Reading Response for April 12th

1. Rhodes places a distinction between intertextuality and allegory by defining them as such: intertextuality is a mode of consumption where filmmakers make references to, name, or point to films or styles of the past, such as Tarantino's Pulp Fiction with its clever references, but allegory is not just a means of consumption.  It is also a mode of production in filmmaking, which means it is ingrained into the filmmaking process itself as a way of making films not just consuming them.  Allegory allows for metaphorical representations within films, such as the AIDS epidemic in Haynes' Safe, which is accomplished by means of recombination, as we've learned about with both Soderbergh and Van Sant.  Allegory is important to Haynes because it is the way in which he makes films.  It allows his films to be more serious and complex while still making references to other films/filmmakers of the past through recombination.  

2. Haynes uses elements of the mis-en-scene to alienate Carol from her house.  False beams on the inside of the house and sectional sofas within the house act to isolate Carol from her own living space.  The house gets the overhand because it is meant to be overpowering in the shots where Carol is composed within it or around the outside.  This is similar to Sirk because he used similar tricks in his films.  Sirk's domestic spaces, meaning houses, were more disorienting than overpowering, however.  Haynes' use of the overpowering house is an allegorical reference to Sirk's disorienting domestic spaces of the past.

3. Rhodes means that using the allegorical filming method is the only way that Safe could have efficiently and effectively represented the AIDS epidemic it was meant to discuss.  Haynes uses a demographic (white, middle class) that is not usually thought to be plagued by the AIDs epidemic.  The differences and similarities in Carol's illness, as it is compared to AIDS in the viewer's mind, brings about thoughts of the epidemic as well.  Haynes adds little touches, such as the year in the film being 1987 (an integral year in the fight of the AIDS epidemic), in order to keep the audience thinking about the allegory he has constructed.  Had Haynes just come right out and discussed the AIDS epidemic directly, he probably would not have been able to reach his audience in the ways that he really wished to reach them.

4. One: The free-indirect surrogate for Haynes as a storyteller and the audience as fact-finding spectators.  Two: A full participant in the glittery genderfuck and  camp identity aspects of the film.  Three: He is the beacon of sexual coming into being within the film.  Arthur is similar to Thompson in Citizen Kane because they are both investigating the backgrounds of their subjects of interest.  They are different because Arthur takes an active role in the investigation while Thompson remains solely an outsider.


5.  The dialectal relationship of Arthur and Brian within the film and their inter-relations are connected through the film's narrative.  Brian influences Arthur's dress and make up as he enters into the world of glam rock.  They're linked when Arthur becomes sexually aroused and masturbates to a picture of Brian.  Their connections to the media through Brian's glam rock background and Arthur's journalism background connect them, as well.  Experiences by one character influence or are similar to the narrative/visual aspects of the other character.  They are further connected dialectically through fantasy.  Brian's character represents the performative fantasy and that of impossible fabrication.  He does not define himself in contradiction.  Arthur is simply a more subtle version of Brian.


6. The links and filler for gaps within the non-chronology of the sequences and shots.  There is no content to explain the intervals of time.  The information about the time between seventies glam rock and eighties corporate culture is lacking as the film transitions between the two, even with the historical markers that the film presents to the audience. 

Reading Response for April 5th

1. Haynes claims that most of what he learned about experimental and avant-garde film was learned during his film education at Brown. There, he studied under experimental filmmaker Leslie Thornton and the other people he met there during his time as an undergraduate. Prior to college, he was exposed to Stan Brakhage films, as well as experimental films made by Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, and James Benning. These allowed him to learn from the classics while seeing how the people he worked with and learned from used their knowledge of making experimental films, which was mainly them using their knowledge for teaching purposes and making their own films on the side.

Haynes' Superstar played with the idea of trends in experimental filmmaking in the 1980s.  The filmmaker considers the film to be an experimental film, and its use of dolls as characters would support that, as it is not a convention of Hollywood to use dolls as main characters instead of actors.  The film can best be thought of as a hybrid.  It was a hybrid in that it followed the rules of narrative structures while still experimenting with Hollywood conventions.

2. This quote from Haynes directly relates to the article by Janet Staiger that we read earlier in the semester.  When Staiger spoke of minority authorship, she directly cited the idea of recombination.  Gus Van Sant recombined images, ideas, and cultural influences into stories with characters that mattered to him in order to make his own works.  While Haynes may not feel that his works are original due to this recombination, there is still a clear mark of authorship based upon which cultural stimuli he chose to use in a particular film and the ways in which he incorporated those images.  So, like Van Sant, Haynes could be taking these supposedly unoriginal works that really and truly say something because of the fact that he is recombining the images with his own viewpoint.

