rhythm: from kill bill to reservoir dog

After a minor detour to the u-topos of theory, I return our conversation to the shifty territory of violence and film, and no name indexes the intersection of violence and film more eloquently than Tarantino.

The last post on violence and/in Tarantino offered a detailed reading of two scenes in Kill Bill. I would like to continue some thoughts that began to take form in that post, in addition to extending the discussion to Reservoir Dog, which remains, in my view, pure cinematic genius.

In Kill Bill the rhythmic and speed alteration from sequence to sequence is commonly expressed by the way the camera gaze pans and cuts. The uneven rhythm injects some degree of tension in a long sequence that otherwise remains utterly predictably. No one doubts that Thurman’s character, the master narrator in the movie thus far, will not perish imminently.

Moreover, the way rhythmic speed fluctuates within the same sequence points to the central space that time occupies both formally and thematically in most of Tarantino’s films, especially in Kill Bill. In “Childhood Living: James and Tarantino” Patrick O’Donnell argues that time is Kill Bill’s main theme: “Kill Bill is a film about wasting time, the wasting away of temporality, the time of wasting bodies, landscapes, cinematic repertories” (CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, N. 2, Fall 2009, 2). The excess that has come to characterize Tarantino’s overall style, particularly of his action-driven scenes of violence, goes hand in hand with the structure of waste that pervades his films, thematically and formally.

The stylization of violence, at least as it is executed in Tarantino’s films, not only presents violence within identifiable aesthetic norms (e.g. animation, farce), but also codifies it to circumscribe its possible repercussions to a deliberately limited frame. O’Donnell notes that in the Kill Bill films excess remains a central formal operation, frequently “backtracking and hypercitational excess” (4), through which theme and narrative become inhered in the structure of the films. In Tarantino, both style and script tend to exceed any standard of necessity.

Contrary to the accusation that some critics level against Tarantinesque violence (in that it beautifies, eroticizes, even glorifies it), the careful stylization that configures these scenes does not attempt to amplify the aesthetic and even affective impressions that they may elicit from the spectator, but to impose on them a certain discipline of perception. Tarantino’s choreographed sequences of inordinate violence reminds us of the old truism that represented violence is hardly the same as actual violence. Not only does represented violence differ from actual violence, but the representation of violence required that it be conceived, perceived, and consumed differently. In other words, the stylization attempts to suggest, at once didactically and playfully, how the spectator is invited to view such performance of violence. Perhaps engrossingly self-referential, not only do his films reference the cinematic universe, but they also set the coordinates for their viewing and critique.

The stylization (based on animation or hyperbolic repetition and intensity) recreates a distance that becomes Tarantino’s primary aesthetic and formal tool, which, instead of mythifying violence, presents it within a specific system of signs. In short, these two sequences in Kill Bill I illustrate how the overt violence in Tarantino’s films is generally codified to signal its own falsity. As some have argued, the overt violence in Tarantino can be considered the most tamed, cinematically speaking, of all the violent elements embedded in his film.

If we broaden our understanding of violence to include the experience of not only shock or outrage but also perplexity, confusion, and doubt, Tarantino’s films are indeed teeming with elements that perform an awaking violence on our perceptive capacities, which have turned either dormant or blindly susceptible to inherited aesthetic norms. Few other films disrupt the order of narrative events more adroitly than Tarantino’s, which constantly interrupt the causal lines of transition that conversely govern the structure of classical cinema. Broadly assuming the form of a jigsaw puzzle, none of his 7 films adopt even the semblance of a linear temporal structure.

Reservoir Dogs arguably presents one of the least disrupted temporalities. The film opens with the lengthy diner scene, in which a group of men drink coffee, smoke, and banter, and ends hours later, when not many of the group remain alive. What is surprising about Reservoir Dog’s more or less linear structure is that the central event that drives the narrative from the opening sequence forward is never shown. (I say more or less linear because on numerous occasions the main narrative line cuts to jump to the past to explicate how some of the individuals end up in the diner at the start of the film.)

After the dinner sequence, the film continues with a car sequence in which Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) are frantically escaping from something or somewhere and speeding to the next destination. Roth’s character is severely wounded, and though he has not lost consciousness he finds himself in blinding, delirium-thrusting pain. He has been shot in the gut. Behind the steering wheel, Mr. White consoles Mr. Orange while nervously trying to decide what the best course of action is in the circumstances. Wasting irrecoverable blood, Mr. Orange lies in the back seat with his head against the left window. The car’s white-leathered seats accentuate the presence of Mr. Orange’s blood pretty everywhere in the back area of the car.

