Lecture 14 - 15 - Barry Spence notes PDF

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Barry Spence notes...

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Media Week: Atwood and CM Clips/Movie 1. Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Episodes Hulu 2. What we should consider about the first season’s episodes a. It’s relationship to the novel i. Tricky: Can’t demand a literalist interpretation b. How it works as an audio visual text i. Each medium it’s embodied by must be considered ii. How it is presented, narration style in the novel for example 1. Story versus narrative discourse (account of events) 2. It’s not about story and narrative discourse really, it’s more about the fiction. a. Faithful in the medium i. Themes, motifs, story, characters, plots method told and built is important. 1. Presentation and told is important 3. Four categories a. Mise-en-scene: Put in the scene: Theatre: all elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the settings and props, lighting, costumes and makeup and figure behavior i. Casting issues 1. Janine not a problem 2. Commander (Fred), Serena, Rita, Nick, Moira, Luke, and Hannah? a. Fred and Serena (more patriarchal when heard with Waterford) i. Much younger and attractive b. Casting decisions are extremely important in audiovisual text. i. The show casts Serena as a young visually appealing wife and shows her through her memories as a passionate/ novel portrays her visually through the use of the cane and her arthritis. Serena: sexual partner to commander 1. Missionary? No, a. More of an active reinforcer of sexual activity with Handmaid 2. Cane 3. Offred wonders if Serena uses her as an armrest 4. Feeble and no sexual or romantic dynamic

ii.

→ jealousy towards Offred in the novel. a. One reason (cast younger) might be to enhance the tension during the Ceremony and to make more visceral the jealousy and resentment she feels towards Offred. 5. Another reason might be that the writers are sensitive to avoid evoking contemporary revulsion toward the familiar pattern of: older man replaces older wife with younger women. This is arguably eliminated by both Serena and Offred with acts of roughly similar ages. Dilution of novel 1. Weave in resonance

ii. Projection b. Cinematography: Manipulations of the film strip by the camera in the shooting phase and by the laboratory in the developing phase. i. Soft focus ii. Evolved directly in telling the story c. Editing: The task of selecting and joining camera takes, and the set of techniques that governs the relations among shots. i. Shot in breaks ii. Editing: The art and science of arrangement 1. Editing moving the story forward and getting story information. d. Sound: the design of music, dialogue, effects, etc. 4. How characters are realized. (Note: See above for Serena) i. Why do you think the writers chose to soften and make more sympathetic Rita’s character? (Absorb Cora, who is nicer to Offred) ii. Rita is salty, but an ally of Offred friendly, etc. 5. Remember that the novel is fairly clear in constructing its dystopian vision in a way that includes the notion of a white supremacist movement. a. All Children of Ham (AA people) have been relocated. i. Cinematography - circumscribed 1. Drone and Offred’s point of view 2. Terror of what is going on 3. Resonant with politics today --- W supremacy 6. The setting is also controlled by aspects of mentioned categories (except for sound)

a. We get POV of Serena (subject) and Offred as well as memories. (in parallel with other in subjectity) i. Serena cries which is strange with post sex activity, anguish about witnessing the Ceremony b. Balance with narrative attention with the women’s perspective c. Serena more sympathetic than Offred, who is much more sassy than the conditioned. d. The Novel makes extensive use of stream of consciousness (or interior monologue): it gives Offred’s subjective experience through language and that is meant to depict the continuous flow of her inner self. i. Word salad: Working of her cognition e. Novel: show follows method i. Fundamental resource for telling stories ii. Show: subjective experience 1. Memories: soft focus and slow motion a. Subjectivity may be from Serena. 7. Offred is not as subjugated in the novel a. Moira is not as rebellious b. O returns the stare of Serena multiple times in ways that suggest the challenge of equal, not of someone beaten into submission c. Allies: Rita, Nick, Ofglen, Ambassador’s assistant (messenger)) 8. At least two storylines - two subjective POV’s a. Offred b. Waterford 9. Pink symbol - Upright triangle (LGBTQ, transgressors of gender) a. SILENCE=DEATH b. 1987 c. Neon sign in two colors d. “In the late 1980s, six gay activists, frustrated by the Reagan administration’s silence about the AIDS epidemic that was killing thousands, formed the SILENCE=DEATH Project. Employing the pink triangle emblem, which the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear in the concentration camps as a badge of humiliation, they created a logo and slogan to protest the oppression of gay people. In their work, however, the triangle was upright, not inverted as in the Nazi era, and became a symbol of resistance. The activists later joined the protest group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). William Olander, a curator at the New Museum in New York and member of ACT UP, invited a group of artists— who would later form the collective Gran Fury—to hang this neon SILENCE=DEATH sign in the museum’s window as a beacon of hope and solidarity during the summer of 1987.” e. ~Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden f. Nazi one is upside down** i. Why not mimic Nazi if talk about W Supremacy 10. Sparagmos – (from the Ancient Greek verb: “to rend, to tear, to pull to pieces”)

