Rush 6: On the River Kwai

The shot of the four officers on the ferry coincides with a pivotal assertion of western values. Ostentatiously, these values are military order, "proper" hierarchy, and the engineering expertise of a "civilized" culture. However, this attitude hides an authoritarian root. While claiming to reassert Britishness, Nicholson is reasserting is own power, autonomy, and authority as a military officer, due to nothing but hierarchy. The shot serves to emphasize this power dynamic by showing the officers physically lift themselves out of the water, the environment the enlisted men are immersed in. Furthermore, the rails of the ferry boat are like a protective cage. There is a visceral separation created by the composition of the shot. Indeed, it is not only the separation of the officers from their men, it is the separation of Nicholson above all. The depth created by the shot places Nicholson firmly in the foreground, as the other officers occlude each other at various times but Nicholson is totally untouched. He is apart from the three-dimensionality of the scene, he is an abstract ideal of the West presiding over the disorder in the jungle.

Rush 9: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Apricot

The two clips being compared here are conversely related. In Spotless Mind, the narrating voice is speaking on screen, but in the past, the "wrong" time logically. In Apricot, the voice is happening in the "right" time that it should be coming from, but it is not shown being spoken on screen as it should. In Apricot, we see a fracture between substance and subject that should not logically be there; in Spotless we see a union of two different subjects, (two different categories of Joel, past and present), pushed together into one substance. Zupancic talks about this difference on page 28:

"In comic consciousness, the substance is not alienated from the self or the subject (as it is in the "unhappy consciousness"), it is alienated from itself and this is the only way it comes to self-consciousness and to life in the strict meaning of the word. Comedy is not the story of the alienation of the subject, it is the story of the alienation of the substance, which has become the subject."

Apricot's diegetic anomaly illustrates in a literal way the substance being alienated from the subject, what Zupancic dubs "unhappy consciousness." However, the clip from Spotless Mind has a substance (the on-screen presence of Joel) being alienated from itself by behaving in a way that contradicts its placement in time and space. The universal/abstract concepts of memory and time-linearity become concrete, manipulatable, fluid.

While this dynamic is emphasized specifically by Joel narrating physically in the logically "wrong" time, it is really the general comedic essence of the film, present throughout in the concept of erasing a human's memory. The absolute nature of the past is flipped to become a medium through which humanity with all of its habits, fears, personality quirks, addictions, etc. becomes a universal constant, which of course creates hilarity and unexpected collisions. In Apricot, the past and the present exchange rapidly and mingle, but the past is still the past and the present is still the present. The characters are struggling to unite the chasm between the two in their own human experience of them. The two films both deal with time and memory on the one hand and human experience and flaws on the other, but only in Eternal Sunshine are they flipped in the way Zupancic describes comedy.

Cinematically, the directors of the two films guide the audience to understand what pattern they are working in. In Apricot, the presence of non-diegetic ambient music throughout, overlapping between past and present tense cuts, creates a dreamlike unity of tone. Along with the parallelism in several of the cuts, it prevents the "disembodied" voice from seeming funny to watchers by creating an even, smoothed out experience. Thus the disembodiment of the voice blends with the music as just another layer that the audience has a category for. However, in Spotless there is no such atmosphere, making the sudden appearance of the formerly intra-diegetic voice-over seem startling and absurd in a beautifully subversive way.

Rush 8: Malcovich

For Craig, being with Maxine would be the union of the two sides of the Mobius strip.

He can't be with Maxine by being Craig so he "goes around the strip" to become John Malcovich. It looks like this solved his problem for a while, but then he gets a phone call from Lester. He realizes that now he can't be with Maxine by being John Malcovich. So he tries to go back around and be Craig, thinking that this time he will be successful.

But in a very powerful and summarizing scene, as he falls out of Malcovich, Maxine drives away with Lottie, and Craig is on the wrong side of the chasm. He shouts out that he will be Malcovich again, still believing that this will get him the chance to be with her. He has gone round and round the Mobius strip and Maxine is still on the "opposite side" at the end.

