Men In Love With Images
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under
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Cinema of France,
Cinema of Portugal,
Hollywood | Tags:
Alfred Hitchcock,
Body Double,
Brian de Palma,
Chris Marker,
Jean Luc Godard,
La Jetée,
Les Carabiniers,
Manoel de Oliveira,
Obsession,
The Strange Case of Angelica,
Vertigo |
[8] Comments
“To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares; to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existence of a ghost)”
– The Invention of Morel (1940, Adolfo Bioy Casares)
October 21, 2012 at 9:33 pm
I strongly recommend you watch “Hayat Var / My Only Sunshine” by Reha Erdem. Apart from being a superb film, it has some of the most haunting, poetic images I’ve seen of late.
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January 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm
THanks for the recco, Mohit. WIll keep an eye out. Happy New Year.
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October 23, 2012 at 12:42 am
Loved this. Don’t know the last and third-to-last films, though I think I recognize the third-to-last. There are so many movies that could fit this paradigm, aren’t there? Indeed, theoretically one could say all movies do…
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October 23, 2012 at 12:43 am
Precisely, Joel, precisely. All movies do.
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November 30, 2012 at 1:13 pm
All movies? I interpreted this as being about the traditional feminist idea of the male gaze and objectification, which obviously doesn’t include all movies. Are you talking about something more general?
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January 1, 2013 at 5:17 pm
Hi Ronak,
Let me copy what I said elsewhere:
What I mean when I said all films are essentially about men falling in love with ghosts is to ask what is film making – sincere one, at least – but the author (male or female) having an amorous relationship with her/his images. Yeah, that’s a general view and these images above only pertain to a specific situation.
The male gaze angle is pretty much there in most of the films above.
Cheers, Happy New Year.
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December 5, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Even i am quite confused that you should say many movies fit this paradigm. Because even as a cursory look at the images would reveal, all these “men” are peeping-toms in love with(or troubled with) “images” of women dead/lost/imaginary. And all share a Hitchcockian influence dont they? I am not sure about La Carabiniers or Strange Case Of Angelica because i havent watched them(or if you’d like it, my efforts at braving the web for some hints were not so fruitful). But surely La Jetee and Obsession have obvious Vertigo influences, the former being a not so noticable one and the latter..well…a not so subtle one. Although i havent watched Body Double either, that shot of the window through the camera lens harks back to Rear Window right? And then there is the theatre screen with a lady in the bathtub in the Godard movie and a woman captured in what looks like a video recorder in Strange case of Angelica, also point to falling in love with women(or ghosts if you will) via artificial medium(or voyeurism, simply put). All this rightly falls neatly into the pigeon hole you hinted via the quote. And here i am bewildered how someone could draw patterns out of such a confounding variety of movies and relate them all beautifully to such a telling quote. Brilliant man! :D
Btw, is the Godard movie also a tribute to hitchcock? Because given the degree to which the Cahiers critics extolled Hitchcock and his methods, it is surprising how the man who had spawned way too many imitations and tributes eluded Godard.
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January 1, 2013 at 5:13 pm
Thanks for those notes, Adarsh!
What I mean when I said all films are essentially about men falling in love with ghosts is to ask what is film making – sincere one, at least – but the author (male or female) having an amorous relationship with her/his images. Yeah, that’s a general view and these images above only pertain to a specific situation.
No, I wouldn’t call Les Carabiniers a Hitchcock tribute. It’s examination of images and our relationship to them locates it closer to critical theory than pop filmmaking.
Cheers and a happy new year!
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