Because of the camera’s still position, the rhythm of this lengthy sequence is set by how Mr. Orange’s blood gradually stains the back area of the car. Tortured by pain, he recoils in his seat. He wants the pain to stop. He wants out. But the static gaze of the camera intensifies the fact that he is indeed going nowhere, and that the pain is getting only worse. For the duration of the sequence, he is stuck there, churning, turning, bending, folding, moving in damning pain.

Captured by a third-person point-of-view camera, the two men talk briefly about the blinding pain, possible survival, and the imminent help from someone named Joe. Something certainly has gone awry, but it is not entirely clear how, where or why.

The gap lingers as it also advances the plot. In fact, one could argue that the gap lingers to structure the plot, which assumes layered form insofar as the gap is preserved.

violence plus repetition minus realism

Continuing the thread on cinema and violence started last week, next I am focusing on how violence is figured, represented and thought in/by Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Some violent scenes in Kill Bill most evidently express that the hyper-stylization they undertake is precisely to deprive them of any lasting or meaningful capacity to shock. The two most eloquent are the sequence in which O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu)’s parents are savagely murdered while she, still a child, hides underneath the bed in which her mother is stabbed numerous time until the blade finally pierces the bed to land inches beside O-Ren Ishii’s head. As the story suggests, the gruesome experience gives birth to the assassin O-Ren Oshii, who soon enough gets her unequivocal revenge by lashing the blade that tears apart the body of the man who killed her mother and ordered the execution of her father.

These lengthy sequence of almost five minutes is animated, and the presence of blood here is considerably more voluminous and seems to be have adopted the ability to leap unimagined surreal heights. The inclusion of animation interrupts further the flow of the film, whose structure is already fragmented into chapters that carry a descriptive title. Tarantino slashes through linearity in the same way as his characters fictionally slash human bodies and things. It is precisely the animation that encapsulates what otherwise would be extremely unbearable scenes, aesthetically and morally, into the possibility of cinematic consumption. It is not an easy sequence by any means, but the animated action stamps it as fiction in very specific terms by which any possibility for transformative shock also gets irrecoverably diminished.

The animated-action demands that the violence be consumed, perceived, understood even, within the parameters of (melo)dramatic, emotive if not almost sentimental, and consequently tamed or domesticated fiction. As Tarantino’s stylization of violence heightens in such scenes and challenges the formal grounds that his previous films had achieved, any potential for shock, let alone moral outrage or deviance, plummets. In other words, just as his films build upon other cinematic traditions to offer inter-filmic works, his own filmography continues to set the signposts for how later films should or can be viewed, read, and even critiqued.

The other sequence of unbridled violence is when The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, goes to Japan to duel with O-Ren Ishii. To do so, Thurman’s character needs to battle with O-Ren Oshii’s modest battalion of furiously armed guards, who, one by one or in a bunch succumb to The Bride’s prodigious sword. Proven invincible, The Bride reaches the final target, O-Ren Ishii, and kills her in a sequence that dramatically changes pace, rhythm, and overall cinematic tone. Privileging long shots, the camera gaze of the duel sequence grows increasingly more static.

The final encounter between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii looks like a serene succession of beautiful paintings. Not unlike the earlier infinitely more frantic shots, these last ones, bathed predominantly in tones of blue, are also carefully constructed. In the first multiple-fight sequence, the camera hardly stays still. The film cuts sometimes gracefully, sometimes choppily to capture all the rapid movements transpiring in front of it. Shots from multiple angles shift places to capture the full magnitude of the fight.

Our eyes may not be able to account precisely for how the fights unfold, but The Bride’s blade strikes down every contender that meets her march: the ground, staircase, narrow pole, and even while taking a high and long leap on the air. Not one corner of the large hall is left untouched by the victims’ blood or covered by their limbs. It is so much, so increasingly over-the-top, that it is undoubtedly absurd. By the end of the mega fight scene, all of O-Ren Ishii’s mob soldiers have lost at least one extremity. They and their severed parts lie scattered in a thick mass of blood.

