Land without Bread (1933) Luis Buñuel
Blood of the Beasts (1949) Georges Franju
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998) Werner Herzog
Hello Everyone!
I'd really love to get the blog rockin' and rollin' within the next few days since we most likely won't have time to discuss these three great films in class this week. Don't feel like you have to have done the readings first to post on the blog-- in fact I'd love to hear what people's face-value impressions are before reading deeper.
Some topics I would love people to delve into:
Narration (What is problematic about the narrator in some of the films? What about when we are presented with multiple narrators? ext.)
Dramatization (Do we have a problem with Buñuel staged scenes such as the dead horse and the goat falling off the cliff? What about Herzog's approach to reenactment, as well as adding quirks to Dieter such as his compulsion to open and close doors?)
Historical Context (How does viewing Blood of the Beasts and Land without Bread change in the context of now? Or does it? Is time and relevance a problem for documentarians?)
Food (This is something I would love to write about and will if I have time, but food plays a central role in all three films-- Buñuel uses bread as a token for a privileged and healthy society, Franju shows us behind the scenes of what happens (used to happen?) to our meat before it hits our table (in a very neutral way?), and Herzog shows how food can offer comfort for anxiety and I way to deal with the past (in hoarding), its necessity and the polarity of abundance and scarcity.)
Feel free to use one of these topics as a jumping off point, or choose many of the other points available to discuss. This is just scratching the surface!
one thing i thought was interesting was that in all three films the use of a narrator added a humor that i hadn't noticed in the films we'd watched previously.
ReplyDeletethe narration in land without bread was so over the top that it was kind of funny in an uncomfortable way.
blood of the beasts had sort of a similar thing going on. while i thought it was really nice and refreshing the way the narrator talked about the men in the slaughterhouse (saying that they had won a prestigious award for their work,etc), it was also so foreign to me that there was a bit of humor in it at first. that kind of contrast between what is being said and what is being shown offers a lot of opportunity for humor.
This was also apparent in little dieter needs to fly, especially in the part where the narrator is talking about the training video.
This was probably my favorite thing about the presence of a narrator. the potential disconnect between the telling and the showing offers a really interesting space for information to be given to the viewer in an silent and ironic way, and allows the viewer to have more of an active interaction with the film.
I agree about the humor in the films, although I'm pretty sure Herzog was the only one with any awareness of that. It seemed clear he has an understanding as a filmmaker of the potential for different readings (in some cases, humorous) of a film when the filmmaker inserts is own voice into the story. I think, in most cases, it was observations and conjectures on the part of the narrators that became funny in a way.
ReplyDeleteI liked Little Dieter so much that I went and took a look at Grizzly Man (I'd never seen it before... I hope that doesn't get me in trouble). There's considerably more of Hertzog's voice in Grizzly Man, and I think it's even more evident in that film that he knows any of his own opinions he inserts as a narrator may be taken as kind of funny.
I guess the first two films and how the narration could be interpreted as kind of amusing relates to the "historical context" noted above. Without the narration, the scenes depicted are interesting to watch, but adding on the perspective of people from that time, that's what dates it and makes it funny. With just the visuals, you only have your own reaction to respond to, but having the additional reaction of someone else (even, an "authority") changes how the information is received.
"With just the visuals, you only have your own reaction to respond to, but having the additional reaction of someone else (even, an "authority") changes how the information is received." --Renée I really like this!
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how the "authority" takes over so much of the skeleton of what the films are saying. I really like the idea of watching these kinds of films (narration driven films) with no sound and seeing how the film reads. I see this working more with Land without Bread and Blood of the Beast than with Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Dieter speaking to the camera, similar to Hertzog's approach in Grizzly Man, starts to break down this barrier or alter it in some way.
The first two films could have a completely different feel once the narrations gone. Or not. is the skelton still there within the visual and editing? I think they could still be present but becomes more dependent on the viewer to find his/ her way instead of the higher voice directing the show.
Dieter and Grizzly Man both hold their own ground or the illusion that they hold there own ground. ( maybe more with Grizzly Man since Hertzog couldn't direct him (since he died)) Hertzog does hold an authoritative figure and has overall control of the output of the film but his "authority" is weaved into the film more which gives the characters of the film more dominance at certain times. who's running the show? I guess Hertzog is but this line is blurred throughout the films.