is a form of sacrificial dismemberment. Group frenzy is usually associated with it. a. Baccae novel (tragos) has an example, which is arguably the most famous example. b. Dionysus (most complicated god, frenzy god, etc.) - he was dismembered. i. Masculine identity ii. Fluid gender persona c. Salvaging - particicution → accused rapist (Mayday guy) was dismembered as suggested. i. Atwood is conscious about the Baccae (look Wikipedia for novel details by searching for Sparagmos) d. Diluted violence i. Worth knowing concept even though may not be sparagmos Children of Men (Please refer to Lecture 15) 1. A 2006 British-American production, the film is set in Britain in 2027. a. The film includes powerful performances by Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, and Michael Caine, among others. b. We should note both the extraordinary cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki and the powerful, highly eclectic soundtrack that includes a wide range of music sampling such as Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and that is held into a thematic unity by the motif of John Tavener’s Fragments of a Prayer. i. Second sequence before tunnel: Long shot ii. Explosion: motif in Hiroshima iii. Religious music in Tavener. iv. Realism: Story CM: more transcendent level that it is deeply spiritually religious in relation to Christianity. 1. Built in fabric of film: newspaper of terror i.e. 2. Instantaneous cuts in action films a. Documentarian approach to CM. c. To appreciate this film fully we need to consider the seamless integration of all the stylistic components: mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. d. This second sequence is an ideal example of how film is much more than simply an audio-visual experience. We don’t just hear and see, our entire body registers and responds to stimuli. Our sense of proprioception is fully engaged in comprehending this raw experience of Theo running through the streets. i. Proprioception: Camera witness: Sense of what we don’t think about in terms of five senses: Your whole body perception of self in space along with the five senses.

1. Film creates: what it would be there or to be Theo. 2. Fully engage raw experience. ii. Cinesthetic body - our body that responds to the immersive power of cinema through the sensory receptivity of our whole body, not just having five senses in play and even tasting through the intensified process of seeing and hearing (a quasi synthetic process) - that ultimately allows us to connect with those onscreen who are different from us. iii. This is a central aspect of this film: the experience of otherness. 1. Cuaron has created a movie that is primarily about the travails of refugees 2. This otherness is depicted in the film through differences in terms of socio-economic class, national origin, spoken language, skin color, and other aspects of merely physical appearance, religious practice, cultural identity. a. No translation of languages on purpose b. Experience it e. Themes i. Immigration ii. Infertility 1. These themes both motivate the narrative and supply the storyworld with its dystopian dimension a. 1984 - horror of the book b. CM and clip - hard to watch without being horrified. i. Viscerally painful ii. Resonance about state power and suffering and negativity (brutality) 2. These themes both motivate the narrative and supply the storyworld with its dystopian dimension. 3. We might think of this movie in post-apocalyptic terms, but it’s probably more accurate to call it dystopian: creating a world that is a “bad place.” a. It’s not particularized in the same way as HT, only Britain in control and the order is not reassuring. b. Dystopian genre limits is about. c. Kee is a beacon of hope, possibilities. 4. One related question would be: how does the concept of “hope” figure in the film? (look above) 2. Kee giving birth: is suffused with spiritual overtones. The sequence evokes the birth of Christ through the ethereal religious music that comes in at the moment of the child emerges.

a. The soundtrack here, as in many places in the film, is heavily layered with the voices and cries of humans, and other effects. i. In the sequence we hear the rising cacophony of numerous dogs in the background, which gathers greater intensity as the baby comes forth leads into the Fragments of Prayer motif and ultimately incorporates the sonic epiphany of neighing of an unseen horse ii. This nativity picks up elements of earlier barn scene when Kee reveals her pregnant belly (Christian symbolism) 1. Pull my finger: Jasper: merciless brutality: antithesis of civilization and representation. 2. Caging of non English speakers 3. In many ways, the primary focus of the film is the development of Theo as an individual. He serves not only as guide to Kee, as a sort of moral compass for the film, but maybe even symbolically as a kind of archangel. a. “Theo” is related to the New Testament Greek word for ”of God”– Θεός. b. We notice that he serves a pervasive caretaker role: consider the way he tells the Fish that he has bad breath; or the way he tells the guard he has something in his teeth. c. Also, the movie is filled with animals, particularly dogs. All the animals, dogs and cats, are drawn to Theo, even when the function of the dog is to act as forbidding guard. d. Dogs are often associated with the maintenance of (dystopian) state tyranny—think of the use of dogs in the Jim Crow South or in the Nazi concentration camps. e. Kee: Key i. Attributes: caretaker, etc. ii. Theo animal lover, morally upright figure. f. Animal abuse activism and condemnation of state power 4. In conclusion: a. Concern of humanity: See through violence and other currents are happening in the film. b. Abuse of refugees and camps c. Give experience how that whole realistic terrain can speak to other cultural and spiritual realities there are....