The exaggeration, undoubtedly, compounds the parodic, if not altogether farcical, under and overtones of the shots. The sequence, it must be said, asks to be taken at once skeptically and seriously. Serious entertainment; dubious drama. Another element that contributes to the farcical sequence of the sheer violence is editing. The sequence is undoubtedly a few minutes too long. The length is accentuated by the countless number of bodies that fall in dramatic quick succession.

The repetition of these bodies neatly uniformed helps to strip them of any individuading trait. Far from being individuals or even the mere shadow of ones, they are killing and dying automata uniformly dressed in white shirts and black suits. Even though the sequence is not animated as the earlier sequence in the movie depicted above, the governing tone of the sequence is one of pretense in which the meticulous choreography of the fights dominates the spotlight of the scenes.

The repetition predicated on the uncomfortably extended length of the sequence once again compounds the farcical composition of the sequence. If repetition sometimes operates to accentuate the subtle or metaphysical difference between one and another, in this sequence, conversely, repetition works to elongate the oppressive accumulation of the same. The repetition cues the audience to keep up, perception-wise, with the fast, thoroughly rhythmic configuration of the sequence while also accepting that there is no need to deem it too seriously.

Despite the vibrant color of the ubiquitous blood as well as the agility of the martial bodies, the repetition structuring the shots and scenes denies the sequence of gruesome violence, any real urgency. The sequence proves just as realist as the earlier animated part in which O-Ren Ishii becomes an orphan.

figuring (visualizing) violence in cinema

I will return to von Trotta’s film in the future, particularly to consider how Heidegger’s philosophy allows us to think (of) cinema. For now, I would like to write some thoughts about another favorite filmmaker of mine, Tarantino.

The question of violence is the specific angle from which I am to discuss part of his filmography in this post and few others to come. I am unsure about the title of this post. Figuring or visualizing fail to conjure up optimally what I am trying to express.

The criticism leveled at Tarantino’s films seldom strikes a balanced position. There is no possible neutrality when it comes to either the auteur or his works. Being enthralled or repelled pretty mush summarizes the more common responses viewers muster at the end of his films. His surreal violent representations in a movie that otherwise purports to be an example of realism, create a schism in the cinematic experience. Viewers rush to make sense of schism morally and emotionally rather than aesthetically.

Tarantino may be many things, but he is foremost a rigorous (as well as overindulgent) cinematic aestheticist. For that reason, his films demand that spectators respond on that level first. The moral and emotional perspectives ought to and will inevitably follow, but they must surrender first place. His films, as does perhaps any piece of representative work, contain some of the parameters by which their very critique will be rendered. That said, we’d be grossly mistaken to file Tarantino as a filmmaker who privileges form or style over narrative and character development. Undoubtedly there are plenty of the two, but his movies are also propelled by sophisticated character substance and narrative flow.

Following Daneyian wisdom, his characters remain always an enigma, and part of materializing that enigma drives the movie satisfyingly away from its starting sequence–away to places of saturated senses and even meaning. Even though there is plenty that thematize and represent the absurd, Tarantino is no Becket: a great deal does happen in his films. Because of this trifecta (character, narrative, and cinematic style/form), one can be simultaneously marveled, troubled, and fully entertained by any one of his 7 movies.

With his last two movies, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Tarantino has proven that his style is hardly merely stylistic bravado, self-indulgent bluff, or manipulative affectation. In fact, one could argue that the crimson dyed sequences of violence in which falling bodies multiply exponentially, represent the most accessible form of violence in his films. If films that regard themselves as dignified or sober portrayals of violence always aim for strictly measured realism, Tarantino’s take on the overtly violent shots, conversely, straddles with discipline between realism and myth, and thus situate such violence firmly in the realm of fictional representation. In other words, such scenes make their artificial character disruptively undeniable.

Either by the use of color, formal style, or basic content, the sequences of overt violence remind the audience that they are not what they pretend to be. And by doing so, these predictably and almost parodic scenes of violence lose their ability to shock, perplex, and ultimately fail to alter the way perception, inside and outside cinema, occurs. We may choose to cover our eyes, but that is precisely because such scenes of gruesome violence are meant to disorder the realm of the visible.

This failure to shock, however, remains in itself perplexing because if Tarantino’s entire filmography can assume comfortably any claim is that it shocks, perplexes, and ultimately does alter how perception unfolds and the realm of visibility is organized; that is, how one views the universe inside and outside cinema. As it was suggested already, however, to the extent that his films confront the inner and outer makeup of perception, they do so in ways other than the loud and excessive scenes of violence, in which blood flows, splashes, and squirts upward and downward, defying gravity.