I found the narration within the films to be somewhat distracting, more so with the consistency of sound in the first film, "Land Without Bread" and the last film "Little Dieter Needs to Fly."
ReplyDeleteI found it easier to pay attention to all the explanation and the discussion than to actually absorb the visual information. It was almost like it desensitized me from the footage in a way.
When I reflect back on the three films I liked the narration of the second film, "Blood of the Beasts", more simply because it wasn't consistent conversation throughout the film- there was silence at certain points when he allowed the images to speak for him.
I found that device really successful.
The questions of dramatization actually made me reflect back on an older article we read, the one for "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes" which was titled "Seeing with Experimental Eyes" by Bart Testa.
There is a moment in the text when Testa is discussing an old French film called, "Death in the Seine (1990), he calls it a "pesudo-documentary" due to the rigorous reconstruction of the dead bodies being pulled from the river Seine. What I found most intriguing was when he used phrases like, "Interpretative Framework" or "The paradox of representation" and "..by showing what can never really be shown."
I felt that a lot of this resonated with the first two films we saw, especially with Hetzog's direct reconstruction of Deiter's past as a Vietnam prisoner of war.
I was wondering if these concepts of "showing something that can never really be shown" and "the paradox of representation" have a lot to do with how unsettling many of us found Hertzog's dramatization of the Vietcong to be.
Was it because he was trying to show us something we could never truly grasp the intensity of?
I'm not sure, but I spent quite some time questioning it.
As a few of you have already touched upon, these films do an incredible job of subtly creating a disjointed space for the audience to process the film, by way of using “structural contradictions” between the narration, music and visuals. They each set up the viewer, at first, in a safe, familiar position of “watching a doc about social issues”--only to then slowly break down the audiences trust in the reliability of the images and narrator, as the film goes on. They do this by introducing visuals of shocking misfortune, violence, trauma and cruelty accompanied by a nonchalant and objective-seeming tone of the narrators (which becomes as unsettling as the images). Also, the odd sequencing (such as the fluctuating relief from city scenes in “Blood of the Beast,”or the train-of-thought transitions of topic in “Las Hurdes”) along with the random, obvious dramatizations (such as the killing of the horse and goat, and dieters scripted reenactments/OCDs) create a surreal tone for the audience, as they are jolted by the disconnected tones in visuals and sounds. These alarm bells make the audience become aware of, not only the filmmakers way of seeing, but the audiences own culturally situated perspective and assumptions. In this way, Bunuels and Franju’s films can be interpreted as “anthropological” on multiple levels—examining the subjects in the film (albeit, maybe, a tongue-in-cheek or avant-garde/metaphorical false-ethnography), examining the cultural and era –situated ideas of the filmmakers, and by the audiences own self-reflexive examination of their own cultural “seeing.” Even if we are a modern audience of violence/tragedy desensitized people, we can still clearly glean a lot from this film, about cultural history of seeing, and about our current perspectives.
ReplyDeleteI feel as if each narration is playing a different character. In The Land Without Bread, Buñuel plays God, telling us what is, what has been and what will be, even if it's satire. The voices in Blood of the Beasts are the strangers in the night, explaining to you a place with which you are also not acquainted, the woman for the soft breezes and where the children play and the man for the meaty, brutal but matter-of-fact insides. Finally, Hertzog plays your friend, the link between you and Dieter Dengler while the three of you are hanging out at a party or something.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to choose a voice-over versus all the other sound-image relationship possibilities. It's like a shorter version of that (I think) Eisenstein montage principal, with the image you see right now will be the context for the image after it and is contextualized by the image before it.
When it comes to narration, what does gender mean to the image? Most of the narrators we encountered last week were men except for the French woman who was stuck roaming about on the outside of the city. The man in that film, however, was traipsing about the slaughterhouse comfortably, as if the gore was nothing out of the of the ordinary for his day to day life. What would it do the the writhing, beheaded sheep or the swiftly split ox of the woman was sharing it with you instead?