
an identification with genre categorization; first of all, with one of these broad
types and then within each, with an established genre like romantic comedy,
melodrama, western, political critique, anime. Often this is straightforward.
The film can be said to “take itself to be” an action-a dventure film, a musical,
a slapstick comedy, and its point in being displayed is to amuse, please, enter-
tain, and thereby to be consumed for a price. And there can certainly be more
ambitious agendas. These typological and genre identities (which, as Stanley
Cavell pointed out, exist mostly to be redefined each time, for the boundaries
to be reset) also signal an audience, suggest assumptions that ought to direct
attentiveness; that is, suggest a modality of attentiveness or the reflective self-
understanding inherent in a kind of viewing. “Embodied” and “inherent” and
the like suggest difficult philosophical questions about just how a reflective
form can be at work in such an aesthetic object even if not prominent and not
attended to in the experience as such.
But one way it can be at work is for the issue itself to be attended to within
the world of the work, and sometimes in the world depicted in the work, ei-
ther as a general issue, or, in the most complex cases, in an internal inter-
rogation of its own particular cinematic form. The film itself can be said to
be metacinematic and attention can be directed to elements of cinematic
form or to the pragmatic dimensions of display and presentation, whether
as a so- called art film or a commercial vehicle. The most familiar examples
are films about filmmaking, either explicitly, like François Truffaut’s Day
for Night (1973) or Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), or more indirectly and in a
way as much about Hollywood as about film, as in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely
Place (1950), Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Robert
Altman’s The Player (1992), or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Both
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1962) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)
thematize the psychological meaning and attraction of observing while being
viii Foreword
unobserved (a key element in all film: the film world is present to us; we are
never present to or in the film world). My candidate for the most complicated
and thoughtful reflection on cinematic form in general and its own psycho-
logical stake in cinema is Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which culminates
in a character, Thorwald (Raymond Burr) exiting the representation of the
“watched world” (the window- framed scenes as watched from the oppo-
site apartment building), entering the viewer’s world, and asking Jeff (James
Stewart), “the viewer,” plaintively, as an avatar of Hitchcock himself: “What do
you want from me?”
The same sort of double viewing is possible in documentaries. I mean
attending to the object of the documentary, while also noting that the docu-
mentary is questioning either the documentary form itself (e.g., its possibility,
the possibility of nonfiction) or the point of its own recording and display.
Perhaps the finest and most subtle example is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act
of Killing (2012, the subject of an essay in the following), where the murderous
death squad members’ own self- display in the film is folded into an interro-
gation of the ethical tone of the documentary itself, its display and relation
to the beholder. Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) embodies this double
viewing in a different way, given that our attention is constantly drawn to the
aesthetic form of the documentary itself, as well as the question of whether it
is a documentary. Errol Morris’s films are also so made as to raise the question,
often left unresolved, about the point of the documentary and “what we want”
by watching it. Since Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008, also the subject of
an essay in this book) combines both the documentary form of autobiography
with animation, that form itself, animation, is immediately thematized as an
issue, its appropriateness and point.
Experimental films, like the works of Louis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth
Anger, Bruce Conner, or Martin Arnold, are unavoidably metacinematic.
The very concept of experimental, which signals an attempt to make some-
thing that will not fit standard typological or genre classifications, or any
classifications, signals a metacinematic interest by requiring the viewer, in ef-
fect, to find the object’s distinctive, even unique, cinematic form and wonder
about the point of the object being made and displayed.
A general question is raised by all such metacinematic attempts. What
is distinctive, especially distinctively valuable, about such cinematic
self- explorations, as opposed most obviously to a standard, discursive
philosophic- aesthetic inquiry into the same issues? Answering that question
would require we first identify the nature of the aesthetic form of cinematic
self- consciousness, in itself quite a complicated issue, but whatever answer
we suggest, we will have to preserve that element of interpretive free-p lay,
Foreword ix
breadth of possible meaning, and affective involvement opened up in an aes-
thetic experience. Its own thematization of itself, as itself aesthetic, could thus
be ironic, deliberately misleading, could capture the point of view of a char-
acter or an ideology. That is, we need to respect the fact that such a form is
not just a shorthand expression of propositional claims. At the minimum,
whatever cinematic attention is directed at the object’s own form, it remains
cinematic attention, not an invitation or spur to independent philosophical
reflection, and as such it requires the same sort of polysemous interpretive
work and affective involvement as any aesthetic form, as is all so ably demon-
strated in this collection.
Robert B. Pippin