In Film Fables, Rancière analyzes a diverse gamut of films and filmmakers that have left their footprint in the variegated tradition of cinema. Examining Fritz Lang’s transition from his earlier phase led by M to his later years working for large Hollywood production powerhouses, Rancière argues that a shake-up in the realm of visibility can be evinced. Rancière describes that Lang “replays the same story of the chase of a psychopathic killer at two different ages of the visible: the first in M, where maps and magnifying glasses, inventories and drag-nets trap the murderer and prosecute him in a theatrical court; the second in While the City Sleeps, where all these accessories have disappeared and been replaced by a machine of vision, the television that places Mobley ‘face to face’ with the murderer and transforms an imaginary capture into a weapon for a real capture” (18).

Following Rancière’s thoughts on Lang’s two films, I propose that Tarantino’s films allow us to grapple not only with cinema’s capacity to represent violence (to render it visible) but also with cinema as a constitutively violent medium. Future posts will explore how Tarantino’s films may think and figure cinema as a constitutively violent medium.

the cigarette as a cinematic object in hannah arendt

What do I mean by a cinematic object? I hope to muster a tentative answer in this post.

First, I would like to elaborate a few more thoughts about the aesthetic connection that I traced between thinking and dying in the previous post. To begin, it is important to highlight the term dwell, which Heidegger deploys to speak of language as the house of dwelling that relates person to Being. The idea of dwelling suggests a space in which or at which one can reside, spend time, continue to be or being. Could we say that language is where time becomes materialized or spatialized, and thus ceases to be pure negativity? The verb presupposes a spatial configuration that is repository-like, presenting a discernible depth, where the surface-level appearance of things is hardly the most defining aspect. It follows that his magnum opus Being and Time, could also be Being in Time, as Being cannot happen outside the duration or passing of Time. That is, one approaches the truth gradually by journeying through the layered distance of things and in the passing of time.

In both his books and lectures, Graham Harman reminds us that for Heidegger Being represents the start and end of philosophical thought. And “Letter on Humanism” affords us a glimpse into this paradigmatic view, which largely informed Heidegger’s philosophical work. Meaning does not lie on flat surfaces, but rather in that which withdraws from immediate perception. There are levels to things, including, of course, people. Think of his tool analysis, for instance, of which Harman offers an unconventional yet re-energized interpretation. Not all the features of a thing appear or become accessible to the perceiving individual. Harman’s treatment of Heidegger’s tool analysis takes it a step further to claim that the things hide qualities not only to the perceiving individual but also to other things, that is, not only to things (or beings) that bear consciousness. [I will continue to develop this paragraph in future posts.]

I view the cigarette in von Trotta’s film as a cinematic object insofar as the cigarette’s meaning in the many scenes in which it appears cannot be exhausted to operate as a unified, non-contradictory entity of signification. Cinematic objects do not simply amount to narratable signification. It is an object rather than a metaphor or even a figure because the role it is playing in each of the scenes as well as the film as a whole cannot be entirely deciphered or decodified. What the cigarette is in the film becomes decidedly inexhaustible. At the same time, in its varied cinematic articulations, the cigarette assembles aesthetic effects and impressions for the viewer.

Thus I propose that cinema does not express itself only or mainly through metaphors or figures that advance an intelligible narrative–of meaning or even lack thereof. Despite commonly held beliefs by those who produce cinema and those who consume it, films do not exist only to tell stories. Aesthetically speaking, cinema is composed of objects, cinematic objects that assemble a tenuous whole. In other words, I ask us to view cinema’s coming into being not just to represent some other or something other or to tell a story in an inevitably mimetic operation in which the film mimics or prefigures something outside the film.

thinking as dying in hannah arendt

In my last post I offered a quick and concise summary of Heidegger’s idea on thinking from his essay “Letter on Humanism.” I noted primarily his concern that philosophical thinking is defined, thought about in relation to scientific practice, always as a way to prove its legitimacy vis-a-vis the latter. Just as Plato and Aristotle viewed thinking as a techne, an operation that becomes action and deed, consequences of quantifiable, verifiable results. Heidegger, on the other hand, reminds us that thinking falls in between poeisis and praxis.