3. One observation that Haynes explicitly makes about the popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s is that of the duality of popular figures at the time, specifically Lucille Ball.  On set, when he met her, she controlled the production "like a general," but her on-screen personality was that of a "child woman."  This duality was something that Haynes could relate to in that he had a different real life and a fantasy world that he moved between as one person -- his own duality.  As far as Sirk films, Haynes finds the melodrama to be incredibly unsatisfying at times.  However, he appreciates the fact that the characters are unable to change all aspects of their lives, though he does admit that some of Sirks backgrounds are completely unrealistic and that other aspects are over the top.

4. Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour and Kenneth Anger's Fireworks are discussed in relation to Poison, though Jean Genet receives most of the discussion time for his use of a prison to show an erotic romance between two prisoners in a completely radical way.  Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures was also mentioned for its trouble with "moral guardians."

Thanks to a faulty review by a critic from the Hollywood Reporter, the film was mislabeled.  Instead of being merited for its three parts, the film was reviewed as if the whole film was the "Homo" section and was simply about anal sex in a prison setting.  The American Family Association found out about the film, and several senators even ended up getting involved in the cause against the film.  People were claiming that the money from the grant, paid by taxpayer money, shouldn't be used to create something deemed "public art that might offend American sensibilities."  The argument turned out to be more about the public funding artists instead of being an opposition to the film itself.

5. "The death of the subject" speaks of the supposed/theoretical "death" of individuality, or individual agency.  This death is due to the systematization of social organizations.  Haynes' characters represent a wide spectrum of "dead" subjects.  The way in which his characters and stories maintain a corrosive, mordant detachment has earned him the title of a 'post-humanist' filmmaker.  The tension between this idea and his interest in “the status of emotion in the formation of cultural identity” is that these dead subjects would be emotional zombies, and the current culture would not understand that.  So, he must create characters that still register emotionally with the general public so that his films can be received by those audiences, or at least by the audiences that he wishes to reach outside of the avant-garde film sphere.


6. The characteristics of post-modern melodrama are the death of the subject/"a waning effect" of the subject/characters, but through melodrama, a character might continue to feel, so they cannot be deemed truly dead.  At times, it can be considered a metanarrative, which is a story about a story.  For Haynes, this means that the suffering comes across as realistic instead of over the top works of other times where the melodrama is over done and true character feelings are left behind.

Filmmakers mentioned in reference to this idea are: Sirk, Fassbender, and Pedro Almodovar.  Sirk is said to be a post-modern melodrama filmmaker because of his use of melodrama stories while emphasizing distanciation over the standard melodramatic techniques.   His characters are often lifeless and without emotion for the audience to connect to at all.  Fassbender and Pedro Almodovar are mentioned in reference to this idea because of the way they use pathos while draining the genre of melodrama while going through the paces of the performances of the characters.  They do not really stay true to the genre of melodrama itself.

7. Illness plays an important part in Haynes' films because it easily illustrates the interplay between the ideas of post-modernism and the ideas of melodrama.  A character might be emotionally/almost physically dead, but the drama presented in the melodrama of the illness they might be facing as characters may spark their emotions to evoke some kind of pathos.  

8. On the surface, this film is an important turning point for Genet because it was created during his absence from literary works, meaning between the first and second period of his work as a writer.  This film showed his ability to take himself out of the text.  It was a sign of his evolution as a creator.

The Gay Liberation Movement of the 1960s and the 1970s was all about accepting and publicly acknowledging ones status as a gay man or woman.  All homosexuals were urged to come out of the closet and embrace the fact that they were the way that they were so that the general public would have no choice but to acknowledge their existence and learn to accept them as a part of the community.  Genet found issue with this because he could not come up with a positive image of the gay community in his film.  He refused to be taken by the movement, even though he allowed his films to become immersed in the subject matter of homosexuality.

9.  The film Poison is structured in three parts: "Horror," "Hero," and "Homo." In "Horror," the story is that of Dr. Thomas Graves.  He accidentally takes a serum that can harness and reign in the sex drive.  In "Hero," the story tells of 7 year-old Richie Beacon.  According to the boy's mother, Richie shoots his father and then takes flight through a window.  The lighting is flat, and the framing is that of just people's heads that give them the appearance of floating.  "Homo" is told from the perspective of prisoner John Broom.  He is having homosexual feelings for a fellow prisoner.  This part of the film has the feeling of typical Hollywood melodramas at times, as it was sometimes shot on sound stages.  The stories go in and out of each other like Haynes' earlier experiments and Genet's stories that contained many elements of parallelism with stories.

Parallel editing is one of the main traditions of montage used in Poison so that the film's three stories can interweave themselves in the way in which Haynes wants them to work.  Secondly, the relation of each shot when placed by another shot provides a meaning instead of just looking at one individual shot for meaning, as in Soviet montage techniques.

10.  This allows the film to be coherent and come together in a way that an audience outside of Haynes' head can make sense of.  All of these attributes make up the typical Hollywood film structure, at least from a narrative standpoint, so that audiences can make sense of the film as a whole.  It unites all three stories with the philosophy of the filmmaker, meaning the homosexual views in the film unite with the stories and come across to the audience as such, according to Laskawy.