In the diegetic world of this film, Craig's efforts to win Maxine literally alienate his substance from itself, as he has to rapidly alternate between physically being someone else and physically being himself. More broadly, the universal idea of "getting to be inside someone else" becomes the concrete here, a physical activity that the characters engage in. The physical action of it in turn becomes the universal, the principle and factor that rules all human social/sexual/romantic relationships in the film.

Rush 7 - Analytical Paper brainstorm

Which one film on our "schedule" page would you choose to write about at this point (whether or not we've seen it yet)? 

La Jetee.

Which one other film or television series would you also like to write about (in conjunction with the above choice)?  

Richard Linklater's film Waking Life.

Which broader issue or topic might you link your analysis to?  

Memories vs. dreams as narrative tools, how they are portrayed similarly or differently on screen, how the protagonist exists in relation to them, how their treatment on screen compares to real life perception of them.

Which specific segment(s) of your first selection might you choose to focus on at this point, and which aspects of cinematic form (e.g. our four categories) strike you as particularly pertinent?  

Specifically on shots in which the main character is actively living "in the past." Diegesis and mise en scene would probably be relevant here. 

Rush 5: Hamlet

"To sleep, perchance to dream..."

This famous quote falls directly in the middle of Hamlet's even more famous soliloquy, and is used to great dramatic and cinematic effect in the Olivier film adaptation. In terms of arc: the comma between these clauses is used to create the turning point of the scene at which Hamlet realizes that suicide is not a viable choice in light of the unknown nature of the afterlife. His objective as a character is now bent purely towards revenge and this line is the pivot point on which this transition hinges. This is shown through the climactic increase in tension and pacing, as well as through assemblage, as a sudden highly contrasting cut startles the audience out of the lull of sleep just as Hamlet does to himself. The mise-en-scene of the first shot ("to sleep") is extremely close up and shaky, cutting to a long shot ("perchance to dream") that shows Hamlet steady and poised. The non-diegetic music swells out of nowhere after he says "to sleep," creating a similar dramatic startling effect to go with the cut.

This line of monologue echoes Antigone in its consideration of death and the afterlife, as well as that of duty to the dead. Antigone expresses multiple times that she is more afraid of the consequences from the gods if she should fail to step up than of the retribution of Creon. Similarly, Hamlet realizes that the "dreams" of death are much more fearful to face than the perils of his mission. However we never see Antigone weighing the two in this way, and thus Hamlet comes across as more weak, flawed, and ultimately more relatable as a character.

Rush 4: Wonderful Life

In the ending of It's A Wonderful Life, one interesting visual parallel that bridges the gap between the worlds of Bedford Falls and Pottersville occurs when George wipes away the snow and ice that covers the dates of his brother's brief life. The film had begun George's story by recounting how he saved Harry from drowning underneath ice, uncovering his body from the ice as it were. The way he uncovers the dates of birth and death from underneath the ice is a similar, parallel gesture, an altered allusion to that opening scene. It brings different meaning to the act of uncovering because here George is powerless, uncovering only the sad truth of death in a world without him. This is an allusion because it necessitates understanding of outside material, in this case not a proverb or a biblical story but a scene from earlier in the film. Like the critic referring to the crucifix in the context of two gangsters, the filmmakers allude to the earlier scene with this simple movement, and it becomes horrific in its new context.

Rush 3: Freud and Chaplin

One example in The Great Dictator of a decidedly "bad" joke is when the officer Schultz tells Chaplin's character, "I always thought of you as an Aryan," and Chaplin replies, "I'm a vegetarian!" with a totally straight face. This is a classic sound-association pun. There is no implied parallel in the inner meanings between Aryan and vegetarian. It qualifies as one of Freud's bad jokes, or a "groaner" in American lingo. Of course, it's still quite hilarious and absurd. I think part of this humor derives from the fact that there is no actual connection between Aryan and vegetarian, yet the gag is delivered as if there was. This pretense goes along with an underlying commentary in the film that shows how ridiculous and arbitrary the Nazi ideology is. Being Jewish should not actually be any more of a ground for genocide than being vegetarian. The two are in reality just as irrelevant in determining how to treat an individual. When cracking a joke that seems to make a pseudo-connection between these two categories, it forces the audience to think about just how insane it is to judge a person on one but not on the other. So this is a "bad" joke which, in its contextual usage and delivery, is actually quite witty and brilliant.