If von Trotta cinematically represents thinking in any particular way, it is far from rendering it scientific. Yes, there are several moments in the film in which Hannah Arendt and other characters discuss evidence and accuracy. We also see the countless piles of documents from the trial of Eichmann. They besiege her office space. With rigor, Hannah Arendt reviews the statements from the trial, as she begins to focus in the expanding gap between what Eichmann says and who he seems to be, and the colossal atrocities of his deeds. Arendt’s thoughts dwell in the gap, and her thoughts are produced to make some intelligible sense of that gap. Is the banality of evil the result of her dwelling in that seemingly irreconcilable gap? This is matter for another post.

The film also presents other several moments of thinking, of her lying, sitting or standing alone accompanied only by silence and a cigarette. On two occasions we see her lying on a divan in her UPW apartment. On the coffee table near the divan we see an ashtray for the lit cigarette that remains still yet gently burning between her two fingers. She looks calm, asleep if not in a state nearing or resembling death. Without being unnecessarily extended, the duration of the scene does make us wonder, albeit briefly, whether she is indeed asleep. Soon she placidly moves the right hand closer to her mouth to smoke the cigarette. Her eyes still shut, she inhales. She is very much awake. No, she is not asleep, let alone dead. She is thinking. And yet thinking happens almost as if she were performing no deed or action. Thinking happens as if life were inadvertently slipping away from her.

The other scenes in which Hannah Arendt is thinking, reflecting or contemplating show her sitting against the window of the house in upstate NY. Fixing her gaze on the glass, she smokes and thinks. Once again, nothing much seems to be happening, yet we know that Arendt is producing thoughts. These various scenes illustrate Heidegger’s idea on thinking:

“Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man. But all working or effecting lies in Being and is directed toward beings. Thinking, in contrast, lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplishes this letting.” Then, he concludes: “Thinking is engagement by Being for Being” (217-8).

It seems to me that von Trotta’s recreation of Hannah Arendt’s thinking moments dramatize Heidegger’s own ideas on thinking: thinking’s autonomous validity is perched on thinking itself as it connects  person to Being. It seems that for von Trotta thinking also bears the aesthetic of dying or death, a quietude of body and mind that nears the appearance of death itself. In other words, these scenes suggest that there is an actual loss that comes with thinking, a destruction of self. Only under such conditions of destruction, loss and death, can thinking connect person to Being.

thinking (as) philosophy

I would like to follow up on some brief, unfinished reflections I laid out in the previous post, in which I discussed how the cinematic representation of thinking signifies more poeisis than praxis.  Here I would like to take a step away from the film per se to discuss instead how thinking is theorized and aestheticized in the film. To avoid an inconveniently long text, the post will consist of two or three parts.

In “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger notes that “Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (Basic Writings 217).

Heidegger continues to explain that, whereas Plato and Aristotle viewed thinking as techne, “a process of reflection in service to doing and making” his text proposes a way of understanding reflection “from the perspective of praxis and poeisis” (218). Thus Heidegger insists that, taken as such thinking is not necessarily practical. He goes so far as to regard “The characterization of thinking as theoria and the determination of known as theoretical behavior” as a reactionary position that attempts “to rescue thinking and preserve its autonomy over against acting and doing” (218).

For Heidegger, the need to press argumentative exigency upon the autonomy of thinking apart from that of acting and doing stems from philosophy’s ongoing struggle to legitimate itself vis-a-vis the solid standing of the sciences, to which truth and logic are immediately attributed. Philosophy justifies itself and its main activity by stressing the fact that thinking is not structurally tied in to action or deed, nor it is merely a premature phase that becomes fulfilled upon the subsequent completion of acting and doing. Heidegger’s explanation for rejecting this reactive attempt to think philosophy’s position always in relation to that of the sciences centers on the following point:

“Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man” (217).

Heidegger’s essay carries the implication that philosophy should examine thinking at the heart of philosophy while firmly sustaining that philosophical thinking is not necessarily unscientific for not being science. And to show that it is not unscientific does not mean that it ought to be discursively and methodologically scientistic. The process that ensues is hardly dialectical. The tragic consequence of failing to dislodge philosophical thinking from the imperious place of the sciences would be, Heidegger specifies, that “Being, as the element of thinking, is abandoned by the technical interpretation of thinking” (219).

The cigarette (in Hannah Arendt) as metaphor?

I would like to comment further on an observation I made in the previous post. In “The banality of evil” I traced a connection between how the presence of the cigarette is deployed in the movie and the act of thinking that engulfs Hannah Arendt in many of the film’s scenes. I claimed that the changing presence of the cigarette in the scenes materializes, namely grants sensuous texture to act of thinking, which is, arguably, a challenge for evocative representation, let alone dramatization.

I stressed the point that von Trotta decides against cinematic shortcuts such as the reliance on narrative (dialogue or voiceover) or suggestions or allusions for the representation of her thinking process. Both the camera’s gaze and montage choices do not undercut the integrity of the numerous shots in which Hannah Arendt is situated thinking, enveloped in silence, solitude, and cigarette smoke.

In the few paragraphs that address this point, I made a conscious effort to avoid associating metaphorically the cinematic use of the cigarettes with the dramatization of her thinking. The cigarette is not deployed, I interpret, to stand as a metaphor of HA’s acts of thinking. The former does not stand particularly for the universality of the latter; the former does not pull down to concrete reality the bodiless abstraction of the latter. Because metaphors recreate a parallel relation of assumed equality. The viability of the assumed equality between the parts of the metaphor hinges on content superseding form. The form of the metaphor never changes so that the contents or substances of the metaphor assume center stage. On the other hand, and bearing a bit of a circular logic, it is precisely the effacement of form that permits the assumption of equality between the parts of the metaphor that enables the metaphor to function as such.

At the same time, it is the flattened two-part form of the metaphor that concedes that the content be compressed into an inseparable two-part one. The metaphor is a tricky rhetorical operation, whose inner makings deserve more carefully and rigorously laid out thoughts than the ones I am assembling here. For now, I end with the following brief reflections:

I am usually skeptical of the unduly trusted explicative prowess of the metaphors as they too quickly satisfy, at least in appearance, the need for clarity and concreteness. It seems to me that the metaphor succeeds more intrepidly when it fails, precisely when the two parts of the metaphor cannot be collapsed or the two parts surrender to the unshackling that inhabits the metaphor’s structure. Upon the failure of the metaphor to operate conventionally, a gap or opening emerges whereby the differences between the two parts remain not only evident but also relevant. The parts engage in inexact relations of similarity and dissimilarity, and in that inexactitude a balance rises that allows for the metaphor to remain an irreducible rhetorical operation. To think of the metaphor as the rhetorical way to ground abstract concepts in concrete reality means to hardly think of the metaphor at all.

Having said this, I still do not interpret the presence of the cigarette in the film as a metaphor for Hannah Arendt’s thinking. What, then?

 

The Banality of Evil

Before I say more about Hannah Arendt’s thesis, which emerged from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), I would like to describe my and J’s response to Margarethe Von Trotta’s eponymous film.

The film makes the director’s deep admiration for Hannah Arendt clear early on. The first scenes show AH moving from one room to another in her warmly lit, intellectually furnished apartment on the Upper West Side where books coexist with wood color furniture, and silence accentuates the steady staccato of the typewriter. Far from being a hagiography, the film expresses great sympathy for the thinker without necessarily simplifying the many tensions that made her a complex, and at times difficult, person. It does present her like an intellectual heroine too ahead of her peers, who failed to understand both her critical perspective and intellectual project because, perhaps, only temporal distance could afford such peers the ability to see the Holocaust in the way HA was approaching the subject. The temporality of her book on Eichmann and the emergence of her theory of the banality of evil is at once unfortunate and inevitable (or fortunate and contingent) and from that impossible confluence emerge the reasons for her intellectual heroism: to write that which her contemporaries are not yet prepared to read or hear.

In most scenes we see her with a cigarette that gently shifts positions from her mouth to her fingers. The cigarette moves almost like an added appendage to HA’s hand. To her, smoking occurs as naturally as does thinking. Cigarettes will remain ubiquitous in the film, filling the shots with mild smoke-trails whose fragrance and warmth become almost tangible for the viewer at times. Rather than a distraction, cigarettes decorate every scene as a way to materialize the act of thinking. But the ideas that are forming prior to their typing on paper probably don’t move as gently and aimlessly as the smoke that lingers from the burning tip of her cigarette. If von Trotta faced a central conundrum at the start of the film, it may have been how film can dramatize the act of thinking.

In Hannah Arendt, the production of thought is not merely suggested, narrated, described, alluded to, or textualized. It happens, many times throughout the film. We see HA thinking while lying down and smoking. We see her sitting against the window somewhere in upstate NY, thinking while smoking. More thinking while walking and, yes, smoking. Etc. The movies does not only thematize the thoughts a brave woman living in tumultuous times, produced; but the film also takes seriously the task of dramatizing the moments in which such thoughts are generated, produced, had. Thinking is engrossing and isolating and solitary, as a briefly appearing Martin Heidegger says in the film: “Thinking is a solitary endeavor.”

Solitary, yes, but never just abstract or immaterial. The universe of eidos in which Hannah the character —and at times also the film— resides is a richly sensuous world and constantly nears a textured existence that the ever shortening presence of the cigarette illustrates so eloquently. Just as the cigarette morphs into various material permutations, the thoughts of HA move from amorphous existence to intelligible and tactile presence on the manuscript.

On a final note, for now, is that the film is far from perfect, but no less worth the viewer’s time for that reason. J felt that the acting proved inconsistent. The actress who plays HA, Barbara Sukowa, is wonderful, but the acting of the secondary characters can be less nuanced and even jarring at times. In future posts I will include a closer analysis of the film’s aesthetic composition and camera use, but to close the present post, I would like to address briefly yet another angle of how the film tackles HA’s theory of the banality of evil.

J felt that, at least insofar as the way in which the film portrays the subject matter and its context, the banality of evil does not make explicit that many historical atrocities legitimate themselves through social mechanisms deeply entrenched in basic tribalism. For him, the banality of evil, a theory ever so abstract and universal, fails to explicate that social atrocities driven by racial, cultural, and religious causes, require that one group pits itself against the dehumanized or animalized other. While I concur with some parts of his objections, I disagree with the presupposition that for being too abstract and universal, the idea of the banality of evil fails to explain concretely how so-called collective evil deeds happen in history. Universality does inherently or structurally preclude, exclude or contradict, let alone negate, historical concreteness.

Discussing Cinema: Víctor Erice

Forty years after his first film, Victor Erice is still regarded as one of Spain’s premier filmmakers. Despite his compact filmography composed of three films, Erice continues to attract the interest of not only film critics but also scholars of the Spanish civil war and the repressive decades under Franco. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) was filmed just two years before the passing of Franco and the end of his autocratic government. The South (1983), on the other hand, was produced ten years later, during democratic times, albeit transitional and unstable ones. Both movies are set during the 1940s, just a few years after the end of the civil war and the institution of the Nationalist government. Even though the plot of either film does not involve the Civil War in any direct way, the consequences of the war quietly haunt the narrative and physical space of the films.

The Spirit of the Beehive tells the story of Ana and her family, composed of Isabel, her older sister, the father, Fernando, and the mother. The ages of Ana and Isabel are not specified, but they are about 5 and 9 respectively. The South also presents the story of girl named Estrella, but this time the voice-over of the adult Estrella serves to recount and thus organize the memories of her past.

The films are teeming with hints to the internal war that has separated friends, families, and lovers. Although no one would dispute that both movies remain prime examples of realist cinema, the more prevalent qualifications to describe them over the years have been: poetic, deeply symbolical, allegorical, mysterious, enigmatic, and inconclusive. That is because despite Erice’s calm and bare cinematic aesthetics, his films are also imbued with reticent, almost secretive expressiveness. The perceptual experiences and thematic possibilities are heightened upon what appears to be a relatively simple plot, involving the coming of age of a child protagonist in the midst of a family very quietly rife with unmet emotions that are never confessed.

Rather than attempting an exhaustive analysis of the films, I focus on the mise en scene and other forms of spatial organization. Erice’s camera prefers long, deep and static shots, which sometimes precede and linger after actions by the characters or mere movement occurs. This type of lingering framing may contribute to nurturing an enigmatic atmosphere throughout the films. But it seems to be that Erice’s preference for long and deep shots is not simply for diegetic or thematic purposes. It is primarily a formal choice that alters the overall montage of the films.

Erice’s method of framing and cutting his shots and sequences does not reflect a desire to generate a coherent and unified narrative about the child protagonists and their families. Neither is his method one that merely attempts to obfuscate and complicate the narrative out of a modernist preference for the fragmentary. Without sacrificing the diegetic flow, Erice’s elliptical method enhances the aesthetic composition of his shots and sequences to afford them a painting-like quality that strangely enhances their polysemic character.